by Gary Mintchell | Aug 31, 2017 | Interoperability, News, Operations Management, Standards
Looks like standards and interoperability week at The Manufacturing Connection. I once was pretty active with MESA and lately I’ve gotten to know the IIC. Both good organizations promoting best practices in industry. MESA is not a standards organization, though, but one that promotes Level 3 (MES/MOM) software applications. IIC has taken a leadership roll bringing Internet of Things people and companies together.
The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association (MESA) International announced they have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to work together to advance their shared interests. Under the agreement, the IIC and MESA will work together to align efforts to maximize interoperability, portability, security and privacy for the industrial Internet. That all sounds pretty vague and something like motherhood, but I applaud all steps toward collaboration.
Joint activities between the IIC and the MESA will include:
- Identifying and sharing IIoT best practices
- Realizing interoperability by harmonizing architecture and other elements
- Collaborating on standardization
- Collaboration in the areas of industrial analytics and asset performance management (APM)
MESA’s President, Mike Yost, said, “This partnership makes good business sense, with the Industrial Internet Consortium advocating for the broad adoption of industrial Internet technologies and with MESA educating manufacturers and solution providers of all sizes on both how and why to adopt them. Collaborating with the IIC also helps ensure MESA members and IIC members have a common vocabulary and a common understanding of business value.”
“We look forward to working with the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Enterprise Association,” said Wael William Diab, IIC Chair of the Liaison Working Group. “Within the manufacturing vertical, industrial analytics and asset intelligence systems enable manufacturers to realize the value of their industrial IoT systems by analyzing and acting on data to increase asset reliability and availability and reduce maintenance. Collaborating on industrial analytics and asset performance management will help to further advance industrial IoT in manufacturing environments.”
MESA and the IIC have agreed to meet regularly to exchange information and have targeted a joint workshop on industrial analytics and asset performance management for Q4. The IIC Liaison Working Group is the gateway for formal relationships with standards and open-source organizations, consortia, alliances, certification and testing bodies and government entities/agencies.
The agreement with the MESA is one of a number of agreements made by the IIC’s Liaison Working Group.
Here is a little more information about the IIC.
The Industrial Internet Consortium maintains active relationships with standards development organizations, open-source organizations, other consortia and alliances, certification and testing bodies and government entities or agencies involved in the Industrial Internet.
The purpose of these relationships is to generate requirements for new standards from every part of the activities taking place within the Industrial Internet Consortium.
These relationships help eliminate duplication of effort and ensure that new standards and technologies necessary to build and enable the Industrial Internet are brought to market more rapidly.
By establishing a formal liaison with the Industrial Internet Consortium, organizations can engage directly with our Working Groups and gain faster access to developing requirements for standards and technologies required for the Industrial Internet across a spectrum of industries and applications.
The Industrial Internet Consortium itself is not a standards organization; however, it strongly advocates for open standard technologies in order to ease the deployment of connected technologies. Our Liaison Working Group is the gateway for the liaison relationships listed below and new ones forming now.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 28, 2017 | Automation, Technology, Workforce
The future of work—humans and machines working together in a truly collaborative fashion. A “partnership” said Dell Technologies.
My blogs on the future have not necessarily brought in tons of new page views (but this blog compares pretty well with industry trade publications), but they have drawn the attention of PR agency account managers looking for a way to prove their worth. Sometimes one of the inquiries strikes gold, as they say.
Yesterday James Lawton, Chief Product and Marketing Officer, Rethink Robotics, gave me 30 minutes of his time to talk about a vision of the future for humans and robotics. Rethink Robotics was founded by Rodney Brooks, an MIT professor and co-founder of iRobot (Roomba). I have written about the company several times including here, here, and here. You may remember Sawyer and Baxter, its two robots.
Baxter the Robot
We began talking a little about why robotics conversations got stale for several years. “Perhaps people had written robots off because of the way they were used” he told me. Those were mainly pick-and-place and welding. “If we can break the traditional barriers with automation technologies, then we can begin to see many new applications.”
Rethink Robotics has bee focusing on a handful of form factors—safe by design.
I asked about one of the hot topics among traditional robotic suppliers—collaboration. “Collaboration has been internalized it as ‘run without a cage’ instead of ‘people and robots working closely together’. We need to break that mental model. Some writers are worried about robots replacing people, but it’s about machines making people ‘super people.’ Both physical and cognitive assist to humans,” Lawton mentioned.
Lawton offered this challenge to the industry, “Make it so that ‘robot’ isn’t a custom construction project, but make more like hiring a temp worker. To do this, we need a common language interface, something like Amazon Echo, ‘Alexa do this.’ We have linguistics to overcome to accomplish this. We say pick up box and have an idea of box; a robot needs to be taught about what box means in all of the word’s many varieties.”
What about the near future? “In 5-10 years we’ll see these technologies begin to build out. We’ll also start to see more robotic technology in homes,” he predicted.
As far as collaborating, Peter Senge wrote in his book 5th Discipline that it is hard for humans to learn from patterns when they are separated by time and space. Lawton explained, “Computers, on the other hand, can do that. I can’t pull in all the data and derive insights. Say I’m applying torque to a part I’m assembling. But a computer can archive all the past data and then compare that with customer feedback on the assembly. With robot assist on the production process, it can reconfigure its own work on the fly and we can assemble the part in a way that better satisfies the customer.”
“This change in how we interact with machines will change how we live and how we work, as well as how we create value.”
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 23, 2017 | Leadership
I learned a leadership lesson about collaboration and design this morning.
The store where I buy birdseed is on a corner. Think small streets, not like a busy city intersection. The primary street has been dug down to dirt, and the contractor is in the process of laying cement pavement, walks, and gutters. The little store built from an old grain elevator has a drive built from pavers.
As Bruce was watching work progress, he noticed that they had raised a manhole three inches. Sure enough, they raised the sidewalk three inches. That meant that if they laid the pavers back where they were, there would be a three-inch drop from the traffic entrance/sidewalk to his drive.
When the engineer came one morning to look at progress, Bruce went out and asked him about that. The contractor said, no problem, I can build that up, make a grade and replace the pavers.
So Bruce asked, what about my neighbor’s drive?
Hmmm. They had built themselves a problem that snowballed as they looked down the street.
Who designed this? Bruce asked. I did, the city engineer replied. Well, guess you messed up, Bruce replied.
If only the engineer had gotten up from the CAD station, walked the one block to the site and asked people about the design, he would have avoided what might be a costly mistake.
The same concept applies to mechanical design, hardware design, and software design. Oh, and to leadership.
Get away from your desk. Wander around. Ask people for ideas and feedback.
by Gary Mintchell | May 9, 2017 | Internet of Things, Operations Management
Dell EMC just keeps the momentum growing in its Internet of Things business with the announcement this morning (PDT) of a new partnership. I’m in Las Vegas at Dell EMC World and expect to pick up much more IoT news in addition to what was announced at Hannover.
Atos and Dell EMC announced they are joining forces to address the growing Internet of Things (IoT) and business analytics markets. This collaboration is based on best-in-class hardware and software from Dell EMC combined with the Atos Codex, a complete set of solutions and capabilities to design, build, run and secure smart data business services, data platforms and Internet of Things. The offering will initially focus on North America and Europe.
By 2020, nearly 40% of IoT-related revenue will come from services according to Markets and Markets. This number is expected to increase annually due to an increasing need for IT consulting and support. IoT professional services accounted for $57 billion in 2016 and are set to reach $158 billion by 2021, a CAGR of over 22%.
The unprecedented growth in connected devices, the data generated and the applications generating value out of these connections will need a strong offering in end-to-end service management, considering the enormous size and complexities of the networks generated by the Internet of Things.
Yuga Joshi, Practice Director at Everest Group: “Atos’ approach to enabling IoT use cases for achieving operational efficiency, customer engagement, and business transformation meets a clear market requirement. Its capabilities across the IoT stack, enhanced by strategic investments, partnerships, such as with Dell EMC, and experience in executing large-scale projects drives continuous value delivery and improved business outcomes for the customers.”
Atos and Dell EMC are working together to build an IoT service management framework to allow customers to be always in control and to be assured that all users can continuously create value from their connected devices. The service management framework will be called Atos Codex IoT Services.
The Atos Codex IoT Services framework will contain a catalogue of services including management of devices, connectivity, data and storage, change and release control, incident management, service desk and support, and the operations to increase resilience against failures or disturbances. These services will be delivered with user-defined service levels, including the necessary security measures for access management and data encryption. The framework also defines an architecture blueprint, containing hardware and software solutions from Dell EMC as well as software solutions and integration services from Atos.
The collaboration is expected to cover two areas:
- Joint development/design of the Service Delivery Framework, utilizing existing assets from both companies.
- Joint market approach, building upon the strength of each company’s brand and capabilities to build and sell solutions driven by customer demand.
The first Atos Codex IoT Services framework capabilities are available now with additional services and products will be added based on market demand.
Jay Snyder, Senior Vice President, Global Alliances, Industries & Service Providers at Dell EMC: “We are proud to help Atos enhance their IoT service offering, which will leverage our comprehensive portfolio such as Dell Edge Gateways to securely transfer and analyze important data at the edge of the network and Dell EMC hyper-converged infrastructure and scale-out storage at the core. Combining these assets with Atos’ expertise, services, hardware and their IoT capabilities in the Atos Codex end-to-end managed analytics offering, we are well positioned to help our customers successfully deliver their IoT-driven digital transformation agenda.”
Paul Albada Jelgersma, Head of IoT Solutions at Atos: “We are proud to partner with Dell EMC to provide our clients with the services, technology and capabilities they need to effectively manage their assets and generate value from them, by leveraging our combined strength in IoT products and services. This will offer businesses the tools to utilize their data and assets to provide continuous value and improved business outcomes, wherever they are.”
by Gary Mintchell | Apr 7, 2017 | Automation, News
Automate is the biennial trade show featuring robots, vision, and motion control technology and products. It is sponsored by the Association for Advancing Automation. I wrote about it Wednesday discussing statistics about robots and jobs.
Even though I was deeply involved in robotic technology and did some vision implementations in past lives, this all became sort of boring to me for quite a few years. Probably ever since the delta robot. Recent developments have made robots much more interesting.
Several companies were exhibiting some innovations at this year’s event. Here are a few I saw.
Autonomous Mobile Robots
One area that holds much promise is autonomous mobile robots (AMR). I walked a booth with several little “pets” wandering around freely going from station to station.
This was in the booth of the Danish company, Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR). It launched its newest robot, the MiR200. It is an upgrade to the company’s flagship MiR100, which has already been installed in more than 30 countries by companies such as Airbus, Boeing, Flex, Honeywell, Michelin, Procter & Gamble, Toyota and Walmart.
AMRs are a dramatic improvement over legacy automated guided vehicles (AGVs), which require the expensive and inflexible installation of sensors or magnets into factory floors for guidance. MiR products are designed to give owners the flexibility to easily redeploy the robots to different processes or facility layouts to support changing business needs and agile manufacturing processes.
“Our robots are changing the game for any size business, from small, regional companies to large multinationals,” said MiR CEO Thomas Visti. “With the new interface of the MiR200, it’s even easier for companies to program the robot themselves and adapt its deployment as their business evolves. That’s critical for their competitiveness, and supports extremely fast ROI. The robot typically pays for itself in less than a year, even in very dynamic environments.”
Gripper Technology
Another recent development that shows great promise is robots working nicely with people. This technology is known as collaborative robots (cobots). I ran into a new company from Denmark (a hotbed of robotic development—I wrote about Universal Robots last September) called On Robot. Its two-finger RG2 grippers—available in both single and dual versions— mount easily on the arms of cobots without any external wires; for robots that have infinite rotation of the last joint, this enables unprecedented flexibility and productivity.
The RG2 grippers can be easily programmed directly from the same interface as the robot, and the gripper can be modified without previous programming experience, making them ideal for collaborative robot users.
“User-friendly robot arms need user-friendly grippers, and until RG2, the ease-of-use and flexibility required just wasn’t available,” said Torben Ekvall, On Robot CEO. “Most traditional grippers work by using compressed air, which takes up a lot of space, is energy-intensive and is far too complicated for many users. On Robot’s RG2 is an electronic solution that is easy to mount, is very flexible and can be modified by an operator on the factory floor without the assistance of an engineer. This ease-of-use will help speed development for an increasing number of manufacturers’ applications.”
Unique features of the RG2 gripper include:
- Simple and intuitive programming: RG2 lets operators easily choose what they need the gripper to do and the gripper responds with motion as flexible as the cobot itself.
- Angle mounting: From 0° to 180° in 30° steps, in both the single- and dual-gripper setup, the gripper ensures great flexibility and adaptability for comprehensive tasks.
- Customizable fingertips: The gripper fingers support the use of customized fingertips, which can be designed by end users to fit production requirements.
- Assisted center-of-gravity calculation: Users enter the value of the payload and the robot calculates the rest, making programming easier, enhancing overall productivity and improving safety by enabling more accurate robot arm movements.
- Continuous grip indication: The gripper can discern any lost or deliberately removed object.
- Automatic Tool Center Point (TCP) calculation: Automatic calculation of how the robot arm moves around the calculated TCP of an object, depending on the position in which the gripper is mounted, for easier programming and use.
Exhibiting along with On Robot was OptoForce. This is a Hungarian company with an ingenious force sensor that can assemble on the robot end of arm with the On Robot grippers. The combination enables many really cool applications.
Dual Arm Cobot
DEONET factory, the Netherlands
Speaking of collaborative robots or cobots, ABB introduced YuMi. “The new era of robotic coworkers is here and an integral part of our Next Level strategy,” said ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer. “YuMi makes collaboration between humans and robots a reality. It is the result of years of research and development, and will change the way humans and robots interact. YuMi is an element of our Internet of Things, Services and People strategy creating an automated future together.”
While YuMi was specifically designed to meet the flexible and agile production needs of the consumer electronics industry, it has equal application in any small parts assembly environment thanks to its dual arms, flexible hands, universal parts feeding system, camera-based part location, lead-through programming, and state-of-the-art precise motion control.
YuMi can operate in very close collaboration with humans thanks to its inherently safe design. It has a lightweight yet rigid magnesium skeleton covered with a floating plastic casing wrapped in soft padding to absorb impacts. YuMi is also compact, with human dimensions and human movements, which makes humans coworkers feel safe and comfortable—a feature that garnered YuMi the prestigious “Red Dot ‘best of the best’ design award.” Check out the YuMi Information Portal for more information.
