Real-World Innovations

• A standardized work in progress system that ensures all products achieved the correct curing for RTV (room temperature vulcanizing application) was the most innovative technology Terry Annas of Delta-Q Technologies (Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada) saw in the past year. Annas says the system, which has been implemented at Delta-Q, does its work in a multi-tier system used to move product between stations.
   
• For Paul Del Net of Rolmaster Conveyors (Cambridge, Ontario, Canada), a digital markup application for managing revisions of product and system drawings was his innovative highlight of the past year.
   
• Also on the software side, Eric Rice of Applied Motion Products (Watsonville, Calif.) cited an adaptive servo loop tuning application as his pick for recently introduced automation technology innovation.
   
• A turnkey assembly operation system was not only the most innovative thing Peter Boyle of Zapco International (Manteca, Calif.) saw recently, it’s also likely to be his next project. Boyle says he is in the process of writing a budget to implement the system.
   
• A foam gripper made Nick Wisniewski’s list of most innovative automation technologies. He is with World Class Plastics (Russells Point, Ohio). “We were able to take parts out of a mold with our robots using the foam gripper where other vacuum cups could not get a seal on the high ribbed parts we have,” he said.
   
• Capitalizing on innovation, as Annas, Boyle and Wisniewski have done, was a fairly common theme across responses to this question. Another example of this was provided by Haifa Almarzooq of the Bahrain Petroleum Company (Awali, Bahrain), who is in the process of implementing a high-throughput wireless data infrastructure that caught the company’s attention as an innovative technology worthy of implementation.

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