Innovative Production Machines and Systems Conference

This paper presents an intelligent system for assembling optical fibre components. The system aligns the core of a fibre relative to a laser emitter to maximise the light output from the fibre. It searches for the location yielding the maximum light output by applying a gradient-based algorithm enhanced with momentum information. The parameters of the algorithm are adjusted on-line by a fuzzy controller according to the progress of the alignment operation. The control knowledge base is automatically generated using a new evolutionary algorithm. The fuzzy logic controller demonstrated a robust performance with alignment times and accuracies comparing favourably against those obtained using a manually designed controller.