Robotics News

If you’re tired of waiting week or months to have your aluminum extrusions or custom equipment delivered, Vention is the new company you need to know about.  Thousands of miles of aluminum extrusion are in use every day in manufacturing spaces all over the country.  Vention changes designing and delivering these solutions from a multiple-month ordeal into a few day success story.

Traditional aluminum extrusion suppliers have large lengths in stock which have to be cut down on the factory floor by your workers which is time consuming and tedious.  When custom cut lengths can be ordered, these pieces can often have multi-week lead times.  Design in a CAD/CAM program can take days due to tedious calculations and interface limitations.  Vention changes all of this.  With a warehouse full of pre-cut extrusion lengths, plus all of the fasteners, supports, and attachments you need, Vention is able to ship most designs within 24 hours of receiving an order.  Their easy-to-use cloud-based design interface reduces design time to a fraction of traditional CAD/CAM modeling.  Vention has really done their homework on assembly, too – many of its fasteners are optimized to limit the frustrations faced by workers with other extrusions on the market today.  This revolutionary company is changing the way manufacturing views aluminum extrusion.

With a recently completed $17 Million capital investment campaign from Bain Capital, Vention has significantly expanded their product offerings.  In addition to a host of new fasteners, extrusions, and interface improvements, Vention now offers actuators, motors, and logic controllers as part of their framework.  This allows manufacturers to design custom equipment for their workspaces with short delivery times and easy assembly.  Vention grew 600% last year and is expected to meet or exceed that growth again in 2019.

Robot27 utilizes Vention to provide sturdy, high-quality components for many of its automation cells.  Vention’s speedy design and delivery windows help us deliver solutions faster than ever.  They even have the entire Universal Robots product line integrated into their design interface which makes Vention the perfect compliment for your collaborative robots.  If you have a project that requires a custom aluminum extrusion, Robot27 can provide the guidance you need to make sure your first Vention creation is a successful one.

Ready to learn more about Vention?  Stay tuned…  We are going to feature Vention in a future edition of our Waypoint newsletter. In the meantime, check out some of the cool designs featured by Vention in their product gallery:

Dual UR5 Workstation – Universal Robots

Overhead 7th axis for UR Cobot – Walt Industries, Inc.

Drilling Station for Automotive Applications

As automation becomes more accessible to small- to medium-sized manufacturers, managers may wonder: “what will happen to my existing labor force when we automate?”  Analysis of an in-depth study by the Mannheim Centre for European Economic Research shows that labor demands grew as the amount of automation in local businesses increased.  Data was collected in over two hundred regions across twenty-seven EU countries to provide a better picture of technological change since the year 2000.  Though the study notes that some jobs were inevitably displaced, the increase in productivity resulting from automation significantly outpaced the technological change alone.  This increase in productivity resulted in the addition of more jobs to handle the increased product output.

As one of the fastest-growing segments in the automation world, the Robotic Industries Association points out that collaborative robots are getting smarter to stay competitive.  Traditionally, heavy industrial tasks have been handled by robots surrounded by safety cages, complex guarding, or other space-wasting items.  With recent developments in the collaborative robot field, however, “the line between industrial robot tasks and collaborative robot tasks are beginning to blur” according to the article.

For example, Universal Robots have broken into the welding industry with an innovative system called SnapWeld detailed in this article on our website.  Most automated welding solutions are large, expensive, and require an immense amount of protective guarding to keep them safe around humans.  With the recent advances in cobot technology, UR provides a more cost-effective solution for both long- and short-run welding projects without the need for excessive guarding due to the robot’s integrated safety systems.  Other industrial applications being tackled by the latest generation of cobots include CNC tending, finished good assembly, and more.

By investing $6 million in robots, Bicycle Corporation of America (BCA) was able to take back 10% of their manufacturing from China and place it into a new factory in Manning, South Carolina employing 140 new workers.

Read full article on therobotreport.com

America’s manufacturing heyday is gone and so are millions of jobs, lost to modernization. Despite what Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin might think, the National Bureau of Economic Research and Silicon Valley executives, among many others, know it’s already happening.

Read full article from Brinknews.com

But for how long?

In the long run, many think that automation and robotics are going to replace a significant percentage, if not the overwhelming majority, of manufacturing jobs. That’s certainly a possibility. But for now, even as companies add more robots to North American factory floors, the number of human jobs in manufacturing is also on the rise.

Read full article from recode.net