Bacardi rum’s Cataño, Puerto Rico plant is the latest factory fire to make headlines. The Cataño plant is the largest rum distillery in the world, producing 100,000 gallons of rum each day. The fire was described by observers as “massive,” but firefighters were able to get it under control quickly and no loss of lives… Read more »
Here’s a great introduction to servo motors. While we have some fine articles on the history and care of servo motors, this is a great starting point for people who don’t know what a servo motor is. If your interest in servos is not academic, if for example you need support for Indramat or Indradrive… Read more »
Your industrial motion control probably involves lots of devices, sensors, motors, controls, drives, robots, packaging machines, and so forth. When you integrate all these things together, you can physically hook them up or use a proprietary system of some kind. But you can also use an open architecture system, which is what Indramat is known… Read more »
We often get calls from engineers who have just opened a sealed cabinet for the very first time and found a mysterious object marked “Indramat.” Often the cabinet has been ignored for years, even decades, and it was only found by following the cable to it from a piece of equipment that has stopped doing… Read more »
The upcoming Industrial Automation North America conference is expected to focus on robotics. 2013 was a banner year for robots and robot sales are expected to increase by another 6% this year. Why? An aging workforce and the skills gap are top contenders for the impetus behind increasing use of robots, but there are other… Read more »
The Bosch Rexroth Corporation’s Bosch Community Fund has given $100,000 in grants supporting STEM education to Pennsylvania schools. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math. These are, frankly, areas in which the American educational system doesn’t always shine. Innovators in education, along with forward-thinking corporations and the government, are trying to fix that with… Read more »
The skills gap continues to be an issue for manufacturing — Congress has even gotten in on the conversation. Increasingly, there’s concern that it isn’t only that the current workforce doesn’t have the needed technical skills, but that they’re not willing to learn them, either. As Manufacturing.net put it, “manufacturers are being held hostage by… Read more »
Robots to you and me are probably mostly arms and other disembodied bits, but the humanoid robot is alive and well in fiction, in Asia — and at the international soccer competition called RoboCup. It’s coming up in Brazil this month. The players are robots. These are not robots programmed to play soccer, though. These… Read more »
They don’t build ’em the way they used to. That’s true, but it’s usually not because we don’t know how, or because we don’t have the skills or the technology. In fact, the opposite is true. People who built things centuries ago had no idea how strong those things would have to be. They built… Read more »
You use them to keep in touch with friends and family, to shop, to take pictures and listen to music, to take notes and store documents, to read books and to make phone calls. Your smartphone or tablet has become such a central part of your life that it’s probably hard to imagine what your… Read more »
