A new curved surface constant force mechanism which mainly consists of a roller and a curved surface has been proposed. The magnitude and the direction of normal force caused by squeezing between the roller and the curved surface satisfy a certain relationship, thus the decomposed force of the normal force keeps constant in a certain direction all the times. According to the envelope theorem, the trajectory of the roller center and the profile of the curved surface are obtained by ignoring friction. Then, the influence of the friction is discussed in detail. In addition, the simulation is performed to verify the theoretical calculation. The simulation results show that the output force is relatively constant and the friction has little effect on the output force.

With the emergence of the concept of green manufacturing, more manufacturers have attached importance to energy consumption indicators. The process planning and shop scheduling procedures involved in manufacturing processes can both independently achieve energy savings, however independent optimization approaches limit the optimization space. In order to achieve a better optimization effect, the optimization of energy savings for integrated process planning and scheduling (IPPS) was studied in this paper. A mathematical model for multi-objective optimization of IPPS was established to minimize the total energy consumption, makespan, and peak power of the job shop. A hierarchical multi-strategy genetic algorithm based on non-dominated sorting (NSHMSGA) was proposed to solve the problem. This algorithm was based on the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm Ⅱ (NSGA-Ⅱ) framework, in which an improved hierarchical coding method is used, containing a variety of genetic operators with different strategies, and in which a population degradation mechanism based on crowding distance is adopted. The results from the case study in this paper showed that the proposed method reduced the energy consumption by approximately 15% for two different scheduling schemes with the same makespan. The computational results for NSHMSGA and NSGA-Ⅱ approaches were evaluated quantitatively in the case study. The C-metric values for NSHMSGA and NSGA-Ⅱ were 0.78 and 0, the spacing metric values were 0.4724 and 0.5775, and the maximum spread values were 1.6404 and 1.3351, respectively. The evaluation indexes showed that the NSHMSGA approach could obtain a better non-dominated solution set than the NSGA-Ⅱ approach in order to solve the multi-objective IPPS problem proposed in this paper.

Radiation therapy is among the top three cancer treatments in current medical services. The novel noncoplanar radiation therapy which claimed the best characteristics in almost all dosimetric properties encountered the challenges of the potential collision and the long time delivering. In this paper, we proposed a brand new scheme which uses a combined method of the collision avoidance path planning based on an improved probability roadmap method (PRM) and the delivery sequence optimization based on a modified genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the problems in noncoplanar radiation therapy. A uniform sampling strategy, an improved connection strategy, and an efficient local planner are introduced to optimize the roadmap result and accelerate the roadmap construction. The GA is improved by the elitist selection, the local search strategy, and the similar substitution strategy to achieve a better performance both in convergence rate and optimal solution. Experiments are carried out on the simulation platform with typical therapy system models. The results show that our proposed methods work well with the radiation therapy system in a compact working area. Collision is avoided and time consumption is reduced. We believe that our proposed algorithms could solve the problems in current radiation therapy and promote their clinic applications.