Recent Factory Automation News for November 28, 2023
, by Jim Ryan, 1 min reading time
Partnerships and acquisitions: Rockwell acquires OT/ICS cybersecurity firm Verve. Also, Miller is developing handheld laser welding in partnership with IPG Photonics.
Tesla, in disputes with Sweden, is having difficulty unloading at ports there, with dockworkers refusing to unload the vehicles. There's more to the story, here and here.
Industrial data is nowadays a topic to consider; it's there and it's available. In the last fifteen years, the ability of computers to slurp up data, store it, and make it available has increased by many orders of magnitude. You can literally major in data in college now. So, the data is there and people are learning how to analyze and use it in business, biomedical research, etc. So, what about in manufacturing? If one manufacturer analyzes and uses its data wisely, this can offer an advantage over those of its competitors that do not. Articles by Bill Frahm and Daniel C. Malyszko offer thoughts on how to analyze manufacturing data and use it wisely.
More on rising steel prices here.
Josh Leath at Yaskawa has some thoughts on small robot welders. He says, "Fabricators still unsure whether high-performance robots will be advantageous to their bottom line should especially consider the viability of small welding workcells...." In some situations, perhaps it's smart to go small.
Metal tech: At The Fabricator, Steve Benson has a technical article on bending sheet metal and the k-factor: "The k-factor matters, but metal fabricators shouldn't overlook the tooling and bending method." Also, at the Eziil blog, a comparison of six options for metal fabrication software. This looks like an impartial blog post, not an ad, even though one of the options is Eziil's own software, which is nice to see.