Manufacturing Ramps Up in the Cloud
Blog 4/10/2013 7 comments Packaged goods companies are constantly being driven to offer higher levels of variety in consumer products. The goal for manufacturers and the machinery builders serving these industries is how they can adapt to move past today’s batch processes to ultimately work toward achieving a batch size of one.
Robotic Advances in Aerospace Manufacturing
Blog 4/4/2013 12 comments The unique demands of aerospace and defense manufacturing are stretching robotic system suppliers to add advanced control functions to keep up the pace of innovation.
Self-Assembled Devices May Transform Manufacturing
Engineering Materials 4/3/2013 33 comments The line between materials and machines will blur when modular, self-reconfigurable robots and self-assembling engineered DNA bricks change the rules of product manufacturing.
My Opinion on Testing Without ATS
Blog 4/2/2013 2 comments Automated test software, or ATS, is nothing new. But as systems grow in complexity, the need for automated testing, and likewise automated testing software, grows correspondingly.
Helicopter Had Lift & Pitch, But No Yaw
Made by Monkeys 4/2/2013 15 comments A simple soldering problem kept a 13-year-old boy from enjoying the three-channel, radio-controlled helicopter he received for Christmas.
Video: Crowdsourcing App Helps Space Agency Improve Robots
Blog 3/28/2013 19 comments A free iPhone video game app turns your Parrot AR.Drone into a simulated spacecraft, which you can use to simulate docking on the International Space Station. You get points for accuracy and speed, and the European Space Agency gets tons of data to help make better space robots.
NASA Uses Video Processing to Study Hurricanes & Wildfires
Blog 3/27/2013 12 comments Advanced video processing and networking deployed aboard NASA's Global Hawk as part of its Hurricane Severe Storm Sentinel mission use a full motion video compression appliance to provide visual situational awareness of hurricanes and wildfires.
Robot Helps People Walk Again
Blog 3/26/2013 30 comments The Ekso wearable robot applies torque to the hip, knee, and ankle joints to help people move, powered by a computer worn by the patient in a backpack.
Taking Some of the Grit out of Manufacturing
Sponsored Blogs 3/26/2013 5 comments Technology can go a long way toward helping people at all levels in manufacturing, and this list of technologies and solutions can help the manufacturing industry.
Results: Your Opinions on a Design Ideas Forum
Engineering Materials 3/25/2013 22 comments Here's a summary of your ideas for starting a Design Ideas forum that poses design problems and asks for input from the community to help solve them in innovative ways. We also ask for a bit more feedback to help fine-tune things.
Slideshow: Robotic Hands Mimic Humans
Blog 3/22/2013 21 comments Robot R&D has focused recently on closely emulating the human ability to pick up; manipulate; and move small, delicate objects in unstructured environments outside the factory safety cage.
Product Showcase: Recent Highlights
Blog 3/22/2013 3 comments We’ve just posted some products in our showcase from HEIDENHAIN, Master Bond, and Tolomatic that deserve a little attention.
Slideshow: Competitors Gear Up For DARPA Robot Challenge
Blog 3/21/2013 32 comments The stage has been set for a $2 million Department of Defense competition to develop a robot that could perform a number of physical tasks that might be required to respond to an emergency.
ConnectSmart App Monitors Solar Inverters
Blog 3/21/2013 6 comments You can expect a continuing wave of mobile apps (like the Danfoss SolarApp) for monitoring all types of industrial equipment over the next couple of years.
Some Cool Happenings in Motors
Blog 3/19/2013 5 comments The recent co-located Design and Manufacturing event held last month in Anaheim was an unveiling site for a few new motors, and they were pretty different from some of the products we’ve seen in the past.
The Engineering Creativity Challenge
Guest Blogs 3/19/2013 12 comments Brainstorming an idea is a good approach, but it's often not the best. We need to focus our creative energies on the design challenge.
How Ethernet Is Expanding Its Role
Blog 3/14/2013 19 comments Belden has tried to understand the role of mission-critical communications for manufacturing and has identified four themes that are driving the expansion of industrial networks.
The Focus on Integrated Industry
Blog 3/12/2013 9 comments Hannover Messe 2013, the gigantic industrial technology event coming up on April 8-12, will be staged this year under the banner of "Integrated Industry."
Trends in Integrated Motor Drives
Blog 3/11/2013 4 comments Servo motion packaged as integrated motor drives is gaining greater acceptance, energized by the attractiveness of distributed motion and I/O solutions, and the key role it plays in enabling modular machine designs.
Opto 22 Develops Tool to Build Mobile Automation, Monitoring & Control Interfaces
Blog 3/11/2013 11 comments Automation and control system provider Opto 22 is readying the release of a new tool that will allow engineers to build and deploy mobile, web-based automation, monitoring, and control interfaces for a variety of device platforms regardless of operating system.
Integration in Industrial Plant Control
Blog 3/8/2013 6 comments ABB’s Extended Automation System 800xA Release 5.1 includes powerful object oriented tools to model and integrate the whole life cycle of plant and product.
What's Your Opinion on a Design Ideas Forum?
Engineering Materials 3/6/2013 40 comments What do you think about starting a forum on Design News that focuses on innovative, problem-solving design ideas where individual engineers and companies can trade comments and suggestions for solving design problems?
Making the Case for Vertical Axis Wind Turbines
Guest Blogs 3/5/2013 13 comments The marketplace is littered with companies that have tried to make a success of vertical axis wind turbines. But not all turbine designs (and sites) are created equal.
Even More on Rotary Encoders
Mechatronics Zone 3/5/2013 2 comments This column wraps up our discussion of encoders with information about resolvers, which provide angular data over 360 degrees.
Video: Robotic Droplets Will Assemble Satellites
Blog 2/28/2013 23 comments Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder are developing small, swarming robots that will assemble a space station or a satellite, or clean up oil spills on Earth. Dubbed droplets, they form a "liquid that thinks" when they swarm together.
3D Printing & Robots at MD&M West
Engineering Materials 2/26/2013 34 comments There are lots of ways to build a product, from high-speed robotic assembly lines to small, refrigerator-sized 3D printing machines that make actual metal production parts for medical or aerospace uses. Many were on display at MD&M West and co-located shows.
New Class of Mobile Industrial Robots
Blog 2/25/2013 17 comments A new category of mobile robots uses a localization and navigation engine to enable self-driving operation in indoor plant and warehousing environments.
Running Robots off the Cuff
Sherlock Ohms 2/22/2013 16 comments When they order the wrong robot and you have to keep the line running, it's time to find a hack solution.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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