Despite its advanced capabilities, automation equipment used on assembly lines remains susceptible to failure. This presents manufacturers with the ongoing challenge of preventing unplanned equipment downtime, which is always disruptive and costly.

Justifying automation has never been easier. The Covid pandemic, coupled with a severe worker shortage, a widening skills gap and the "great resignation," has increased demand for automated guided vehicles, conveyors, robots and other types of equipment.

Some questions that manufacturers must address have a simple yes or no answer. Others are not so clear cut. A good example of the latter type is 'Should we build automation in-house?'

With frequent manual format change adjustments on their press feed resulting in wasted material and tool damage, a Michigan-based metalworking manufacturer sought a cost-effective solution that didn't require replacing their aging machinery.

That marketers increasingly use robots and automation equipment in their TV ads should come as no surprise. To them, such machinery represents the product they're selling: An automatic and simple push-button solution to the problem consumers are worried about at that moment.

Does this sound familiar? Management envisions "a sea of robots" on the shop floor. They haven't deployed robots before, and they don't have a specific goal in mind. They just want "automation." The next thing you know, there's a collaborative robot on the loading dock. Your job: Find something to do with it.

Poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou wrote, “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.”

Alabama is home to a variety of manufacturers that employ thousands of people, including Airbus, Austal, Boeing, Daimler, GE Appliances, Honda, Hyundai, Lear, Polaris and Toyota.

Traditionally, additive manufacturing has been used in the aerospace industry to print small metal parts, such as brackets and fuel nozzles. But, Relativity Space Inc. hopes to change that scenario by thinking big.

More than 18 years after NASA commissioned it to be built by TRW Inc., the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched into orbit by Ariane rocket flight VA256 on Dec. 25, 2021. The launch took place at the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana.