Speeding up cobots, updating compliance & 3D factory simulation at Automate 2017

Register for the conference here.

From April 3 to April 6, the biennial Automate conference and exhibition will take place, bringing robotics expertise to Chicago. Hosted by the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), the show will hold more than 400 exhibitors who will be showing off their technology.

In the run up to the show, several Automate 2017 presenters have written pieces for Control Design that highlight their expertise.

Bob Rochelle, logistics market specialist/area sales manager at Güdel in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will be giving a presentation on getting started with robotics. He writes a primer on getting started with robotics, beginning with identifying processes and systems to automate.

Brian Carlisle, CEO of Precise Automation, will be giving a presentation on speeding up collaborative robots, as part of the Collaborative Robots: Getting Started session. His piece highlights the same topic, showing how cobots continue to become better workers.

Roberta Nelson Shea, chief technical compliance officer at Universal Robots, will be giving a presentation on safety implications as part of the Collaborative Robots: Opportunities and Challenges session. She writes about compliance and finding common ground in a world of numerous environments.

Lee Van Every, senior account manager at Cenit North America, will be giving a presentation on advanced manufacturing and future production environments, as part of the How Manufacturing is Impacted by IIoT / Industry 4.0 session. His writing focuses on factory simulation as a numbers game and how Industry 4.0 can benefit from a new set of 3D tools.

Daniela Rus, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-winner of this years Engelberger Award, chatted with us about super powers, autonomous cars & the future of robotics. A dinner honoring the awardees will be held in conjunction with Automate and the International Symposium on Robotics at the Adler Planetarium on April 5.

Robert Tait, partner at Optical Metrology Solutions, will be giving a presentation on reliable vision application development and tells us how to develop reliable vision applications with a checklist to make sure all steps are covered in designing your machine vision system.

Michael Wagner, CEO and co-founder of Edge Case Research, will be giving a presentation on the challenges in testing and validation of collaborative robotic technologies and discusses with us the implications of robot motion planning on testing and validation.

Matthew Bush, COO and co-founder of Hirebotics, a Franklin, Tennessee-based company that rents collaborative robots, will be giving a presentation on eliminating barriers to employee acceptance of robotic automation and offers us advice on how to best make employees comfortable when you add robotics to your production facility.

Bhaskar Ramakrishnan, technical sales engineer at DWFritz Automation, will be giving a presentation on why inspection is critical to automation and wrote for us about why inspection is critical to automation.

Craig Salvalaggio, vice president of engineering at Applied Manufacturing Technologies in Detroit, will be giving a presentation on the key factors to consider before deploying automation, here he writes about the same subject.

Automate show hours are 10 am – 5 pm on April 3, 4 and 5. 10:00 am – 3:00 pm on April 6th. The conference sessions run longer, varying between 8 am – 5 pm each day.