Congratulations to Will Meis (Outside Sales) & Martin Greenlee (Calibration Specialist) on their 1st place bass tournament win! Great catch!

Safe, Reliable. Fast. Standard and Custom Sealing Connection Tools for Leak Test and Fluid Transfer Applications.
FasTest Sealing Connection Tools significantly increase operational throughput and reduce manufacturing costs.

Partnership is Part of an Initiative to Increase Technical Support in the Midwest

CARSON, Calif., – March 16, 2020 – As part of an initiative to increase technical support in the
Midwest US, Epson Robots, the #1 SCARA robot manufacturer in the world, today announced it
is expanding its relationship with Air Automation Engineering (AAE), a leading automation
solutions provider. The partnership establishes AAE as an official Authorized Epson Service
Center and will expand beyond selling Epson Robots, automation products and integrated
solutions to include maintenance and repair of the broad installed base of Epson robots, helping
to ensure fast repair turnaround times throughout the Upper Midwest.

The partnership with Air Automation Engineering involves all Epson Robots automation
products, including the large lineup of SCARA and 6-Axis robots and the lineup of integrated
solutions. The company has helped Epson Robots introduce award-winning robot-based
automation solutions throughout the Upper Midwest, including Iowa, North Dakota, South
Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.

“We’re pleased to expand our relationship with Epson Robots and help our joint customers in
the Upper Midwest,” said Paul Wood, general manager, Air Automation Engineering. “Our team
of long-term professionals focus on providing the best repair and support services so our
customers benefit from a high return on investment.”
“Air Automation has a long history of providing automation solutions and we are looking forward
to adding them as an Authorized Epson Service Center for the Upper Midwest,” said Tom
Versfelt, VP Commercial Sales Epson. “The company’s expertise and commitment to offering a
full service and support portfolio help set our customers up for maximum productivity with Epson
robots.”

About Air Automation Engineering
Air Automation Engineering (AAE) was founded in 1978 and is recognized as a leading
distributor in the Greater Upper Midwest. The company supports its manufacturing customers
with application support, repair, value added services & inventory from 2 locations in North
Dakota & Minnesota. AAE has passion for automation opportunities with the personnel &
support programs to provide a solution that delivers increased productivity, enhanced machine
safety and improved ergonomics. For more information, visit www.airautomation.com

 

Brushless servo motors with integrated controller…
  • Reduced material costs
  • Reduced labor costs
  • Better quality and reliability
  • Fewer connections, less wiring
Call or email us for a demonstration or
on-site application evaluation.
Toll Free: (800) 231-9205

High-performance BR12PP-8 Smart Rivet Tool from STANLEY Assembly Technologies allows manufacturers to reduce scrap, optimize the assembly area, and provide real-time process data.

The high-performance BR12PP-8 Smart Rivet Tool from STANLEY® Assembly Technologies, the global leader in precision fastening, allows manufacturers to reduce scrap, optimize the assembly area, and provide real-time process data to the existing plant manufacturing execution system by recording the stem break load and rivet pull distance.

“The product launch of the BR12PP-8, STANLEY Assembly Technologies is the latest development in partnership with the STANLEY® Engineered Fastening to offer the best in smart, cordless, programmable rivet setting technology,” said Deanna Postlethwaite, director of global product management at STANLEY Assembly Technologies.

The BR12PP-8 Smart Rivet Tool offers benefits including:

  • Digitally adjustable force and distance acceptance values
  • Use 1 tool for many rivets and applications for reduced cost of ownership and increased error detection
  • Detects errors in the process, preventing customer returns and recalls
  • Optional integrated force switch
  • Programmable multi-function button provides a simple, flexible way to complete many different tasks with a single button
  • Durable brushless DC servo motor engineered for the high production environment

This programmable, smart-rivet reporting system offers built-in, smart electronics that allow the tool to operate without a STANLEY Assembly Technologies QBE-Series Controller. This saves on setup time and cost. For customers requiring a QBE-Series Controller to connect to an error-proofing system, plant networks, and other advanced features, the BR12PP-8’s built-in WiFi provides the capability to add to a QBE-Series Controller for expanded convenience.

Air Automation Engineering is now the Upper Midwest Distributor for Precise Automation!

Introducing the world’s safest/fastest Scara Robot: The PF3400 is the world’s first collaborative four-axis SCARA robot. Its inherently safe design allows the PF3400 to achieve speeds and accelerations much faster than any other collaborative robot while still limiting forces to ISO collaborative robot standards, making the PF3400 the world’s fastest/safest robot. There are over 1,000 units of the PreciseFlex Industrial Collaborative family of robots currently operating safely in a variety of workcells all over the world without shielding. These applications include life science/laboratory automation, small parts handling and consumer electronics testing. In addition to the robot satisfying ISO standards, these cells have been evaluated by both internal end-user and OEM safety groups and have been judged to be safe to use without shielding.

Dunwoody College having some fun with the Epson robots they purchased through AAE!

Dunwoody Student Programs Robot to Play Super Mario Bros. Theme Song

Dunwoody student Jeremy Berg began playing the piano when he was 5 years-old. Now, studying Automated Systems & Robotics, he programmed a SCARA Robot to play the Nintendo Super Mario Bros. theme song. How cool is that?

Posted by Dunwoody College of Technology on Friday, December 7, 2018

 

By Noah Smith Bloomberg Opinion

Studies foresee big numbers of jobs becoming automated. But what exactly that means and how it might play out are far from clear. An Amazon warehouse in New Jersey last year. In some cases, machines are doing jobs that humans once did, but humans are minding the machines.

How many jobs are vulnerable to automation? Plenty of people ask that question, and plenty of people try to give numerical answers.

A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said that about 46 percent of jobs have a better-than-even chance of being automated. A 2016 study by Citigroup and the University of Oxford reported that 57 percent of jobs were at high risk of automation, although a 2013 paper by two of the same researchers predicted 47 percent. A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report comes up with somewhat lower numbers, though it varies by country. In 2016, the World Economic Forum report came up with a number just less than 40 percent for the U.S. There are many other examples.

These are large numbers. Even more troubling, they’re all fairly similar — each of the studies seems to come to the conclusion that roughly half of all jobs are very vulnerable to automation. But don’t panic — nobody really knows how many jobs will be replaced by robots, or even what it means to be replaced.

What does it mean for a job to be lost to automation? Does it mean that a worker is rendered entirely obsolete as a worker and is forced to go on the welfare rolls? Or does it mean that she loses her current job, with her current company? If a person gets a new job at a different company in the same industry for more pay, does it still count as a job loss? What about for 85 percent as much pay?

The studies are not clear about this. Usually, their basic methodology is to show some technology experts a description of a job — or the tasks that, on paper, a job is said to require — and then ask the experts whether they think technology will soon be able to do those tasks. But even assuming that the experts are correct — that there isn’t another AI winter or broad technological stagnation — nobody really knows what happens to a job whose tasks can be automated.

In their book, “Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence,” economists and AI specialists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb predict that few jobs will be entirely replaced by AI in the near future but that many individual tasks will be automated. What happens to an employee who now has a machine to do half of her work for her, but who is still needed to do the other half? She might get a pay cut, but she also might get a raise, since she can now get more work done per hour than before. Her job description and job title might change, but if she’s earning more, she’s unlikely to mind.

In other words, the so-called risk posed by automation isn’t all downside — it has considerable upside as well.

Even more importantly, studies like the ones cited above can’t say much about what automation does to the job market as a whole. It’s almost certain that as some jobs get automated, others will be created to take their place. Just consider all the new jobs that didn’t exist a few years or decades ago — social-media manager, data scientist or podcast producer. Additionally, those job categories that don’t end up getting fully automated might expand if the supply of workers available to do them increased — the nation might have fewer cashiers but more landscapers.

The studies also don’t account for income effects. Automation makes it cheaper to run a business, which can make the number of businesses proliferate. That means that even if each business employs fewer people for a particular job, the number of people doing that job can increase. A famous case of this is how ATMs were predicted to reduce the number of bank tellers. In fact, the number of tellers per branch did fall substantially, but banks opened a lot more branches, in part because ATMs made it cheaper to do so. As a result, the number of bank tellers actually increased steadily between 1980 and 2010 (though it has fallen somewhat since then, thanks in part to industry consolidation). Cashiers are another example — despite the advent of self-checkout machines, the number of humans working in the area has remained essentially constant.

More fundamentally, automation of one sort or another has been happening for centuries — machine tools, steam shovels, word processors, street sweepers and plenty of other machines are just forms of automation. If you did a study like the ones listed above in 1900, you would have found that almost any job at the time had some tasks that machines would someday perform. And yet, most people still have a job.

To really know how automation will affect employment levels, wages and inequality, you need a macroeconomic model, and you need lots of assumptions about how technology affects companies’ costs, workers’ productivity and consumers’ preferences. All of those things introduce huge amounts of uncertainty. Meanwhile, studies like the ones listed above are helpful and informative, and many of them contain a lot of interesting data about the relationship between technology and economy — but they don’t tell you whether your livelihood is really at risk.

 

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