Thursday 19 July 2018

Reasons to Utilize Automation

Image result for automation in manufacturing
                                   


                               The use of automated manufacturing systems has been steadily increases over the past several years, and for good reason. Automation’s ability to process, assemble, inspect, and handle physical products in the manufacturing process can benefit your business in a number of ways. We’ve compiled a list of 8 reasons that you too should be utilizing automation. Here are 8 reasons to utilize automation in your manufacturing environment.

Increased labor productivity

Automated manufacturing operations increase production rates and labor productivity, giving your company greater output per hour of labor input. This increased production leads to greater gains for your business, which aids in your overall growth.

Reduces labor costs
Labor costs continue to slowly increase in all of the world’s industrialized societies. This has made higher investments in automation economically beneficial. While this does unfortunately reduce the need for laborers, which is at times not good for people, it does reduce unit production costs, which is very good for business. However, increased production does make it possible for companies to hire more people in the areas of production where automation is not necessary or feasible.

 Mitigates the effects of labor shortages

Many companies have experienced a significant shortage in both general and skilled labor forces. This has made the usage of automated operations not just possible, but necessary.

 Reduces or eliminates routine manual tasks

Automation of certain manual manufacturing tasks reduces or even eliminates the need to use employees for routine, menial, and quite often fatiguing tasks. This serves to improve labor energy and general working conditions.

Improves worker safety

The safety and physical well-being of the manufacturing workforce has been the focus of OSHA since 1970 and was an impetus for automation.Automating operations and transferring your workers from active participant to supervisory roles, you greatly increase their safety by removing them from situations and tasks that quite frequently lead to injury.

 Improves product quality

Not only does automation result in higher production rates than what you see with traditional manual operations, it also performs the manufacturing process with greater uniformity and conformity to quality specifications. This reduction of fraction defect rates is one of the primary benefits of automation.

 Reduces manufacturing lead times

Automation will reduce the elapsed time between ordering and product delivery, which provides you with a significant competitive edge in your market. Reducing manufacturing lead time, you also reduce your work-in-progress inventory, saving you precious operational space.

 Accomplishes processes that can’t be done manually

Finally, utilizing automation enables you to perform certain operations that simply cannot be done without the aid of a machine, such as processes that require optimum levels of precision, miniaturization, or complex geometry.

There is a significant competitive advantage to be gained by incorporating more automation in your manufacturing plant. Not only will it help you increase production and quality, reduce employee injury, and complete processes you could not do otherwise, it also leads to higher sales, customer and labor relations, and even a better company image.

Friday 6 July 2018

Benefits of Automation

Automation is the use of control systems to control processes, reducing the need for human intervention. Putting this into context, automation is having technology do things for you so that you don’t have to.
Automation is all around us. When you’re at a set of traffic lights, there isn’t a traffic light operator that decides when to change the light from red to green. It is done automatically. The street lights come on at night automatically. There are no lamplighters running around turning each light on anymore. We can apply this same idea to our own life. Granted, most of us can’t create complex control systems, so we will have to do our best with what is available, but having the most mundane tasks automated will help free up some time.
Advantages of Automation
Visions of a mechanized world flourished long before the term “automation” was coined. The star of Westinghouse’s exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair was Electro, a robot that could walk, talk, and count on its fingers. Sadly, Electro and his kind were little more than demonstrations of remote control by human operators. By the early sixties, they had been replaced in the public imagination by something much more useful—the computer.
In movies and advertisements, these “electronic brains” hummed away in orderly surroundings, watched over by well-dressed individuals who seemed to have nothing to do except gaze at the flickering lights and occasionally change a reel of tape. However, the reality was quite different. Most machine room supervisors would trade their last box of punch cards for an “Electro” who could unfailingly schedule and manage jobs, deal with unexpected events, and resolve performance problems. The same is true today—and that’s where automated operations come in.
In the mainframe computing environment, the variety of software needed to perform essential functions has always posed a challenging operations management problem. Initial solutions relied on numerous human operators, whose salaries became a significant portion of the IT budget.
Operations became a monster that had to be fed constantly. Whole administrative structures were created to support it. This bureaucracy, and the nature of people, led to a system that was prone to errors— resulting in more expense and complexity. The situation was out of control and something had to be done. The answer turned out to be using the computer to control and manage itself.

The Beginnings of Automated Operations
Automated computer operations began about 45 years ago when IBM introduced the OS/360 operating system. Like other early operating systems, OS/360 was a supervisory program that managed system resources and provided automatic transition from one job to another. This was called batch processing. OS/360 could run batch jobs, but had only limited control over their sequence and no capability to schedule future jobs. It still required a high level of operator involvement.
Subsequently, IBM developed add-on components like Job Entry System 3 (JES3) that provided basic job scheduling. But, this capability remained weak in later IBM operating systems such as MVS, VM, and DOS/VE. The issues surrounding automating computer operations lie in the complexity of the various operating systems, databases, communications, and other software in use. Because each component was independent, they had to be manually integrated and controlled by the Operations staff.
The continuing need for people to perform complex, labor-intensive tasks led software developers to begin developing today’s automated operations software. The number and breadth of products has grown considerably to encompass scheduling, management of console messages, backup and recovery, printing services, performance tuning, and more.

5 Major Benefits of Automation
Given the right tools, automating computer operations can be surprisingly easy and can reap major benefits. Understanding these benefits—and some obstacles—will help you develop support for an operations automation project. A recent study by a leading trade journal asked the question, “What do you see as the most important benefits of an automated or unattended computer center?” The primary benefits of operations automation cited most often were cost reduction; productivity, availability, reliability, and performance.

Every business faces global pressure to increase their profitability. One approach is to reduce costs. But, reducing the capabilities of the computer center negatively impacts the entire company.
Automation software is a better and more intelligent approach to cost containment and reduction. The greatest opportunity is to increase service to the customer (end user) while systematically reducing costs. Management often overlooks this potential for savings. Most modern servers have a low operating cost and the total cost of ownership has been declining. Even so, the cost of the operations staff can be as high as 71% of the total cost.
Productivity
As an organization’s technology demands grow, productivity becomes a bigger concern. Typically, as other business areas were given tools to increase their productivity and effectiveness, IT operations took a back seat. The proliferation of desktop productivity software has created substantial gains in the office and HR environments. But, instead of alleviating workload for the IT professionals in the back room, the spread of PCs has meant more tasks to be accomplished.
As people use computers more, they place greater demands on the system. More users are generating more jobs, and printed output has increased despite efforts to reduce printed reports. In spite of the trend to online transaction-oriented and client/server systems, batch workloads continue to grow. Production batch jobs still consume the majority of CPU time, and in large shops, jobs are constantly being added.
Automated operations can resolve these issues in several ways.
Job scheduling software increases batch throughput by automating the production batch schedule. In the early days, computer throughput was limited by how fast operators could reset switches on the console. The solution for today is not to allow the computer to remain idle while waiting for the operator to release the next job. You save time and money by eliminating the lag time between jobs and minimizing operator intervention. In some instances, you can trim hours off your process, which lets you process more work and significantly improve system use.
Once the job schedule is established, the automation software executes the commands precisely and in the correct sequence, eliminating operator errors. Forecasting job completion and being able to perform “what if” analyses of schedule changes benefits operations by removing much of the guesswork from daily tasks.
Availability
Companies are continually more reliant on their computers. Day-to-day business is routinely conducted with online systems: order entry, reservations, assembly instructions, shipping orders—the list goes on. If the computer is not available, the business suffers.
Years ago, it was considered acceptable to have the computer unavailable for a few hours. Today, with the high volume of cloud computing, the outage of key systems can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue and tarnish a company’s reputation.
High availability is clearly one of IT management’s primary goals. Here too, automated operations can help. A disk drive may crash, but the situation becomes serious when there is not an adequate backup— or worse, the tape cannot be found. A key advantage to automation is the ability to automate your save and recovery systems to ensure protection from the potential disaster of disk loss, or inadvertent damage to system objects from human error.
In a networked environment, centralized management also makes sense. Remote resources can solve business issues while a single operator at a central console observes critical functions throughout the network. Continuous monitoring with a low CPU and communications overhead makes it easier to spot vital network performance trends.
Reliability
Productivity is an obvious benefit of automation. However, reliability is the real gem that sparkles with automation. It is the cornerstone of any good IT operations department and without it you have confusion, chaos, and unhappy users. IT operations require two opposed skill sets: On one hand, an operations person needs highly technical skills, such as the ability to understand the complexities of an operating system and to analyze and solve problems as they arise. On the other hand, this same person has to be content pushing buttons and loading paper. 
Let’s face it, off-shift operations include some of the most boring, repetitive, and error-prone tasks of an IT organization. But, when you remove the human factor, you eliminate most batch processing errors.
Automated operations ensure that jobs are not forgotten or run out of sequence, that prerequisite jobs are completed successfully, that the input data is correct, and that any special processing is performed.
All these types of errors occur in single-location organizations. Now, imagine a network of multiple systems, geographically dispersed that include multiple operating systems, communications issues, integrated local area network processing, and attached PCs. The chance for errors rises exponentially. The only way to make this type of environment work is automated operations.
Software can handle complex tasks dynamically and intelligently, based on predefined parameters. Yet, critical company functions such as releasing jobs, performing backups, and ensuring communications, are normally performed by entry-level individuals within the IT organization. The benefit of an automated system is that these functions are reliably executed by the automation software, relieving operations personnel from hours of tedious, boring and manual tasks.
Performance
Every company would like to have their enterprise perform like a thoroughbred. In reality, it is more likely to be overburdened with work. Even though advancements in computers make them faster and less expensive every year, the demands on them always catch up and eventually exceed the level of capability that a company’s computer infrastructure possesses. That leaves a lot of companies wanting to improve their system performance.
Two options to improve performance are to upgrade hardware or purchase a newer system—both expensive choices. It’s also possible to tune a system for better performance, but this takes a highly skilled person who is not normally available 24 hours a day. And, once a system is tuned for a specific workload, if the workload changes, the settings are no longer optimum.

Tuesday 3 July 2018

Sony's Aibo.


Probably the oldest and best known robot dog in the world, Sony’s Aibo returns this year as the new ERS 1000 model, which the company says will be more like a real dog then ever before. With its fish eye lens cameras, Wi-fi connectivity, and location and mapping software, the robot will learn from its owner, develop its own personality and grow together with its owner as a partner. As it interacts with people over time, Aibo’s behaviour slowly changes and adapts in response to its unique environment. The robot can move along at a total of 22 axes to resemble smooth and natural movements of a dog, with its body language expressed through a combination of voices and eye, ear and tail movements.

Saturday 30 June 2018

Buddy by Blue Frog




















With it’s a cheerful and sweet little face to express emotion, the Buddy by Blue Frog Robotics is the companion robot for the family. The fully mobile robot moves with two motorised wheels. With its sensors, cameras, and microphones, the robot is able to hear and speak. It is full of personality and reacts to its environment through a range of expressions (such as happiness, grumpiness, anger or sadness) that allow it to better engage with his family. The robot can help the family with daily tasks, protect the home, entertain the children, and interact with other smart connected devices in the home.

Friday 29 June 2018

Honda's new 3E (Empower, Experience, Empathy) Robotics.


Better known for its ASIMO humanoid robot, Honda unveiled a family of robots under its new 3E (Empower, Experience, Empathy) Robotics Concept, which demonstrates the company’s vision of a society where robotics and AI (artificial intelligence) can assist people in a multitude of situations, from disaster recovery and recreation to learning from human interaction to become more helpful and empathetic. The family includes the 3E-A18, a companion robotics concept that shows compassion to humans with a variety of facial expressions; 3E-B18, a chair-type mobility concept designed for casual use in indoor or outdoor spaces; 3E-C18, a small-sized electric mobility concept with multi functional cargo space; and 3E-D18, an autonomous off-road vehicle concept with AI designed to support people in a broad range of work activities.

Wednesday 27 June 2018

Ubtech Robotics’ Walker.




Ubtech Robotics’ Walker is the world’s first commercialised biped (walking on two legs) robot for the consumer market, offering a complete “home butler” service. The robot is designed to provide smart assistance and support across a wide range of people’s daily lives. Activated by voice or via a touch screen, it can perform a variety of functions for the home; including smart home control, video surveillance monitoring, security patrol monitoring, motion detection, instant alarm, video calls/conferencing, real time email integration, calendar/schedule management, playing music and videos and dancing. New functional arms and a variety of interactive control features are being developed.

The Aeolus Robot


The Aeolus Robot is one of the first household robot assistants. Equipped with an agile arm, it is able to move household objects and can recognize and adapt to changing environments. The robot can learn, navigate and complete tasks independently. With several key features and functionalities such as recognition of thousands of items, it can pick up items off the floor and put them away in their proper storage areas. The robot can use a vacuum or a dry mop to clean floors, and continually adapts to unique home layouts and routines. With advanced sensory and bio metric technologies, it can recognize and differentiate between family members, the physical living space and household items.