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 »
One of the new machines Rexroth is showing off at trade shows this season is a vertical flexible fill and seal machine. The flexible pouches this machine works with have some game-changing benefits for food producers: They use less packaging material, helping to reach sustainability goals within companies as well as those required by retailers…. Read more »
Rexroth is the first company to be supported by the Romanian government in a new program designed to bring jobs to the European country. The first state grant brings an influx of 16.6 million euros, over $18 million, to expand the current factory in Blaj. Rexroth will be matching the grant with funds for the… Read more »
Our old friend Baxter is one of the stars of this documentary about the future of factories. One of the points made in this video is that demands from retailers and consumers are increasing the need for fully transparent manufacturing. With the best will in the world, it can be hard to monitor for sustainability… Read more »
Information silos — those private collections of data that live on desktops, in file drawers, and even in the heads of individual people — can be a real speed bump in the way of progress. When it comes to manufacturing, silos are sometimes built intentionally for reasons that seem good at the time. Let’s not… Read more »
