NEWS DESK WHAT’S NEW IN MANUFACTURING n FANUC Introduces New IoT Technology T
OKYO—An enthusiastic Yoshi- haru Inaba, president and CEO of FANUC Corp., the world’s leading
supplier of robotics and factory automa- tion, in April unveiled a wide range of new products—collaborative robots, CNCs and easy-to-use human-machine interfaces—at an invitation-only event for engineering and other executives from American manufacturing companies.
Yoshiharu Inaba, president and CEO of FANUC Corp.
But the highlight of the day was clear: an all-new Internet of Things technology called FIELD that will undergird the company’s vision for the smarter factory of the future. More than 100 leading manufacturers and other guests
from the US—from GE, Whirlpool, SpaceX, Kohler, Graco, Autodesk, CNC Mastercam and more—traveled to the com- pany’s headquarters and sprawling production compound in a forested area at the base of Mount Fuji outside of Tokyo to hear about the new technologies, which are de- signed to make their companies more competitive, regardless of whether they manufacture in low- or high-labor cost countries. Many of the technologies are big news in their own right. For example, FANUC launched three smaller collaborative robots, in addition to its high-payload (35 kg) CR-35iA, which gives the company a lineup of affordable cobots that can safely do an array of tasks without being gated, such as paint cars, assemble gears, apply ad- hesives on windshields and pack or move boxes and other objects.
But the standout technology of the day was FIELD—the FANUC Intelligent Edge Link and Drive system, a platform that will connect not only CNCs and robots, but also peripheral devices and sensors, to capture and analyze data that will help optimize manufacturing production, improving uptime, quality, fl exibility and speed. FANUC developed FIELD in collaboration with Cisco (San Jose, CA), the global IT leader; Rockwell Automation (Mil-
waukee), the world’s largest company dedicated to industrial automation and information solutions; and Preferred Net- works (PFN; Tokyo), a startup and leading provider of artifi cial intelligence (AI) solutions. PFN is particularly focused on deep intelligence, which can imbue robots and other devices with intelligent thinking or the ability to learn on their own by quickly processing streams of data. Dr. Inaba, the son of the company’s founder, noted that because labor costs are relatively high in the US, just as they are in Japan, where FANUC manufactures the majority of its products, automation and IT technologies such as these are critical for competitiveness. “As much as we can,” he said, “we robotize and automate and put in IT function.” FANUC put its own superior level of automation on display during an afternoon tour of several of its 24 factories in the compound, where it showed how its robots build new robots fairly independently, and how smart its own facilities have become in recent years with advanced technologies.
Schematic of FANUC Intelligent Edge Link and Drive system.
The advancements have made FANUC factories, by and large, clinical places: super clean—and with the exception of the machining factory—quiet, with very few people within eyeshot. In fact, among the army of yellow FANUC robots making new robots, a human operator can barely be made
June 2016 |
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