Originally made popular by the introduction of Rethink Robotics’ Baxter, so-called collaborative robots have created a lot of excitement around the industry over the last few years.

For decades, quality, low cost, and on-time delivery have been the primary demands of manufacturing customers. Recently, a new demand has been added to the mix—speed. Customers still want a quality product delivered on-time at a fair price. Only now they want it faster. 

In manufacturing, the slightest deviation can have significant repercussions. This guide presents solutions, in the form of best practices, that will help quality and production managers solve their productivity issues and implement near-line and in-line automated dimensional inspections.

East meets west. It’s a common idiom that has been around for so long that it has evolved to both express agreement and collaboration as well as to describe polar opposites, and just about everything in between.

With the help of microscopy and imaging technologies, as well as automation, manufacturing is making great strides toward more advanced and efficient processes for building bigger and better things.

It all started with the wheel. Moving things, and ourselves, across distances became easier and more efficient with the wheel. Over the centuries, we progressed from carts we pushed ourselves to wagons pulled by animals we domesticated and trained.

The quality lab is a critical component to manufacturing companies, especially when preparing parts for production, routine inspection and also product development.

The first thing we can do to understand revolution versus evolution is to turn to the pure definition of these two words. The word evolution˜refers to the gradual development or changes in something over a period. 

The fundamental goal of automation is to reduce reliance on manpower. Whether for traditional manufacturing or additive manufacturing, it is important to understand the capabilities of supporting post-process manufacturing and metrology for validating that process.

For decades, many manufacturers have counted on robots to tirelessly produce parts of predictable quality. One of the key attributes of robots is their repeatability, which means that their tool tip will return to the same pre-programmed location with a known and relatively small error.