EPN Industrial Automation Blog

Packaging and robots

While the Scandinavian industrial markets in themselves are more or less negligible, they nevertheless are very interesting as they are considered stepping stones for the North-East European markets. This might be the driving motive behind the acquisiotion of the Finnish company Trimaster Oy by German packaging specialist Multivac.

Robotics + motion control + PLC

EtherCAT , the Industrial Ethernet system, has become the process communication standard in many robots. Its use in the field of robotics offers a number of advantages: EtherCAT enables extremely short update times for the process image (50 μs); control loops (up to the current controller) can be closed via the bus. Control of the axes can take place centrally in the controller – including the coupled movement function. It integrates redundancy, hot connect and hot swap options.

Green Automation

The German Engineering Federation VDMA is going to present at this year’s Automatica trade fair together with the show organizers its "Green Automation" initiative. Automatica takes place in Munich June 8-11, 2010.

Volcano hits Hanover

Despite the obstacles the Icelandic volcano at the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier is causing in the international aviation, the organizer has opened the world leading showcase for industrial technology HANNOVER MESSE 2010 on Sunday as planned.

Robot Design

Not only avid readers of science fiction literature consider Isaac Asimov's famous three (or four) laws of robotics quite a good idea. So, why on earth does nobody think of them when devoloping robotic systems? Maybe the graphical systems design software LabVIEW Robotics 2009 facilitates coding of these fundamental rules.