The Next Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution was a period of unprecedented expansion of technology that lead to a huge increase in economic opportunity.  It was a period marked with great inventiveness that transformed the Europe and America.  The power of that inventiveness echoes through today.

Similarly, in recent years, there have been a number of significant breakthroughs that offer great potential for the improvement of many current technologies.  But more subtle transformations are taking place throughout the industrial landscape that offer new opportunities yet to be explored.

In many areas of part production, there are solutions that offer reduced cost per part.  The emergence of new CNC’s that are available at the $10,000 level reduces the amortized cost for producing parts by as much as 500%.  Simply put, it you have to produce 1000 parts on a machine tool, the final cost of the part is significantly impacted by the cost of the machine tool.  A $50,000 machine tool will cost $50 per part across 1000 parts.  A $10,000 machine tool will only cost $10 per part.

This economic shift may make it possible to enter a market with an improved price point for an existing product, or create an opportunity to do something new that wasn’t possible because of cost and volume constraints.

In similar fashion the metals industry has consistently worked to developed processes and technology that allow part cost reductions, and more recently, smaller batch sizes for certain applications.  The smaller batch size has the same effect on cost, it lowers the investment cost for improving old designs or coming up with new ones.

The same trend is in place in the controls arena.  Processor technology that used to cost $20. a few years ago is available now for $2-3 and network versions that permit Internet interface are available for around $5.  This makes it practical to embed intelligence and communications in products even if the application is relatively simple.  The low cost is a compelling value in many products.  And in many arenas there are libraries of application code that already exists that may provide 60% or more of the development code for something you are working on.

Energy is still a bit of a limitation.  We don’t have a “Mr. Fusion” nuclear reactor that runs of kitchen scraps.  But things are looking up in this area with lithium based batteries making great strides in energy density.  And there is substantial improvement on the way.

But the real point here is;  Dust if off and Try it Again.  Take those “back of the napkin” sketches you’ve been tinkering with or thinking about and look at them again from the perspective that there dozens of technology improvements out there that will reduce the cost of the product you were thinking about a couple of years ago.  The change in the economics, as amortized cost, or the cost threshold to get your first batch of parts made, are factors that have a huge impact on the feasibility.

It just may be the time for a breakthrough.  A second industrial revolution.

Personal CNC?

There has been a thread going through my mind involving the general field of machinery.   The design of specialty machinery requires a great many disciplines, truly a mechatronic endeavor.

Over the years, machine tool makers constantly worked on making the machines more complex in order to serve the market with greater functionality.   In fact the goal seemed to be to make the machines and control systems more complex so that one machine could solve a wider range of geometry problems.  Unfortunately, this leads to ever increasing cost.  Take a simple three axis mill and add a fourth or fifth axis to it and it’s not just the cost of the additional axes of motion that will impact the final cost of the machine.  It’s the complex mechanics needed to support the fourth and fifth axis and articulate their geometry correctly PLUS the two extra servo motors and their respective feedbacks AND a huge programming effort to make sure that the coordination of the axes is as precise as expected.

And the mechanics have to be as accurate and reliable over hundreds of thousands of operations so that the specified precision of the machine does not deteriorate over time.  So things start getting pretty complex.  And when you make a machine tool that is going to cost $100,000 or more, you can’t afford the problems of a design that won’t hold up in production.  So you do a lot of testing to verify performance, which usually involves a lot of custom measurement equipment and a lot of manpower and development time.

But what if you reverse the goal of the design process? What if the objective were to create a machine tool that has the lowest cost for a specific set of features.  Let’s face it, if you know that you will not need 10’s of thousands of parts per year, or if the precision tolerances are not extremely tight, you can get a lot done on a budget.

Machinery cost is only the beginning of the equation.  Amortization of the cost of the machine over the number of parts to be produced is critical to holding cost down and making a profit.  That’s where the paradigm shift creates value.  Lower cost also means smaller batch size when calculating break even points.

So the discussion of how to make a cheaper machine tool must be considered in it’s proper context.  And history proves that it works because that’s what the folks at Haas did some years ago.  They came up with high quality machine tools that cost $50K, roughly 1/3 the cost of the available technology.  This opened up a whole new playing field in the CNC industry.  They did the job so well, that they now do business all over the world with one of the most cost effective pieces of equipment around.

And now for the next wave.  Tormach is producing a high quality 3 axis machine tool at a $10,000 starting price. Full CNC control.  And there are others available from China and India, which while not to be compared on precision, may be exactly what a small company needs to get their product to the market cost effectively.

So the real trend is just getting started and will give rise to whole new layers of improved cost and performance.  Personal fabrication technology is emerging all over the US through innovative small companies who are solving the most important problem of all.  Bringing new products to the market cost effectively.  I think there’s going to be some great opportunities.

Robots and Actuators

A couple of important nuances of the robotics field came to my attention recently.  The relationship of the actuators themselves to the robot design, and of course, the kinematic framework of the robot itself.  I have some history in both areas but am regularly surprised by the way innovation continues to take place. Despite the appearance that we have reached some plateau of performance based on the existing solutions, and that further progress is marginal, man continues to change, and improve, his relationships with machines.

Actuators are a combination of mechatronic components that achieve linear or rotary motion.  This isn’t always apparent because we purchase many actuators as finished products.  The integration process is not easy and involves a number of technical disciplines.  For many factory floor applications, it is more cost effective to purchase the actuator as a product.

But aspects of actuators such as power density and accuracy become the building blocks of more complex systems, like robots. It turns out that robots which use parallel actuators have greater power density and accuracy due to the elimination of parasitic losses that result from the way that robots are organized.  This is a subtlety I missed.

On the topic of broad organization of the robot, the kinematics, there are two major families that have been defined.   The robots that have been around for a while doing welding, painting and material handling tasks are generally referred to as Serial robots. They are serial in the sense that the load and forces of each axis are dependent on the axis that follows in a series, regardless of whether the axes are rotary or linear.   The more axes, the more loads and error that must be compensated for in each preceding axis.

This is especially true for machining applications.  Most CNC’s are serial in their framework.  Its great from the control system standpoint since the axes can all be treated independently.  But when the cumulative error or each axis can be measures, with an orthogonal laser system, things can be pretty well out of hand.  The latest solution is a 3D compensation model added to the coordinate system of the machine.  Siemens has pioneered the development of such as system and it works.

So the alternative to serial robots is parallel kinematic machines.  PKM.  And you can find a few really interesting examples.  The now classic Delta robot available from Lenze, Siemens and others.  The Lenze version recently added a rotary axis in the center line of the machine making it more versatile.  Check out www.pkmtricept.com for  some insights from one of the pre-eminent suppiers of parallel kinematic machines.  There are also some excellent notes and applications from Physik Instrumente (www.hexapods.net).  In general the hexapod topic is now dominated by 6 legged robots, which is an interesting side note, but not really the core of the technology we’re looking at, but again, it is fun to see how people continue to apply robotics in unique and interesting ways.