Monthly Archives: January 2022

Toyota’s Lunar Cruiser

Toyota is working on a new vehicle, but you won’t see it on your local streets. The Lunar Cruiser is designed to house two people safely on the surface of the moon (and maybe someday Mars as well) for up to two weeks. Toyota is working with Japan’s space agency, JAXA, to create a safe… Read more »

Are American Workers’ Digital Skills Good Enough?

A new study suggests that U.S. workers don’t have the digital skills needed to compete in the manufacturing space. Sure, we have skilled IT workers, but Industry Week wonders whether the rest of us have the digital chops to keep up. “In manufacturing” columnist Stephen Ezell says, “this could pertain to workers’ ability, for instance,… Read more »

IndraDrive Safety Codes

Rexroth acquired Indramat, a pioneering company in motion control, in 1965. Rexroth was already important in hydraulics by then, and adding the electric motion control expertise of Indramat to the hydraulic chops of Rexroth made the company a force to be reckoned with. Rexroth later stopped using the Indramat name, but called their new electric… Read more »

Servos Are More Than On/Off

If you have Rexroth or Indramat servos in your manufacturing plant, it’s tempting to think of them in two ways—on and off. If the servo is working and on, everything is fine. If it’s not working and is off, you’ve got a big problem. Actually, servomotors, and servomechanisms in general, have a lot more going… Read more »

Do You Need a Smart Bed?

There was a commercial showing up on TV a while back advertising a smart bed. “I don’t actually talk,” this bed remarks, “but I’m smart enough to.” Do you want a sentient bed? A bed that could gossip about you? A bed that chats on video while you sleep? This is not what I want… Read more »

Dangerous Movements

Dangerous movements? Are we talking about bungee jumping or skateboarding off the roof? We’re talking about movements made by industrial robots that threaten human safety. Elon Musk wants to see AI regulated because potential risks are serious, but modern industrial machinery can be very dangerous without any AI at all. It comes down to the… Read more »

Another Reason Not to Disassemble That Servo Motor

Are you thinking about opening up that Rexroth servo motor to see what you can see? Think twice. All Rexroth manuals tell you that components can’t be disassembled and repaired on the machine. They always must go to the factory for repair or reman. If you open them up and poke around, you will void… Read more »

The ctrlX developR Challenge

Bosch Rexroth’s ctrlX developR Challenge is challenging more than just traditional ideas about capital letters. It’s challenging developers to take their ideas from dream to reality with ctrlX CORE. ctrlX is an open source automation platform using Linux and EtherCat. 30 developers with great ideas have been chosen to implement those ideas, with expert help… Read more »

Robot Cruelty?

It’s almost impossible to think about new robot technologies without getting emotional. We hear about robot abuse, an alarming trend among humans to physically abuse robots. Reseachers program robots to manipulate human beings emotionally — and it’s way easier than you would think. Now YouTube has removed hundreds of robot battle videos because their bots… Read more »

Rexroth in Space

Often we can listen to a machine over the phone and hear that the parameters have been misconfigured. This is because, since we have been Rexroth Indramat motion control specialists for so many years, we know what the machinery ought to sound like and how it sounds when it’s got problems. Automation at its best… Read more »