Smart Factory

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Conventional manufacturing on the verge of intelligence

Digital twins are the key to achieving smart factories. They will open the door to the manufacturing industry’s cyber-physical future.

Digital twins are cyber clones of physical things. Their use in product design and planning is big news at the moment, and using them to plan entire factories is potentially the next major step toward smart manufacturing.

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Getting it right the first time

With digital twins helping to ward off manufacturing defects, maybe product recalls will soon be a thing of the past?

15 September is a date Samsung employees are unlikely to forget anytime soon. It’s the day U.S. safety regulators formally announced a recall of Samsung’s new flagship Galaxy Note 7 smartphone in response to an electrical fault that had caused several units to overheat and even catch fire during charging. At that time there were already over a million of the phones in circulation worldwide, making the recall action a hugely expensive exercise.

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Robot or cobot: The five key differences

Cobots are on the rise. How do they differ from conventional industrial robots?

The concept for cobots (collaborative robots) was born in 1995 as part of a research project spearheaded by the General Motors Foundation. The idea was to make robots so safe that they could literally work hand in hand with people. Now, twenty years later, cobots have found a place on many factory floors – and also in public awareness. And yet many don’t really understand how cobots are different from robots.