🦾 Industrial Automation Gets Sexy! 🤭

Robot's Drunken New Year

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results....robots are predisposed to be the epitome of insanity

📣 Topics of the Day 📣

• I'd Like Fries With That

• Why Pose Your Robot?

• Inappropriate Linear Motions!

• Tech of the Day: Apple of My Photoeye

WTF Kevin 🤣

Todays Newsletter Brought To You By

Wauseon Machine & Manufacturing

Wanna know what gets me pumped up? How about a techno-ish beat in a video intro of a company! Are you tired of working with pie in the sky minded automation companies that love to stick you with change orders? Don't want to get sold a boat anchor of a system? Reach out to these folks in the heart of the rustbelt at Wauseon Machine & Manufacturing. They can solve all your problems (maybe) and have you feeling good about writing those 7 figure checks.

https://www.wauseonmachine.com/

Don't do a job that doesn't bring you joy. If your job sucks, go find a new one!

Fast Food Automation

I love reading about fast food automation. There are so many polar opinions that, well, it's just fun to read about. The latest news on the topic comes out of good ol' Texas. The home of dry dirt and cowboys. Seems like the golden arches have decided Fort Worth Texas is a great town to test out an automated drive thru. I'd love to know why they picked Fort Worth. I have zero ideas on what would make the people in that area the best test demographic. But nonetheless McDonalds did what they did.

In a nutshell they built a vertical reciprocating conveyor that can deliver your bags of food to a drive thru window. This is super basic, like lumberjacks wearing flannels. But of course you have some people that think this is ludicrous, that this "robot" is taking peoples' jobs, how dare you not have a person hand me my double cheeseburger!! What if I need ketchup? If you check out the original tweet there are so many funny comments. IE people are going to boycott McDonalds over this (yeah right, you're addicted to their food, good luck), to others complaining about needing to have a person to interact with (so do you talk to your mailman or Amazon driver every time they drop off a package?). Two things that chap me are #1 the idea that some people are calling this a fully automated McDonalds. It's not. People are still making the food and bagging it. #2 this delivery system is not a freakin robot. Stop calling everything a robot!

Why Pose Your Robot?

Who do we call when we need to report suspected robot/automation abuse? Here we see a robot, being posed as if it was kicking a soccer ball. There are several other photos too of this robot being used as publicity fodder. Why pose a robot doing this? Makes no sense whatsoever. I'm curious if they photoshopped out the stabilizing system from this picture because in any videos you see of this robot, Artemis from UCLA, you'll see a human walking behind the robot with a stabilizer.

Now as much as I want to rag on this robot I am really intrigued by what I see. It looks like a robot that is being built for speed and agility, vs BD's Atlas that seems clunky and kinda slow.

So RoMeLa and Boston Dynamics...when are we going to have our first real battle bot fight or better yet Olympics?!!!!

Tech of the Day: Apple of My Photoeye

Eye see you, you see me, we're a happy family..of photoeyes.

So in day 1 of automation class you learn about PLCs. Day 2, you get schooled on photoeyes. These devices are so critically fundamental to automation that if you have a degree in robotics or automation and didn't learn about them I say ask your university for a refund cause you've been taken.

Photoeyes are pretty much just a small device that emits an infrared signal and reads the signal that it gets back. So imagine you have a flashlight. You turn on the flashlight and it hits an object. Well if your flashlight was a photoeye it would see the light that reflects off of the object you pointed it at. The output of a basic photoeye is on or off. So for example if you step place an object in front of a photoeye it'll trigger, remove the object and it is then untriggered. It's that simple but not.

There are 3 main types of photo eyes:

• Reflective - has an emitter and received in one device and like I described already it emits a beam and catches what comes back

• Retro-reflective - includes an emitter and receiver but you have to use a reflective target

• Through Beam - this one splits the photoeye into 2 devices, the receiver and emitter. This is what's used in common household garage door openers to monitor obstructions in the doorway. One device emits a beam and it is received by the receiver.

For a photoeye to be of value it needs to be tied into the inputs of a PLC or IPC and some logic performed when the photoeye sees or doesn't see something. The most common application of a photoeye is to be the start of a process when an object triggers it. So the logic would go something like..if a box is placed into this spot (where the photoeye is pointed at) then a robot crushes it.

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Inappropriate Linear Motions

Maybe I'm just simple minded with a propensity to think dirty thoughts. But I just can't help but giggle watching this marketing video from Iris Dynamics. I know that the British are a bit more forward than Americans when it comes to sexuality but boy, I didn't realize it overflowed into the automation space! Check out the video and let me know if it's just me or are there not so subtle undertones....

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Have feedback or want to contribute a video, article or tacos? Maybe I'm interested maybe I'm not sure that I'm looking for it. If you have something constructive you can catch me on Twitter. @robotsrcoming or email us at [email protected]

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