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Advanced warning, this may not be the most professional or business-centric blog post for Gibson Engineering's Support Community. I wanted to share an automation application and the associated story that may entertain some of our readers. Earlier in the year, as we went into coronavirus quarantine and our kids were sent home from school, my wife decided it was a great time to get chickens. I've shrugged off this idea for a couple of years now. However, I came home one night to three excited children making chicken noises before informing me about the "family decision" they had made that day. The family decided to get chickens. They just forgot to consult me first. At this point, I had no say in the matter. I thought I'd have a few weeks or even months to research and build a chicken coop, run, and whatever else I may need for the chickens. Meanwhile, the next day I was texted pictures of my three children holding a dozen baby chicks. After some online research and generating a BOM for my DIY chicken coop, I realizing that it was far less expensive to buy a coop than build one. I soon learned that backyard chickens were experiencing a surge in popularity because of COVID-19. Buying a chicken coop now meant a lead time of 6-9 months which was far beyond the date our chicks needed to move outdoors. Shortly after contacting a few places, I got a call back from a coop builder suggesting that if I wanted to pay in Bitcoin, he would expedite my coop! I'd never dealt with bitcoin before, but for the discount and expedited delivery he was offering, I rolled the dice. I create my Coinbase account, and after a short delay, my cash was converted to cryptocurrency, and the downpayment was funneled to a guy I'd never met in New Hampshire. He apparently has little faith in our federal reserve but he has a kind heart and a knack for building chicken coops. A portion of the sale from every coop he sells is donated to charities bringing food, water, and electricity to impoverished people worldwide and saving children from human trafficking. The coop made it to our home in MA after my son and I picked it up with a rented trailer and moved it into place on some PVC pipes. The chicken run (the outside area) still needed to be built. I then learned the recent popularity of chickens apparently created a shortage of hardware mesh which I'll describe as the Fort Knox version of chicken wire. There was no way my family would let me use standard chicken wire to protect our new family members from the fisher cats, fox, raccoon, coyotes, and hawks that may find them tasty. A combination of amazon and curbside pickup at multiple local Tractor Supply Stores got me enough hardware mesh to complete the job but it was a close call. Now for the automation part that makes this blog at least slightly relevant for Gibson's Support Community. Letting out and then safely closing in a dozen chickens every day and night proves to be painful, in particular, if you aren't home. We entrusted our teenage neighbor to open the door and let the hens out for food and water for a few mornings, that was all we needed to decide an automated door was neccesary. This is where my son Jackson and I put our heads together. After learning about the multiple hundreds of dollars, you could spend on fairly archaic automatic chicken coop doors; my 8-year old son Jackson and I decided we had a better solution. Our plan was to automate the existing door and, of course, integrate some safety to make sure we didn't decapitate a curious hen that may stick her head in or out as that door is closing with 22 pounds of force generated by an open-loop DC brush motor and lead screw. We looked for actuators first. As robust and high performance as Intelligent Actuator RoboCylinders are, these industrial actuators I am familiar with were overkill for our application. We found a compact 6-inch stroke actuator with integrated motor and limit switches for about $25 online. Then we researched wifi-enabled relays for home automation. We found a $15 multiple channel relay module with built-in interlocking capabilities to ensure we weren't trying to open and close at the same time. The wifi module was compatible with a free open source app for any smartphone and included scheduling capabilities. We really didn't want to crush our hens in the door so we added another $6 relay module and a Sick retroreflective H18 sensor to detect any chickens across the door opening that would cut power to the DC motors and stop any motion. It isn't exactly "safety-rated," but we are talking about chickens, not humans here. Once we had all our components, I spent some of a completely unscheduled COVID weekend drawing electrical circuits with my son. I explained the 12vdc power supply for the actuator versus the 5vdc supply on the wifi relay module. We talked about what interlocked meant and how wifi works. We covered series and parallel circuits, and my 8-year-old Jackson son was thrilled to cut and strip some wires, see some lights illuminate, and control electricity to the point he could make something open and close. Last, we added a couple of really cost effective WYZE cams to check in on the chickens anytime we wanted. I never thought I'd say we owned and raised chickens. It's particularly odd when I think about that statement, "We got chickens during a global pandemic, purchased the coop with cryptocurrency, and then my son and I added IIoT devices and automated it!" At Gibson Engineering, we've talked about the personal and professional silver linings through this pandemic. This COVID-driven chicken undertaking has been a silver lining for me and my family. My kid got to see baby chicks grow from fragile little peeping birds to full-grown clucking, egg-laying hens, each with their own personalities. They see where their food comes from, take responsibility for some shared chores (sort-of), and spend more time together taking care of the chickens.

In the 2D industrial imaging realm, I am going to split the cameras into 2 groups: Monochrome and Color cameras. They both have different applications and we usually see monochrome cameras used in the automation industry and machine vision applications. Take a look at the bottom infographic for how to turn light into a digital file. Industrial cameras are digital cameras so this applies to them too. Light hits the subject (no light, no image), a lens collects the light then gets reflected on a sensor that gets converted into signals. Let’s dive into the different parts of this process. Lensing Why do you need a lens to get an image? It is a given that our cell phone cameras have lenses on them, some of our industrial cameras come with autofocus lenses but do we really need a lens to get an image? Actually, you don’t. You can get an image without a lens, it just might not look great. If you have an interchangeable lens DSLR sitting around or if you have a removable lens industrial camera laying around, take off the lens (please be careful with your image sensor…). Take a needle, and make a hole in one of your business cards. Put the business card where the lens might go, and you are going to find that you can actually get an image this way. Crazy! So the job of a lens is to collect light and redirect it to the image sensor. You can accomplish the same function with a pinhole(called a pinhole camera), it’s just not very effective. Image Sensor/Imager Image sensor is where most of the magic happens. Manufacturers mostly use two different image sensors: 1) CMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) 2) CCD (Charged coupled device). I am not going to dive into these technologies but CMOS is what is being used mostly because of the cost and speed of the technology grabbing information from the world. Briefly, on a CMOS sensor, there are little “sensors”(called transistors) that reflect a voltage value depending on the amount of light they receive. On a monochrome camera the light that got collected from the lens hits each pixel on the sensor, the transistor behind reflects a voltage value depending on the brightness, you end up with various voltage levels that represent a grayscale image. Color Filters and Color Cameras Mainly, there are 2 types of hardware technologies manufacturers use to get color images from their image sensors. The main component is the filter in front of the sensor. The phenomenon that you need to understand here is that, when you look through a red film, you will be seeing red. Conversely, if you were a monochrome camera, looking through a red film, the red lights would show up as white. The first and expensive way of getting a color image is to have 3 different image sensors, one to capture Red, one to capture Green and one for Blue. So then, in software, you can create that RGB image. Gets very complicated with how to interact between 3 different imagers, triple the cost because of the hardware, bigger cameras to fit all the sensors and circuitry. Second way of getting a color image is to implement a Bayer filter in front of the image sensor. You can see an image of a Bayer filter in the picture below; It is important to spot that there are way more green pixels than blue and red (%50 green, %25 blue and %25 red to be exact). This is because human eyes like to see green. There is not a lot of reason other than it looks good to the human eye. And if you have been working with industrial cameras for some time now, what looks good to the human eye might not actually be the best image for inspection purposes. Another disadvantage is that you can basically think that you are losing 1/3rd of the resolution of your image. In machine vision, specifically in measuring application, we see the resolution of the camera being very important to hit the right tolerances. So you will find yourself paying for a more expensive color camera with more resolution to get the same tolerances as a monochrome camera. To sum up, it is possible to summarize the image acquisition process in terms of hardware into a couple of steps. Light hits the subject, a lens collects the light, depending on the type of sensor or the filter on the sensor, light hits the pixels and we convert the light into electrical signals. Rest is software. Image Resources :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter https://www.loveyourlens.co.uk/which_entry_level_digital_camera/digital-camera-sensor/ https://meroli.web.cern.ch/lecture_cmos_vs_ccd_pixel_sensor.html

To start, an executive round table happened on Wednesday, September 9th, called “The State of the Global Robotics Industry” at RIA Robotics Week (Link here if you want to watch it). It was an interesting talk about the past couple of months, the current and most importantly the future of advanced manufacturing and robotics. I thought it was great to hear the opinions of some important names of the automation industry. (If you haven’t watched the round table, feel free to read the summary I wrote at the end of this post.) The round table started with analyzing how the last quarter went in terms of numbers. With all the stoppage in manufacturing, it seems like the automotive and aerospace industry saw the biggest hit. However the rebounding already has started and if the automotive projection numbers hold true, we will only be seeing a 15% decrease in year to year numbers. In Gibson’s territory, we don’t see a ton of automotive applications comparatively to Midwest or the rest of the country. It has been mentioned several times in the talk that medical industries are surging. The reason for this is that advanced manufacturing has been able to react so quickly to the changes. GM is a big example of this, a powerhouse in automotive, producing masks. It’s amazing what could be achieved if we work as a team. I agree with the point that Robert Little, CEO of ATI brought up about re-shoring and producing locally. With the COVID crisis, the biggest supporters of most industries were local manufacturers. This brings up one of the biggest (maybe?) questions of the decade. With the unemployment rate going from 3.4% to astronomical numbers, how do we justify implementing robots and automation? It’s pretty simple, it has been proven that robotics and automation actually do add jobs for people, they are different jobs but it does add them. Only problem is the talent gap and finding that talent. Michael Cicco of FANUC summarized it great by giving two options: You either find the talent, or you up-skill your current workforce. Implementing advanced manufacturing techniques and getting high school, trade school or college students touching robots is going to take time, maybe up-skilling current workforce is a better option right at this second. Very good segway to integrators and/or value-add distributors. At Gibson Engineering, we make sure all of our team can assist with any technical problem or applications of customers and that’s how we show we are dedicated to the solution. This aligns with the thoughts of the group. The execs thought there is going to be a huge need for systems integrators in the next year and the upcoming 5 years. In my opinion, the point that has not been emphasized enough is the type of help needed from the systems integrators. A lot of small companies will try to automate themselves and are not going to have enough funds to afford systems integrators. The need from the systems integrators is going to shift from “here is WHAT you want” to “here is HOW you do it”. Education is going to be key for advanced manufacturing and companies who are trying to implement robotics. A very interesting discussion that’s going to emerge soon in pretty much every industry out there is the work from home and how effective it is. I think a lot of engineers would agree with Robert Little of ATI, where he put it as his engineers have been “lighting up a fire” and being so much more productive than ever. I personally think working from home helped a lot of people to be more productive, made them realize that they have a life other than work since they now don't have the commuting time. I am sure the lunches with the family are amazing at home, however maybe a hybrid system in the future is the best way to move forward. Definitely a longer discussion.. To sum up, I found a couple of takeaways from this very informative discussion; - COVID crisis hit the robotics and advanced manufacturing market hard seeing lows similar to Q1 in 2014 - We already have been seeing a rebound and the attendees seem to agree that the future is bright and next year is going to be busy - With the acceleration of introducing automation in companies, finding talent is going to get harder. Upskilling the current workforce is something everyone should focus on. - The need, especially next year for systems integrators, is going to be huge. It’s important to keep in mind that the function of these integrators is going to be different than before. - The COVID Crisis did not create some of the needs in automation or advanced manufacturing, it accelerated it. In terms of the last point, I think that’s the biggest silver lining to the current situation we are going through. The COVID Crisis hurt a lot of people, it is an absolutely horrible time. I think about the sales team doing web conferences or virtual sales calls before COVID times and it just doesn’t make sense when we can drive and talk to them face to face. As mentioned in the talk, COVID did not create the change, just accelerated it. We were going to make more virtual sales calls at some point in time, we just didn’t think it was this close. Or in another example, we were going to start producing more web content, host more webinars, and increase our focus on educating customers, we just didn’t think it was this close. It is remarkable how the people reacted to the tough times and how advanced manufacturing reacted to help. I hope we keep this versatility and embrace change to bigger and better things together. As Gibson Engineering, we have already been trying our best to help customers navigate these difficult times. We try to embrace the change and do our best to collaborate with our customers, analyze their projects and applications together, and give them application support to the best of our abilities. If you are interested, the summary of the round table is below. Summary: The roundtable started with analyzing how the past quarter went. The notes were towards aerospace and automotive industries seeing a big hit, Milton Guerry from Schunk mentioned that the automotive industry probably has never seen such a stop before, but it is picking back up. Michael Cicco from FANUC mentioned that all the industries closed down in April and May and that is reflecting on the numbers we see for Q2 of this year. He also mentioned that the non-automotive sectors are only %6 down and it is impressive how advanced automation reacted to this crisis. Milton Guerry from Schunk chimed in that the aerospace industry has seen a very big hit and will take time to get back on track, he added that the demand for general goods is stable. All the attendees agreed on how impressive the advanced manufacturing stepping in was. Milton Guerry also mentioned with the current projections on the automotive industry, we will see less than %15 drop Year to Year. Robert Little, CEO of ATI gave a general overview of how the trade war has been affecting the US and we should trend towards reshoring. Cost of manufacturing is going up in China, so it only makes sense for advanced manufacturing and automation to reshore. An important question got raised asking how the conversation about robotics is going considering the %3.4 unemployment rate in the beginning of the year is at astronomical numbers. Michael Cicco from FANUC answered the question by discussing finding talent. He mentioned there are 2 ways to find talent; - Find people that understand advanced manufacturing - Upskill the existing workforce He also mentioned how important it is that from high school level to technical college to college, advanced manufacturing needs to be taught. Currently, half a million students are touching robotics or advanced manufacturing. He segwayed into the apprenticeship programs and all the attendees agreed this is an interesting idea that has been implemented in Germany for some time now. This ties in with upskilling the existing workforce. Next topic was systems integrators. Robert Little from ATI started the discussion with a huge optimism for the next year. He believes that there is going to be a shortage of systems integrators because of the demand for automation. The whole group appreciated the optimism and agreed with Robert, it was mentioned that the smaller companies are going to try to automate now because of social distancing and working from home. Also, there is going to be a different need from systems integrators: Going from “we will do everything for you” to “let’s educate you”. The conversation turned into the idea of COVID crisis accelerating some of the needs. Klaus Koenig from KUKA had an interesting idea about digital factories and systems integrators being able to supply to manufacturers and customers with the right technology. This crisis made a lot of people more open to the idea of change and doing things differently now. A question was directed to Milton Guerry of Schunk asking if the robots, end of arm tooling and sensors are easier to implement now. He started answering by agreeing with the attendees where “the rising tide is going to lift all the boats” and open up a lot more companies into automation. He added that the connectivity, ease of use and implementation are crucial for automation and satisfying the needs to companies trying to automate. The systems integrators and vendors need to make sure they focus on quick successes and move on to the next project. Klaus Koenig from KUKA mentioned a forgotten but crucial part of industrial automation, where he mentioned that the “robots behind fences” also need to be easy to use and implement not only collaborative robots. Towards the closing notes, Robert Little from ATI talked about how ATI engineers have “lit up a fire” working from home and how they have been more efficient and productive than ever. (I think a lot of us engineers will agree with that statement). He added that this is a great time to reinvest into your company with implementing a new CRM, ERP or other aspects of the company. Milton Guerry from Schunk talked about how we are going to see automation go into places that we never thought it was going to go. He repeatedly mentioned that this was going to happen, COVID crisis just accelerated the process. He talked briefly about the skill gap and how we need to upskill the current workforce. Tagging along the optimistic approach that Robert Little from ATI started, he believes that we need to look at the potential, get excited however not forget to get ready for it and fix the problems we had before the crisis. The last topic was the future of automation and advanced manufacturing. The systems integrators are key, and in 5 years, there are going to be a lot of startups and new integrators that use cutting edge technology.

I am going to be honest here, I didn’t think I needed a 7th axis on a robot. I thought it was a marketing gimmick or an additional linkage to make the kinematics equations harder… I was wrong. Disclaimer: There are two different options to get 7 different axis; 1) a 7 axis robot, 2) an additional 7th axis for a 6 axis robot. Two different things. I am going to be talking about 7 axis robots in this post rather than adding an elevator or a slide to a 6 axis arm. Save time on the design stage You don’t need to spend tons of time and money designing your machine around your robot. For example, let’s think of a machine tending application. With a 6 axis robot, you need to make sure you can clear the door of the CNC machine, and your reach is enough to get to all of the positions that you need to go. Even then, you might see some surprises where a joint is out of limit after you reach into the machine or when you are closing the door. With a 7 axis robot, you can easily reach around the door and you don’t really need to think where the robot should go to be able to do the application. Just a couple of basic measurements and you should be good to go! Save money If you have ever worked with a 6 axis arm, you know that if you are packing a box or if you need to operate close to the base of your robot, you just can’t. To be able to get the rotation on a 6 axis arm, you have to rotate your 1st joint. Take a look at the picture below and see how the first joint of the robot is pointing at a different angle than the end-effector. This helps with distributing the load on each axis better since you can rotate joint 1 and actuate other joints to achieve the same rotation of the overall robot as a 6 axis robot, you end up not exhausting that Joint 1. This leads to longer lifetime of the robot and saving money in the long term. (Check out this link to see a video of a 7 axis robot going through motions that you wouldn't be able to do with a 6 axis robot.) 3. Save space on your factory floor With a 7 axis robot, it is no problem to have a working area right near your robot base.. The 7th axis helps with bending the arm in such a different way so that you can easily work right in front of you. But what does this mean? This means when you are building a machine, your machine can take way less space than if it would with a 6 axis robot. Everything can be compact. And you can also get away with purchasing a robot that has shorter reach for the same application compared to a 6 axis robot. 4. Save time on deployment Maybe in the design stage, you didn’t think about the limitations of a 6 axis robot. And you put the place station a little too close to your robot. Now you need to spend time and money to change the layout of your application. Or, if you know a 6 axis robot can definitely do this application, you might spend hours if not days more to program the robot. Usually robot programmer times are expensive, so this could be the factor that makes or breaks the project financially. I don’t want to sound wrong. 6 axis robots definitely have their application. Every product has their place. But sometimes you have some details in the application specifications that makes getting a 7 axis robot more sense. Now that you know where you can use a 6 axis or 7 axis robot, please reach out with your application details and we’ll be more than happy to discuss it with you at Gibson Engineering.

If you don’t have the right end of arm tooling for your application, it might not matter how good of a robot you pick. Robots and the end of arm tooling go hand in hand together. (Please read my other blog “5 Major Factors to Consider When Choosing a Robot” to get a better idea on how to choose a robot) Case 1: Let’s pick an application for a vacuum gripper, a bottle pack out machine. The bottles have flat caps and are fairly easy to get a seal with almost any vacuum cups that are the right size. Everything should go smoothly, right? That’s where it gets dangerous. Since the bottles are heavy, and the boxes that they go in are tight, the same vacuum cup with bellows will not work as good as the vacuum cups without any bellows. You have the risk of bottles peeling off from the cups easier with no bellows however, you lose a lot of the positional accuracy of the robot since bellows will introduce flexibility with the weight of the bottles. If the pack out boxes are too tight, the robot selection might not really matter if your bottles are drooping because of the wrong vacuum cup selection. Case 2: Let me give you a different application. A flexible feeding solution, Flexibowl with a Scara robot, Intelligent Actuator’s really fast IXA. My goto candy at the quarantine, Starbursts as the parts (I like the pink ones the best..). Let’s go with a parallel gripper to pick up these parts and place them in a stationary nest. The parallel gripper was picked for this application because it was the cost-effective solution. Now, let’s think about the application. A camera looks at the bowl, and finds a Starburst that is available to pick. Camera locates the candy, gives the coordinates to the robot. Sounds simple, works for about a couple of minutes and then the customer starts seeing crushed Starbursts. It turns out, the available Starburst pattern doesn’t actually look if there are any candies around it. So when the candies end up next to each other, the fingers of the parallel gripper crushes the candy that’s next to the one the robot is going to pick. Parallel gripper was picked because of cost savings. However, with the time that got spent on vision programming made this solution way more expensive than a vacuum pick solution. Case 3: This time I am going to give an example from the quotation stage of an application. A simple deburring application. Robot will pick up a part from a nest, debur it, and bring it back to its place. A vacuum gripper might be able to get this application done, however, it is going to make the robot programming a little bit harder compared to using a 2 finger gripper. In a deburring application, depending on the amount of material that needs to be taken off, a vacuum grip might see a lot of lateral forces acting on the cup which might result in the part falling off the gripper. Going at a slower pace might help but now the programmer needs to take this into consideration. On the other hand, using a 2 finger gripper, having the clamping force high, the probability of the part falling out of the finger is lower. Case 4: This time, we chose the right gripper and selected the OnRobot RG2 for the application. The goal was to save some cost so the very versatile default fingers were used in a very critical precise application. Robot’s repeatability specs are well under the specifications that the part needs to be at. Customer realizes that the Cognex vision system picks up some variability in the finished part, at the inspection process. The vision system gets checked, the robot positions get checked but nothing could be found. It takes 2 days of engineering time to troubleshoot the system that the part was slipping slightly from the fingers of the gripper. The need for this application was to get a custom set of machined fingers that fits the parts exactly right so we could use the full power of the awesome RG2 gripper. To sum up, choosing the right end of arm tooling will make a project go smoother and might actually be more important than which robot to use in some cases. When a challenging application gets presented to me, I think about how to handle the part because if I succeed at that portion of the project, the rest will be easier.