Developments

Model X is said to be the safest, fastest and most capable sport utility vehicle in history. Standard with all-wheel drive and a 90 kWh battery providing 250 miles of range, Model X has ample seating for seven adults and all of their gear. And it’s ludicrously fast, accelerating from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.2 seconds. Model X is the SUV uncompromised. The estimated delivery for new reservations is the latter half of 2016. Safety First Design Every part of Model X is designed with safety as a first priority. The floor-mounted battery lowers the centre of gravity so that the risk of rollover is almost non-existent. The battery structure strengthens Model X against side impact intrusions. And without a gasoline engine, the large front trunk acts as a giant impact-absorbing crumple zone. Active Safety Model X continually scans the surrounding roadway with camera, radar and sonar systems, providing the driver with real-time feedback to avoid collisions. Even at highway speeds, Model X will automatically apply brakes in an emergency. Pollution Free, Inside and Out A medical grade HEPA filter strips outside air of pollen, bacteria, viruses and pollution before circulating it into the cabin. There are three modes: circulate with outside air, re-circulate inside air and a bioweapon defence mode that creates positive pressure inside the cabin to protect occupants. Falcon Wings Falcon Wing doors allow easy access to second and third row seats from any parking space. Minivan style sliding doors open at most halfway while traditional doors are not capable of opening fully when parked next to another car. With only a foot of clearance, Falcon Wing doors articulate smoothly up and out of the way, allowing passengers to enter from both front and rear directions. The side and overhead opening is so large […]

RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc, the global distributor for engineers, has launched DesignSpark Electrical, which brings the benefits of design software to all those not already using electrical CAD tools. The new software targets electrical design engineers and other electrical professionals, enabling them to save time and money. Supported by Schneider Electric, DesignSpark Electrical joins the award-winning suite of DesignSpark engineering resources and continues to drive the initiative of removing the barriers to innovation for every engineer. DesignSpark Electrical is a fully specified electrical CAD package delivering time saving and error avoidance, for control panel, machinery and electrical system design. This new free tool provides access to the functionality of electrical CAD for businesses that in many cases cannot reasonably justify the considerable price tag per seat for existing commercial electrical CAD software. A key element of the DesignSpark Electrical software is the integration of a library that comprises more than 250,000 components and parts, including 80,000 from Schneider Electric and 10,000 from RS, which can easily be added to customer designs. Other key features of the highly intuitive and highly functional software include intelligent and specialist electrical design tools, real-time referencing and validity checking to allow the creation of accurate 2D panel layouts, all of which saves time and reduces errors. Also built into the software is Bill-of-Materials (BOM) quote functionality, enabling customers to order parts via RS for their designs, both quickly and easily. The high cost and the learning time required of existing commercial electrical CAD tools have been major barriers to adoption for many companies. The introduction of the highly intuitive DesignSpark Electrical removes these cost barriers in a single stroke and passes on the key benefits of electrical CAD to all engineers. DesignSpark Electrical is available for free download at www.designspark.com.

In the picture: Kiyotaka Ise, Toyota’s Chief Officer of its Research and Development Group. The opportunities to improve every-day living through artificial intelligence supported technologies are boundless. Toyota will invest $US 50 million in the research and development of intelligent vehicle and mobility technologies with an ambitious new collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, California. Joint research centres will be established at each university with Toyota investing $US50 million over the next five years. Dr. Gill Pratt, former Program Manager at DARPA (the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) and leader of its recent Robotics Challenge, has joined Toyota to direct and accelerate these research activities and their application to intelligent vehicles and robotics. Toyota believes the opportunities to improve every-day living through artificial intelligence supported technologies are boundless, with significant breakthrough potential for the development of life-saving intelligent vehicles and life-improving robots. “We’re here to mark the beginning of an unprecedented commitment. We will initially focus on the acceleration of intelligent vehicle technology, with the immediate goal of helping eliminate traffic casualties and the ultimate goal of helping improve quality of life through enhanced mobility and robotics,” said Kiyotaka Ise, Toyota’s Chief Officer of its Research and Development Group. Combined research will be targeted at improving the ability of intelligent vehicle technologies to recognise objects around the vehicle, provide elevated judgment of surrounding conditions, and safely collaborate with vehicle occupants, other vehicles, and pedestrians. The joint research will also look at applications of the same technology to human-interactive robotics and information service, said Dr. Pratt. Both Universities already have computer science and artificial intelligence research facilities. Beyond Toyota’s longstanding work on autonomous vehicles and advanced driving support systems, the company has been developing robots for industrial use since the 1970s, and for Partner and Human Support […]

Delcam has launched the 2016 release of its FeatureCAM feature-based CAM software. This includes a range of enhancements, in particular more options for the Vortex high-efficiency area-clearance strategy, support for bar-fed mills, more efficient turning and user-interface improvements to make programming even easier and faster. FeatureCAM was the world’s first feature-based programming software when it was launched in 1995. Constant development since then has ensured that the system has retained its leadership in programming speed and ease of use, while an increased range of strategies has been added to provide more efficient toolpaths that give greater productivity on a wider range of machinery, including mill-turn machines, five-axis mills and wire EDM equipment. The 2016 release includes a number of enhancements to the Vortex area-clearance strategy. Vortex gives the fastest safe metal removal from solid carbide tooling, in particular designs that give deeper cuts by using the full flute length as the cutting surface. It produces toolpaths with a controlled engagement angle and so maintains the optimum cutting conditions for the complete roughing cycle, giving faster machining and longer tool life. The ability has now been added to adjust and fine tune the non-cutting moves of 2.5D and 3D Vortex toolpaths, with options to retract the tool and/or to increase the feedrate. These options can be set individually, or can be combined to achieve an optimum toolpath, with a reduced cycle time. Other roughing improvements include the ability to take into account any remaining stock on the model during holder collision checking, ensuring that Z-level roughing toolpaths are completely free of tool-holder collisions. Milling of inside or outside groove features has been upgraded with a number of improvements. These include support for different types of roughing links, wind-fan approach and retract moves for finishing, better gouge checking for plunges and retracts, […]

By Ian Raper, Regional Vice President, Riverbed Australia & New Zealand Automation and the rise of smart, Internet-connected manufacturing equipment (known as M2M or the Internet of Things depending on the device) stand to deliver previously unimaginable productivity gains and cost-savings. While these new technologies promise to simplify the production process, this influx of connected machines and devices also complicates the network used to deliver these efficiency gains. With each new machine connected to a network, finding faults and troubleshooting application performance issues when they occur could be like finding a needle in an ever-increasing haystack. A major source of delay in the troubleshooting process can be found in the way IT teams are structured; specific parts of the infrastructure (e.g. network operations; server operations; application operations) are run by different groups. Each of these teams has visibility into a different part of infrastructure and, traditionally, has had no way to share information effectively. This siloed approach means that the first step in the troubleshooting process is usually a counterproductive round of finger pointing between groups as none have visibility of the whole. But it doesn’t need to be like this The key to effective, real-time performance optimisation and troubleshooting is visibility. If each of these teams has a deep, end-to-end view within and across the complex networks and applications that make up the modern manufacturing process, any performance issue can be quickly resolved. In fact, these issues can even be fixed before they have an effect on the production line by using the same automation that is becoming prevalent on factory floors. At Riverbed, we’ve developed solutions to minimise downtime in the production environment and avoid potentially devastating disruptions that can reverberate through the supply chain. Clearing the fog of war The first strategy is to have the right […]

In PowerSHAPE 2016, reverse engineering of prismatic parts has been made easier. Delcam has added a series of enhancements to its PowerSHAPE Pro software for modelling and reverse engineering that will help users to complete complex designs more quickly and more easily. In addition, a combination of new, more efficient, code and the extension of multi-threaded calculations to many commonly-used tasks will make the software significantly faster than any previous version. Full details, including video demonstrations, are on the Learning Zone – www.delcam.tv/ps2016/lz/en By offering a combination of solid, surface and direct modelling, together with reverse engineering, PowerSHAPE Pro provides the most comprehensive range of design techniques available in a single CAD program. Having all the different technologies in the same package reduces the need to transfer data between multiple programs and so streamlines any modelling-for-manufacture projects that require both reverse-engineering and CAD functionality. The first enhancement in the 2016 release allows groups of features to be copied between two solids in a single operation. While the features do not need to be of the same type, the most common application is expected to be in copying patterns of holes with a single click from one solid to another, for example from one mould plate to any other plate in the mould stack. Another new option to save modelling time is the ability to edit the axis direction of any number of surface or solid primitives simultaneously. Similarly, the axis direction of a group of primitives that are not aligned can be brought into alignment in one operation. PowerSHAPE Pro already had the ability to edit simultaneously the dimensions of groups of primitives. For customers using PowerSHAPE Pro to capture data for reverse engineering, the software can connect directly to most scanning hardware to capture and display scan data in […]