Parkour, Painting, and Inspecting - Graffiti Robots Are Coming Next

Labor shortages are forcing robotics to advance at a rapid pace, while semiconductors remain a hot item for manufacturers to get their hands on. GANufacturing gets its start in dental prostheses.

David Rogers

Aug 29, 2021

Visual Inspection

Linde released an animated schematic of various poultry processing lines.

Acoustic Monitoring

BechTech Podcast: Data Science and the “Art of Possible” with Dr. Evann Smith available on PodBean.

Assembly Line

Semiconductor Manufacturing: Making Impossibly Small Features

Date: August 12, 2021
Author: Willy Shih
Vertical: Semiconductor

Deposition, litho, and etch are interdependent processes tightly linked together. Technology continues to press forward to meet the incredible opportunity of 5G, cloud, and IoT, and these processes enable our customers to go further by reducing feature sizes and improving pattern fidelity to get a better feature. The litho process can produce lines that have some edge roughness, which can have a negative impact on the variability of the devices you make because it affects what are called “critical dimensions,” such as the transistor gate length. We can also take litho printed lines and improve the sidewall smoothness by typically 30% or more.

Digital Transformation in Medical Device Manufacturing

Date: August 23, 2021
Author: John Sprovieri
Vertical: Medical Equipment

The technique gained notoriety as a tool for creating “deepfake” videos on the internet, but it can also be adapted to work with 3D data to customize production of physical products, a concept that Goodfellow has dubbed “GANufacturing.” Glidewell is the first company to use GANs to make better teeth. Dentists often spend considerable time and effort creating custom dental prostheses. Not only does a new prosthesis have to fit a 3D shape that works with the patient’s other teeth, but it also must work well with the overall pattern of the person’s bite. As a result, a prosthesis typically needs to be tested on a dental model and ground to fit. Through GANufacturing, Glidewell can generate a near-perfect, realistic and functional tooth that needs little or no post-processing.

Applying Artificial Intelligence to Paint Shop Robots

Date: August 24, 2021
Author: David Greenfield
Vertical: Automotive

Häcker says that factories in the automotive industry have “enormous amounts of latent data about manufacturing processes, raw materials, and products. The key to leveraging these data assets is connectivity with the right interface at the control level to get at the information provided by robots, ovens, cathodic electrocoating systems or conveyor technology. Operators in existing plants are often constrained because most of their systems do not have connectivity and the right interface for data acquisition.”

Secure device onboarding for manufacturing supply chain

Date: August 25, 2021
Author: Chris Varva

FDO 1.0 can offer many benefits for manufacturers that have industrial and enterprise devices. It’s also useful with multi-ecosystem applications and services and helps streamline distributor sales. Other benefits for manufacturers include:

Zero-touch onboarding: It can integrate with existing zero-touch solutions.
Speed and security: It is designed to onboard with IoT devices in less than a minute, which is up to 20 times faster than it would have been for a manual installer.
Hardware flexibility: It is designed to be hardware-agnostic and work with any microcontroller or computer processor.
Cloud flexibility: As with hardware, it is flexible and can work with the internet and on-premise.
Late binding: This reduces costs and complexity in the supply chain by providing a single SKU for all customers.

Late binding, in particular, is a key aspect of the process, Kerslake said. “Late binding reduces costs and complexity in supply chain, providing a single device SKU for all customers instead of making unique SKUs and creating a mess of things.”

How to Integrate Robotic Inspections into Your Workflow

Date: August 25, 2021

Data is the hallmark of a robotic inspection, providing up to 1,000 times more information than traditional methods. When deciding between drones and robot crawlers, data type and quality should be considered. Drones provide aerial footage and pictures, and can even provide B-scans of assets. But, as previously mentioned, this method doesn’t result in the level of quantitative data that robot crawlers can supply. Additionally, some robots are equipped with cameras to provide the best of both worlds.

Surge Demand

China’s factories are struggling to recruit young people while goods demand remains strong. Parsable reports on Gen Z’s perception of manufacturing with salary topping the list. TSMC to raise prices of most semiconductor chips by 10 to 20%, putting even more pressure on shortages affecting Apple, Toyota, and General Motors among others. Boston Dynamics humanoid robots learn to parkour. Tesla Bots are coming to try and perform repetitive tasks that only humans can do today.

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