The Future of Factory Automation

welcome to the product design show I'm Vince Penman analysts have long forecasted that will soon see completely automated factories well it's getting closer we'll take a look at innovations driving industrial automation and how advanced manufacturing can improve your product design process I'm Allison Toepperwein since the dawn of the industrial era factory owners and product designers have looked to increase productivity by automating manufacturing and since the mid 18th century they've had a ton of success factories that once looked like this have given way to factories that look like this these days product designers are looking for transparency during the manufacturing stage of their products life cycle due to regulatory demands product designers have to abide by strict sustainability requirements rather than hiring a dedicated monitor to make sure everything is up to code at every manufacturing facility a new era of automation is making factories smarter key to creating the next generation of smart factories is the development of easily scalable Network machines that can provide information about every step of manufacturing process automated factories generate data at every step in the manufacturing process by interconnecting every machine in the factory a complete view of the materials and processes can be visible to everyone on the team but beyond networking and transparency new robots are being created that have the potential to redefine where industrial automation can happen one of these robots is named Baxter back in the 1970s when industrial robots were taking over in factories across the globe you could be pretty sure of a few things one the robots would be expensive - they'd be difficult to program and three they were dangerous but Baxter turns these conventions on their heads to start with Baxter has a base cost of under $25,000 and can be programmed through a touchscreen interface without complex programming what's even cooler is that Baxter's movements can also be programmed by directly manipulating its arms add to the fact that Baxter is armed with sensors to detect people and you have a robot that doesn't need to be caged while Baxter is doing his part to bring automation to smaller industries even larger more expensive industrial robots are seeing major upgrades the new generation of large bots are being targeted to provide better speed and user-friendly interface at the same time vision guidance systems help larger robots more accurately pick-and-place smaller objects with greater accuracy because of these developments in the near future product design teams will be able to access real-time information from a series of connected machines and robots in factories worlds away these highly automated connected factories will give tomorrow's designers a greater grasp of their product design cycle and the data to track manufacturing and delivery and who knows maybe one day we'll have factories so automated we can turn the lights off and just go home this episode is sponsored by ptc to learn more about PTC creo and how it can help your team develop complex products visit ptc comm slash product slash korea and thanks for watching this episode of the product design show please give it a like on Facebook subscribe on youtube or give us a rating on iTunes

Channel: Engineering TV

Views: 254,687

Keywords: pds, product design show, Factory Automation, Future, automated, current trends, networked facilities, manufacturing

Id: wZkZb9I-g3s

Length: 3min 48sec (228 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2013