Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Innovate in manufacturing On the drive to Detroit today, I listened to the news on NPR for a little while. One of the anchors is in Detroit, and he interviewed some doofus about the economic situation in the state of Michigan given the doldrums of the automotive industry. He opined that Michigan needed to get over manufacturing and attract finance and insurance companies. What??? Look what good those companies have done for us. They need to be investing in small, innovative startups in manufacturing. Maybe not autos, but there are many other things that need to be made. I know a few engineering professors and students at the University of Michigan--and there are tons more at UM, MSU and other schools in the state that could be a hot bed of innovative companies with some seed money. The people who see this and can do something about it are the people who should be speaking on NPR--not that clown. (sorry for the language, but I'm passionate about this topic) 10:44:23 PM    comment []

ABB Robotics I drove up I-75 to the north Detroit area this morning to attend the ABB robotic technology days conference. People often associate Automation World with robotics, but to be honest, I haven't covered that area much over the past 5 years. One reason is that most of the business was auto body shops (welding and painting) with a little palletizing thrown in, and that was just too mature of a market. There was a flurry of activity around packaging by a few, but when I would run a robot article in the Packaging Automation Review we were lucky to get stories. There is change in the air. I walked in, picked up my badge, ran into Sales and Marketing Vice President Joe Campbell and went non-stop for the next two hours. ABB robotics is like a completely new place from my last visit there. Energy, excitement, new ideas. ABB has a nice mid-size six axis robot that Qcomp (a machine builder/OEM) has designed into a compact, inexpensive little palletizing cell that can be set up in hours (by a sales guy) for a list price of about $135,000. ABB has designed an enclosed cell for water jet deburring and parts cleaning. It recycles the water (green, ecofriendly, etc. meaning also no detergents) and cleans out the inside of the cell on command. I saw a demo of a robot cell that does cold metal transfer welding of dissimilar metals (e.g. galvanized to aluminum) or aluminum to aluminum. An adjacent cell using ABB feedback technology and offline engineering software was doing complex laser cutting on a complex formed metal part. Circles were actually round. Notice that while all those solutions featured robots, the idea was in the whole system. When I wrote the first issue of Automation World in June 2003, I interviewed a Lean guru who hated automation. Thought everything should be done by hand. The very thought of buying automation he considered wasteful. Well, he would have flipped out over marketing vice president Ted Wodoslawsky's presentation on how the appropriate application of robotics is actually Lean. Persuasive--saves motion, danger, cost, time. ABB has several customers manufacturing solar panels. Keith Fox, the industry specialist, gave a presentation showing all the uses of robotics in that booming industry. I just had a post about M2M--or remote services. Well, ABB has a small embedded product with cellular communication built in as part of its Remote Services offering that can call home with alarms to an ABB service tech--the office is manned 24/7. Busy day. 10:39:18 PM    comment []

Podcast on PACs I think I feel a series coming on PACs. I just posted Automation Minutes Episode 66--an interview with Rockwell's Lee Lane on that topic. Previously I recorded an interview with Advantech's John Willhite. Any other takers? Let me know. 10:15:58 PM    comment []