Industrial automation relies on a very low level of intelligence most of the time. The whole point of automation is to get a machine to do something consistently time after time. You want completely predictable results. Creative, whimsical results are not the goal when you’re manufacturing and packaging millions of packets of wet wipes. At… Read more »
Automation is a good thing, as far as we’re concerned. It allows us to be more productive, more profitable, and at the same time to be more respectful of both our environment and each other. We can give machinery highly repetitive tasks, dangerous jobs, and chores that need to be done in environments which are… Read more »
Some questions about robots come up more often than others. “Why do the humanoid ones fall down all the time?”, “Are they going to enslave and kill us?”, and “Will they take away our jobs?” are hardy perennials. But a new article in Forbes says that increasing automation will actually increase the number of jobs… Read more »
Some Rexroth controllers use a multimedia card (MMC). There’s a whole range of errors you can encounter with your MMC, some hard to fix and some easy. Here are some MMC errors you might encounter. Query: Load safety technology parameters from MMC? If you get this message, then your MMC has changed since the last… Read more »
OT and IT are often at odds and that probably comes from a lot of bad history together. IT is often all about the latest and greatest, wanting to keep things updated and the most recent firmware on machines. OT, however, knows that this isn’t always possible with legacy equipment. As legacy equipment is brought… Read more »
U.S. manufacturers are in a race: can they replace skilled factory workers with robots before they all retire? Part of the problem is that automation tends to replace unskilled labor. Highly skilled jobs continue to need human workers, and no one seems to be trying to replace highly skilled human workers. Unskilled workers are being… Read more »
Have you ever had one of those special cars? The door doesn’t open when it’s cold, and when it’s hot the trunk won’t stay up when you open it. You have to turn the key just the right way to make it start, and the window needs to be pulled up manually from the top… Read more »
Brushed motors came first — by a long chalk. Ernst Werner von Siemens invented the brushed DC motor in 1856. The brushed DC motor was the only game in town for over a century, till the brushless motor was developed in the 1970s. Indramat’s brushless AC Servo was released in 1979, and quickly became the… Read more »
The Winter Olympics are over. They had their share of heartbreaks and triumphs, surprises and excitement, and winter sports fans are still savoring their favorite moments. It’s also now time to determine whether South Korea’s side focus on robots paid off. 85 robots were among the workers at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South… Read more »
The traditional way to set up a factory line is to buy or build a machine that does a specific task, find a safe place for it, and install a conveyor from that machine to the next one. An uncoiler feeds aluminum through a lubricator, for example, and then on to a cupping press. The… Read more »
