Drones have come a long way in a fairly short time, commercially speaking. In less than 20 years, these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gone from being used by the CIA to attack the Taliban in Afghanistan, to soon being used by Amazon to deliver a wide range of packages to homes.

The lives of manufacturers would be so much easier if all their automation processes were homogeneous. Unfortunately, there are many that require customization to satisfy the unique requirements of an automated work-holding or material-handling application.

There's nothing quite like a multistation automated assembly system. Watching robots, actuators and indexers go about their carefully choreographed routines with little or no human intervention can seem nothing short of miraculous.

Refrigerators are one of the only appliances found in nearly every type of home, whether it's an apartment in suburban Atlanta, a high-rise condominium in downtown Chicago, a beach house in Hawaii or a trailer in Texas. The humble refrigerator is also the hardest working household appliance. Day and night, it's constantly running to keep all types of food and beverages cool, fresh or frozen.

Often, hands-on experience is the best way to prepare college students for life in the real world. That's the goal of the Omron Senior Design and Robotics Laboratory at the University of Houston.

Beer drinkers have debated for years about whether the taste of a bottle of beer improves with age. What they agree upon, however, is that the longer a company makes beer, the better the odds that it produces a great-tasting product, glass after glass.

For basic welding jobs, companies often rely on blueprints, tools and tape measures to build and weld the parts. However, when using these conventional tools, there's a high risk of mistakes being made and, at the end, having to break the parts loose, which is expensive and time consuming.

Automated assembly is becoming increasingly common, even for small manufacturing companies. Robotic assemblers improve productivity and boost output while ensuring that results are more consistent.

Robotics and wrestling have a lot in common. Flexibility and reach are important to both. Robots and wrestlers also have numerous categories that are based on different weight and payload capacities.

In my first postcollege job, I was a manufacturing engineer for Cummins Engine Co. in Columbus, IN. Two weeks into the job, my boss came to me with a project to purchase an industrial wash system, and I leaped at the opportunity. It was a disaster.