A historic building in Shanghai walked to a new home with 200 robotic legs. The walk of about 200 feet took 18 days. The building weighs about 7,600 tons, and is too complex in shape to be driven to its new home on a flatbed. Thus, the walk. Strictly speaking, since the legs had wheels,… Read more »
Rexroth electric motion control units won’t remind you of the movie Her, but they do their best to communicate with you. The messages they send are called “diagnostic messages.” These messages consist of a string of numerals followed by a string of text. If there are multiple messages, one will be shown at a time,… Read more »
3-D printing, or additive manufacturing, has already been a game changer for manufacturing in some ways. Now it has a new capability that could be the revolutionary new development we’ve been waiting for. In traditional manufacturing, parts are made and then joined together. They can break apart. A new approach to 3-D printing creates something… Read more »
It depends what you mean by languages. On the one hand, some servo motors (and drives and controls) have to be programmed in specific machine languages. This can be an issue. The last guy who really knew the programming language for that system installed in 1987 has already retired. Now what? This is why Rexroth… Read more »
Rexroth has a new e-commerce website. That’s a good move, especially with a pandemic going on. Until now, if you wanted to pop a Rexroth motion control component into your cart, you had to go to eBay or Amazon. You’d be looking at used components fixed up by a third-party repair shop with parts from… Read more »
Liquid or water-cooled Indramat and Rexroth drives and servomotors are great for huge amounts of torque in small spaces, but all that condensation can wreak havoc on your Indramat and Rexroth equipment if you don’t take the proper steps to ensure against it. Your equipment is probably contained inside of a big climate-controlled case, but… Read more »
In real life, robots aren’t all that scary. Follow basic safety rules (not that most of us do) and you can coexist with your servos and robots just fine. In the movies, it’s different. In honor of Halloween, we present some seriously scary robots: 1. Ash from Alien 2. The Drone Sphere from Phantasm 3…. Read more »
A new report from the International Federation of Robotics shows that 2.7 million industrial robots are now in service at factories. This is a global record. How did we get here? It’s not the robotic upsurge we’ve all been expecting because of the pandemic. Between 2014 and 2019, there was an increase of 85% in… Read more »
When you check the Rexroth Troubleshooting Guides for instructions on Rexroth repairs — and we’ll be happy to provide you with one — you are likely to see announcements like this: “Only Rexroth service engineers are allowed to replace the control section.” Allowed? Your Rexroth electric motion control components belong to you. Why would you… Read more »
The range of jobs robots can theoretically do keeps growing. One of the most desirable is cleaning up oil spills. Researchers have been looking for ways to delegate this job to robots for years. One MIT project, Seaswarm, sent out swarms of oil-drinking robots to gather oil in nanowire meshes. Powered by a solar panel, each… Read more »
