Entries for the 'Manufacturing Automation & Intelligence' Category

Jody Koplo

07/06/2009

3 Comments

I recently finished a project that checked for gas leaks on a mission critical system. Any leaks needed to be diagnosed and discovered as quickly as possible. Our solution also had to be mobile and easily carted around the facility. To develop a s...

Eric Anderson

06/26/2009

0 Comments

Ladder diagrams are an industrial programming language typically used on programmable logic controllers (PLC). This graphical language mimics a relay logic electrical schematic. For engineers that are not familiar with relay logic, though, ladder dia...

Leon Grossman

06/26/2009

0 Comments

Some time ago, the staff of the Advanced Powertrain Research Facility at Argonne National Laboratory asked me if we could create a robotic driver to control speed of a vehicle on their dynamometer. There are off-the-shelf solutions for this task but ...

Ken Brey

06/09/2009

0 Comments

Matrox has added 3D scanning tools to the Matrix Imaging Library (MIL), version 9.0. The concept is similar to that employed in single-purpose devices by Micro-Epsilon and SICK. (see Two 3D Scanner tools.) The camera images a laser line from an ou...

Ken Brey

06/09/2009

0 Comments

I saw an amazing new 3d vision tool at the Robot and Vision Show today. It is the IFM Defector PMD 3DD. This device is a 64X48 pixel distance sensor. It operates by the time of flight principle. A pulse of light infra-red light is emitted by ...

Ken Brey

05/27/2009

1 Comments

Purpose-built 3D scanning tools are an exciting new development in machine vision. People have been building their own 3D scanners for years with cameras and line lasers. Now, a couple of integrated and factory-calibrated units are on the market w...

Nick Shea

05/21/2009

0 Comments

Yesterday, I attended the 2009 Energy Management Seminar presented by Schneider Electric. The seminar focused on strategies and technologies to monitor and improve energy efficiency. The keynote speaker, Peter Garforth, made a compelling case for ...

Frank Riordan

05/15/2009

0 Comments

A Solar Panel Assembly Project that DMC recently completed was the basis for a feature article in Design World Magazine. The article can be found here. DMC provided controls engineering and programming services for a company that makes machines th...

David Simmons

05/01/2009

0 Comments

Mike Bacidore over at ControlDesign.com has written an insightful article discussing the recent shift of many of their readers from using traditional PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) to using more powerful PACs (Programmable Automation Controlle...