Being able to identify parts and assemblies on the line is vital for a number of reasons. It ensures that the right parts are installed in the right products. It helps to keep track of production, inventories and supplies. 

The Automate Show was held June 6-9 in Detroit. More than 550 robotics and automation vendors exhibited. Here are five new products on display at the event.

A slightly crooked painting gets most people’s attention, whereas very few people will notice a car door that is askew by less than a millimeter. Catching that imperfection is often reserved for trained personnel on an automobile assembly line.

Fully and semiautomatic wire processing machines can greatly increase quality and productivity—if they are set up and run properly. But, as the great Scottish poet Robert Burns reminds us, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

Conveyors do more than simply move parts from point A to point B. They serve as the backbone of an assembly line, and, as such, help manufacturers move forward on their road to success.

The primary purpose of secondary packaging is to ensure the safety of a product during storage and transportation. The integrity of secondary packaging is particularly important with medical devices.

You can’t accuse Volkswagen’s Dirk Voigt of having his head in the clouds—he’ll take it as a compliment. The head of digital production at VW, Voigt and a team of manufacturing and IT pros are developing an industrial cloud computing system to amalgamate production data from more than 120 factories. The objective: greater efficiency and lower costs.

Automotive OEMs love to show off their automated body-in-white assembly lines. Commercials invariably feature dozens of six-axis robots producing showers of sparks in choreographed routines. 

BMW has been at the forefront of Industry 4.0 for years. For example, the company was an early adopter of additive manufacturing, and today prints hundreds of thousands of production parts annually. 

Like many long-established car manufacturers, the company that would become Škoda Auto started in the early 1890s by making bicycles. Today, you won’t see velocipedes rolling off of Škoda assembly lines, but you just might see plug-in electric vehicles.