WORLD OF TEST
ROBOTS AND DIGITISATION ‘WILL CHANGE THE WAY WE WORK’
With around 1.8 million industrial robots, their numbers have reached a new record in factories around the world. Workers consider that “colleague robots” can take over work that is detrimental to health or handle hazardous materials as being positive. However, employees are
worried about how their own training can keep up with the pace. These are the findings of the Automatica Trend Index 2018. 7,000 employees in the USA, Asia and Europe in a representative survey of the population were interviewed by a market research institute on behalf of Automatica, the European trade fair for robotics and automation.
RAPID BUILD OF DIGITAL TWINS
ANSYS Twin Builder is an innovative product enabling designers to build, validate and deploy simulation-based digital twins within one workflow — potentially saving millions for oil and gas, industrial, energy, and aerospace & defence industries. Traditional preventive
maintenance for industrial assets leads to expensive and potentially unnecessary maintenance costs. These costs can be reduced
with a digital twin, which combines accurate virtual replicas of a product with data collected using the Industrial Internet of Things. The resulting intelligence and
predictive maintenance insights enable engineers to make informed decisions that avoid unplanned downtime.
This new collaboration with
robots is regarded by the majority of all seven countries (average 68 per cent) as an opportunity to master higher- skilled work. Particularly in China (86 per cent) and in the USA (74 per cent), people expect that robotics automation will provide added impetus to further their vocational training. The number of higher-skilled
and better paid jobs will rise in the future with the new human- robot teams – according to about half the survey respondents in Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Japan. In China and the United States, as many as 80% of workers presume this will be the case.
HARTING CHALLENGE OFFERS OPPORTUNITY
German connector manufacturer Harting recently challenged postgraduate students from the Centre for Doctoral Training in Embedded Intelligence at Loughborough University to investigate practical application solutions where MICA — the company’s open platform-based ruggedised industrial edge computing device — could be applied to the benefit of UK manufacturing. One proposal was for volume
manufacturers in the pharmaceutical industry: in particular, tablet manufacturing using automated presses and punch tools. Data from these machines can
be collected using passive UHF RFID “on metal” transponders, which can be retrofitted to existing tablet press machines and mounted on the actual
4 /// Environmental Engineering /// June 2018
press-die/punch tools. The RFID read and write tags can record the pressing process — the number of operations performed by a particular press die, plus any other critical operating sensor-monitored conditions. The system can then
review that data against expected normal end-of-life projected limits set for that die. Such data can be managed
and processed through MICA, which can then automatically alert the machine operator that maintenance is required to
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