The Trump Administration’s tariff regime has sent shockwaves around the manufacturing world, and has made ”re-shoring” the new word in American manufacturing. Machinery, however, is a global commodity, and some of the highest technology machinery is from European and Asian sources that previously enjoyed an open trading relationship with the US.

Dr. Carlo Angelo Bocci is the Italian Trade Agency Trade Commissioner based in Miami and is the Trade Commissioner for Canada. He met with engineering.com’s Jim Anderton at the Canadian Manufacturing Technology Show in Toronto. Dr. Bocci is a trade veteran with experience in Asia, the Americas and Europe, and he discussed the outlook for the Italian machine industry, and that of European machine builders in general. 

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The post Italian machine tech and why it endures in uncertain times appeared first on Engineering.com.

Self-driving cars, drones, humanoid robots. They are all over the news and popular culture today and are technologies that need a critical capability: navigation. It’s been true for thousands of years, and for most of human history, dead reckoning was a rare skill, and a black art. “Shooting” stars with the sextant is still an option for sport sailors, but today, repeatability and accuracy have never been more important.

It’s been a story of rapid technological development for the last 75 years, from the gyro compass, accelerometer driven inertial navigation systems, to stellar tracking, and terrain following. GPS is of course the lowest cost method in widespread use today, but even its significant capability isn’t enough for many of today’s demanding applications.

Advanced Navigation Senior Application Engineer Matthew Suntup describes the challenges and capabilities of this critical technology in conversation with engineering.com’s Jim Anderton.

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The post Robots, drones, AGVs: it’s all about navigation  appeared first on Engineering.com.

Drones are everywhere today, from suburban backyards to battlefields. In between these extremes is a huge market for useful pilotless aircraft for remote inspection, payload delivery and remote sensing. SwissDrones is one of a new breed of small aerospace companies that use advanced design and development tools to deliver complex projects quickly and cost effectively.

Their medium payload drone helicopter has multiple commercial applications, and Pol-Victor Gisquet, Team Leader, Mechanical Systems Integration with SwissDrones, discussed the technology in conversation with Jim Anderton at AU 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee.  

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The post Drone helicopters with multiple applications appeared first on Engineering.com.

Manufacturing engineers call it the “death zone”. Some call it the “scaling conundrum”. Once a design is finalized, and a prototype made, it’s frequently expensive and difficult to create the pilot runs and small volume production that’s essential to test market and validate a new product. It’s far too expensive to tool up for mass production of a part or device based on only a single prototype, but how can an innovator bridge that gap?

At AU 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee,  Autodesk Fusion Community Manager Jonathan Odom demonstrated a short run manufacturing platform that allows innovators to program and control multiple production technologies, from multi-axis machine tools to 3D printers, and significantly, to share designs with contract manufacturers that offer both manufacturing capacity and useful design expertise of their own.  Is this the universal tool for making anything and everything? Odom explains all to Jim Anderton. 

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The post One tool, to make everything? appeared first on Engineering.com.

COVID 19 generated an unprecedented demand for remote work and created a demand for mass collaboration tools that let designers work as unified teams, without a physical presence. For many tasks, it’s relatively simple, but in the architecture, engineering and construction space, substantially different systems, designs and skills must be sequenced correctly to deliver a project on time and on budget.  Effective project management of an already difficult task, along with simultaneous mass collaboration, is highly challenging. 

Autodesk Workshop XR Senior Director and General Manager Nicolas Fonta talks to Jim Anderton about how the power of artificial intelligence allows widely dispersed engineering and design teams to work cohesively to deliver projects on time and on budget. 

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The post AI powered mass collaboration for engineering appeared first on Engineering.com.

Building engineering is a unique form of craft and science, blending multiple materials, processes and design methodologies. Cabling a modern structure means coping with power and signal conductors which must be routed efficiently through complex structures, a 3D puzzle which challenges even the most experienced engineers.

Toronto-based Augmenta is an AI powered generates optimized layouts without tedious and time-consuming at the design level. Augment co-founder Aaron Szymanski discusses this design first with Jim Anderton.

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The post An AI first: building electrical layout appeared first on Engineering.com.

Few emerging technologies have generated as much interest, research and concern as AI, and in the engineering space, it’s no different. It is now clear that AI represents a tool of unprecedented power to streamline engineering workflows, but at the rapid pace of development, it is quickly evolving into something more.

The art and science of engineering is now changing in real time, as agentic AI not only performs the singular design and development tasks, but collaborates with other AI systems in ways which aren’t fully understood by the people using them.

It sounds scary, but the actual future is exactly the opposite, according to Autodesk Senior Director of AI Research, Dr. Tonya Custis. She is a true AI tech insider, and she discusses this important topic in conversation with Jim Anderton.

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The post The future of artificial intelligence isn’t what you think  appeared first on Engineering.com.

Mechatronics blends mechanical engineering, electronics, control systems, and computing into one intelligent system. Without it, self-parking cars, smart thermostats, and precision robotics simply won’t work reliably in the real world. This blend of mechanical systems, electronics and software has blurred the lines between traditional engineering disciplines, especially with the rapid and ongoing development of artificial intelligence.

Dr. Hoe Seng Ooi, Chief Technology Officer at Taipei-based NexAIoT, thinks that mechatronics is the key to unlocking “physical AI” on the street and in our homes, and he joins Jim Anderton on the podcast to explain why.

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The post Why the future is mechatronic appeared first on Engineering.com.

This episode of Industry Insights & Trends is brought to you by Siemens.

Engineering design is an iterative process. It’s been said that engineering is not about design, but redesign, and the stepwise pathway toward verified, proved in production ready parts and assemblies is frequently restrained by testing and validation.

But what if the design tools can themselves flag the designer about trouble very early in the design process? It’s a “shift left” in the design timeline, and it represents a way to build better, faster and with less risk. Advanced engineering software tools such as Siemens NX Performance Predictor deliver these benefits without the need to extensively retrain design personnel.

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Learn more: engineering.com is hosting Design Like a Pro: The Power of Simulation in Your Workflow webinar on Monday, September 29, 2025. Registration and attendance is free.

The post From idea to impact: Accelerating the engineering workflows appeared first on Engineering.com.

Edge computing is the logical extension of the smart sensor technology which drastically improved control of manufacturing processes in the 1980s and ‘90s. Moving the computational burden down to the plant floor has multiple benefits, but it has also created new challenges. Where does artificial intelligence fit in? What does process control really mean when human interaction in manufacturing technology is limited? What’s the future for data in manufacturing?

Digi International Principal Engineer Kevin Johnson discusses the issues in conversation with engineering.com’s Jim Anderton.

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The post What happens when edge computing with AI comes to the shop floor? appeared first on Engineering.com.