We specialize in electric servo motors, drives, and controls, so we naturally are rooting for the electric contenders in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals coming up next week. There will be 25 entrants in the finals, which challenge robots to clear up debris from simulated disasters. Seven of the contenders are based on Atlas, a… Read more »
Mechatronics is an interdisciplinary field of engineering that brings a design focus to planning mechanical processes. Rexroth follows six basic principles of mechatronics: Intelligent integration Energy efficiency Modular design Intelligence Precision Load appropriateness As you’re thinking about the best design for your factory, it makes sense to explore a range of different options. The Rexroth… Read more »
Rexroth is known for intense support of education and connection with classroom training. It’s an outgrowth of their European roots, with a long tradition of apprenticeships, and its also their way to address the skills gap which is creating so many problems for manufacturers in the U.S. But what is it like to work as… Read more »
If you move your Rexroth servos, you may find that have to do some reconfiguration to help them work well in a new temperature, altitude, or humidity environment. Just think if you had to move them into space. A European group has been thinking about their machinery and how it will work in space, because… Read more »
Servo motors are still the best means of controlling industrial motion, and most of the dazzling new ideas in industrial automation these days come from AI (artificial intelligence). Here’s something new for robots, though: softness. Robots right now move in straight lines with straight arms. That’s fine for many uses, but a European study group… Read more »
The consequences of connected industry (the industrial Internet of Things) for businesses and the people who work in them are just beginning to come to light as technology gets off the digital drawing board and into the smart factory. Harvard Business School pointed out in a recent article that the first two waves of change… Read more »
Rexroth’s award-winning Industry 4.0 assembly line is using the smart factory technology of the future today. They’ve produced a video that gives us a better look at the approach. It’s energy efficient, practical, clean, way more accurate than humans, and — well, not really the technology of the future. The line was created as a… Read more »
Dora, a student project, allows people to show up to work robotically. But it’s not a remote working robot in the sense that DaVinci surgical robots are: it doesn’t actually do jobs in response to human programming or movements. Instead of taking the human beings out of the work situation so that automation… Read more »
QR codes — the special bar codes that smartphones can read with a handy app — have been moving down the trendiness list recently in daily life. They were ubiquitous in magazines and on CPG packaging for a while, and then marketers got crazy and started putting them on totally impractical surfaces like banners… Read more »
Servo motors have been around since the 19th century, and there’s no sign of a replacement for the basic concept. So what big news could there be on the demand for servo motors? According to Transparency Market Research, the demand for servo motors generally is expected to increase most strongly in the Asia-Pacific region, where… Read more »
