I had a nice chat about safety and automation with with Jeff Hawkins of Festo Corp. at the MD&M West show in Anaheim, California, today. Hawkins is the manager of electronics and light assembly, North and South America, for Festo.
Hawkins explained that, especially in a complex mechanical device, you have pneumatic, you can have hydraulic, you can have electric, or you can have different combinations of technologies—and different safety protocols for each of those.
“And so we’ve integrated safety protocols between our pneumatic and our electric together,” said Hawkins, “So if you break a light curtain, then both the pneumatic and the electric shut down in such a way to keep people from being injured in crimping situations or anything that’s [dangerous] in a mechanical way, yet holding objects in place in the event that you were handling something either over someone’s head or over a workpiece, so that the product itself wouldn’t cause damage.”
Safety regulations differ by country, Hawkins noted. “But we try to exceed them and be above the maximum; we don’t take the least common denominator of any of them.”
So what does he see as the next big trend in automation safety? The answer is in the air all around you.
“I think that eventually, we’re going to get into the wireless safety protocols, where RF interference and those type of things could start interfering with some of the Bluetooth capabilities and things on machines, so I would envision we’ll start seeing some of those new protocols come out as the wireless technology takes life.
Festo Corp.
www.festo.com/us
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