Monthly Archives: October 2019

Rexroth Safety Technology Errors

Integrated safety technology in Rexroth drive and motion control systems focuses on motion control. Devices may be locked, motions may be limited, brakes may be managed… the object is always to keep your machinery from being in the same place at the same time as a human operator or bystander. The newest version of the… Read more »

We Don’t Automate Jobs

“We don’t automate jobs,” Alex Garden, CEO of food-tech startup Zume, said in a recent interview. “We automate boring, dangerous, repetitive tasks.” This is the general story of automation: using technology to improve the lives of human beings. The human beings don’t always appreciate it. One group of anti-machine protestors were the Luddites, a group… Read more »

Does EOL Mean SOL?

What responsibility does a manufacturer have for their products, and what should they do about items that are coming to the end of their life (EOL)? In motion control, and especially when you’re talking about the Indramat motion control from Rexroth Bosch which is our specialty, you often have drives or controllers or motors that… Read more »

Rexroth Cures Downtime

Short of an explosion, unscheduled downtime is the biggest issue for most manufacturing facilities. Whether you’ve got a big problem or a small one, if you have to shut down the line for any period of time, you’re looking at cost overruns, scheduling issues, and unhappy customers. Fortunately, Rexroth has always been concerned with downtime…. Read more »

The Body Gap

Manufacturers have been worrying about the Skills Gap for years. Automation requires skills in math, technology, even engineering. Yet U.S. grads continue to major in business, history, sociology, and psychology — that’s more than a third of American college grads right there. High school grads typically don’t have the science and math chops to major… Read more »

The Future of Printing

We work with lots of printing presses, so I guess it’s natural that we would be interested in the history of printing. It’s even more natural that we would be interested in the future of printing. The future of printing is a lot harder to lay out, though. Imagine a tree with multiple branches. Each… Read more »

Italian Choreographer Inspires Robot Bartender

Modern robots are inspired by everything from fleas to octopi… and now by an Italian choreographer, Marco Pelle. Makr Shakr‘s new robotic bartender is a pair of standard industrial robotic arms. The company used film of Marco Pelle’s movements to design the machine’s gestures, however. Nino, a new version of the machine which has built… Read more »

Ethics of Military Robots

Automation can free human beings from dangerous, tedious jobs. Workers may have mixed feelings about some of those jobs, but there’s one field in which you’d expect everyone to be in favor of automation: military work. The Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (darpa) has been testing a six-drone swarm that can work collaboratively in a… Read more »

Meal Kits Push Consumer Demand

One of the biggest pressures on manufacturing is consumer demand for ever smaller and more customized packages. Home meal kits like Blue Apron could bring new demands to food manufacturing and packaging. People used to getting 2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar in a tiny bottle don’t want to buy an 8 oz bottle of… Read more »

Are Human Workers Serving Robots?

A tortilla manufacturer increased automation successfully, calling on robots to check the tortilla packages before sending them on a conveyor to the next station. Unfortunately, the tortillas got rejected when the temperature dropped — somehow they just didn’t look right to the robot. The machine also rejected packages if a tortilla’s edge rolled under. Since… Read more »