Manufacturing in the Era of 4th Industrial Revolution: A World Scientific Reference (in 3 Volumes) (World Scientific Advanced Manufacturing)

The era of the fourth industrial revolution has fundamentally transformed the manufacturing landscape. Products are getting increasingly complex and customers expect a higher level of customization and quality. Manufacturing in the Era of 4th Industrial Revolution explores three technologies that are the building blocks of the next-generation advanced manufacturing.

The first technology covered in Volume 1 is Additive Manufacturing (AM). AM has emerged as a very popular manufacturing process. The most common form of AM is referred to as ""three-dimensional (3D) printing"". Overall, the revolution of additive manufacturing has led to many opportunities in fabricating complex, customized, and novel products. As the number of printable materials increases and AM processes evolve, manufacturing capabilities for future engineering systems will expand rapidly, resulting in a completely new paradigm for solving a myriad of global problems.

The second technology is industrial robots, which is covered in Volume 2 on Robotics. Traditionally, industrial robots have been used on mass production lines, where the same manufacturing operation is repeated many times. Recent advances in human-safe industrial robots present an opportunity for creating hybrid work cells, where humans and robots can collaborate in close physical proximities. This Cobots, or collaborative robots, has opened up to opportunity for humans and robots to work more closely together. Recent advances in artificial intelligence are striving to make industrial robots more agile, with the ability to adapt to changing environments and tasks. Additionally, recent advances in force and tactile sensing enable robots to be used in complex manufacturing tasks. These new capabilities are expanding the role of robotics in manufacturing operations and leading to significant growth in the industrial robotics area.

The third technology covered in Volume 3 is augmented and virtual reality. Augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) technologies are being leveraged by the manufacturing community to improve operations in a wide variety of ways. Traditional applications have included operator training and design visualization, with more recent applications including interactive design and manufacturing planning, human and robot interactions, ergonomic analysis, information and knowledge capture, and manufacturing simulation. The advent of low-cost solutions in these areas is accepted to accelerate the rate of adoption of these technologies in the manufacturing and related sectors.

Consisting of chapters by leading experts in the world, Manufacturing in the Era of 4th Industrial Revolution provides a reference set for supporting graduate programs in the advanced manufacturing area.

Dr Satyandra K Gupta is Smith International Professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and Department of Computer Science in Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California. He served as a program director for the National Robotics Initiative at the National Science Foundation from September 2012 to September 2014. Dr Gupta's interests are in the area of physics-aware decision making to facilitate and advance the state of automation. He has published more than 350 technical articles. He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME). He serves as editor of the ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering. Dr Gupta has received numerous honors and awards for his scholarly contributions. Representative examples include a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research in 2000, Robert W Galvin Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers in 2001, CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2001, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2001, Invention of the Year Award at the University of Maryland in 2007, Kos Ishii-Toshiba Award from ASME in 2011, Excellence in Research Award from ASME Computers and Information in Engineering Division in 2013, and Distinguished Alumnus Award from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee in 2014. He has also received ten best paper awards at international conferences.