Materials Motion/ Handling Systems

Abstract

Aside from a few very exceptional cases, which may date back a century or more, factory automation on a rather grand scale was not taken seriously until the post-World War II era. During the 1940s and 1950s, the major steps toward automation were largely confined to various materials-handling situations. Conveying and transferring materials from one workstation to another, or in the case of the transfer machine per se, where several operations were integrated in one machine (an early version of the cell concept), were particularly suited to relay logic. Consequently, well before the appearance of the programmable controller in the very late 1960s, progress in automation tended to be measured by progress in materials handling. In fact, during those earlier days of automation, a vice-president of Ford Motor Company (D. S. Harder) in 1947 defined automation as “the automatic handling of workpieces into, between, and out of machines.”

Robots may be considered a special form of materials-handling equipment. They are described in Handbook, Section 2.