Industrial Automation

In a move that is likely to be replicated by many companies in the coming decades, Japanese company Canon announced they will completely automate the manufacturing of cameras. Jan Misumi, company spokesman, made the announcement this month, that in the next few years, the company will completely rely on robots to produce their cameras.

This gargantuan move will be made in an effort to cut cost, Misumi explained. Of course, many worry that this trend of robotic automating will lead to job loss, but the company denies this.

The company points out that as the yen soars in value, companies are choosing to move production out of Japan. (Side note: This truly illustrates how backwards global monetary and financial systems are) So, in order to avoid moving out of Japan, robots will handle production at the Canon factories and those workers being displaced will be assigned new jobs in a different part of the organization.

Misumi did not give a date for when this switch would be completed, but some speculate it could happen as early as early as 2015.

See the below short form Discovery Documentary on how camera lenses are made. Then see who will be replaced.

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Military mechanics are part of the unsung heroes of our (US) armed forces. Ask anyone who either served or is currently serving over-seas (or at home for that matter) and they’ll tell you ‘Murphy’ is usually in full effect and any and all vehicles will eventually break down. 'Murphy,' or Murphy's Laws are a military joke that ulitmately means "anything that can go wrong, will." (See Murphy's Laws) Weather its aircraft, ships or vehicles; without these mechanics you simply cannot take the fight to the enemy. As you can imagine, mechanics are usually one of the last few to acquire all the fun tech-toys some of the other MOS’s (Army Military Occupation Specialists) receive and are usually limited to hand or power tools to get the job done. That may be a thing of the past as Steven Henderson and Steven Feiner from the Columbia University’s Computer Graphics & User Interfaces Lab are looking to outfit our men and women mechanics with an augmented reality system that will enable them to see in a whole new perspective.

Called ‘ARMAR’ (Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair) the augmented reality system overlays useful information over the area of the vehicle that’s being worked on. The user wears a tracked head-set with micro-screens that can display arrows (for problem location), text labels (for the various parts) and animation sequences with real-time diagnostic data that are designed to help the mechanic with reassembly of the part in question. This mobile AR system can also send a live feed to supervisors stationed elsewhere for monitoring and assisting with the repairs being performed. ARMAR was tested against two other systems that included an untracked head-worn system and a laptop (system being currently used by mechanics) in a controlled environment on a Marine Corps LAV-25A1 (armored personnel carrier). The results showed that the mechanic could perform the repair more quickly over the other two systems without the need for excess head movements. Another test was conducted using what’s known as the ‘psychomotor’ phase of the repair. This is where the physical layout of the equipment being worked on is changed through the repair itself. These results showed that the mechanic again was able to complete the task more efficiently and quickly over the 3D-based laptop as well as the untracked head-gear.

As a result of the tests conducted, the researchers plan to implement ‘Opportunistic Controls’ into the ARMAR platform which would give the person using it the ability to use gestures with relative ease as well as provide tangible feedback. As an example; a user could assign a set of virtual buttons to various objects with the relevant information attached to each button thereby giving the user haptic information needed as a pop-up screen according to which one is pressed. Again, this was tested against the other two base-line systems and was found to be superior over the others. While ARMAR is still in its infancy, the test results should help the researchers improve the over-all effectiveness of the system and have it available for our invaluable military mechanics sometime in the near future as they have earned the right to get the ‘latest and greatest’ toys as any other outfit in the military!

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Equipment designed for an industrial environment must recover from ESD events and be immune to magnetic coupling from motors and wires carrying current transients. 

In ESD testing, every connector port and accessible surface is shocked with an ESD gun.  The ESD gun is configured for 15kV air gap and brought close enough to discharge to the product.  All locations are hit again with an 8kV contact discharge.  Both tests are repeated with negative polarity. 

One would expect the transient currents inside the enclosure associated with the ESD testing would also test immunity to magnetic coupling.  If something can recover from the current associated with rapidly discharging a capacitor with 8kV through the device, you might think, it can recover from any reasonable pulsed current outside of the enclosure.  This intuitive reasoning turns out to be false.

A few years ago I performed this test on a product for use in an industrial environment.  Applications engineers reported that in apps testing interference from a motor being energized could cause the product to lock up.  How could this be if it recovered reliably from repeated ESD gun discharges? 

It turned out that a processor’s low-voltage core reset line was routed over a break in the ground plane.  One side of the split plane was connected to the product chassis.  The reset line, like most reset lines, was connected to an open-drain output on a reset chip and a weak pullup resistor.  A small amount of current flowing between the ground planes was enough to assert the reset.  A proper reset required two reset lines to be asserted..  The direct ESD discharges caused both reset lines to be asserted, hiding the potential problem of a partial reset. 

A stronger pull up increased immunity to magnetic transients.  Drilling through the trace and routing it with engineering wire, keeping it clear of chassis ground, completely solved the problem. 

A good source of magnetic transients is an ESD gun discharged to its ground with its cord wrapped around the device under test (DUT).  If I had done that test at the time of my ESD testing, I would have found the problem before my product went to apps testing. 

Lessons Learned:

1. Even though a reset line does not have high-edge rate signals that could make it an aggressor trace, high-impedance pullups make it susceptible to becoming a victim trace.  Trace routing has a huge impact on coupling. 
2. Whenver I’m doing ESD testing, even when pulsed magnetic field testing is not part of the test, I always discharge it the gun a few times directly to its ground to see if it affects the behavior of the DUT.