Fast Radius, a manufacturing technology company, launched production of reusable face shield kits to be used by health care workers treating patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The U.S. auto industry has been automated for decades. Production of cars and trucks is associated with large, hulking robots fenced off from human employees. Inside those fenced off areas, tasks such as welding are performed. The industry, though, is advancing on the automation front.
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is set to award $10 million in funding this year to the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII) here, UI Labs CEO Caralynn Nowinski Collens, said this morning. UI Labs is DMDII’s parent organization.
The institutes that make up Manufacturing USA need to move at the speed of business, considering that the endeavor represents the U.S. government’s biggest investment in the digitization of manufacturing to date.
For machine shops in a competitive global marketplace, keeping spindles running and making product is the only way to stay in business. Still, adding a new piece of equipment, even with the promise of improving the efficiency of your existing ones, may be a difficult sell to management.
We all know the buzzwords circulating around digital data and the factory. You have heard them—Industry 4.0, smart factories, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). The question we all have is how will this impact workers in the long term? What do these terms really mean? Nevertheless, both traditional software suppliers and makers of advanced manufacturing equipment are offering digital solutions.
Manufacturers who have deployed the digital or smart factory have put down their pencils, found new uses for their clipboards and closed their spreadsheet programs in favor of using real-time data gleaned from condition monitoring of their machinery.
Before harmonizing new technology onto the manufacturing floor, critical steps include determining the business problems to be solved and securing buy-in from all stakeholders, industry leaders said recently during an AeroDef conference panel talk on manufacturing production harmonization.
FANUC has made real one of the promises of Industry 4.0, that of predictive maintenance for factory equipment, with its Zero Down Time IoT solution. ZDT can be applied to any of FANUC’s robotic arms and their peripherals.
Industrial computed tomography is a cost-effective, reliable way to meet intensifying
requirements for qualifying both the design of aerospace parts and the materials needed for their construction.
