Filling Without Spilling
Watching a form-fill-seal machine in operation is rather fascinating. It looks so easy, but the precision technology needed to ensure that bag after bag is being filled without breaking, or its intended content being misdirected and wasted, is far from simple.
7 Signs That Your Business is Ready for Automation
Investing in automation has to make financial sense for individual businesses, regardless of trends. Here are seven signs that could point to your companys need to automate.
The Hershey Company
Until 2005, everything at the Hershey plant was hand-palletized, resulting in low palletizing rates and high manual labor costs.
Top Six Trends in Industrial Robotics
Here are six emerging trends in the world of industrial robots that will likely have a big impact on a wide variety of industrial sectors, and provide benefits well beyond what was once imaginable.
Sensing, Measurement and Process Control Robots
One of the major problems with a robot is sensor irregularity, where the sensors provide data that at times is accurate and at other times inaccurate.
Quickstick® Linear Synchronous Motors Increase Productivity in Pharmaceutical Application
A major mail order pharmacy was planning a new facility so they approached their long time supplier of automated solutions, Tension Packaging, to design a system that would reduce their cost per prescription and produce 1,000 validated and labeled pieces per hour.
YuMi: ABB's Collaborative Robot
From ABB:
YuMi is a human-friendly dual arm robot designed for a new era of automation, for example in small parts assembly, where people and robots work hand-in-hand on the same tasks. YuMi is short for ‘you and me,' working together.
YuMi has been developed to meet the flexible and agile production needs of the consumer electronics industry in the first instance. It will increasingly be rolled out to cover other market sectors. YuMi is a collaborative, dual arm assembly solution with the ability to feel and see. The robot's soft, padded dual arms, combined with innovative force-sensing technology ensure the safety of YuMi's human co-workers. Safety is built into the functionality of the robot itself so that it can work cage-free... (cont'd)
Robotics Provides 114-year-old Manufacturer 55 Percent Productivity Gain
Robotic palletizing solution from Intelligrated adds staffing and production flexibility, avoids worker injuries, and yields floor-space savings.
Beginners Tutorial: Autonomous Robot Control Theory
From Nick McCrea at Toptal:
In this article, I’m going to describe the control scheme of my simulated robot, illustrate how it interacts with its environment and achieves its goals, and discuss some of the fundamental challenges of robotics that I encountered along the way... (full article)
Unbounded Robotics to Shut Down Due to Issues With Willow Garage Spin-Off Agreement
From Evan Ackerman at IEEE Spectrum:
IEEE Spectrum has learned that Unbounded Robotics, a spin-off of Willow Garage that developed the UBR-1 mobile manipulator, is currently "in the process of shutting down." The UBR-1 is no longer for sale.
Recently, a source (who asked not to be named) forwarded us an email from Unbounded Robotics CEO Melonee Wise. Our source received the message after requesting a quote for a UBR-1 robot:
"Unfortunately Unbounded Robotics is in the process of shutting down due to issues with our Willow Garage spin off agreement that prevents us from raising series A investment. Unbounded Robotics is no longer selling the UBR-1.... (cont'd)
Vacuum-based Bag Handling
Traditionally, vacuum-based bag handling systems have been marred by problems to the extent that it has been almost impossible to use them.
Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014
Introduction:
This challenge evaluates algorithms for object detection and image classification at large scale. This year there will be two competitions:
A PASCAL-style detection challenge on fully labeled data for 200 categories of objects, and
An image classification plus object localization challenge with 1000 categories.
NEW: This year all participants are encouraged to submit object localization results; in past challenges, submissions to classification and classification with localization tasks were accepted separately.One high level motivation is to allow researchers to compare progress in detection across a wider variety of objects -- taking advantage of the quite expensive labeling effort. Another motivation is to measure the progress of computer vision for large scale image indexing for retrieval and annotation... (rules and results)
New York Times article:
Started in 2010 by Stanford, Princeton and Columbia University scientists, the Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge this year drew 38 entrants from 13 countries. The groups use advanced software, in most cases modeled loosely on the biological vision systems, to detect, locate and classify a huge set of images taken from Internet sources like Twitter. The contest was sponsored this year by Google, Stanford, Facebook and the University of North Carolina.
Contestants run their recognition programs on high-performance computers based in many cases on specialized processors called G.P.U.s, for graphic processing units.
This year there were six categories based on object detection, locating objects and classifying them... (cont'd)
Coding & Marking Challenges: Common Industrial Print Techniques and Their Challenges
If a barcode or marking is unreadable, it can result in recalls, unhappy customers, and even fines. It is important to identify these issues early by implementing regular checks and verification to ensure quality.
Nvidia Jetson TK1 Development Kit
Features ($192 ):
Tegra K1 SOC
Kepler GPU with 192 CUDA cores
4-Plus-1 quad-core ARM Cortex A15 CPU
2 GB x16 memory with 64 bit width
16 GB 4.51 eMMC memory
1 Half mini-PCIE slot
1 Full size SD/MMC connector
1 Full-size HDMI port
1 USB 2.0 port, micro AB
1 USB 3.0 port, A
1 RS232 serial port
1 ALC5639 Realtek Audio codec with Mic in and Line out
1 RTL8111GS Realtek GigE LAN
1 SATA data port
SPI 4MByte boot flash
Dr. Dobbs has an in depth look here.
Robot With Broken Leg Learns To Walk Again In 2 Minutes
From Medium:
Today, Antoine Cully at the Sorbonne University in Paris and a couple of pals say they’ve developed a technique that allows a damaged robot to learn how to walk again in just a few seconds. They say their work has important consequences for the reliability and robustness of future robots and may also provide some insight into the way that animals adapt to injury as well... (cont'd)
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Factory Automation - Featured Product
OnLogic Karbon 520 Series of Scalable Rugged Computers
The OnLogic Karbon 520 Series of rugged computers is purpose-built to deliver unwavering performance and reliability in the face of extreme temperatures, vibration, and dynamic power conditions. Powered by the latest Intel® Core™ Ultra processors and validated by MIL-STD-810H testing, the Karbon 520 Series makes it possible to deploy dependable computing for AI at the edge, advanced automation, or critical remote and in-vehicle applications in even the most challenging environments.
Robotics and Automation - Featured Company
Zimmer Group US, Inc.
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