More about robots and industry

TM Robotics recently authored a report investigating which nations are leading the way in the race for automated production. Statistics from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) show that the number of industrial robots used in production activities is increasing rapidly. However, three-quarters of total robot sales are currently attributed to just five countries — China, the Republic of Korea, Japan, the United States, and Germany.

Asia has long remained the strongest market for robotics. Of the record-breaking 380,550 robot units sold globally in 2017, a significant percentage of these are deployed to Asian factories. In fact, the region has reported record-breaking robot sales for the past four years in a row, rising by 19% in 2017. Asia has pulled out all the stops to remain at the forefront in this area. In 2015, for instance, the Chinese government announced Made in China 2025 (MiC2015), a national initiative that aims to reboot the country’s manufacturing sector, with the objective of China becoming the world’s largest user of robots.

Similarly, Japan launched its own transformation project in 2017, called Society 5.0. This initiative aims to go beyond Germany’s 2011 Industry 4.0 initiative by considering the challenges that these new technologies will bring to society, rather than focusing solely on their use in manufacturing. 

According to the World Robot Statistics, the world’s average robot density is 74 robots per 10,000 employees. The United States sits comfortably above this, at 189 robots per 10,000 employees. In 2016, the country began to climb the robot-density ranks, and today comes in at seventh in the world, behind South Korea, Singapore, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and Denmark.

This figure has been significantly boosted by the modernization of U.S. production facilities, as well as the growing demand for products made in the United States. What’s more, robot sales in the U.S. are expected to increase by at least 15% per year between now and 2020.

Europe, the world’s second-largest market for industrial robot sales, has also increased its volume of robot deployment. Purchasing 56,000 units in total, the continent reached a new peak for robot sales for the third year in a row. That said, much of this deployment was attributed to Germany, currently the fifth-largest robot market in the world. Much of Europe’s deployment of robotic technology is related to the automotive industry. It’s therefore no surprise that the greatest champions for robotics in Europe are those with a strong automotive presence — Germany, Italy, and Sweden.

Automotive manufacturers have long used six-axis robots throughout production. Looking to the future, increasing the volume of robot deployment will rely on the small- to medium-sized companies also investing in automation.

To reach this market, industrial robots must become more accessible, in relation to both cost and user experience. The results of TM Robotics’ "Global Robotics Report," which will be released in 2019, stated that simple programming was one of the most important features when choosing a SCARA, Cartesian, or six-axis model, with 79% of respondents naming this as a top-five consideration.

Easy robot programming is not only an attractive feature for new users, but also provides established users with reduced programming time. Growing demand for easily programmable robots is also evident in the rapid increase in sales of collaborative models — robots that can work without protective barriers between machine and employee.

Collaborative robots, or co-bots, currently account for 3% of the total robotics market, but this figure is expected to reach 34% by 2025. Although these machines have been marketed as easy to program, they should not be considered a complete alternative to traditional industrial robots.

While co-bots do boast some impressive responsive features, these machines generally cannot tackle the dangerous, repetitive, and heavy-duty tasks usually associated with industrial robots — and respondents to the "Global Robotics Report" agree, with 55% saying that they do not believe co-bot technology is advanced enough to deliver the performance required for manufacturing, and a further 25% saying that they are unsure of these co-bots' capabilities.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for automating a facility. While growth in the co-bot market shows that co-bots may indeed be an ideal first step toward automation, there’s more than one route to deploying robotics in an industrial facility.

Unlike the first industrial revolution, today’s manufacturing industry is fiercely competitive. Not only are nations aiming to increase the volume of robots they deploy in their facilities, but new types of robotic technologies are emerging every day to take on new tasks and operations. The IFR predicts that the industry will experience another boom in 2019, with an estimated 2.6 million robot units set to be deployed. There’s no denying that Asia is currently dominating the robotics market, but with such rapid changes happening in a relatively short period of time, there’s good opportunity for other nations to catch up.

Image credit: PopTika / Shutterstock.com

Interesting facts

Solid-state batteries have long been heralded as The Next Big Thing after lithium-ion, with companies from all quarters racing to get them into high-volume production. Dyson, BMW and car manufacturer Fisker are just a few names that have been working on the tech for the last few years, but now, reports suggest a Chinese start-up might be the first to have cracked it.

According to Chinese media, Qing Tao Energy Development Co, a startup out of the technical Tsinghua University, has deployed a solid-state battery production line in Kunshan, East China. Reports claim the line has a capacity of 100MWh per year -- which is planned to increase to 700MWh by 2020 -- and that the company has achieved an energy density of more than 400Wh/kg, compared to new generation lithium-ion batteries that boast a capacity of around 250-300Wh/kg.

Details beyond this are sparse. The headline news here, if accurate, would be that the company has managed to put solid-state batteries into high volume production, but it's not clear how Qing Tao Energy Development has achieved this, nor what price points are involved. Furthermore, while a capacity of 100MWh is not to be sneezed at, it still only equates to fewer than 2,000 long-range EVs per year. Nonetheless, the news demonstrates that progress is happening in the solid-state battery arena. We might not feasibly yet be at high volume production, but we're on our way.

Via: Electrek

Your data security

This is a nice article and is very serious:

In the age of digital technology, the biggest asset any company has is its data. But despite hearing that fact repeated over and over, organizations often haven’t a clue what their data is worth. That’s no surprise, considering how difficult it is to measure the value of enterprise data without generally accepted accounting principles.

However, knowing the value of your data is extremely important for determining your cybersecurity measures. Insurance policy estimates also rely on value, so operating in a vacuum where we know only that data is “valuable” can be problematic. How can you calculate how much your company’s data is worth?  

Finding the True Value of Your Data  

There are actually several ways to determine the value of your data in practical terms. For example, you can estimate the costs of replacing all the data that you have; you could try measuring how much data contributes to your organization’s revenue; or you could figure the income made by selling or renting your data if you were to turn it into Data-as-a-Service. However, calculating data value in these ways can be complex if your organization lacks deep analytic capabilities. 

Figuring Data Value by the Costs of a Breach  

One valid and intelligent way to measure the worth of data is by examining the costs of a data breach. According to the Ponemon 2018 Cost of a Data Breach report, the average loss to the company caused by an attack is $148 per compromised record. 

That means for breaches in which more than 50,000 records are compromised, damages could reach $6.9 million. Even that is nowhere near the scale of a truly massive, headline-grabbing  breach: one million compromised records could cost a company up to $39 million!

Securing Data and Its Value to the Company 

The root cause of all this high risk and potentially massive damage is the phishing attack. When you place a quantifiable value on the data that your organization collects and processes, it’s easy to see why cybersecurity must become a top priority. 

Once a phishing attack succeeds in installing malware on your system, your data is threatened by ransomware, theft of vital banking information and corporate credentials, and other crimes.  

This is why Gartner names anti-phishing defense as essential to an overall protection architecture. 

Data breaches are common occurrences, especially when hackers target humans as the weakest link in any cybersecurity system. Gartner notes Verizon’s statistic that phishing and pretexting encompass 98 percent of social incidents and 93 percent of breaches.

Through a phishing attack, a criminal needs for you to make only one miscalculation and click on a malicious link to enable breach of your organization and considerable financial damage. Because of this vulnerability, anti-phishing protection that preempts attacks before they become a threat should be the first course of action and best practice for protecting your organization—far more reliable than trying to train employees.  

Area 1 Security offers the technology-based anti-phishing protection that Gartner recommends as a necessary element of an overall security infrastructure. A dedicated anti-phishing strategy can detect threats in advance and disable them before they reach the inbox. Don’t let a data breach force you to put a costly price tag on your organization’s data—protect that data from phishing and retain its value intact.

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Article by Kim Del Fierro, VP of Marketing for Area 1 Security.

More to coem soon

Joe Rossini

The day of the robot!!!

Here is an interesting yet frighting article about robots and construction!

The HRP-5P is a humanoid robot from Japan’s Advanced Industrial Science and Technology Institute that can perform common construction tasks including – as we see above – install drywall.

While HRP-5P – maybe we can call it Herb? – uses environmental measurement, object detection, and motion planning to perform various tasks. In this video we see it use small hooks to grab the wallboard and slide it off onto the floor. Then, with a bit of maneuvering, it’s able to place the board against the joists and drill them in place.

“By utilizing HRP-5P as a development platform of industry-academia collaboration, it is expected that research and development for practical use of humanoid robots in building construction sites and assembly of large structures such as aircraft and ships will be accelerated,” write the creators.

The researchers see the robot as a replacement for an aging population and a declining birthrate. “It is expected that many industries such as the construction industry will fall into serious manual shortages in the future, and it is urgent to solve this problem by robot technology,” the write. “Also, at work sites assembling very large structures such as building sites and assembling of aircraft/ships, workers are carrying out dangerous heavy work, and it is desired to replace these tasks with robot technology. However, at the assembly site of these large structures, it is difficult to develop a work environment tailored to the robot, and the introduction of robots has not progressed.”

Considering there are 6 million contractors in the US alone, robots like this one could be a boon or a curse. What happens when we can easily replace humans in shipping, logistics, and construction? Let’s just hope Herb here needs a supervisor.

More to come!

Joe

Automation on all levels of life is growing

Automation, it over the centuries has been a dirty word for many. Way back the horse so necessary to go from one place to another or to help farm the land gave way grudgingly to the car. The locomotive gave way to the airplane. The old fashion printing system gave way to the big presses. The mail is or has given way to the Internet. The list goes on and on. Today we see the web being used more and more and we are seeing the rise of driverless cars. Hamburgers are being made automatically and kiosks allow you to buy a burger without a person.  Ok, I have made the point and that is life as we know it is changing. Things and work that used to require people are quickly shrinking. The big key is retraining to be able to program or guide those robots and that, for now, is the job to have.

More to come soon.

Joe

Brick and mortar fight back!

Aldi is taking its online delivery strategy national.

• RELATED

  
  Aldi expanding in the Garden State

Through its partnership with Instacart, the German supermarket company is bringing its online grocery delivery service to all stores in the United States. The national rollout covers 75 major markets, including San Diego, New York City, Miami, Raleigh and Minneapolis. By Thanksgiving, the service will be available across 5,000 new ZIP codes in 35 states.

Shoppers can participate by visiting Instacart.com or downloading the Instacart app. At checkout, customers can choose a delivery window that works best with their schedule, anywhere from an hour or up to a week later.

The German discount grocer began piloting the service in Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles in August 2017. By March, the company expanded the program to the Midwest.

“Aldi is a pioneer and a leader in creating a shopping experience that works with people’s busy lives,” said Jason Hart, CEO of Aldi U.S. “Our partnership with Instacart and the expansion of our e-commerce options are more ways we are meeting the growing needs of today’s shopper…”

The delivery program coincides with Aldi’s aggressive store expansionacross the U.S. Aldi is in investing more than $5 billion to remodel and expand its store count to 2,500 by the end of 2022. The company, which already operates more than 1,800 stores across the country, said it is more than halfway through its remodel investment.

From China Store Age magazine

A great customer

Describe a recent project you are fond of. How long did it take?

We are very proud of the website and Internet presence we created for Fifth Avenue Internet Garage in Clay Center, Kansas. We approached the owner, Randy Rundle via a cold call and introduced ourselves as web marketing specialists. Randy informed us that he had contracted with other specialists to build him a web page, but they could not create the satisfactory web presence that he was looking for. Randy has a customer base that is not web savvy and he wanted something that was user-friendly and easy to navigate and allowed him the one-on-one customer support that he has used for years. Randy wanted simplicity: He wanted his customers to understand what he offered and also new products he adds several times a year

 

Our programmers created his website, and you will see it is not Responsive Design, but that is by his desire because he wanted a site that would render on most browsers available at the time, including ones that are older since many of his customers do not have new PCs or other devices. Randy invented 6 volt and 12-volt alternators for antique vehicles. An area of pride for Randy is his knowledge of antique cars and their internal workings and he displays that with the release of “The Alternator gazette” a PDF document published for antique vehicle enthusiasts.

 

The website was a huge success. Randy’s website is visited by people from all over the world! After the website success, he decided he wanted to start blogging as a way to further his reputation and introduce new products. We created his first blog, and he has published 72 blog entries. The next year he added another blog to market antique parts and other memorabilia he has collected over the years.

 

As an SEO specialist, I often tell my customers to participate in marketing and evaluation of their website; the most successful websites are where the customer and Rossini.com are a team. Think of a  website as a living document, reflecting you and your company. I am proud to report that this small company has, on a consistent basis, thousands of visitations per week, and is my top producer of visitations beating out several multi million-dollar companies with much bigger websites, and that is because he cares and participates in the process. Besides, his website is a fun site! Be sure and visit his website at: http://fifthaveinternetgarage.com/index.php, his Garage Tech blog: https://fifthaveinternetgarage.blogspot.com/, and Mr. Haney’s Specials: http://mrhaneyspecials.blogspot.com/.