Industrial robots have been expensive semi-custom products for decades, and there's no good reason for that.
This product isn't going to replace the expensive semi-custom robot systems; that is not their target market. This is enabling automation in lower-speed, lower-volume, low-complexity tasks. Look at the specs listed at the bottom of this page on the Rethink Robotics website. - 8-12 pick & place operations/minute (total incl. both arms)
- 5 lb. payload per arm
- 1 m/sec arm speed
So they won't be competing with the following "expensive semi-custom products":
- high-speed pick and place (i.e. PCB surface mount components) - cycle rate 10 to 20 times higher than that
- anything high payload
- anything with a complex custom end-effector (counts against your payload)
- I can go on.
Ultimately you get what you pay for; there will be tasks where these are suitable, but they will not be replacing high-power, high-speed, custom-engineered robot/automation systems any time soon, as they aren't intended for/capable of those tasks. I'm sure there's a market niche for these, but is it going to transform the world of industrial robotics? No.
Sorry, what? It's not really SCADA? No, actually it's exactly SCADA.
SCADA is a general-use acronym, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition. It has been in common use in the industrial control system world for at least 20 years. It is not a term specific to Siemens or any other control systems vendor. And it is not incorrect to apply the acronym to application areas like building automation; there can be a fair amount of overlap in system architecture, devices, & communication protocols between building automation and industrial manafacturing automation.
Source: 10 years experience as a industrial control systems engineer.
OPG's Darlington nuclear site has been selected by the Government of Ontario as the location for Ontario's next nuclear generating facility. OPG is proud to have been selected as the operator of this new facility. It will be the first new nuclear station to be built in Ontario in more than 15 years.
The host community of Clarington and the Region of Durham have both expressed their strong support for this project.
This community has been home to an existing 4-unit nuclear generating station for the last 20 years and is happy to host more. Might have something to do with the good-paying jobs and economic spinoffs.
Companies pay more money for flexibility. Food manufacturing in particular is one industry where the flexibility offered by vision-guided robotics provides an overall cost advantage vs. multiple automation systems for specific products.
IIRC, Adept specifically markets this robot to the food, medical, and semiconductor industries because it is cleanroom & washdown rated. Because the servomotors and electronics are all contained within the box at the top, it's much easier to keep the guts properly sealed from the work environment when compared to a 6-axis or SCARA robot.
I don't think the Lego company would have grown to this size/survived this long without employing some folks who can run a cost/benefit analysis on capital equipment purchases.
Just considering the basic rectangular bricks, given the number of combinations of brick width, length, and colour, which option do you think is cheaper:
(a) buy 100 injection molding machines for the "brick production" side of the operation, and have them sit idle 75% of the time, so they're available to produce brick X on-demand whenever required by the "set packaging" side of the operation
(b) buy 25 injection molding machines, run them 24/7, swapping out mold sets to produce several different bricks on each machine, and storing the produced bricks in an automated warehouse for on-demand retrieval for the packaging side
I can assure you that (b) is the more cost-efficient approach.
Would it not be really easy to misattribute the sources of these attacks to Chinese-gov't sources when everybody in China connects to the Net through a gov't-controlled firewall?
Can anyone who knows more about this than me comment?
Oh, and regarding the "U5" debate, RTFA. From the article "We have had confirmation from our partners U5 (USA, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada)" This corresponds to the UKUSA member countries.
I wonder how hes going to turn that $20k into $100k so he can actually get a college degree. He doesn't. He turns it into $40k and gets a bachelors degree at pretty much any Canadian university he wants to attend.
Or he registers in an honours co-op degree program at his local university and then his $20k, plus what he earns on co-op work placements, pays for his bachelors degree entirely.
None of the reasons you mentioned above are remotely close to being an ok reason to enter a robotic workcell in full auto. Assuming you're talking about almost any modern industrial robot from a major manufacturer (ABB, Fanuc, Motoman, Epson, Siemens, etc.) you can use a jog/teach pendant for testing with power on while standing in the work envelope (with motion speed limits enforced). IMO, the other three reasons you gave reek of laziness and an incredibly foolish disregard for one's own safety. I understand that in many manufacturing environments there is alot of pressure to get a system back up as quickly as possible during downtime, but I guarantee that if you straight up ask any supervisor/manager if they want you to risk your own safety to get a job done faster the answer will be 'no'.
As numerous other posters have already pointed out, this guy intentionally defeated the safety guarding. His employer excercised due diligence to keep him isolated from a hazardous energy source and bears no responsibility.
And in response to many posters who have mentioned safety devices within the robots' work envelope, devices such as motion sensors, light curtains, floor scanners, and pressure-sensitive floor mats are quite common today, but in 1981 the technology simply wasn't there. In fact, interlocked guarding is still the primary method of safety isolation in industrial automation, and will continue to be for the forseeable future.
Universities in Canada must have their curriculum certified by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board, the national body for regulating engineering education.
Furthermore, each province has a regulatory body which manages licensing of Professional Engineers (P.Eng.'s) which is a regulated designation. In Ontario this body is the PEO. They have a webpage here
on the whole "software engineering" issue.
swordfighting sound from civilization is the same as the black night scene from monty python and the holy grail
Yeah dude I was going to mention this one as well. The battle sound that the Warrior/Legion/Phalanx/Chariot type units make in Civ3 is definitely the same sound from MP&THG.
The issue wasn't really with stealing local telephone service. Phreakers used their knowledge of the phone system to get access to conference calling systems and long-distance trunk lines, often so they could talk to other tech. people on the conference calls and call BBS's long distance for free. Also remember that back in the days of telecom conglomerates, long-distance calling wasn't nearly as cheap as it can be now, and there wasn't much of an internet beyond ARPA.
What we should have done was hand every passenger on every flight a really big knife as they board the plane. Yeah, because that whole "right to bear arms" thing has had such a positive effect on your rate of gun violence per capita, clearly similar systems should be employed elsewhere.
You sir, are an offense to all that is good in the world.
Please find a way to remove yourself from the domain of the living as expediently as possible so the rest of us can get on with doing something constructive towards the betterment of mankind.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds that to be the more desirable option here, rather than wasting our time listening to you defend the morally bankrupt ideas and policies of a wealthy elite class that enshrines such laudable concepts as the destruction of personal freedoms, war for profit, and granting corporations all the rights of citizenship while asking them (or their officers) to bear none of the responsibilities.
And if you're so willing to spew forth this sort of bile-inducing rhetoric here, at least have the stones to take your (-1, offtopic) and put your name to it.
Man, this has "genetic analysis" written all over it. Screw world overpopulation problems; I wanna be immortal!
Oh, and just cuz I can, fr0st p1st, bizzatches.
I don't mean to sound arrogant, but you just don't understand how (a)nuclear stations or (b)the power grid operate.
Nuclear reactors have a certain minimum output level that they have to sustain in order to maintain the fission chain reaction. If the station is putting out 500 MW onto the grid and demand suddenly cuts out (as it did during the blackout) the operators can't just turn the knob down to 2 MW and wait indefinitely. There's about a 30 minute window (for the CANDU reactors in question, used at Pickering, Darlington, and Bruce nuclear stations in Ontario) where the operators can lower output and then bring it back up if the grid comes back online. After that, the reactor is "poisoned" by the chemical byproducts produced during the low-power phase of operation and the reactor must be taken offline and undergo a 2-3 day purge cycle to remove the chemicals in question (I believe it's Xenon, or an isotope of it).
As far as the power grid goes, do you think that the city of Pickering is directly connected to the nuclear station? Sadly that's not how they wire things up. Power from the generating stations is stepped up to transmission grid voltages (230 kV, 750 kV) and dumped onto that grid. Consumers in cities get their power off of smaller distribution grids downstream of the transmission grids, where the voltage is stepped down to lower, less dangerous levels. This is the architecture of the system. There are good reasons why it is designed that way.
Furthermore, CANDU reactors are well-recognized as some of the safest nuclear reactor designs in the world, and the probability of a catastrophic release of nuclear material is miniscule. As someone who grew up in between the Pickering and Darlington nuclear stations, I regularly got to see the public service announcements in the local paper which always showed that a person living less than a kilometre from one of the stations gets an additional annual dose of radiation less than what is received from a chest x-ray. Your incremental annual dose of radiation goes up about 1-2% compared to what anyone on the planet is exposed to through normal background radiation. This is right next door to the station. And I'm sure the city of Pickering derives a decent amount of economic benefit from having a power plant offering several hundred well-paying jobs.
I've seen a house that has some PVC pipes and a solar cell on their garage roof, must be some solar water heating system. Every little bit helps.
These are usually for heating your pool on the cheap. The big panels aren't actually solar cells, just dark panels (higher radiation absorption) with lots of little channels (higher surface area == better heat transfer) for the water to travel through and heat up. I helped install one on my uncle's roof a couple years ago.
That being said, you're absolutely right, that every little bit does help, though somebody also might point out that a pool is a luxury item and still using up more electricity running the pump that pushes the water through the filters and up to the roof to be heated.:)
In a sense, this was part of the idea behind Orwell's 1984. The world's production capacity was sufficient to adequately supply the population with the means to live a happy, comfortable life. But to do so would undermine the authority of the Party. So the solution was continuous, unending global warfare between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Orwells' stance seemed to primarily center around the disposal of excess material resources, while this real-world situation is one of excess labour resources, but it's the same idea.
The notable difference between Orwells' world and our own was that his populace was ruled by the corrupt leaders of a Socialist revolution, while it appears we'll be ground under the boots of a Capitalist ruling class, but hey, a boot in the face is a boot in the face, right?
Quebec had the foresight not to connect up to the grid at all.
Well, that's not entirely true. Quebec's power grid is connected to the rest through high-voltage DC transmission lines, because their AC grid runs at a different frequency than everyone else. The HVDC lines effectively isolate them from the rest of us.
Synchronous condensors and large cap. banks are also often used by major industrial users (i.e. with large inductive loads) to accomplish the same thing.
For all the non-engineers, this is called "power factor correction". In AC power systems, the voltage and current waveforms are sinusoids (well, with harmonics and crap, but we'll ignore them). The system operates more efficiently when the voltage and current waveforms are in phase. If we call the phase angle between the voltage and current (a.k.a. the power factor angle) "theta", then the power factor is arccos(theta).
Someone correct me if I've got it backwards, but I believe inductive loads cause current to lag voltage, and capacitive loads cause current to lead voltage. Mathematically we treat these as imaginary (sqrt(-1)) impedences. If you can get the inductive and capacitive parts to cancel out (kinda like adding complex conjugates) you're left with only real impedences (i.e. resistive-only loads), which are much nicer.
Cool. Thanks for the link. Very interesting. Kinda neat that it would only work for polygons with an odd number of vertices, since the edges are circumscribed by an arc centered at the opposite vertex. Shapes with an even number of vertices don't have corners opposite their edges.
if you can find me a link that describes and/or depicts these shapes, i would recant my earlier comments and immortalize you in my.sig as an intelligent individual. how's that for motivation, eh? come on. having your name in some assholes' sig. you know you want it:P
Sorry, but you are completely wrong. For an polygon to be sufficiently rounded so that it cannot fall through the hole under any circumstances, the distance from the center to any point on an edge must be the same as the maximum distance, which would be from the center to a vertex. Oh, I've just described a circle. Fancy that.
Slashdot Mirror
Mechatronics Engineering is an accredited program at some universities.
Industrial robots have been expensive semi-custom products for decades, and there's no good reason for that.
This product isn't going to replace the expensive semi-custom robot systems; that is not their target market. This is enabling automation in lower-speed, lower-volume, low-complexity tasks. Look at the specs listed at the bottom of this page on the Rethink Robotics website.
- 8-12 pick & place operations/minute (total incl. both arms)
- 5 lb. payload per arm
- 1 m/sec arm speed
So they won't be competing with the following "expensive semi-custom products":
- high-speed pick and place (i.e. PCB surface mount components) - cycle rate 10 to 20 times higher than that
- anything high payload
- anything with a complex custom end-effector (counts against your payload)
- I can go on.
Ultimately you get what you pay for; there will be tasks where these are suitable, but they will not be replacing high-power, high-speed, custom-engineered robot/automation systems any time soon, as they aren't intended for/capable of those tasks. I'm sure there's a market niche for these, but is it going to transform the world of industrial robotics? No.
SCADA is a general-use acronym, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition. It has been in common use in the industrial control system world for at least 20 years. It is not a term specific to Siemens or any other control systems vendor. And it is not incorrect to apply the acronym to application areas like building automation; there can be a fair amount of overlap in system architecture, devices, & communication protocols between building automation and industrial manafacturing automation.
Source: 10 years experience as a industrial control systems engineer.
Quoting from the above-named page:
This community has been home to an existing 4-unit nuclear generating station for the last 20 years and is happy to host more. Might have something to do with the good-paying jobs and economic spinoffs.
Companies pay more money for flexibility. Food manufacturing in particular is one industry where the flexibility offered by vision-guided robotics provides an overall cost advantage vs. multiple automation systems for specific products.
IIRC, Adept specifically markets this robot to the food, medical, and semiconductor industries because it is cleanroom & washdown rated. Because the servomotors and electronics are all contained within the box at the top, it's much easier to keep the guts properly sealed from the work environment when compared to a 6-axis or SCARA robot.
Just considering the basic rectangular bricks, given the number of combinations of brick width, length, and colour, which option do you think is cheaper:
(a) buy 100 injection molding machines for the "brick production" side of the operation, and have them sit idle 75% of the time, so they're available to produce brick X on-demand whenever required by the "set packaging" side of the operation
(b) buy 25 injection molding machines, run them 24/7, swapping out mold sets to produce several different bricks on each machine, and storing the produced bricks in an automated warehouse for on-demand retrieval for the packaging side
I can assure you that (b) is the more cost-efficient approach.
Can anyone who knows more about this than me comment?
Oh, and regarding the "U5" debate, RTFA. From the article "We have had confirmation from our partners U5 (USA, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada)" This corresponds to the UKUSA member countries.
Or he registers in an honours co-op degree program at his local university and then his $20k, plus what he earns on co-op work placements, pays for his bachelors degree entirely.
None of the reasons you mentioned above are remotely close to being an ok reason to enter a robotic workcell in full auto. Assuming you're talking about almost any modern industrial robot from a major manufacturer (ABB, Fanuc, Motoman, Epson, Siemens, etc.) you can use a jog/teach pendant for testing with power on while standing in the work envelope (with motion speed limits enforced). IMO, the other three reasons you gave reek of laziness and an incredibly foolish disregard for one's own safety. I understand that in many manufacturing environments there is alot of pressure to get a system back up as quickly as possible during downtime, but I guarantee that if you straight up ask any supervisor/manager if they want you to risk your own safety to get a job done faster the answer will be 'no'.
As numerous other posters have already pointed out, this guy intentionally defeated the safety guarding. His employer excercised due diligence to keep him isolated from a hazardous energy source and bears no responsibility.
And in response to many posters who have mentioned safety devices within the robots' work envelope, devices such as motion sensors, light curtains, floor scanners, and pressure-sensitive floor mats are quite common today, but in 1981 the technology simply wasn't there. In fact, interlocked guarding is still the primary method of safety isolation in industrial automation, and will continue to be for the forseeable future.
Universities in Canada must have their curriculum certified by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board, the national body for regulating engineering education.
Furthermore, each province has a regulatory body which manages licensing of Professional Engineers (P.Eng.'s) which is a regulated designation. In Ontario this body is the PEO. They have a webpage here on the whole "software engineering" issue.
Yeah dude I was going to mention this one as well. The battle sound that the Warrior/Legion/Phalanx/Chariot type units make in Civ3 is definitely the same sound from MP&THG.
The issue wasn't really with stealing local telephone service. Phreakers used their knowledge of the phone system to get access to conference calling systems and long-distance trunk lines, often so they could talk to other tech. people on the conference calls and call BBS's long distance for free. Also remember that back in the days of telecom conglomerates, long-distance calling wasn't nearly as cheap as it can be now, and there wasn't much of an internet beyond ARPA.
What we should have done was hand every passenger on every flight a really big knife as they board the plane.
Yeah, because that whole "right to bear arms" thing has had such a positive effect on your rate of gun violence per capita, clearly similar systems should be employed elsewhere.
You sir, are an offense to all that is good in the world.
Please find a way to remove yourself from the domain of the living as expediently as possible so the rest of us can get on with doing something constructive towards the betterment of mankind.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds that to be the more desirable option here, rather than wasting our time listening to you defend the morally bankrupt ideas and policies of a wealthy elite class that enshrines such laudable concepts as the destruction of personal freedoms, war for profit, and granting corporations all the rights of citizenship while asking them (or their officers) to bear none of the responsibilities.
And if you're so willing to spew forth this sort of bile-inducing rhetoric here, at least have the stones to take your (-1, offtopic) and put your name to it.
Man, this has "genetic analysis" written all over it. Screw world overpopulation problems; I wanna be immortal!
Oh, and just cuz I can, fr0st p1st, bizzatches.
Nuclear reactors have a certain minimum output level that they have to sustain in order to maintain the fission chain reaction. If the station is putting out 500 MW onto the grid and demand suddenly cuts out (as it did during the blackout) the operators can't just turn the knob down to 2 MW and wait indefinitely. There's about a 30 minute window (for the CANDU reactors in question, used at Pickering, Darlington, and Bruce nuclear stations in Ontario) where the operators can lower output and then bring it back up if the grid comes back online. After that, the reactor is "poisoned" by the chemical byproducts produced during the low-power phase of operation and the reactor must be taken offline and undergo a 2-3 day purge cycle to remove the chemicals in question (I believe it's Xenon, or an isotope of it).
As far as the power grid goes, do you think that the city of Pickering is directly connected to the nuclear station? Sadly that's not how they wire things up. Power from the generating stations is stepped up to transmission grid voltages (230 kV, 750 kV) and dumped onto that grid. Consumers in cities get their power off of smaller distribution grids downstream of the transmission grids, where the voltage is stepped down to lower, less dangerous levels. This is the architecture of the system. There are good reasons why it is designed that way.
Furthermore, CANDU reactors are well-recognized as some of the safest nuclear reactor designs in the world, and the probability of a catastrophic release of nuclear material is miniscule. As someone who grew up in between the Pickering and Darlington nuclear stations, I regularly got to see the public service announcements in the local paper which always showed that a person living less than a kilometre from one of the stations gets an additional annual dose of radiation less than what is received from a chest x-ray. Your incremental annual dose of radiation goes up about 1-2% compared to what anyone on the planet is exposed to through normal background radiation. This is right next door to the station. And I'm sure the city of Pickering derives a decent amount of economic benefit from having a power plant offering several hundred well-paying jobs.
These are usually for heating your pool on the cheap. The big panels aren't actually solar cells, just dark panels (higher radiation absorption) with lots of little channels (higher surface area == better heat transfer) for the water to travel through and heat up. I helped install one on my uncle's roof a couple years ago.
That being said, you're absolutely right, that every little bit does help, though somebody also might point out that a pool is a luxury item and still using up more electricity running the pump that pushes the water through the filters and up to the roof to be heated. :)
The notable difference between Orwells' world and our own was that his populace was ruled by the corrupt leaders of a Socialist revolution, while it appears we'll be ground under the boots of a Capitalist ruling class, but hey, a boot in the face is a boot in the face, right?
yeah, but it's water from the ocean, so who cares?
Yes indeed. Guess who's company it was? Big Billy Gates, himself
Well, that's not entirely true. Quebec's power grid is connected to the rest through high-voltage DC transmission lines, because their AC grid runs at a different frequency than everyone else. The HVDC lines effectively isolate them from the rest of us.
For all the non-engineers, this is called "power factor correction". In AC power systems, the voltage and current waveforms are sinusoids (well, with harmonics and crap, but we'll ignore them). The system operates more efficiently when the voltage and current waveforms are in phase. If we call the phase angle between the voltage and current (a.k.a. the power factor angle) "theta", then the power factor is arccos(theta).
Someone correct me if I've got it backwards, but I believe inductive loads cause current to lag voltage, and capacitive loads cause current to lead voltage. Mathematically we treat these as imaginary (sqrt(-1)) impedences. If you can get the inductive and capacitive parts to cancel out (kinda like adding complex conjugates) you're left with only real impedences (i.e. resistive-only loads), which are much nicer.
Cool. Thanks for the link. Very interesting. Kinda neat that it would only work for polygons with an odd number of vertices, since the edges are circumscribed by an arc centered at the opposite vertex. Shapes with an even number of vertices don't have corners opposite their edges.
if you can find me a link that describes and/or depicts these shapes, i would recant my earlier comments and immortalize you in my .sig as an intelligent individual. how's that for motivation, eh? come on. having your name in some assholes' sig. you know you want it :P
Sorry, but you are completely wrong. For an polygon to be sufficiently rounded so that it cannot fall through the hole under any circumstances, the distance from the center to any point on an edge must be the same as the maximum distance, which would be from the center to a vertex. Oh, I've just described a circle. Fancy that.