Motion control is arguably one of the most important areas in modern engineering. As increased productivity becomes ever more important along with sustainability and energy efficiency, innovative industrial automation is one of the most obvious positive steps. And yet we have fewer STEM grads, and those who are excited by motion control are increasingly ending… Read more »
Not that well, frankly. America’s industrial sector is not as badly off as the rest of the world’s, but there’s reason to believe that the global industrial sector’s problems are affecting America. Growth in manufacturing in the U.S. has been contracting for three months, with last month signalling the fastest rate of loss so far…. Read more »
Financial analysts are tagging industrial automation as a good investment. They have some interesting reasons: The race to the bottom is over. With third-world countries running out of their cheapest labor supplies — rural workers with little training and low expectations — automation is becoming attractive to nations that haven’t considered it before. Increasingly strict… Read more »
You know how, once a subject comes up, you see it everywhere? This morning I was reading about how the Outdoor Retailer Summer Show (it’s trade show season everywhere, not just in motion control) had a new award: a miniature Sasquatch figure designed to celebrate American-made goods. Then I read Jerry Jasinowski’s interesting article about… Read more »
After many years of trade show attendance, I have formulated a law about trade shows that I think all trade show attendees will find helpful. I call it “Jernigan’s Law.” There is an inverse relationship between the length of exhibitors’ skirts and the number of actual new products being exhibited. That is, when there’s really… Read more »
Mitsubishi’s new MR-J4 series sounds pretty smart. Its list of abilities provides a reminder that servo motors were one of the earliest examples of artificial intelligence, long before there was any real need for a Turing test. But the best item on the list, in my opinion, is probably not the one that dazzles most… Read more »
<iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/dNkZQ_LKrKc?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe> In school, we learned that the average life span of a theory was 17 minutes, except on Friday afternoons. The reason a theory would last longer on a Friday afternoon is that people were thinking ahead to Friday night, when they might head down to the local watering hole… Read more »
Rexroth has been making the best motion control solutions available for about three decades now, and many of their Indramat motors and drives from the 1970s are still around and in use. One of the reasons for this is quality control. And one of the manifestations of that quality control is the fact that Rexroth… Read more »
