Assembly of 'difficult' components onto printed circuit boards is
emerging as an important application area for small, fast industrial
robots. For other robot tasks - for example paint spraying or arc
welding - the applications engineer can rely on a body of published
information representing decades of accumulated knowledge about the
actual process being automated. But for the process of assembly
relatively little systematically presented knowledge exists, mainly
because so much manual assembly depends on extremely subtle
co-ordination of hand, eye and brain which is hard to represent directly
in engineering terms. As for the particular processes of electronic
assembly, they have hardly been covered at all in the literature. Yet
the design of a good PCB automation system depends crucially on the
responsible engineer fully understanding every aspect of the process he
or she is automating, whether working for the electronics manufacturer,
an automation company, a research laboratory or a machine builder. The
author of this book has had extensive practical experience in all these
roles: as a source of great detail on most aspects of the electronic
assembly process it will be of unique value not only to the robot
specialist but well beyond that to anyone needing to understand how
printed circuit boards are manufactured. P. G. Davey Acknowledgements
The author is indebted to many companies and individuals from within the
pcb assembly industry.