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This year’s MD&M (and ATX) West is dominated by a common theme of automating and robotizing an array of new manufacturing, semiconductor, and medical end uses. Earlier this week we blogged at motioncontroltips.com about how that relates to the application of motion-control and power-transmission technologies ; today we profile robotics we’ve seen at the show. ATI Industrial Automation — MD&M West Booth 4211 — End-effector innovations ATI Industrial Automation — which last we checked is still undergoing an enormous facility expansion (to 185,000 ft 2 ) at its Apex, N.C. location — is highlighting a pretty recent release at MD&M West. The U1-050 Universal Compliance Compensator is an end-effecting technology that combines adaptability to boost throughput and precision in bin picking (the application everyone seems to want to discuss here in Anaheim) as well as automated assembly and loading and unloading tasks and robotic finishing. The U1-050 is compliant to address misalignment in multiple directions … with concurrent Z compression, X-Y lateral, and X-Y-Z axis rotation compliance. (Upon completion of a task requiring forgiveness, a reset piston returns U1-050 to a repeatable center.) In addition to this newer release, ATI Industrial Automation is also displaying its core product offerings — including force-torque transducers that measure force and torque from multiple directions. Cognex — MD&M West Booth 4523 — New barcode readers to cutting-edge deep learning Check out this booth for the latest on this manufacturer’s mobile barcode reading; tools for (IoT-ready) realtime automation monitoring; and even a bit on Cognex’s efforts to advance Deep Learning through the use of machine-vision data collection. Denso Robotics — MD&M West Booth 4139 — for cobot functionality from traditional industrial robots Highlighted in Anaheim this year is Denso’s RC8A robot controller with what the company calls Safety Motion. Released last year, the software […]