Aug 11 2019
The first stop in Christoph Roser‘s tour of Industry 4.0 in Germany last month was a research facility called ARENA2036, attached to the University of Stuttgart. There, the first demonstration we saw was of the Bosch smart floor, and the pictures included here were taken by fellow participants Franck Vermet and Hironori Hibino.
Jul 30 2019
Pick-to-Light directs manual picking by lighting up bins. The Lean literature is mute about it, it’s not in the Industry 4.0 technology stack, and Wikipedia doesn’t have an article about it. Pick-to-Light system suppliers are touting it as part of both Lean and Industry 4.0 but no one else is chiming in. In the field, however, you find it in many factories, where it reduces training time and picking errors, while increasing picker productivity.
Pick-to-Light fits best in usability engineering. It’s neither jidoka nor automation because it just prompts the operator. And it’s not Poka-Yoke because it doesn’t physically prevent mistakes, the way flip-lids can. It looks like an intermediate technology, a stepping stone on the way to full picking automation but is it? It can also be viewed as a move towards using technology to make work easier for people instead of automating it.
Jun 10 2019
At the invitation of our Spanish partner Asenta, Michel Baudin gave a lecture in Madrid on the ways Industry 4.0 does or can contribute to operational excellence. Industry 4.0 was presented as a stack of technologies — from direct machine control to knowledge management — with each layer relying on the layers below. Following are the notes taken by Asenta’s Jose Ignacio Erausquin, organized by layer.
Mar 25 2019
“The robots are coming. Hide the WD-40. Lock up your nine-volt batteries. Build a booby trap out of giant magnets; dig a moat as deep as a grave. “Ever since a study by the University of Oxford predicted that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next fifteen to twenty years, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the future of work,” Andrés Oppenheimer writes, in “The Robots Are Coming: The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation” (Vintage). No one is safe. ”
Source: The New Yorker
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
In this article, Jill Lepore skewers the countless gurus who, for the past 100 years, have been predicting a future in which robots have eliminated all jobs, manufacturing or not. While Lepore does not go back that far, “Robot” is a word from science fiction, specifically Karel Čapek’s 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots. In this play, robots actually kill off humans.
Dec 8 2019
We Should Pay More Attention to PLCs
Until this year, I didn’t pay much attention to Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). During Christoph Roser’s van full of nerds tour of Industry 4.0 in Germany last July, I heard about PLCs everywhere and even visited the Siemens plant in Amberg that produces 31% of the world’s PLCs. It was a wake-up call.
Continue reading…
Share this:
Like this:
By Michel Baudin • Automation, Uncategorized • 3 • Tags: Arduino, Automation, Industry 4.0, PLC, Programmable Logic Controllers, Raspberry Pi