REDWOOD CITY, CA—To help small and midsized manufacturers take advantage of digital transformation, software supplier Pico MES has announced that all manufacturers will be able to use its digital work instruction suite of tools for free. 

CHICAGO—Ford Motor Co.’s Chicago Assembly Plant officially celebrated its centennial yesterday with a big birthday bash and an open house.

ARLINGTON, TX—General Motors’ assembly plant here celebrated its 70th anniversary last week and assembled its 13 millionth vehicle. The milestone vehicle is a 2024 Cadillac Escalade-V powered by a 682-horsepower supercharged V8 engine.

AUBURN, MA—PI’s new N-332 nanometer-precision linear stage family is designed for high-end applications in semiconductors, fiber-optics, microscopy, nanobiotechnology, metrology, and research on beamlines and lasers. 

TOKYO—Yazaki Corp. and Toray Industries Inc. have developed a new recycled plastic formulated specifically to mold connectors for automotive wire harnesses.

WASHINGTON—Three automotive recalls this year have been related to assembly defects in wire harnesses.

MOBILE, AL—An expansion project that will double the production space at Airbus’ assembly plant here is passing key milestones as it moves forward on schedule for completion next year.

Software is enabling Modine Manufacturing to optimize its supply chain with predictive analytics and prescriptive execution recommendations.

The Grasping Neural Process trains robots to infer invisible physical properties from a history of attempted grasps, and then use the inferred properties to guess which grasps would work well in the future.

Engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS) here have developed a new system that combines sensor technology, data acquisition and AI-based data evaluation for condition monitoring and predictive maintenance.