Robotics & Automation News

Where Innovation Meets Imagination

electronics assembly

Intrinsic’s vision for physical AI: Building the software-defined factory

by

For decades, industrial automation has largely followed the same formula. Production lines have become faster, robots have become more capable, and software has steadily improved, but the underlying model has remained relatively fixed: automation systems are engineered for specific tasks, making flexibility expensive and time-consuming.

That model is increasingly being challenged.

Manufacturers today are under pressure to produce a wider variety of products, switch between production runs more quickly, cope with labour shortages and integrate artificial intelligence into existing operations. [Read more…] about Intrinsic’s vision for physical AI: Building the software-defined factory

What Makes Asian Electronics Manufacturing a Smart Choice for Global Companies?

by

The Reality of Diversified Supply Chains

Relying on a single factory or region for your entire bill of materials is a fast way to bottleneck your product launch. US hardware companies learned this the hard way over the last few supply cycles.

The conversation has shifted from just chasing the lowest piece price to building a resilient and capable network of suppliers. Asia remains the center of gravity for electronics manufacturing because of its deep and established supply base.

You can find specialized facilities for every tier of production. It is not just about cheap labor anymore. It is about access to component ecosystems and engineering teams that do nothing but optimize assembly lines all day. [Read more…] about What Makes Asian Electronics Manufacturing a Smart Choice for Global Companies?

Precision robotics: Applications in electronics assembly and medical device manufacturing

by

A few decades ago, industrial robots were extraordinary because they could place heavy parts with centimetre-level accuracy. Today, the competitive benchmark has shifted by several orders of magnitude.

Modern precision robots routinely achieve ±5 µm repeatability, with some specialist motion stages achieving sub-micrometre accuracy. To put that into context:

  • 1 micrometre (µm) equals one-thousandth of a millimetre, often called a micron. Put another way, 1 micrometre is one-millionth of a metre.
  • A human hair is roughly 70 to 100 µm thick.
  • An advanced SCARA robot can place components with an error margin smaller than one-tenth of a human hair’s diameter.
  • High-end photonics assembly systems use motion stages with a command resolution of 0.1 µm – too fine for the average human eye to see, even when aided by most optical microscopes.

[Read more…] about Precision robotics: Applications in electronics assembly and medical device manufacturing