As I may have mentioned on occasion, the title of my degree course was Control Engineering. This was a co-op course, which meant I spent two 6-month periods in industry. My first outing was an apprenticeship at Rolls Royce where I learnt how to use mills, drills, lathes, grinders… along with various forms of welding (oxyacetylene, electric arc, argon arc). My second sojourn was at an R&D laboratory for a glass foundry.
The sensors and systems we worked with were rudimentary by today’s standards. A large proportion of digital control was still implemented using relays. Process and electrical signals from factory instrumentation were predominantly stored on electro-mechanical chart recorders.
All of this seems a lifetime away from the technologies of today. Sensors like 3-axis gyroscopes that used to be the size of small oil drums costing hundreds of thousands of dollars are now available implemented using microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technologies in packages measured in millimeters costing only a few dollars.
I’m in an awesome position of being introduced to something new and exciting daily. For example, I was just chatting with the guys and gals at a company called AIRY3D. They can take a cheap-and-cheerful CMOS camera sensor and use it to capture both regular 2D images and associated 3D depth maps simultaneously in real time. This has incredible potential across the board (commercial, industrial, automotive, robotics…).
I certainly didn’t see this one coming. I bet you didn’t either. Which is why our mission here at DENA is to keep you informed as to the latest and greatest developments.