Mechatronics, System Engineering and Robotics

By changing the way of production with the same resources engineers and managers always trying to increase outcomes. Lean is a method that is focused on reducing waste, it is used to manufacturing industries to reduce waste and, in the meantime, the quality is higher. Application of lean manufacturing into enterprises may bring many benefits and advantages such as time reduction to the customers, efficient usage of processes, less utilization of inventory, improvement of knowledge management, cost savings, and rework reduction. This paper has attempted to understand how lean manufacturing is being used in the Kosovo Manufacturing Industry and benefits implementation of lean manufacturing techniques and their facilities.

Optical based characterization techniques and related analytical methodologies, originally utilized in the mineral sector, can be profitably applied to solid waste streams products as resulting from different recycling processes. This approach, when supported by digital tools allows to perform a full characterization of compositional and textural attributes of the different particulate solids constituting the waste flow streams. To reach this goal specific physical-chemical attributes must be collected, analyzed and processed in order to define, according to market requirements, specific classes of quality to assume as reference to define optimal processing strategies. Computer-assisted optical characterization, coupled with hyperspectral sensing devices and embedding recognition/classification logics, can contribute to reach these goals, dramatically reducing analytical time and costs. In this work an example of this “transfer approach”, from minerals to waste, is presented, analyzed and discussed, with reference to a porphyry copper ore sample and a WEEE product.

Diversity and inclusion are the vital to the long-term success of any business. In Industry 4.0 and 5.0 there is a requirement that engineering firms have the best talent to foster innovation, entrepreneurship and growth. The best talent means offering engineering education to all members of society, including minority groups. Traditionally automation is not an engineering sector that attracts a diverse cohort. This paper looks at why science, technology engineering and math (STEM) in general, and automation in particular, flourishes when opened up to a more diverse and inclusive community and it offers insight as to how to attract this more diverse and inclusive society.

As we know the artificial intelligence, and specifically artificial neural networks, have improved rapidly in the last decade which leads to the application of these systems in commercial fields like in buying online products, medical applications, financial applications, etc. But we know also that ANN usually are complex systems that need a lot of computing power in order to function properly which limits their application in number of fields, including here embedded systems because of their limited hardware and software properties. In this paper our goal is to implement a fully functional ANN in ATmega328p microcontroller, which will be programmed and trained in microcontroller. Our study case is solar tracker, where we aim to create a functional tracker which works based on ANN and with very limited hardware resources. With this implementation we aim to prove that ANN can function in practical systems without need of high computing power but just with simple low cost embedded system.

The possibility of increasing production capacity by re-designing the actual layout and material flow at the Elsam factory is explained in this article. Planning of the actual layout needs some improvements because it does not meet customer demand. The actual layout is found to be disorganized on material flow which leads to a decrease in production capacity. Three different layouts are considered and analyzed. A comparison between the proposed and actual layout is shown to find out the influence on production capacity. According to the data taken from simulation software FlexSim, significant improvement is foreseen. This study reveals that redesigning the layout ensures an increase of production capacity and decrease the possibilities of accidents during transportation between consecutive workstations by decreasing the traveling distance.