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Q&A with Jon Sobel, co-founder and CEO of Sight Machine located in both San Francisco, CA and Ann Arbor, MI.

Urschel Laboratories has come a long way since its founder William E. Urschel introduced the gooseberry snipper to Michigan canneries in 1910. Today, the company’s innovative machines are used by virtually every food processing manufacturer worldwide to slice, dice, trim, grate, and process foods that are stored in pantries and refrigerator shelves. For the record, Urschel’s gooseberry snipper machine handled the removal of a stem and thick bud appendage from the berry.

While cameras and motion control have worked in tandem for at least 15 years, their integration has improved because networks have gotten faster, more reliable, and more deterministic (i.e., nothing will interfere with a function that’s a priority).

It’s a familiar scenario at the factory. Quality issues have reared their ugly heads, requiring rework, causing backorders, delaying shipments, and driving tense daily customer calls. Meanwhile, the team works to address production issues using a mix of day-old post-mortem reports, shop-floor observations captured on notepads, and other operational data summarized on spreadsheets and sticky notes.

In today’s booming software landscape, you see highly dynamic teams quickly iterating to develop and improve their products. Yet while the world’s software creators have learned to “move fast and break things,” hardware developers are still (slowly) moving to adopt a more agile product development methodology.

The devices quickly become less costly, sophisticated and independent, gaining wider influence.

Would you roll down the driveway on a scooter without bolts, rivets, or mechanical fasteners of any kind? 3M scientists Michael Leighton and Brent Bystrom would. And they did.

Defense systems are, by design, built to defend against threats. Today, however, manufacturers of these systems are focusing on an entirely new kind of threat: security breaches targeting their automation systems.

A team of researchers from UC Berkeley, led by Pieter Abbeel, is working on the creation of smart robots that are teachable and can learn new skills without pre-programming. Abbeel and his team also formed a startup called Embodied Intelligence with the aim of developing artificial intelligence (AI) software to enable robots to learn from humans to perform complex tasks.

Kuka Robotics Corp. held a grand opening of its new Metal & Arc TechCenter at its 80,000-sq.-ft. Shelby Township, MI, headquarters, Nov. 29-30. The grand opening featured 13 live robotic automation demonstrations, tours of the new TechCenter, and presentations on new technology.