The time of flight sensor (ToF) has a peculiar name. It doesn’t necessarily mean it will calculate the time a flying object is in the air, nor does it measure the precise time an object takes off from the ground. Before understanding what a ToF sensor does, it’s essential to understand what ToF actually is. ToF measures the time it takes for a physical object to travel a given distance through a medium. Typically, this measurement can determine velocity and path length, but it can also be used to learn about an object’s dimensions.

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FABTECH has once again come and gone and this year’s rendition offered, for the first time since the pandemic, a chance to see everyone’s faces again. With hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of exhibitors and attendees alike roaming around in the Georgia World Congress Center, there was a diverse set of robots, machines, and approaches to manufacturing automation. But what stood out the most?

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With the increasing abundance of robots, you need a relative increase in engineers to set them up for each company. So how complicated of a process is programming a robot?

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With so many different suppliers, machines, and setups, you want to make sure that whatever decision you make, it’s a comprehensive one – one that ticks all the boxes for your manufacturing plant and one that can secure a more productive and efficient future.

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Though the autonomous robots we have today aren’t sentient like HAL, we’re approaching an era of humanoid robots that look like humans but function off lines of code. So if a humanoid robot isn’t quite HAL but also not a standard pick-and-place robot, then what exactly is it?

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Many new pieces of technology always seem to have long names with abbreviations to simplify their pronunciation. Sometimes, they’re easy to decipher like the widely-known AI – or artificial intelligence. Other times, they refer to technologies with specific uses and would only be known to the users who handle them daily. The Human-Machine Interface (HMI) is one of those pieces of technology.

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To the untrained eye, welding can come across as a more pleasurable form of labor. The action of welding just seems that much more interesting than other processes. But just because it looks fascinating doesn’t mean it’s all glitz and glamor. It’s a physically and mentally demanding job that, if done without the proper care, could lead to many problems and hiccups along the way.

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As time has passed, their use has only increased. Advancements in robotics have allowed robots to alleviate the stress of demanding and tiring jobs. With fewer workers entering the manufacturing workforce as the years pass, more robots are being tasked with performing jobs that people simply do not want or have the energy to do on a long-term basis. With the saturation of robots in manufacturing, a clear division of labor is present, showing the ever-growing distance between human and robotic labor.

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Manual skilled labor is always as difficult and time-consuming as it seems. When it comes to sanding, there is a recurring set of problems that can arise due to many factors. Sanding is still a human’s game despite significant advancements in autonomous technology. Like most things, being human means human errors are still part of the process. Some of the biggest problems lie in the equipment setup, miscalculations of distances, and, of course, fatigue.

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There’s no question we’re in the midst of a climate crisis. As officials from all over the world struggle to create a plan to mitigate the effects of climate change, the causes are still points of contention. The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic paved the way for a brief but impactful decline in carbon emissions.

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