Current vision assisted printed circuit board assembly systems use fiducial marks to locate the position of pads relative to pick and place mechanism (or robot). Although, the fiducial marks are desired patterns to be located by a vision system but the accuracy of object locating is limited by the accuracy of hardware implemented and this may not be adequate. In this paper it is suggested to use pads itself instead of fiducial marks. This way some prior information will be available that can be used in conjunction with the readings of the vision system to improve the accuracy of object locating. A simulated experiment has been performed and the results are presented. It is shown that the accuracy is improved.

A generic process agent architecture is used to build systems for business process management. The architecture is a three-layer BDI, hybrid architecture. The agents in this system attempt to make choices in line with corporate priorities. Choices are made on the basis of estimates of the values of particular parameters. These estimates are accepted as long as they are statistically stable. If variations in these estimates lie outside specified limits then the system attempts to deduce why this is so. If it is unable to deduce a reason then it asks for one. If the reason for an unexpected measurement is quantifiable then the reason is used to revise subsequent measurements while that reason remains significant. The architecture has been trialed on emergent process management in a university administrative context.

This paper describes CAPE, a programming environment that combines CLIPS And Perl with Extensions. CLIPS is an efficient and expressive forward-chaining rule-based system with a flexible object system (supporting both message passing and generic functions). Perl is a popular procedural language with extremely powerful regular expression matching facilities, and a huge library of freely available software modules. CAPE closely integrates these two programming languages, and provides extensions to facilitate building systems with an intimate mixture of the two languages. These features make CAPE an excellent language for building knowledge-based systems to exploit the opportunities being presented by the Internet. This paper describes the current version of CAPE and the facilities it offers programmers, including the demonstration systems and ``component applications'' that are distributed with it. The use of the system is then discussed with reference to an application for automatically generating graphs of remote web sites. Finally, planned developments of the system are indicated.