Industrial gearbox users – especially in the EMEA region – are turning increasingly to integrated gear-motor packages, which offer cost and maintenance advantages over buying separate gearboxes and motors, according to a new study of the $6.2bn global market for gear-motors and solo gearboxes by Interact Analysis. Geared motors remove the need for couplings and mountings. They not only save space, but ensure compatibility between the components and make predictive maintenance easier to implement.
ABB’s Austrian subsidiary B&R Automation has announced a magnetically levitating shuttle system with six degrees of freedom for moving items freely around production machines. It claims that the rail-free Acopos 6D system, which can carry items weighing from 0.6–14kg at speeds of up to 2m/s with a positioning repeatability of ±5µm, heralds “a new era for manufacturing”.
The German injection-moulding machine manufacturer Arburg has bought the drives and motors developer AMK Arnold Müller from its Chinese owner, Zhongding Holding Europe. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
The German machine safety specialist Pilz has developed a technology that allows users to configure and order customised safety relays online for orders as small as one relay. In many cases, the bespoke modular relays will be delivered the next day, tested and ready-to-install without needing any programming. All that’s needed is a screwdriver to install the relay in a control cabinet.
The US engine-maker Fairbanks Morse has acquired one of the oldest names in the electric motor industry, Ward Leonard, for an undisclosed sum. This acquisition will expand the power and propulsion equipment and services that Fairbanks Morse offers to its customers, which include the US Navy, US Coast Guard and the Canadian Coast Guard.
The US industrial conglomerate Teledyne Technologies is buying the infrared imaging giant Flir Systems in a cash-and-stock deal worth around $8bn. Although both companies are active in the sensing market, they say that their technologies and markets are “perfectly complementary … with minimal overlap”.
The Japanese drive and robot manufacturer Yaskawa is investing $4m in Transphorm, a Californian pioneer in gallium nitride (GaN) power semiconductors, with the aim of using GaN to enhance the performance of the next generation of power conversion systems, including servodrives and variable-speed drives. The two companies have entered a multi-year cooperation and development agreement, expanding on a co-operation initiated in 2017, when Yaskawa invested $15m in Transphorm.
Amazon has announced five machine-learning technologies and services designed to help industrial and manufacturing users to embed intelligence into their production processes to improve efficiency, quality control, security, and workplace safety. The services combine machine learning, sensor analysis, and computer vision capabilities to address common technical challenges faced by industry, and are claimed to be the most comprehensive suite of cloud-to-edge industrial machine learning services available.
An Israeli specialist in autonomous inspection technologies has secured a $45m investment from US-based Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) to launch a “transformative” system for remote, autonomous inspection and monitoring of assets at industrial sites. The company, Percepto, has also reached an agreement with Boston Robotics to integrate its dog-shaped robot Spot with its own drone technology to perform coordinated inspections on the ground and from the air. The KDT injection brings bringing the total invested in the company so far to $72.5m.
Rockwell Automation is buying the Canadian computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) provider, Fiix, for an undisclosed sum. Fiix’s cloud-based CMMS creates workflows for scheduling, organising and tracking equipment maintenance.
ABB has announced plans to sell off its Dodge mechanical power transmission division following a strategic review of its portfolio. It is also planning to dispose of its Turbocharging and Power Conversion divisions. Together the three divisions represent about $1.75bn of combined annual revenues, or about 6% of ABB’s total revenues.
Siemens is giving all of its employees around the world, except for its senior managers, a special Covid-19 bonus of up to €1,000 to honour their “extraordinary performance during the pandemic”. The company says it is also making the payments – which will cost it about €200m – to live up to its role as a responsible employer “during these special times”.
A report from the Nikkei news service suggests that the Japanese motor manufacturer Nidec is planning to build a $1.9bn factory in Serbia to produce motors for the European electric vehicle market. The company is said to be in the final stage of negotiations for the plant, which would include a research centre and could be producing up to 300,000 motors per year by 2023.
The global market for industrial gearboxes and geared motors has dropped by more than 7% this year as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, and it could take until 2022 for sales to recover to their 2019 levels, according to a new report from Interact Analysis.
The British online supermarket and technology group Ocado is buying two North American robotics companies – Kindred Systems and Haddington Dynamics – for a total of $287m to enhance its robotic manipulation capabilities and to accelerate the delivery of robotic picking technologies to its Ocado Smart Platform (OSP) customers. Ocado has also acquired a minority stake in materials-handling robotics start-up called Myrmex, which has operations in the US and Greece.
