"All the World's a Stage We Pass Through" R. Ayana

Showing posts with label second industrial revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label second industrial revolution. Show all posts

Thursday, 26 March 2015

Humans Need Not Apply: Rise of Robot Factories Leading 'Fourth Industrial Revolution'


Humans Need Not Apply
Rise of Robot Factories Leading 'Fourth Industrial Revolution'

 


Merkel factory
German Chancellor Angela Merkel visiting the model shop floor.




Busy day? A million things to do? Well, here’s depressing news: you’ll probably mess up about 1,000 of them. That’s what the research shows, at least: for every million tasks a human performs, even the best of us inserts mistakes between 500 and 1,000 times. It might seem a lot, but think of the number of emails you send containing a typo, the number of dishes that make it to the drying rack with a fleck of food still on them, the gaffes when talking with colleagues, the mismatched socks you only spot at lunchtime.

None of these slip-ups is likely to prove very costly, whether in terms of time, money or reputation. But the stakes grow higher in certain environments: a pharmacist getting a dosage wrong can take a life; a trader with “fat fingers” can cost his employer millions. It was with this idea in mind, just over 25 years ago, that a team of engineers and scientists at Siemens began to rethink one particular shop floor. The factory in Amberg, a small town near Nuremberg in Germany, made controllers – the boxes stuffed with circuit boards and switches that act as brains for other factories. And it did a pretty good job of it, with customers from across countries and sectors, and a defects per million rate of 550.

But even that number felt too high, particularly given that a broken controller can quickly shut down a factory, costing its owners millions of euros per day in stopped production alone. So the team at Siemens began moving the factory towards greater automation, counting on computers to beat humans in the race for quality. In 1990, 25% of the shop floor was automated; today, it is 75%. And the defect rate has dropped sharply – to 11.5 per million. Output has increased 8.5 times while employee numbers and floor space have stayed steady.

Amberg has become something of a showcase for what automation can achieve; Angela Merkel visited in February and called it an example of Germany’s wealth of “ideas and well-educated workers”. But its real interest for managers, politicians and workers is what it can tell them about the future. The plant is Siemens’s testing ground for a huge development in automation, where factories act less as the setting for a series of sequential steps and more as networks – networks in which assembly lines communicate not just with one another or within the company, but with systems elsewhere and – this is key – with the very products being produced. An automobile bonnet rolls up to the paint machine and tells it, “I should be white”; the next one sends the message to paint it blue.

In Germany, the engineers and academics working to create this “fourth industrial revolution” call it Industrie 4.0; in the US it’s referred to as “the industrial internet”. General Electric describes it thus: “[It is] the tight integration of the physical and digital worlds . . . [enabling] companies to use sensors, software, machine-to-machine learning and other technologies to gather and analyse data from physical objects or other large data streams – and then use those analyses to manage operations.”

It is also, according to Volkmar Koch, a partner at the consultancy Strategy&, a chance for Europe to lead where in the past it has followed: whereas digitisation of the consumer world “is basically owned and shaped by US companies”, no country or region yet dominates the transformation of industry.

You might expect a world built on sensors, software and machines to be devoid of humans. But in Amberg, the 10,000-square-metre shop floor is populated by 1,020 workers over three shifts. And their labour looks relatively physical: a young man lying on his back inches his way under an elegant blue-and-grey machine, as you would under a car needing repair; a woman nearby bends over a circuit board wielding tweezers. Yet other members of staff peer at screens, never touching the products rolling down glassed-in assembly lines.


Robot factory 
Robot arms weld bodywork at the Porche factory in Leipzig, Germany. Sean Gallup/Getty


“A digital future can frighten people,” says Günter Ziebell, production unit leader in Amberg. “But we complement automated tests with eye checks.” More to the point, this project has created demand for people with experience and creativity, who can improve the processes. So the management structure in Amberg has become very flat, allowing, for example, line workers to speak with the IT department directly rather than go through their bosses. Any employee can initiate a project that requires an investment of less than €10,000, and managers simply check every quarter that their teams are neither spending too much nor too little. Employees also earn bonuses when they suggest changes that are later implemented. The average employee earns an additional €1,000 per year this way, says Ziebell. He stresses the importance of schemes like this: “If a digital factory is being managed top-down, you wouldn’t get many advantages from it.”

But even if increasing automation hasn’t sapped jobs in Amberg, fast-growing efficiency means new plants might have been built to meet rising customer demand – and new positions to fill them – are now unnecessary. It is an issue that the Germans, at least, are attempting to address head-on, with plans under way to form a national-level working group for Industrie 4.0 that includes employee representatives as well as private businesses and industry bodies.

Dieter Wegener, Siemens’s coordinator for Industrie 4.0, argues that companies aren’t pushing these developments forward – consumers are. We want customised products, we want them now, and we want them made efficiently, whether to bring down prices or preserve natural resources. This isn’t possible without networked production processes. As Mr Wegener says, “This is coming from you and me.” He also argues that Germany is at least two years ahead of the industrial internet community in the US “but we appear as if we’re following the Americans. The Americans are better at marketing.”

Roman Friedrich, a Strategy& expert on digitisation, is more cautious: “By definition, these changes are happening with such speed that you might not stay dominant for long. There are pockets of excellence and we see shifts in who’s ahead every year.”

And still, there are serious challenges to overcome, beyond what all of this might mean for workers. Standardisation is one; it doesn’t do much good for your soda bottle to signal to a bottling machine if they don’t speak the same language. A survey by the consultancy Accenture found last year that a third of companies eager to embrace the industrial internet cited “consolidation of disparate data” as a grave concern. And that didn’t just mean data from along the supply chain, where different companies need to find similar standards, but also between departments in their own operations.

Security, inevitably, was another top worry. Technicians at Siemens’s headquarters in Munich have recently started trying to hack into the Amberg factory’s systems, as tests to protect against the real deal. To take full advantage of “smart factories”, every link in the supply chain must be secure – a huge challenge, and one with an inherent conundrum in that taking full advantage of “smart factories” also necessitates allowing a wide distribution of information; in Amberg, any employee can see the real-time data about each product on the assembly line. Companies must find a way to find a balance between transparency and security.

For Wegener, a third challenge is remembering the factors, such as efficiency, customisation and speed, that are driving the revolution (or evolution, as he prefers) – and making sure Big Data isn’t tapped simply for the sake of tapping Big Data. It has to add specific value to each operation. “There’s no benefit to making something smart,” he says, “without it making sense”



The Rise of Turing Robots Leads to a Fall in Wages

 

RTR4BYA6
A staff member stands next to robots at a Kuka Robotics plant in Shanghai on August 13, 2014.



Saturday, 23 November 2013

3D Printing Advances: The Second (Post) Industrial Revolution Continues


3D Printing Advances
The Second (Post) Industrial Revolution Continues

 

CC 3D printer, "printing" an entire house - 
The fabrication technology is called Contour Crafting (CC) and it was developed by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of Southern California

2,500 Ft² House PRINTED in 20 Hours


By Alexander Light

The second industrial revolution is here, thanks to a relatively new invention: the 3D printer. This amazing technical achievement can be used in most of the fields one can think of, with unparalleled financial and time-saving advantages.

Recently, NASA used a 3D printer to make parts for a rocket engine, which performed just as expected. [1] They also plan to launch a 3D printer into space next year, in order to help astronauts manufacture spare parts on the ISS. [2] Yes, that's how cool a 3D printer is, and you haven't heard everything yet.

Thanks to a company named "Contour Crafting - Robotic Construction System" [3], the 3D printer can now be used to built entire houses on site, and it will take around 20 hours for a 2,500 square feet home.


According to the official website, "Contour Crafting technology has great potential for automating the construction of whole structures as well as sub-components. Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning."


Here is how this technology works:




I don't know how many people fully comprehend the implications of this technology. It's not only much better, faster and cheaper than today's "traditional" technology, but it also has the potential to liberate mankind from physical labor.

It is only a glimpse into the future, but we can imagine the rest.

Because machines are faster and better than humans at repetitive tasks and heavy industry, it is inevitable that sooner, rather than later, we will all be replaced by them. This doesn't mean that we should fear technology. By contrast, we should embrace it and allow ourselves to be liberated.

What about unemployment?

Unless we consider a viable alternative today, a huge percent of people will find themselves homeless and unemployed, in the near future. Luckily, there is a solution for all to study and take into account: "The Venus Project". [4]

TVP is the model for a futuristic society than can be achieved within 10 years, if we decide to accept the "upgrade". Because it is built around a Resource Based Economy, there will be no more financial institutions - hence no more elites, corruption, low quality products, wars, poverty, famine, etc.;

Giving the fact that we already have a viable transition plan towards a RBE, the only questions remaining is "how bad do we want it?". It is only up to us to make the transition. [5]



A 3D Printed Spaceship On The Scale Of A Human Hair?

Hello Nanoscribe 3D Printer

nanoscribe-scaffold


3D printing has become one of the most exciting and talked about technologies of 2013. The ability for the masses to make almost any object not only fuels imagination but challenges modern consumerism and its supply chain. While some enthusiasts continue to showcase the technology by producing toys, cars, and even guns in their garage, others look to 3D printing to manufacture the next generation of electronics, whether for mobile applications, medical devices, or wearable computing.

Regardless of the application, the challenge in manufacturing at the submicron scale is fabricating structures in a precise, rapid, and consistent fashion. Even though 3D printing is just getting started, the race for the fastest, most capable printer is already on.

Last year, a group of researchers at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria refined a 3D printing technique that allowed the construction of sophisticated structures (an F1 racecar and a cathedral) smaller than dust mites in about 4 minutes. Now, a company called Nanoscribe GmbH that emerged from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany has made a 3D printer called the Photonic Professional GT which can produce detailed structures on a similar scale but faster.

In fact, the technique was able to produce a spaceship (from the Wing Commander line of video games) from a CAD file that measures 125µm x 81µm x 26.8µm (on the order of the width of a human hair) in less than 50 seconds.

It really is an amazing feat that needs to be seen to be believed — remember: this video is in realtime!:




As if that the video isn’t awesome enough, this is not research phase production: it’s a commercially available printer, although you’d also need a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to actually see what you print.

For their fabrications, both Nanoscribe and the Austrian researchers utilize a two-photon lithographic printing technique using a laser and rotating mirrors. By directing the beam precisely, structures are built up layer by layer through polymerization. This fabrication method allows for highly precise structures to be formed with a resolution of 30nm with the right material, according to Technology Review.

Nanoscribe has developed this printer for applications in biotechnology, so many of the printed samples showcased are scaffolds for cells, as can be seen in the following gallery of SEM images of the printed structures.


Cell scaffold as artificial extracellular matrix:nanoscribe 3d scaffold
 


Composite scaffold for cells fabricated in two steps (red square indicates the cubes generated in the second step):nanoscribe ormocomp

Microscaffold or comb for cells:
nanoscribe microcell

Microneedles:nanoscribe microneedles
 

Microstent:nanoscribe stent

Additionally, Nanoscribe produced a miniaturized version of the Empire State Building to get a sense of scale with a familiar object:

Nanoscribe_EmpireStateBuilding

3D printer manufactures are clearly on the warpath to push the technology as far as it can go before the resolution of light becomes a barrier and speed thresholds are reached. Yet, the capabilities of current machines is impressive as is.

The challenge now will be to develop those applications which can truly benefit with 3D printed microfabrication. Biotech and nanotech researchers around the world are certainly anxious to get printers in the lab and utilize them for novel experiments. What companies can equally utilize these printers for the development of commercial products remains to be seen.

Regardless, Nanoscribe demonstrates that we are closing in on a time when precise, complex engineering at the submicron level is commonplace, and that opens the door to an entirely new world at the bottom.

[images: Nanoscribe]


From Singularity Hub @ http://singularityhub.com/2013/03/17/a-3d-printed-spaceship-on-the-scale-of-a-human-hair-hello-nanoscribe-3d-printer/


For more information about 3d printing see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/3d%20printing
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