Speaker 0 00:00:00 The hazards on a piece of equipment, when you're starting it up, they don't change daily, they change sometimes hourly or, or by the minute. In some ways, the automation industry has kind of stuck their head in the sand and just said, we don't want to talk about it, and we don't really wanna come up with a, a better plan for how to deal with it. I think there has to be a better communication mechanism or a better way to handle that kind of risk.
Speaker 2 00:00:31 Today's episode of The Robot Industry Podcast is brought to you by canova, a global leader in robotics. Founded in 2006 in Montreal. The company's original mission was to empower individuals with upper body limitations. Through the use of assistive robots, the companies evolved its products and services, researchers, medical professionals, governments, businesses, and educational institutions to achieve their innovation goals. Through strategic partnerships with over a decade of inspired ingenuity, Ken Nova's solutions are found in industries as diverse as AgriFood, healthcare, security, nuclear, hazmat, and of course, advanced manufacturing. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Robot Industry Podcast. We're glad you're here. And thank you for subscribing. My guest for this episode is Jeff Werner. Jeff is with ETHOS Automation, and he's no stranger to the automation industry and machine building for capital equipment. Jeff's worked with many large systems integrators as team lead in project management. He's held such roles as vice president and general manager and VP and general manager for a packaging automation company. Hey, welcome to the podcast, Jeff.
Speaker 0 00:01:35 Thanks, Jim. I'm really glad to be here.
Speaker 2 00:01:37 Hey, I'm glad you're here too. And tell me a little bit about Ethos Automation.
Speaker 0 00:01:41 Yeah, we've, uh, we've been around for, uh, close to six years now. Uh, we're, uh, one of the smaller integrators around, but very rapidly growing. Uh, we're, we spend most of our, uh, most of our time in right now in the automotive industry, uh, doing a lot of, uh, assembly work. Uh, we do a lot of process development. We do a lot of welding. We're growing quickly and, uh, really enjoying, uh, this, this boom that's happening right now in the automation industry. Jeff,
Speaker 2 00:02:08 When you and I kind of discuss this idea as a topic for a webinar, I, I, I thought it was a really cool idea, and we're gonna talk about safety today. And then I started thinking about all the issues and it, and it's not just safety with robots, uh, because safety, robot safety is fairly well documented, and it's pretty easy to get up to speed on robot safety. There's conferences, there's lots of experts, lots of opportunity, but robots are just part of the conversation. When you're talking about custom automation systems, you have so many players, so many technologies such as indexers and conveyors and welders and lasers. Um, you've worked for some pretty awesome machine builders, Jeff, like Ethos and others. Where are you seeing some of the challenges in the automation regarding safety?
Speaker 0 00:02:52 Well, Jim, you know, if, if you take a step back, you know, 10 years, even 20 years ago, safety and automation was a, was a hardwired thing, right? It was, uh, safety relays. It was, uh, redundant, uh, contacts, uh, on door switches and stuff like that. And it was, it was all very, you know, kind of, uh, uh, hardcore, uh, very difficult to change. And then when, uh, programmable safety came along, that brought, you know, a a whole new level of flexibility to, uh, safety systems, uh, connectivity between different devices, while that flexibility and, and connectivity and safety is, is amazing. That in itself has brought along a whole bunch of different challenges along with it. And to your point, when you're dealing with indexers and conveyors, welders, that kind of stuff, every one of those devices kind of speak their own safety language as well.
Speaker 0 00:03:51 You know, some of them have, uh, safety zoning for speed control or, uh, you know, to allow operators to be within, uh, within reach of them while they're, while they're still live. And then, you know, uh, some of them, you know, still have hardwired, uh, interfaces to them. So, for an automation company in a, in a controls integrator, you really have to, uh, dig into the details of every single one of those devices. And, you know, they're not necessarily the same, you know, across all of them. So your, your safety architecture, uh, is, is different from device to device. And, you know, as things are becoming more and more ethernet safety based, more and more devices are talking that language. But it's still, it doesn't mean even that the safety code itself is, is universal. So, you know, when you're looking at the challenges, uh, that, that are hitting the industry with all of this amazing flexibility that's coming along, you know, one, one of that, one of those issues is there's a huge labor shortage in the automation industry industry right now.
Speaker 0 00:04:57 Uh, it's hard to find people with more than two or three years of experience. And to be honest with you, if you only have, you know, two or three years of programming experience, uh, for PLCs or robots, you really haven't probably seen much of the safety programming side of, of, uh, of that work. What it means is there's fewer and fewer people available that are able to actually manage programming on the safety system. So that in conjunction with, uh, the increased flexibility in the constantly evolving architecture of the safety devices means that when we start up machines, there's a, there's sometimes a, uh, a, a, a challenge when you're trying to configure this equipment and ensure that the safety system's been verified before the toolmakers go in and start setting up things like, uh, pneumatic AEs or servo AEs and that kind of stuff. So it takes a really high level of coordination.
Speaker 0 00:05:52 Now, you know, to be honest with you, it was kind of what I was thinking of when you and I first discussed doing this episode was I think there's a lot of, uh, time where the safety system has not been fully verified, and yet we have people working on these machines. Like when, by the time these, uh, pieces of equipment go to the customer's site, the safety system's been fully verified, safety program has been locked, signature has been recorded for, uh, if you're in Ontario for a P H S R, uh, requirements, you know, when we're setting the equipment up, none of that's been verified. So effectively, the controls team, the machine builders at a, at a, at an integrator's house, they're not working on a proven or verified safety system. So there's inherent risks that go along with that. I think that's a big deal, and it, it seems to go almost like it's undiscussed within the industry that it's just accepted that that part of the business is, is inherently dangerous and
Speaker 2 00:06:50 It's inherently dangerous to like ethos employees, right? Like, this is one of the challenges that I think we're facing. And, and, and thank you for kind of bringing it to our attention.
Speaker 0 00:07:00 Yeah. And it's, you know, it's, it's obviously, it's not just an ethos. It's, it's every, it's every integrator out there. And, and, you know, I've seen some of them deal, some integrators deal with that, uh, inherent risk by putting, you know, what they call a, a, a job hazard or a, a machine hazard assessment form. You know, tape it to a whiteboard in front of the machine and make sure that everybody signs it. And, you know, may, maybe that's a good way to, to cover, you know, the legalities of making sure that employees are aware of the hazards. But in reality, those, you know, the hazards on a piece of equipment when you're starting it up, they don't change daily. They change sometimes hourly or, or by the minute as, uh, we're starting to bring new devices online. The program team is, is configuring additional safety devices. It really is a big deal. And I think that in some ways, the automation industry has kind of stuck their head in the sand and just said, we don't want to talk about it, and we don't really wanna come up with a, a better plan for how to deal with it. I think there has to be a better communication mechanism or a better way to handle that kind of risk.
Speaker 2 00:08:12 And of course, being a machine builder, you're really, you're really good at handling risks. But this is kind of a, a new level of risk, right? It's like, before we even put our own people in the field, in the, in our, in, in the wave a robot, let's do this. But now you do have mechanical walkouts, right? Like that's kind of standard. Yes,
Speaker 0 00:08:28 That's
Speaker 2 00:08:29 Right. So you, you can actually walk out machine guarding, and that's one of the very important parts of building machinery is making sure that machine guarding is, is appropriate and is to the task. Correct.
Speaker 0 00:08:39 Yeah. So you're saying locking it out? Yeah. But remember those, what you're putting a lock on is a device that feeds into a control system, right? Right. And the control system is programmed by somebody, somebody with a laptop. That control system has to be programmed from scratch, effectively, or, or used from a, from a template, a programming template. So in the event that somebody goes in and makes a small adjustment to a safety program, 'cause remember that safety program is changing as the equipment's being started up. As you bring more and more devices or more zones of the, of the safety system online, you're going in constantly, the controls team is going in constantly and changing the safety program to add these other devices. In some cases, they have things bypassed mm-hmm. <affirmative> because they can't run the rest of the machine. If, if, you know, that particular zone is not, uh, even, even wired yet.
Speaker 0 00:09:37 While locking out a machine is, is, is great. You can't, uh, in a lot of cases, you can't set up a machine, you can't set up flow controls, you can't set up speeds and, and coordinated motion if the machine's not powered up and moving. And at least not in a practical way. So, you know, there's a lot of bypassing that happens during the startup of a piece of equipment. And obviously as a, as a manufacturer of automation equipment, we try to do our best to, you know, minimize that risk, make sure that everybody's aware of what's going on, you know, you put signs on the equipment, you, you cordon off particular areas of it. It is definitely a challenge. And, and again, with, with a lot of younger people coming in that don't necessarily have the experience of working on equipment, I think that adds another level of complexity to, to starting up automation equipment.
Speaker 2 00:10:30 We're gonna revisit that in a minute, but I wanted to ask you, you've, you've probably seen some errors in approaches to safety in many of the factory tours that you've been on or all around the world?
Speaker 0 00:10:42 Y yeah, you know, I, I would say one of the ones that I see probably the most often is when a piece of equipment is, uh, originally concepted, either, you know, the customer has included a spec in their, uh, R F Q or the applications team for the integrator that's gone out and, and, uh, looked at the application. You know, they present a, a quote to the customer. One of the ways that seems, it, it seems like, uh, everybody wants to try to cut costs in order to win the contract, is to decrease the number of safety zones, because each safety zone adds labor, time, materials and cost to a project. So, for example, if you've got a, a robotic, uh, material handling system, and maybe there's three or four robots handing, uh, apart from, uh, you know, one robot to another to another, in a lot of cases, uh, the applications team will quote it as though it's just one big zone, one fence, one perimeter fence all the way around it.
Speaker 0 00:11:42 But in reality, that's not practical for a customer to operate it that way. And what seems to happen is either the customer doesn't have the money to properly zone a safety system, or they wait until, uh, you know, halfway through the build of the equipment or even during install, before they say, Hey, this doesn't work properly. Uh, you know, how are we supposed to go in and remove a part without stopping the whole line? I think that's probably one of the biggest, uh, errors I see, uh, is that there just, there hasn't been enough, uh, thought put into how the safety system needs to function in order for the machine to run properly and not have a lot of nuisance errors because somebody opens a gate and stops an entire machine. And, uh, that kind of stuff. I would say one of the other ones is the fact that it's unbelievable to me how many bypass keys are still used in industry today.
Speaker 0 00:12:38 And you go out in the factories and the customers have, you know, uh, set up guys or maintenance guys with bypass keys in their toolbox, uh, and they put those in the gates in order to go in and set up pieces of equipment. And to me, that's a failure of how the, how the machine was concepted, how the safety system was concepted. You know, if you, if you've got a small cell where a robot's loading and unloading a C N C machine, there has to be provisions in the safety system to allow the robot to be moved into a safe position and locked out so that the setup person can go in and effectively set up the C N C machine. And now that's a simple application, but you'd be amazed how many times I've seen, uh, uh, maintenance guys have to put bypass keys into a, a, a piece of guarding so they can still go in and set up a C N C machine or a press or that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 00:13:32 And just, just to clarify, for anybody in the audience who doesn't know what this is, so bypass, bypass key is a special key that's only used to bypass a safety zone, like for a, a sensor or so, and it's, like you say, it's kind of coveted by the toolmakers or programmers so that they can do exactly the wrong thing, which is they probably shouldn't have this key. Right?
Speaker 0 00:13:51 Yeah. And, you know, in, in a lot of cases, it was a, a physical, uh, key that would plug into a door switch on a guard, and effectively putting a, a bypass key into that switch, uh, tells the machine that, uh, door is effectively closed when it's not, uh, or, you know, there's, there's other ways of, of bypassing them. I've seen doors taken off mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, so that, that the, the whole switch is left on and the bypass key's taken off the door so that it simulates that the machine is, is closed. You know, I, I think one of the other errors I see fairly regularly out in the industry right now is that just safe stopping distance hasn't been taken into account for robots. They're running so close to the guards, you know, floor spaces at a premium in, in, in most, uh, customers facilities right there.
Speaker 0 00:14:41 Yeah. The density of equipment going into these facilities is, is incredible. And it's getting tighter and tighter all the time. You know, there, there still needs to be adequate stopping time when robots need to, to decelerate and come to a safe stop and without hitting guards or hitting machines. And, uh, it seems like that's, uh, sometimes that's forgotten. And because customers aren't prepared to, to give up that extra six inches of space, they want them squeezed really tightly together. So I think, again, that's part of the initial cell layout. Uh, it, I think it's, uh, I think it's just, just something that I think needs to have, have more focus on early on in the application.
Speaker 2 00:15:22 I, I agree with you, and I'm kind of thinking about this from a manufacturer's lens. Like maybe the manufacturer only builds a, an automation system in a year or something like that, and they're not really experts in safety on the other side. So what steps do you think end customers can take to improve their approach to safety or their approach to safety from the machine builder?
Speaker 0 00:15:42 Yeah, that's a great question. I, I, I think having a functional specification in the application stage or very early in the design stage that deals with the safety side of the equipment head on, instead of, you know, treating safety like it's a, uh, a secondary thought that comes along later. And, you know, they, they leave it up to the hands, uh, of the, uh, p h ss r uh, engineer that's gonna come in and certify the equipment. Uh, that's great, but, you know, you can get a safety sign off from a P H S R engineer by having a single solid guard around your machine and, uh, one, one door switch that's locked to a, to a safety system. But that doesn't mean that machine's practical to use by the customer. And I think a lot of the times the customers just don't play an active enough role in how the safety system functionality is set up.
Speaker 0 00:16:38 So the integrator, you know, they do what they think is normal or, or practical, uh, or sometimes most cost effective, still, still being safe and not posing a safety hazard, but it doesn't mean it's functional. If you've gotta have an operator going in and out of a door 10 times a shift to remove a part, there probably needs to be a better layout to that machine. Maybe they need a, a, a, an exit conveyor where the robot can drop off a, a defected part or a, a rejected part instead of an operator having to go in and interface with that safety system. Uh, that number of times, you know, that comes down to the occurrence rating in a risk assessment is how often does this safety hazard, uh, being presented to the operator? And if you can decrease the occurrence rate, then the system just inherently becomes safer.
Speaker 2 00:17:28 Jeff, uh, you've, you've seen a lot of automation. What, who, uh, gets involved from the, the end customer side when it comes to safety? Do they typically have a safety officer or is it a project manager or, or who kind of signs off on it after the um, P H S R consultant?
Speaker 0 00:17:46 You know, it really depends on the size and sophistication of the customer. In the automotive industry, for example, a lot of cases these facilities have their own safety coordinators or even safety program managers that are responsible for safety for the entire facility. And they'll bring a team of people down, usually in, uh, somebody responsible for ergonomics, somebody responsible for, uh, production flow, uh, somebody responsible for overall, uh, making sure that the equipment meets kind of the safety standards of the, of the plant. They're using the same safety switches has the same, you know, lockout tagout methodology used as the other ones, but some customers are very, uh, immature from a safety or an integration standpoint, and they really leave it up to the integrator. And so those, those ones actually tend to be the most challenging because, you know, they don't know what they don't know.
Speaker 0 00:18:40 So you have to kind of guide those people along and make sure that they're aware of, uh, interaction with an automated piece of equipment looks like, and you have to try to pull out of them how they're gonna use the equipment, how they want to see the equipment, you know, be managed from the operators or or maintenance standpoint as well. And I think that, you know, that it's, it to, to build a piece of equipment to run and make production parts is in reality, it's not that difficult to make a, a machine that's safe to maintain when a maintenance person has to go in and do different maintenance tasks on it is also, to me, that's the most challenging part of it. It's not the, the constant run mode that the machine's in, in auto, it's the recovery. It's how do you get the, the system to, uh, you know, recover from a crash without somebody having to go in and, and manually lift tooling up or move things around that potentially causes, uh, you know, pinch hazards or fall hazards of pieces of equipment, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 00:19:42 It even gets a bit more complicated when you've got purchasing or supply chain on the customer side, trying to negotiate tight pricing and tight margins on the, on the, on the equipment. And you say, Hey, listen, but we can't scrimp on safety. You know, so they're not thinking about safety, uh, from the purchasing side of the customer either, right?
Speaker 0 00:20:00 Yeah. And that's kind of back to that zoning discussion or point that I made, Jim, that, you know, when, when purchasing goes back and says, Hey, we need to drop your price by 15% to be competitive, one of the first things that the integrators do is they go back and they try to figure out how do they take cost outta the equipment. But the customer has a very clear understanding of, of, you know, the, the, the pieces they want in the machine. Uh, you know, it has to have this number of end of arm tools. The, the welding, uh, uh, apparatus has to be reliable, or the not runners or the drills or whatever it is. The safety zoning side of it is something that takes a fair amount of time, and in reality doesn't affect the o e e of the equipment unless there is problems where the, uh, machine is not very reliable, in which case it, it, it will because it, it takes longer to get the machine back up to a run state.
Speaker 2 00:20:54 And I liked your comment earlier about how do, how do we pull this information outta the customer? Especially if it's a new customer, a new customer to automation, uh, how do we know they that maybe they're, the parts that they supply you for runoff are gonna be the same parts they're gonna be using, and if they get a lot of fails from those parts. So it really is a complicated, um, a complicated discussion. So my question on this is, what's the answer? Like, how, how can machine builders approach safety differently?
Speaker 0 00:21:18 I think it has to be a collaborative effort with the customer to start with. I think there has to be, um, more focus put on how does the customer need the safety system on the machine to, to operate? Again, it, you know, it's not like it's just two wires going to a safety relay anymore. There's sometimes there's hundreds of devices on the safety network that are talking to each other at, at any one time. There's a lot of coordination. It, it, it seems to me like a safety system deserves its own functional specification outside of the standard functional spec that's normally written because the customers have a clear idea, depending on the sophistication of them, they have a clear idea as to what they want that, uh, machine to do. What they don't typically do is put enough effort into defining to the integrator how they want the safety system to function. I think if they, if they, if there was more effort put into developing a safety system, functional specification that includes, you know, what's, what devices stop, what zones, uh, what does recovery look like, what does maintenance look like for the, for the, uh, you know, the situations where the, it's not in a normal run mode or, and even setup mode, right? If they have to set up the machine, what do they have to do? Validation, quality checks, all of that comes into play with how operators have to inter interface with the safety system.
Speaker 2 00:22:42 And it's everybody, right? It's, it's like project managers, it's mechanical designers, it's applications engineers, and especially to your point earlier, but it's P L C programmers, right?
Speaker 0 00:22:51 Yeah. It, it is, it's, it's an entire team effort. The, the machine that the designers have to build a, a, a design that's safe, that gives enough area within the, the machine to program it. First of all, for the, the person that's doing the programming with a teach penant in their hand, uh, they're touching up points. They have to design enough stopping time for the robots so they don't hit the guarding. And then, you know, the, uh, the electrical design team has to jump in and, and build the, the architecture for the safety system, the, the wiring system, the network configurations, the device selections. You know, you've got, typically, most of the companies I've worked with use the third party P H SS R engineer. Uh, so there's a, there's an initial review that happens there to ensure that you know, that nothing's been forgotten.
Speaker 0 00:23:39 And then, you know, it goes into manufacturing and the machine builders have to get involved and start building it. And they're involved in the, you know, the, the kind of the scariest part of it, which is before the safety system's even fully functional and tested and proven out, then obviously the P L C guys have to get involved. Uh, they have to get in and start, uh, testing out the offline software goes, gets dumped in. And so it, it really is a, a whole team effort and the project manager, they have to ensure that the customer's brought along and, and actively involved so that there's no surprises for the customer.
Speaker 2 00:24:14 And what about machines going to far away places? Like I, I know you wouldn't design maybe a machine different from Mexico versus, uh, Canada versus U S A, right?
Speaker 0 00:24:24 Y yeah, you're right. We don't, we, we, you know, thankfully we, we live in a country that has a very, very stringent safety regulations with regards to building of equipment. The, the C SS A standards are, are, you know, uh, some of the most stringent in the world. So we typically design every machine to follow the same regulations and, uh, meet the same standards. And in a lot of cases, the customers that are buying these pieces of equipment to ship to say Mexico, they want them designed and to actually have a, uh, Ontario professional engineer certify them through the P H S R process because they want the ability to one day bring that machine from Mexico back into Canada.
Speaker 2 00:25:07 Okay, that makes sense. And can you explain for our audience, just in case what, what P H SS R is?
Speaker 0 00:25:13 Yeah. It's a pre-start health and safety review. And in Ontario, somebody that, a, a customer that, that runs a, a factory that makes parts, uh, they're responsible for ensuring that any piece of equipment that's brought into their facility has been signed off by a professional engineer to state that it meets the current safety regulations that are in place at that time. They have to have that done before the machine is put into production with operators. So for us, what it means is we use a P H SS R company, uh, we use multiple mm-hmm <affirmative>, and sometimes the customers have their own, you know, preferred, uh, P H SS R customer or, uh, vendors that they use. We'll interface with them. So during the design stage, we send a, a rough layout of the equipment over to the P H S R engineer. We'll have a, usually a small, uh, discussion.
Speaker 0 00:26:06 Uh, uh, we walk through the, the layout functionality of the equipment, and we look at any extraordinary risks that exist on the equipment so that we can deal with them from a design stage. And then when the machine's built and on our floor, we would have the P H SS R engineer come back in and they would do safety checks, light curtain, uh, stopping time calculations, robot stopping time calculations. They look at the integrity of the safety system, ensure that the devices meet the requirements that the design meets the requirements, and they also go through the safety software and ensure that the safety software is, uh, appropriate for the task that it's trying to do. And then they will, at that time, before the pieces of equipment ships, uh, we would typically lock out the software. And at that point in time, when you lock it, there's a safety signature that's calculated in the safety processor. And the P H S R engineer will record that safety signature, that's, it's got some kind of an algorithm that's based on time of day and everything else. So they record that so that later on in the future, if something ever happens on that piece of equipment, they can go in and take a look at the safety signature that's in the processor at that time, and they can tell whether or not somebody has gone in and tampered with the safety system.
Speaker 2 00:27:26 Well, that's a great overview. Thank you for that. And, uh, thanks for coming on the podcast today. Did we forget to talk about anything?
Speaker 0 00:27:32 Uh, I would say the only other thing that, that I think is relevant from a safety standpoint in the industry today is, um, delivery schedules are getting shorter and shorter and shorter. And you know, what used to be a, a lead time on a piece of capital equipment might be 50 weeks. And a lot of cases now it's down to 30 or 32 weeks. And what that means for an integrator is a lot of the times they actually have to run two shifts for the controls team at the end to try to meet these, in some cases, unrealistic delivery schedules. So what that means is you're handing piece of equipment from one software team to another software team while you're trying to configure and verify a safety system. And I think that adds an even more, uh, you know, uh, challenging level of, uh, complications to that, that part of the process. So I think, I think these very, very short delivery schedules are adding an undue risk on integrators on from a safety standpoint.
Speaker 2 00:28:39 Yeah. And I think the, from my background experience in the automation industry, it's like, let's just get started earlier, right? Let's get those design reviews, let's start the safety systems, let's start the purchasing, uh, conversations earlier. Like, this can be solved, right? All these things. Hey, um, when you're not automating, integrating, and keeping workers safe, what, uh, what do you like to do? Do you have any hobbies?
Speaker 0 00:29:01 Uh, yeah, I got a few of them. Jim. I'm a, I'm a huge dog lover, so I've got a couple dogs that, uh, keep me pretty busy. And then I'm a pretty avid fly fishing person, so those are probably the two things that I spend the bulk of my time with.
Speaker 2 00:29:14 Well, that's great. And, uh, thanks again for coming on. And how can people get ahold of you?
Speaker 0 00:29:18 Uh, they can reach me at, uh, ethos Automation at, uh, Jeff dot Werner, w e r n e r, at ethos automation.com, or they can reach out to me on LinkedIn as well.
Speaker 2 00:29:31 Our sponsor for this episode is Erhardt Automation Systems. Erhardt builds and commissions turnkey solutions for their worldwide clients. With over 80 years of precision manufacturing. They understand the complex world of robotics, automated manufacturing and project management, delivering world-class custom automation on time and on budget. I'd like to acknowledge a three, the Association for Advancing Automation. They are the leading automation trade association for robotics, vision and imaging motion control and motors, and the industrial artificial intelligence technologies. Visit automate.org to learn more, and I'd like to recognize Painted Robot. They build and integrate digital solutions. They're a web development firm that offers ss e o digital, social marketing, and can set up and connect c r m and other e r P tools to unify marketing, sales, and operations. And you can find
[email protected]. And if you'd like to get in touch with us at the Robot Industry Podcast, you can find me, Jim Beretta on LinkedIn. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. Today's podcast was produced by Customer Traction Industrial Marketing, and I'd like to recognize my nephews Chris Gray for the music, Jeffrey Bremner for audio production. My business partner Janet and our sponsors, Erhardt Automation Systems, and Canova Robotics.
