I come from an Industrial Engineering background and I really liked this quick overview of the job. The cost of robotic arms has dropped considerably in the last ~10 years. Glancing through Ebay quick, you can get tons of robotic arm models for less than $20,000. I anticipate many more processes getting automated in the next couple years especially with the rapid pace of computer vision improvements we're seeing. Like a lot of things, running a factory can look and sound easy until you get to actually doing it. Some things that can really trip up a factory:<p>* Improper product from upstream processes (wrong dimensions, doesn't assemble, wrong physical properties, etc).<p>* Unplanned downtime.<p>* Being behind on production goals (meaning they won't stop the machine for you to install and test your new widget that might fix everything).<p>* Management turning down many very useful OEM upgrades on a cost basis.<p>* Imbalanced production rates. The bottleneck of the factory should be the primary focus for improvements.<p>And for a fun fact: lubricant used in food production equipment must be safe for humans. For this reason, vegetable oil and similar products are often used.
I worked in a cheese factory and I am familiar with all the tasks here, except we also churned the whey to get very salty butter which went into other products.<p>We used pallets and when you would have a small tower built on these things you would have to do the clingfilm wrap to hold it all together. This was not a big process, it would take a couple of minutes to do and a forklift would need to access the pallet to take it away as soon as this was done.<p>In this factory we made cheese on a truly industrial scale, however, the thought of getting a robot to do the clingfilm wrap would be anything but the first thing on the mind of the boss. So this cheese factory must be gigantic, up there with the gigafactory...<p>So is this any good, this string cheese in packs from this vast industrial operation? Is there some conclusion to this where America ends up with just one mega-dairy factory somewhere in the Mid-West with nobody else able to compete against the robots? For things like clingfilm wrapping to be too hard for humans to do?<p>I would like to see a different approach, a highly robotised but small scale cheese factory, on the back of a lorry. Something that can be taken to the farm so that we can have 'single farm' cheeses.
I had a tour of an incandescent light bulb factory in the 90’s. It was interesting seeing machines that were possibly 100 years old retrofitted with the latest programmable controllers.
This is a very accessible intro. And I was fascinated by the progression of her interests and education.<p>One note: the link to her Instagram page at the bottom of the article is broken (there's an unneeded = at the end). The correct URL is:<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/theladymachinist/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/theladymachinist/</a>