Automatic control systems in industrial manufacturing processes are becoming fundamental systems for maintaining effective productivity and high quality products. In addition to them, assisted utilities like electricity, steam, air or gas supplies and appropriate plc(programmable logic control) systems also must be adequately designed and installed for those manufacturing processes. Above mentioned automatic control systems and utility systems are made up with many kinds of electronic and electric parts like computers, plc’s, valves, switches, relays, sensors, guages, meters, etc., and should be mounted in control panels, so called control boxes or cabinets for easily operated and safely maintained. But these control boxes are usually exposed to unexpected environments like excessive high and low temperature, high humidity, dust, gas, vibration, impact, condensation, rain and snow, etc.. Nevertheless in those poor environments, the control systems should work always accurately, so the control boxes and all the parts inside the boxes should be made from the beginning to have durability against those environments suggested by some protection ratings standards. In Kimchi manufacturing fields also, there are also many kinds of control boxes for the variety of process lines, especially there are many damp and salty processes, and if the moisture contains salt ingredients and it affects 20% more than that of water-only moisture influences. In this presentation, the environments of general manufacturing fields are suggested and the strong environmental resistance control box design process are proposed. And some international standards examples are presented for the control boxes of the Kimchi manufacturing fields.

Home robot arms require a payload of 2 kg to perform various household tasks; at the same time, they should be operated by low-capacity motors and low-cost speed reducers to ensure reasonable product cost. Furthermore, as robot arms on mobile platforms are battery-driven, their energy efficiency should be very high. To satisfy these requirements, we designed a lightweight counterbalance mechanism (CBM) based on a spring and a wire and developed a home robot arm with five degrees of freedom (DOF) based on this CBM. The CBM compensates for gravitational torques applied to the two pitch joints that are most affected by the robot’s weight. The developed counterbalance robot adopts a belt-pulley based parallelogram mechanism for 2-DOF gravity compensation. Experiments using this robot demonstrate that the CBM allows the robot to meet the above-mentioned requirements, even with low-capacity motors and speed reducers.