All machines Page 5
All machines
Page 5 of 5.
Films on page 5
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3:09 Giant MachinesA floating crane rated to 3,600 tons
A floating crane that lifts up to 3,600 tons in a single pick, used to set bridge spans and offshore platform modules that cannot be built in place. The vessel ballasts down, takes the load and ballasts up to lift. Three minutes of physics doing something that looks like a special effect.
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2:18 PrecisionA six spindle lathe turning parts in parallel
A six-spindle CNC multispindle lathe is effectively six machines sharing one bar feed, indexing so that every station cuts at once. Finished parts drop out at a rate a single-spindle machine cannot approach. INDEX shows the drum indexing and the tooling crowding in from every direction.
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2:49 Textile and Bedding AutomationA mattress line running panel to finished cover
A mattress quilting machine running at production speed with the pattern head tracing a design across the full panel width. The needle bar movement is fast enough to blur. Bedding machinery rarely gets filmed well and this one does the job.
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0:49 Printing and ConvertingHigh speed packaging printing on a sheetfed press
Twenty-one thousand sheets an hour, which is close to six sheets every second, each one printed in multiple colors and stacked in perfect register. At that speed the sheet is airborne for most of its journey through the press. Fifty seconds of the fastest sheetfed offset printing in the world.
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1:00 FuturisticA robot picking single items out of a tote
A robotic arm picking individual products out of a mixed tote, which sounds trivial and is one of the hardest unsolved problems in automation because every item is a different shape. Machine learning does the grasp planning. One minute, and the significance is much larger than the runtime.
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2:12 Robotics and Factory AutomationMulti-line robotic palletizing and stretch wrapping
Multiple production lines feed one robotic palletizing island, which builds mixed pallets and hands them straight to a stretch wrapper. The robot never stops and the lines never back up. This is what the end of a packaging hall looks like when it is designed properly rather than added on later.
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2:29 Giant MachinesA tunnel borer's cutterhead hauled back for a second dig
A tunnel boring machine cutterhead the width of a house is hauled back overland to start a second bore. HS2 filmed the whole move. Seeing the business end of a TBM out in daylight, on a road, is the only time most people ever get a proper look at one.
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2:07 PrecisionMicro assembly under a microscope
Micro assembly means placing components measured in microns, repeatedly, without touching anything else. SmarAct uses piezo-driven stages and vision to build optical and photonic assemblies that human hands could never manage. The motion is so small and so fast it barely reads as movement.
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2:07 Textile and Bedding AutomationA fully automatic carded pillow line
Fiber is opened, carded, weighed and blown into pillow shells, then the shells are closed and stacked, all in one continuous line. Filling a pillow to a consistent weight is much harder than it sounds because fiber does not flow like a liquid. This line does it without an operator.
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0:54 FuturisticCan a humanoid robot work under real factory conditions
BMW asking, on their own channel, whether a humanoid robot can genuinely be integrated into a working plant rather than a demo bay. The honest framing is what makes it interesting. Under a minute, and directly relevant to the upstate South Carolina manufacturing base.
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1:45 Robotics and Factory AutomationAutonomous mobile robots inside a car plant
Ford put ABB autonomous mobile robots into a live automotive plant to shuttle parts between stations. Short, factual and shot on the floor rather than in a studio. The value here is seeing AMRs mixed with human traffic in a real building instead of a demo cell.
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2:08 Giant MachinesAutomated ship to shore container cranes
A ship-to-shore gantry crane picks a container off a vessel and puts it on a truck with the operator sitting in an office rather than a cab 40 meters up. Anti-sway control and automated positioning do the hard part. Cranes in the largest class reach over 70 meters out across the water and lift up to about 120 tonnes.
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1:08 PrecisionA Swiss-type lathe running nine axes at once
A short, clean look at a Mazak Swiss-type turning center working through a small complex part with multiple tools engaged at once. Mazak films their own machine without music or drama. Good for a feed because it reads instantly at thumbnail size.
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1:50 Textile and Bedding AutomationMulti-needle quilting with automatic hemming
A multi-needle quilting machine stitches a full mattress panel pattern in one continuous pass, then hands it to an automatic hemming station with no operator between them. This is the heart of every mattress factory on earth. MPT films it at floor level so you can watch the fabric feed and the needle bar work.
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0:57 Robotics and Factory AutomationA 3D-vision robot depalletizing mixed cases
A 3D camera looks at a pallet of randomly stacked boxes, works out where every box edge is, and an ABB arm strips the layers off one at a time. No teaching, no fixed pattern, no two pallets alike. Machine vision solving an unstructured problem in real time is the whole show here.
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2:07 Giant MachinesThe world's largest bucket wheel excavator
Two minutes of National Geographic doing what it does best: putting a human next to the Bagger 293 so your brain can register that the bucket wheel alone is 21 meters across. Eighteen buckets, roughly fifteen tons of earth each, turning continuously. Short enough to share and impossible to argue with.
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1:05 PrecisionA Swiss-type lathe cutting a watchmaking screw
The Tornos SwissNano is a sliding headstock lathe built specifically for the watch industry, and here it turns a screw of a size that is hard to photograph. The guide bushing supports the bar right at the cut, which is why parts this slender do not deflect. Sixty-five seconds, no talking, all machine.
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0:57 Textile and Bedding AutomationA needlepunch line turning loose fiber into felt
Needlepunch turns loose fiber into fabric with no weaving and no adhesive, by driving thousands of barbed needles through the web to tangle the fibers together. ANDRITZ shows the line running at speed. Every geotextile, filter felt and mattress pad you have ever touched came off a machine like this.
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1:07 Giant MachinesRobots welding a double hull ship section
A gantry-mounted welding robot lays continuous seams inside a double-hull ship section, working in a space no welder would want to spend a shift in. Kranendonk built the system around the geometry of the block rather than the other way round. Short, technical and quietly impressive.
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1:05 PrecisionThree small robots assembling electronics in a tight cell
Three tiny six-axis robots working shoulder to shoulder in a cell smaller than a desk, assembling electronics in a space where a normal industrial arm would not fit. Small robots open up applications that were previously manual by default. It is a good reminder that automation is not only about size.
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0:55 Textile and Bedding AutomationAn unmanned sewing workstation
A sewing workstation running with nobody at it: the machine feeds, positions, sews and stacks on its own. Soft goods have resisted automation longer than almost anything else because fabric moves unpredictably. Fifty-five seconds that shows the problem finally being solved.
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1:01 Giant MachinesA shipyard Goliath crane going up, in time lapse
A time lapse of the Goliath gantry crane at the Meyer Turku shipyard lowering a complete ship block into place. The crane spans the entire dry dock. Sixty seconds, no narration, and the sense of scale arrives immediately.
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0:44 PrecisionGrinding machines for gears taller than a person
Forty-five seconds of a Gleason machine grinding a gear big enough to sit in, holding a tooth profile that will run quietly under load for decades. Large gear grinding is one of the least glamorous and most demanding processes in metalworking. Wind turbine and mining gearboxes live or die on it.