Our Sites

The future of fabrication is now

Sometimes to see the future you just need to look around the shop floor

Augmented reality meets the press brake.

A visitor to the 2016 EuroBLECH International Sheet Metal Working Technology Exhibition dons a pair of goggles to try out augmented reality in front of a SafanDarley press brake.

Shawn DuBravac didn’t seem like the quintessential speaker for a room full of fabricators, machine tool builders, and metals industry professionals at the 12th edition of The FABRICATOR’s Leadership Summit in New Orleans in March. He’s the chief economist for the Consumer Technology Association, the promoters of the annual collision between technology and pop culture, the Consumers Electronics Show. He’s written books addressing the emergence of the digital lifestyle, and he’s a go-to source for observations on driverless cars, smartwatches, and at-home robots.

“Can you relate how what you’ve described this morning might relate to our own manufacturing operations?” asked an audience member after DuBravac’s presentation.

A similar thought had crossed my mind early in the keynote. But by the time DuBravac had covered topics such as virtual reality (“The online and offline existence is now the same.”) and people’s acceptance of artificial intelligence (“With Alexa [the voice-activated assistant inside the Amazon Echo] in our home for two years now, my kids are interacting with it on a regular basis now.”), you only needed to think about what has been shown at tradeshows and what has appeared in The FABRICATOR in recent years. The future is now.

Let’s talk about augmented reality. Senior Editor Tim Heston covered it recently, and with good reason. Augmented reality, which incorporates virtual elements and overlays them on a real-world landscape, holds great promise to improve assembly operations for manufacturers. For example, wearing augmented reality goggles, an assembly technician can view a fabrication and also see where specific hardware should be inserted. How many times have you seen parts rejected because of misplaced hardware?

The scenario works on an even larger scale when an engineer can don goggles and see a life-size model of the assembly or end product without having to walk out to the shop floor. For instance, AGCO engineers, with the help of state-of-the-art visualization technology, are able to lift up the hood of a new tractor or climb into the cab of a combine without actually having either piece of farm equipment in front of them. This way engineers can test CAD models to ensure they result in designs that are manufacturable and sure to work in the end.

At the EuroBLECH International Sheet Metal Working Technology Exhibition, SafanDarley demonstrated this type of goggle as part of the bending process. Instead of having to look away from the brake and to the screen to view a model and the virtual bending process, the operator can focus on virtual guides that appear within the goggles and that tell him where to place the blank against the back-gauge. Similar virtual reminders occur in subsequent steps. The focus always remains on the job at hand.

Does this type of technology make it possible to throw a new hire in front of a press brake on the first day? That might be a stretch, but it certainly gives a novice a head-start on the way to being productive.

It’s not just augmented reality that we’re talking about either. The act of verbalizing a command, such as playing a song from a computer-based library or providing a weather forecast, will soon be coming to a machine tool near you.

Bystronic has introduced voice command on its press brakes. This way an operator can ask the control to skip a bend sequence or change to another program without walking to the control. Such a stroll to the control doesn’t seem like a big deal, but over the course of a full shift, those steps add up. The ability to talk directly to the control keeps the operator in front of the press brake making parts.

Of course, humans aren’t going anywhere, but they may not be doing the same jobs—or at least spending as much time doing those same jobs—as they once did on the fabricating floor. These technology advancements make too much sense not to be a part of tomorrow’s manufacturing mix.

Want one more technological leap to look forward to? DuBravac said that mobile computing is headed to the next level with the advent of 5G networks. In an attempt to describe the impact, he said that it took about 26 hours to download a two-hour movie over a 3G network at 384 kilo bits per second and 6 minutes over a 4G network at 100 megabits/second. Over that 5G network, it will take 3.6 seconds at speeds greater than 10 gigabits/second.

Technology isn’t slowing down for anyone, including metal fabricators. Hold on.

About the Author
The Fabricator

Dan Davis

Editor-in-Chief

2135 Point Blvd.

Elgin, IL 60123

815-227-8281

Dan Davis is editor-in-chief of The Fabricator, the industry's most widely circulated metal fabricating magazine, and its sister publications, The Tube & Pipe Journal and The Welder. He has been with the publications since April 2002.