OK, I admit it: I once ripped my entire “Star Wars” DVD collection so I could watch it on my iPad. There was a long flight coming up and a certain well-known media store wanted 100 bucks for the download. Please don’t tell anyone though; I’ve since learned that I violated Title I of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 17 U.S.C. 1201 and could face a $500,000 penalty and up to 5 years of imprisonment. I get it. Intellectual property theft is a serious offense, but really, paying for “The Phantom Menace” a second time would be adding insult to…
Carbon announces a strategic partnership with Arkema through an investment in the startup’s capital, to deliver new materials performance and a supply chain model for Carbon’s manufacturing partners. Arkema has taken part, with an investment of US$ 20 million, in the Carbon Growth Funding Round to support the next generation of fully integrated digital manufacturing platforms with collaboration, materials and innovative solutions. This alliance is an opportunity for both companies to grow the pipeline of production applications driving volume and revenues, through advanced materials technology, the companies report. “We are eager to continue and strengthen our joint efforts in delivering…
Private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P. announced on Tuesday, June 25, 2019, that it had a definitive agreement to acquire AutoStore, a Norwegian-based provider of robotics and software order fulfillment solutions to warehouses and distribution centers around the world. This marks at least third investment by THL in the supply chain and materials handling space in recent years. In 2017, THL acquired MHS, a Louisville-based provider of parcel handling systems. More recently, in March 2019, the firm announced an investment in Fortna, a supply chain consulting and design firm. Members of AutoStore’s senior management and equity teams, among…
Robots Replacing 20 million Manufacturing Jobs Oxford Economics, global forecasting, and quantitative analysis firm have released a new report that predicts robotic machines will displace about 20 million manufacturing jobs across the world over the next decade. Robots are increasingly capable of performing tasks that were previously relied on human hands. This robotic revolution is propelled by technological advances in automation, engineering, energy storage, AI and machine learning. Already, the number of robots in use worldwide multiplied three-fold over the past two decades, to 2.25 million. Trends suggest the global stock of robots will multiply even faster in the next…
The ExOne Company announces the premiere of its newest industrial 3D sand printer, the S-MAX Pro. The latest generation of industrial 3D printing technology can handle prototyping and industrial series production. S-MAX Pro can achieve printing speeds of up to 135 l/h (18 s/layer) and can 3D print two full 1,800x1,000x700 (mm) job boxes, each with a volume of 1,260 L, in just 24 hours. It features an efficient printhead and the fully automated recoater. The molding material can be replaced quickly. This enables production of complex parts with various casting materials and a 3D sand printing solution. The design…
SparkFun Electronics’ SparkX division, led by founder Nathan Seidle, has released the company’s first open-source, embedded-systems module—SparkFun Artemis, Engineering Version—to empower engineers, prototypers and R&D teams to integrate the TensorFlow machine-learning platform into any design. Additionally, the team has launched three boards with the unshielded module: BlackBoard Artemis; BlackBoard Artemis Nano; and BlackBoard Artemis ATP. “Our goal is to enable anyone to integrate low-power machine learning into their designs and projects without being locked into a specific toolchain,” says SparkFun founder and engineer, Nathan Seidle. “The Artemis module is the first product to bridge the gap between hobbyists and consumer…
When HP CEO Meg Whitman announced in 2013 her company would start building 3D printers, the announcement took not only the 3D printing industry by surprise, but also many inside HP. Researchers rushed to get a prototype up and running in time for a press event a few months later. Fast forward to 2019. Whitman has retired, but what she set in motion has taken off on an unexpected trajectory. The company and outside analysts alike believed in 2013 that HP would focus on consumer and small lot print runs including prototyping and mass customization of consumer products. Instead, HP…
Hexagon Hosts HxGN 2019 Hexagon, a company with roots in metrology and precision measurement technologies, recently hosted the annual user conference, HxGN Live (June 15-18, Las Vegas, Nevada). Over the last decade, the company has steadily expanded through growth and acquisitions into simulation, autonomous vehicles, location-based intelligence, and manufacturing, among others. One of the most popular demos on the show floor is the Birdly, a VR flight simulator. It lets you strap on to a set of artificial wings and fly through a virtual 3D city. The faster you flap your wings, the faster you fly. You can perform deep…
Airbus Defence and Space is leveraging ANSYS’ embedded software solution to develop an advanced Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that will be engineered for speed, safety and affordability. Through a new strategic partnership, ANSYS and Airbus Defence and Space will collaborate to innovate a new ANSYS solution for enabling safety-critical flight controls with artificial intelligence (AI), aiming at autonomous flight by 2030. The partnership between Airbus and ANSYS will engineer an advanced ANSYS SCADE tool that links traditional model-based software development with new AI-based development flow. The new ANSYS SCADE tool is designed to help drive the development, certification and embedding…
At its 31st annual conference, the Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) presented Elizabeth Goode of Goode Ink with its President's Award. Goode, the eighth to receive this award, is an additive manufacturing veteran and owner of Goode Ink, which provides consulting services for marketing and strategy. For the past nine years, she has been a key advisor to the AMUG Board. Presently, Goode is AMUG’s principal consultant. Elizabeth Goode received AMUG’s President’s Award for her guidance, counsel and support over the past nine years. Image courtesy of AMUG. “AMUG has relied on Elizabeth’s guidance to become what it is today,”…
North American sales of machine vision (MV) components and systems that provide vision intelligence to robots and other machines declined 4.5 percent over the same period last year. According to statistics from the AIA, the industry’s trade group part of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), financial transactions for the entire market contracted to $674 million, with sales of MV components down 12.6 percent to $93 million and sales of MV systems down 3.1 percent to $579 million. “Based on what we were hearing from our member companies at the end of last year and into the new year, we…
MathWorks announces expanded access to MATLAB Parallel Server to help speed academic research. Now all researchers and students at academic institutions with a MathWorks Campus-Wide License that includes MATLAB Parallel Server have unlimited access to scale MATLAB programs and Simulink simulations to clusters and clouds. The new flexible usage policy also extends to visiting professors and researchers from other academic institutions to enable collaboration. MATLAB Parallel Server provides a way to use additional compute resources to speed up research. Now faculty, researchers and students across an entire campus can run an unlimited number of simultaneous MATLAB computational engines, called MATLAB…
