The march of automation and manufacturing has always been associated with the fear of job loss. The rapid advancement of industrial robotics in the last 20 years has created a cottage industry of speculation over the economic and societal shift caused by a reduced need for workers on the assembly line. US manufacturing workers live in a high wage nation, and are especially vulnerable…do they fear the rise of the machines?

The Pittsburgh Robotics Network has just released the results of a new national survey that examines US worker attitudes toward our AI-driven automation revolution, and Executive Director of the organization Jennifer Apicella, joins engineering.com’s Jim Anderton to talk about the apparent mismatch between worker perception and reality.

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engineering.com produces a number of video programs for the engineering professional found exclusively on engineering.com TV such as Designing the Future, Manufacturing the Future, and The Engineering Roundtable.

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The Trump Administration’s tariff regime has sent shockwaves around the manufacturing world, and has made ”re-shoring" the new word in American manufacturing. Machinery, however, is a global commodity, and some of the highest technology machinery is from European and Asian sources that previously enjoyed an open trading relationship with the US.

Dr. Carlo Angelo Bocci is the Italian Trade Agency Trade Commissioner based in Miami and is the Trade Commissioner for Canada. He met with engineering.com’s Jim Anderton at the Canadian Manufacturing Technology Show in Toronto. Dr. Bocci is a trade veteran with experience in Asia, the Americas and Europe, and he discussed the outlook for the Italian machine industry, and that of European machine builders in general.

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engineering.com produces a number of video programs for the engineering professional found exclusively on engineering.com TV such as Designing the Future, Manufacturing the Future, and The Engineering Roundtable.

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay current with the latest in engineering trends.

Self-driving cars, drones, humanoid robots. They are all over the news and popular culture today and are technologies that need a critical capability: navigation. It’s been true for thousands of years, and for most of human history, dead reckoning was a rare skill, and a black art. “Shooting” stars with the sextant is still an option for sport sailors, but today, repeatability and accuracy have never been more important.

It’s been a story of rapid technological development for the last 75 years, from the gyro compass, accelerometer driven inertial navigation systems, to stellar tracking, and terrain following. GPS is of course the lowest cost method in widespread use today, but even its significant capability isn't enough for many of today’s demanding applications.

Advanced Navigation Senior Application Engineer Matthew Suntup describes the challenges and capabilities of this critical technology in conversation with engineering.com’s Jim Anderton.

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engineering.com produces a number of video programs for the engineering professional found exclusively on engineering.com TV such as Designing the Future, Manufacturing the Future, and The Engineering Roundtable.

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay current with the latest in engineering trends.