Automation blog
How can adaptive AI inspection contribute to flexible manufacturing?
4. oktober 2022 Consumers today demand customized products to meet their personal needs and tastes. Instead of producing items that are ‘made to shelve’ and ‘sent to stock’, manufacturers must personalize products that are ‘made for me’ and ‘sent to me’. This is revolutionizing production and forcing companies to rethink their processes. At the same time, ensuring zero complaints and zero defects is a must.The trained eye of an experienced vision inspector is quick to spot errors, but a routine task like this is tiring, and cannot be carried out at each step of the production, especially due to the current labor shortages in many industries. But could this task be automated also in high-mix low-volume production? Could a smart vision system or an ‘electronic eye’ replicate the discernment of the human eye, with the added benefit of repeatability and robustness? The latest AI-enabled adaptive inspection can overcome the challenges of automated quality inspection, with improved flexibility, productivity, and adaptability.
Artificial Intelligence: hope, hype and FOMO
22. september 2022 Ten years ago when we received enquiries about AI-based projects, they were mainly driven by hype or FOMO. When I asked why they wanted to get into AI, the answer, more often than not, was either ‘because my boss asked me to’, ‘because we have a lot of data’ or ‘because it seems like an interesting area’. None of these were particularly solid reasons and certainly didn’t justify the hefty investment that AI applications would have required at that time.That is changing, and hope, rather than hype or ‘FOMO’, is the driver. Customers don’t ask whether we can help them with AI anymore. They ask us whether we can help with predictive maintenance, quality control or process optimisation. They come to us with a problem that they want us to help solve. The adoption of AI is no longer a motive or an aim in itself. Instead, AI has become an ‘enabler’.Whatever the industry - whether food & drink, pharmaceutical, electronics or automotive - the end goal is the same: producing high quality, defect-free products at a lower cost, using less energy and less labour. And AI can be one of a suite of solutions for achieving those objectives.
Automation adapts to sustainable packaging
16. august 2022 Have you ever ordered a small item online, and then felt incensed when it arrived in an oversized box packed out with bubble wrap, air-filled cushions or paper inserts?
Flexible Manufacturing Roadshow: Taking the factory of the future across Europe
16. juni 2022 What if you could see, feel and touch the factory of the future? What does it take to realize flexible, efficient, and sustainable production? This is the idea behind OMRON’s unique Flexible Manufacturing Roadshow travelling across Europe this year. The roadshow features exclusive demonstrations of human-machine collaborative solutions not usually seen outside of a factory setting due to their size and scale.
Building the Factory of the Future together
16. juni 2022 As one of the largest business units at OMRON, we aim to further develop the Den Bosch plant to serve the needs in the EMEA region.
Traceability in Automotive: What decision-makers and experts should look out for now
23. maj 2022 From e-mobility to autonomous driving, from skills shortages to digitalization: The automotive industry is undergoing a profound change, marked, for example, by a shift to globalized platforms and standardized vehicle architectures. On the one hand, production is becoming increasingly efficient, but on the other, even a single faulty part can have more far-reaching effects than ever before. Faced with costly recalls, automotive manufacturers are confronted with increasingly complex requirements and stricter specifications. Is the effort of traceability worth it if it means labeling up to 20,000 parts per vehicle? Yes, it is, but powerful reading and verification technologies along with powerful software is needed to make sense of all the data.There are several reasons why manufacturers need to keep accurate records of the parts and components that make up a new car. From a quality perspective, for example, barcode tracking helps to ensure that the right parts are put together. Even more important, however, is the ability to trace each car part back to its original supplier. In the event of a recall or the discovery of a faulty part, manufacturers have to be able to quickly and comprehensively find out where each part came from. This is complemented by information such as batch number, date of manufacture and other important information to identify which vehicles are affected by a defective part. Recommendations and standards from AIAG, VDA, ANSI and ISO specify the details. As the automotive industry globalizes, worldwide production of light vehicles is expected to reach around 96 million units by 2023. This means that even a single faulty part can have an enormous impact, and therefore must be prevented at all costs.
Lights out? Still unlikely with Industry 4.0
21. april 2022 For many manufacturers, the prospect of a fully automated, human-free factory feels light years away. When, they ask, is the 4th Industrial revolution coming to us and what can we expect? In this blog, we look at the realities of (fully-/semi-)automated manufacturing, what robots can and can’t do, and why the human touch is still (mostly) irreplaceable.
Vadain automates the inspection of curtain fabrics with machine vision
8. april 2022 Vadain, the market leader in custom curtains in the Netherlands, needed a solution to detect errors as early as possible in kilometers of curtain fabrics. Together with software developers from Sycade, OMRON machine vision technology, and machine builder Eisenkolb, they developed an automated solution to detect and analyze errors in curtain fabrics, making the time-consuming manual inspection process a thing of the past.
Traditional factories have data needs too
18. marts 2022 The right tools and tech can enable advanced predictive maintenance, bottleneck prevention and optimization. Find out how digitalization is bridging the gap between legacy systems and Industry 4.0.
Fuel for the future: What to look out for in fuel cell production
10. marts 2022 When people talk about sustainable mobility, the first thing that comes to mind is battery-powered e-cars. Fuel cells or direct hydrogen burners are complementary technologies that often fade into the background, yet have a lot to offer when it comes to CO₂ reduction and market options.
Mastering packaging and intralogistics challenges in eCommerce
24. februar 2022 Robot-assisted packaging enables fast and cost-efficient scalability upward and downward to handle swings in demands from the supply chain.
Green packaging industry: How to achieve sustainable manufacturing
9. februar 2022 Sustainability in the packaging industry is one of the key aspects in fighting the plastic waste issue and ultimately climate change. The challenges that this presents, require flexible and powerful automation technology.
Autonomous bin picking with a collaborative mobile robot
16. oktober 2019 Our TM collaborative robot provides a unique solution to easily automate applications such as picking and packing that, traditionally performed by humans, have been challenging to automate. As part of the TM series launch, we also released a mobile-compatible model, which seamlessly integrates into Omron’s LD series autonomous mobile robot. Combined with a 3D vision camera mounted directly onto the collaborative robot, this enables for example e-commerce companies to automate more complex tasks. This includes pick and place of various items onto a tray or container, as well as connecting production processes with the autonomous mobile robots for flexible manufacturing and materials handling.
The power of collaboration between machines, people and teams
1. oktober 2019 With today’s rapid advances in technology, the manufacturing sector needs to be increasingly agile, ready to adapt to changing demands. Production lines must be more flexible, so that they can cope with shorter production runs, more varied products and tight deadlines. So how can manufacturers address these challenges? The solution lies in more advanced, interconnected and intelligent systems that can be programmed to handle a range of tasks.
Mobile robots speed production at new ‘smart factory’
26. september 2019 Showcasing flexible production in real life, a new ‘Smart Factory’ in Norway uses a variety of robots in a system developed and implemented by system integrator Intek Engineering.