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.

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?

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?

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.

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?