Issue link: https://resources.mouser.com/i/1442832
ROBOTS IN MANUFACTURING By TE Connectivity Robotics in manufacturing on the smart factory floor are enabling incredible efficiency gains. New robotic equipment has pervasive, ubiquitous data collection about its operational status and effectiveness, and even about many of the processes happening before and after the goods under manufacture come in contact with that equipment. Now, the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of a given robot may be measured, controlled, and improved upon with precision and flexibility once thought impossible. The critical factor is not the mechanics and productivity of these robots in isolation but rather how the machines are connected reliably in harsh manufacturing environments. In this connected environment, they work in unison towards the smart factory's ultimate goals. Critical and reliable connections are how the enormous quantities of data points from the robots and their manufacturing environment are gathered and routed where desired and needed. All of this interconnectivity must get done without an untenable amount of power supplies, headers, cabling, shielding for that cabling, and proprietary on-board computing systems to physically accommodate and maintain. Here at TE Connectivity, we are building the physical connectors, sensors, EMI filters, passives, relays, cables, and labels that go into these industrial robots. Our customers, in partnership with us, are ushering in an incredible convergence of machine- to-machine communication protocols and connectivity types. Globally, the industrial engineering and automation communities have spent years hashing out a common pathway to more straightforward, better, yet more sophisticated connections of a shared network infrastructure that starts at the sensor at the very tip of a robot arm and reaches into Operations' analytical brains in the computing cloud. Ethernet may be a better choice of technology for industrial connectivity, based partly on how TE Connectivity's compatriots in automotive networks are making a step-function jump up in their network speed and power capability by working within an Ethernet framework. Rather than having smart factory floor network systems with a layered build-up of serial, BUS, and partial Ethernet, a better, more flexible system may get implemented by using Ethernet everywhere. This flexibility requires the industrial networking ecosystem to map a pathway from where they were to a Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) future. TE Connectivity has announced it is collaborating with Harting AG on exactly the SPE up to IEC 63171-6, the most robust most stringent specification type that industrial environments need, according to the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). | 4 |