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In a high-mix/low-volume environment, it’s not good enough to simply be part of the pack. Today you need to be out front and pulling away, powered by the best smart tech available.

When Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute needed clear plastic to make face shields for the coronavirus pandemic, conventional suppliers were unable to provide it. “We are now one of the largest purchasers of document covers in the country,” Robert Hull, acting VP for research at Rensselaer, said during a  webinar that SME and CESMII – the Smart Manufacturing Institute hosted last week.

This is the first in a series of articles that will cover the accelerating improvement in manufacturing technology.

The devices quickly become less costly, sophisticated and independent, gaining wider influence.

Manufacturers continue to be bombarded with an onslaught of technology terms, as well as different ideas on where to begin and how to proceed. This confusion has slowed the adoption of new technology. Yet a big opportunity for a huge increase in efficiency awaits.

It’s a familiar scenario at the factory. Quality issues have reared their ugly heads, requiring rework, causing backorders, delaying shipments, and driving tense daily customer calls. Meanwhile, the team works to address production issues using a mix of day-old post-mortem reports, shop-floor observations captured on notepads, and other operational data summarized on spreadsheets and sticky notes.

In today’s booming software landscape, you see highly dynamic teams quickly iterating to develop and improve their products. Yet while the world’s software creators have learned to “move fast and break things,” hardware developers are still (slowly) moving to adopt a more agile product development methodology.

Industry 4.0 is inevitable, and everyone is looking to find a way forward. But manufacturing leaders who focus only on the technology involved will be frustrated—because the new industrial revolution is just as much a culture and people thing as it is a technology thing.

A team of researchers from UC Berkeley, led by Pieter Abbeel, is working on the creation of smart robots that are teachable and can learn new skills without pre-programming. Abbeel and his team also formed a startup called Embodied Intelligence with the aim of developing artificial intelligence (AI) software to enable robots to learn from humans to perform complex tasks.

While cameras and motion control have worked in tandem for at least 15 years, their integration has improved because networks have gotten faster, more reliable, and more deterministic (i.e., nothing will interfere with a function that’s a priority).