Safety is a topic that is on everyone's mind. No one wants to be interviewed on television after an explosion at their plant or after a severe injury occurs.

  Robot simulation and offline programming software is producing savings for North American Bus Industries.

  Scott Fraser is the Electrical Technology Department Chair at Long Beach City College in California. Besides providing electrical training, the Department offers specialty areas in robotics and industrial automation.

  By developing closer links between 3D simulation tools and factory floor automation, major PLM and controls vendors are aiming to move digital manufacturing technology one step closer to the mainstream.

  While not everyone likes the name, a new generation of programmable automation controllers that feature multi-domain control functionality are helping to reduce costs for a growing number of manufacturers.

  While the fogginess around mechatronics may not have dissipated entirely, one thing is increasingly clear: as a conceptual schema for design, mechatronics continues to become more visible—and its importance can only grow over the next few years.

 The Kendall-Jackson winery packages more than 3 million cases of wine each year, so it’s a big challenge to position labels on bottles that race through its production lines. 

  Fast Digital Fieldbuses Improve Motion Control.

  (Sidebar to "Plugging the Automation Skills Gap" from the August 2007 issue of Automation World)

  U.S. manufacturing companies discover what it takes to be competitive here and how to grow in Asia.

 New safety standards and technology are allowing plants to grab productivity gains by implementing safety systems.

 Lean Manufacturing can deliver huge efficiency gains for mass production operations, but Pearson Packaging Systems has proved that Lean can produce big payoffs for one-off, custom manufacturers as well.

  Technology advances enable fast changeovers and a seamless manufacturing line, from raw materials to packaged goods.

  Users like different flavors of the technology.Retrofitting an old gantry requires a lot more than simply replacing the manual, pull-along crane with a robot—especially when the plan is for people and a high-speed robot to share the 100-foot long workspace in front of a bank of machines. Just ask Steve Dickerson, chief technology officer at CAMotion Inc., an Altanta-based systems integrator. “You have to do a very fast, repeated scan to make sure that none of the safety conditions have been violated,” he says. Fast and reliable communications are a must.

 Smart field devices might not be glamorous enough to take the spotlight, but they sure do play an important role in managing assets these days.

 Upgrading control platforms to gain all the advantages of the latest technology can be done in several ways, but careful planning, and involving everyone affected, can assure success.

 At the heart of lean thinking is constant change, like the metamorphosis of a butterfly over and over, creating improved manufacturing.

 Replacing traditional hard-wired safety systems with safety programmable controllers running on safe versions of open-architecture fieldbus networks can pay big dividends for manufacturers.

 Trevor Jones, a Canadian-based executive for Thermo Electron Corp., was elected last January as President of the Robotic Industries Association (RIA), the North American robot industry trade organization. Jones spoke recently with Automation World Managing Editor Wes Iversen about his goals for his two-year term, and the prospects for growth in the robotics and automation markets.

 Trevor Jones is the 2006 President of the Robotic Industries Association. He is currently director of OEM business development for Thermo Electron Corp., Laboratory Automation and Integration (formerly CRS Robotics), based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada.