The U.S. Dept. of Energy says there are 13.5 million electric motors in use in the U.S. today. That includes household appliances as well as servos for industrial motion control, but the same source calculates that 70% of manufacturing’s collective electric bill goes to feed electric motors — and many of those will be servo… Read more »
Not all robotics competitions are big, government-funded, international meets where universities face off on automata for major world needs. There are also big, government-funded, international meets where secondary school students face off in a medieval theme, like the FIRST competition. For more than a quarter of a century, FIRST has been preparing kids for study… Read more »
Open Core and Open Source technologies are central to the Internet of Things, and Rexroth is leading the way for Industry 4.0. The focus on open source software is unavoidable, since machines have to be able to communicate freely in order to fulfill the promise of the IoT in industry and beyond. Put at its… Read more »
What was the big news in 2015? Here, we had visits to 2,665 different pages, but some of our blog posts were more popular than others. Here’s the Top 10 for 2015: Indramat Error Codes: What Do E and F Mean? Indramat Motor Cables: The First Spare You Should Buy Indramat Manuals The Dreaded F228… Read more »
Developments in sensors have extended the potential of servos to an impressive degree, but there’s another big change in the wind. Bosch Rexroth has now created servos that can serve as sensors. The servos send information on things like their temperature to the controllers. “For the first time,” say Rexroth experts, “the servomotor can act… Read more »
Some new reports are questioning whether the reshoring trend has stalled, or perhaps was never a trend at all. Some of the controversy is a matter of definition. Reports of the reshoring trend have in some cases been based on what companies say they plan to do. It makes sense to look at corporate plans,… Read more »
The phrase “industrial robots” naturally brings to mind the robot arms, dancing or otherwise, that we so often see in factories. Autonomous robots may bring up the Roomba, Pepper the service robot, or DaVinci surgical robotics. But autonomous robots like Sawyer and Baxter, designed as collaborative robots that work with people, rather than in safety… Read more »
A servo motor uses information from sensors, with the help of drives and controls, to control the actions of machines precisely. It could be drones flying packages to shoppers. It could be a robot making Tinder judgements so that people seeking their soulmates online can avoid overthinking their decisions. It could be super-safe cars that… Read more »
There is no title on this brief but poignant film, so we’ve titled it “Error Code” in recognition of the deeper meaning. The drive in the video is calling out for help with an error code, and we see the response of the motor as the camera goes back and forth between the two. The… Read more »
