08/13/12 — When Apple comes home—and it will happen sooner than anyone, even Apple, would ever imagine—we’ll need to thank the triumvirate of rising wages overseas, automation and robots, especially robots. Rising wages and automation alone might make Apple move to India or Africa, but not re-shore itself stateside. The robot, however, holds the automation key. It takes five days and 325 steps to assemble an IPad The 325 steps and five assembly days needed to bring an iPad to life are in the hands of 300,000 Chinese workers at Foxconn’s Longhua factory. It’s those 300,000 pairs of assembly hands that robots…

07/19/12 — Optima Control Solutions Ltd, an independent automation company, was approached by KUKA Robots and charged with the task of installing and programming a robot solution to integrate with the paper mill’s existing machine control system. The mill’s automation engineer reported: “We had complete confidence in the company’s expertise when KUKA recommended Optima as the best system integrator for the job. KUKA Robots employed a 3G router solution and made sure that remote robot diagnostics are possible via LogMeIn (a remote control desktop website). The most challenging part of the project was calculating the arc the robot had to take relative…