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.
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.
Mar 6 2018
“The factory is getting a facelift, thanks to a raft of new technologies designed to make manufacturing more efficient, flexible and connected. Daniela Costa […] outlines three key drivers of this development, which could provide more than $500 billion in combined savings for manufacturers and customers.”
Source it from Goldman-Sachs
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
Thanks. I didn’t know Goldman-Sachs was the go-to place for manufacturing expertise.
The only departure from classical automation hype is the emphasis on human-machine collaboration. This topic had been ignored in the American and European approach to automation, with the exception of Working With Machines.
Otherwise, she used the word “significant” many times, probably to imply the existence of research and data behind her statements while saying nothing about what that research might have been. I am particularly curious about where the “$500B in savings” figure came from. It is given context-free, so we don’t know whether she means in Europe or worldwide and over how many years.
She also equated automation with the use of robots but that is common in the press.
Nov 24 2017
“[…]As a zone leader, Stinson is responsible for about fifteen employees on a section of the production line that makes parts for Steelcase’s Ology series—height-adjustable tables built for the standing-desk craze. Until last year, the plant workers had to consult a long list of steps, taking pains to remove the correct parts out of a cart filled with variously sized bolts and screws and pins and to insert each one in the correct hole and in the correct order. Now computerized workstations, called ‘vision tables,’ dictate, step by step, how workers are to assemble a piece of furniture. The process is virtually mistake-proof: the system won’t let the workers proceed if a step isn’t completed correctly. We stood behind a young woman wearing a polo shirt and Lycra shorts, with a long blond ponytail. When a step was completed, a light turned on above the next required part, accompanied by a beep-beep-whoosh sound. A scanner overhead tracked everything as it was happening, beaming the data it collected to unseen engineers with iPads.[…] ”
Sourced through The New Yorker
Michel Baudin‘s comments: This is excerpted from a long article entitled Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords, from the 10/23/2017 issue of The New Yorker that caught my attention because it’s not about robots and it seems to be in the same spirit as Omron’s Digital Yatai back in 2002: using technology to eliminate hesitation and to mistake-proof operations that are too long or have too many variants to allow operators to go “on automatic” while performing them.
When repeating the same 60 seconds of work 400 times in a shift, operators quickly develop the ability to execute rapidly and accurately with their minds elsewhere. If on the other hand, the takt time is 20 minutes or the work is customized for every unit, the work requires the operators’ undivided, conscious attention and their productivity is increased by systems like the vision tables described in the article, that prompt them for every step and validate its completion.
Oct 27 2017
“[…]The principle of Jidoka applies everywhere, especially if we come down to its fundamental intent: preventing bad quality from going down the line and impacting the customer, understanding the causes of a problem as it happens, and giving the employee the authority (and autonomy) to stop the line when an issue occurs.”Sourced Planet Lean
Michel Baudin‘s comments: The experience of an executive like Marc Onetto is always a good read. What he recounts, however, has everything to do with the TPS approach to quality and nothing to do with Jidoka. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate its value. I have seen plants where assembly work is continued on units known to be defective, with a repair area to fix them at the end. I have heard managers justify this practice with the mistaken assumption that it allowed them to ship faster and I have seen the improvements that result from stopping it, in line with what Onetto describes.
But we shouldn’t forget that Jidoka is not about employee empowerment but about automation. Regardless of whether it’s translated as “automation with a human touch” or “autonomation,” it’s still a form of automation. Onetto recounts being made to watch Sakichi Toyoda’s Type G loom stopping when threads broke but that’s not all it did. It also had automatic shuttle change, which solved the problem of what to do when shuttles run out of yarn that had bedeviled loom engineers for decades.
See Jidoka isn’t just about “stop and fix”, Jidoka versus automation, or check out Working with Machines
See on <Scoop it link>
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.
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By Michel Baudin • Automation, Uncategorized • 3 • Tags: Arduino, Automation, Industry 4.0, PLC, Programmable Logic Controllers, Raspberry Pi