Marian Schneider with Planar Motor

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

MD&M West, medtech automation, mechanical engineering, magnetic levitation, motion technology, assembly line, packaging line, modular system, programmability, scalability, software development, customer support, maintenance-free, industrial innovation.

00:00

Hey, this episode of Industrial Talk is proudly brought to you by MD&M West and the incredible News and Brews team. MD&M West delivered big medtech automation, packaging, plastics and design all came together under one roof, the innovation, the energy, the conversation, it was everything that makes this industry extraordinary. I was on the floor, capturing the stories, the breakthroughs and the leaders who are shaping the future. Thanks for tuning in and celebrating the people driving industrial innovation. Industrial Talk powered by MD&M West and the News and Brews team.

00:54

All right, once again, welcome to News and Brews. We are brought to you by those wonderful people at MD&M West. And if this is if you're not here, you're not hanging out with the cool kids here at MD&M West in Anaheim, you're missing a lot. You're missing a lot of great opportunities to be able to connect, network with individuals that are truly passionate about your success. And they are all here. There are they don't have just conference centers. These are concourses. They're much bigger, much bigger, you know, venues that you need to be a part of. So remember, put this on your calendar for next year, MD&M West. And I think it's probably going to be in Anaheim. It was in Anaheim. It's always in Anaheim. I think I know it's always west. It is what it is, all right, in the hot seat. Speaking of incredible individuals, we've jab a gentleman by the name of Marian Schneider. Planter mortar is the company. Let's get a cracker.

01:53

Yeah, I got to tell you, truth be told,

01:59

we have some great footage from your booth. Just telling you, that's right, great footage, because it was, it was impressive. I'm sorry, I digress. Now I'm a big fan of planner motors, big fan of Marian right now. Love to hear all it. All right. Are you having a good conference? Because I got to tell you, your booth is a dog. It's like, it's like ants to a candy bar, and they look like ants because they're zipping around.

02:27

Yeah, absolutely, yeah, no. It's been a great first day. Super busy. Exceeded all expectations. I think, yeah, yeah. We're couldn't be happy

02:37

every time I was trying to talk to you, you were always he's busy. I can never get a hold of you, and it's like you're talking that's true.

02:46

Yeah. I mean, we do have a very eye catching demo, and so anybody who sees it gets drawn in hard, hard to avoid. It is hard to avoid.

02:55

Yeah, it's, it's really pretty good. All right, before we really get into the conversation around planner, we need to know a little bit about Marian. Little background. Where do you come from? What you're all about outside of the fact that you're in BC,

03:09

yes, yeah, like you said, We're based in BC. I'm originally from Germany. My background is in,

03:18

hold it. There's no There's no accent.

03:21

I've been practicing for a while, yeah, but

03:24

yeah, born, born and raised. No actually,

03:29

but yeah, living in Vancouver now for quite a while. Yeah. My background is in mechanical engineering. That's where I started, at Planar as well, on the mechanical team, and then transition onto the solutions team. So how long have you been with them? Just a bit, over two years at this point,

03:48

background into your capability outside of the fact that you're you're from Germany and you have no accent whatsoever, zero.

03:58

What I mean, what makes you such an

04:01

You're older than two, so you gotta, you gotta have some sort of a background there.

04:06

That is true. Yeah. So I did aerospace engineering in my undergrad, and then Mechatronics in my master's, mechatronics design, yeah. So that's like the combination between mechanical engineering, electrical software, a little bit of everything.

04:22

That's the first time I've heard that you're just, you're just blowing my mind there. Marian, over and over, I just like, Okay, I didn't know that either.

04:32

All right.

04:33

So listener, truth be told, we were out at the planner location on the floor, and things were zipping around, and you couldn't help but notice how incredible the technology is. It is. I have to ask.

04:53

I've never seen it before.

04:55

I don't understand. I don't I don't understand.

04:58

I mean, yeah, it does look like my. Magic, I promise it's just physics. Yeah, it's a fairly new technology. We've been around for 10 years. We'll have our 10 year anniversary this year. So fairly new technology. But yeah, what we're doing is magnetic levitation, so we got motion

05:17

technology has been out there. Yes, not

05:22

like that Exactly, yeah. So we don't only move forwards and backwards, like the mag lift trains do, right? Yeah. We move in any direction. We move up and down, we rotate, we tip and tilt all six degrees of freedom. So quite a bit more advanced, I would say, than like, yeah, the mag lift that's been around for a long time.

05:42

Yeah, no, yeah. Okay, so I have to tell you, outside of doing it a little on site interview and conversation about your technology, there was a gentleman that was with us, and we both noticed the same thing, and it was that I want to say x spot. Did I get that? Yes, that's right, yeah. So that x spot, and it was doing a little like, a little shimmy, right? It was going moving right, left, or whatever. It was just, I can't, I can't put my I can't, I can't wrap my head around that. What? What? What's the application? What are we looking at? What do we it's fast. So what's the application it?

06:25

Yeah, it can be fast. We can go slow, too if we want to, of course. But yeah, application really anywhere where you have some kind of assembly line, packaging line filling, basically, where we're moving from one workstation to the to the next one. That's where you'll find us. And so we're not only the transport solution between these individual stations, but we're also taking over part of those processes that happen at the workstation. So we take a product or a part of a product, to a workstation where, let's say, it's assembled. It is being laser marked. It is being inspected in front of a camera and so indexing, for example, like, let's say we want to inspect different sides of our component. What you would previously have to do with some external axis, right? Like, you come on a traditional conveyor belt. Let's say you need to hand off that product to a rotary axis that spins it in front of the camera. Now we don't have to do that anymore. We arrive with the product, and we can spin right there, do whatever inspection we need to do, and then move on to the next workstation.

07:33

Okay, so this is interesting, because i i see that i see unlimited solutions that can and programmability to the platform to be able to meet my immediate need, but then also my unforeseen future needs. It just seems a very flexible, scalable and and powerful solution. Am I looking at

08:04

it right? Yeah, that's, that's 100% right, yeah. I almost want to say, I was

08:08

gonna say, if you say no to that, wow,

08:13

no, yeah, it's 100% right. I almost want to say flexibility is what we're selling here, or what we enable you to get out of our system? One because the system itself is completely modular, so we're able to build up any like layout around other automation equipment that makes the most sense for you or process, right? And then the second part is the motion on the system itself is just a program. You said programmability? Yeah, that's a huge point. So I can run product A, tomorrow, Product B, tomorrow, product A, today, Product B, tomorrow, and all that happens in between. It's just a clip click of a button. I upload a different software, and then I have a completely different motion pattern that's happening on there, all without touching one single screw.

09:01

And yeah, bring up a good point. Not, not one single screw. Because I when, when you're looking at the solution, and do you have a video out on your website?

09:11

Absolutely, yeah,

09:14

you should know we don't. Well, let me just sort of make sure that you think about it and consider it for the website, because that I would go out there and just look and be marveled at it,

09:28

what is sort of the

09:31

you have your existing solution today and you and it's spectacular. Don't get me wrong. I'm all but, but, like companies, you never stop, you know, innovating, you never stop pushing that envelope. You're never stop listening to the market and say that's a different problem. That's a weekend, whatever. What do you see happening in the horizon for you guys, what are we talking about here? Put your future hat on there.

09:59

Marian. Right? So I think scalability is one point where we're already great today, we can basically go as big as we want the other direction, going smaller. That could be an interesting thing where some, some of our customers, are asking if we could make smaller movers for smaller payloads to have even higher density and reduce the footprint of a machine further, just our motion capabilities in terms of, let's say, rotation, speed, acceleration, how stable the motion is, those kind of things. And then a huge portion of our product really is software development. So everything that enables us to do all these motions, that's controls that are running in the background, right? And so, of course, there's always room for improvement and adding new features that will make it even easier to integrate, even like cut down on programming time, those kind of things, and that's where we're really, working really closely together with our customers to find out their needs and their requirements and what kind of pain points they're facing today.

11:07

I would imagine you want to compress that time. The faster you could do it, the better everybody's happier, absolutely and achieve that objective of trying to whatever modify the I don't help me understand. Okay, listen, I'm gonna paint this picture. Got these, these discs, these square little discs, and they're zipping around on this floor, for lack of a better term, but the floor has got a lot of technology in it, so that's zipping around on this floor, and it looks like organized chaos, however, zipping around on the floor, but there's nothing moving on that floor. It's, it's how it's how it's being. It's just a battery and it's hot. You see

11:53

where I'm getting at? I don't know where I'm going. I don't even know

11:55

how to ask that question.

11:57

You get it.

11:58

I think I'm getting where it's

12:00

moving, but that core is

12:01

not moving. Something's not it's not that thing is moving but, but I know that that the

12:09

magnets not moving,

12:11

yeah, that's right. So we actually got magnets in the moving part. So those, those little discs that you call them, yeah, those have permanent magnets and size. So they are, they're fully passive. And then underneath, in the floor, which you set, we got a 2d grid of coils in there, basically, so no mechanical parts. Nothing is moving. It's all solid state electronics. And we basically control how much current and where exactly is running through these coils. And that allows us to give a dynamic field that enables us to control all six degrees of freedom.

12:44

That's just stupid stuff. It is not stupid, like stupid, but stupid as an amazing I just, it just blew my mind. It's an amazing solution.

12:56

How you spoke,

13:00

and I say, floor. I gotta, gotta hold on to these questions. You know, I call it a floor. I don't know what you call it, but it's there. Do you have sort of floor versions where they just, sort of, you stack them all together and you upgrade this, and then just,

13:14

you, yeah, you could turn them into a floor. I mean, they're, they're super robust, yeah, we can press on the the flyweight, that's what we call the the floor module, yeah, flyways can handle up to somewhere around 500 pounds of there it is. So we can

13:30

walk on there. Yeah? That, that would just defeat the purpose of what you guys are doing. Yeah, you don't want that. Okay, so with that, we talked about the making it smaller, whatever, and I would imagine that that's an objective. That'd be great, making it smaller. But what about do you see an application that's big, like bigger? I don't know what your limits are, what that look like? I don't know I I don't, I don't have

14:01

14:44

you want. Special training you guys. I'm a manufacturer. I'm all in on your solution. I like what you guys are doing. You come in and you you put it into action, and then you don't leave me alone. I. Train me you do it is necessary to of

15:02

course, yeah, yeah. Like I said earlier, we work really closely with our customers, basically through the entire life cycle. So that's starting at application development, which, that's my job as an Applications Engineer. We gather all requirements and constraints. We run simulations to check cycle times, throughputs, we try and optimize the system, make it as compact and cheap as possible, and then, yeah, of course, once you get the system, or even before, we can do a lot of like virtual stuff and emulated stuff, where our customers can start with software development before they even receive the first piece of hardware for even faster commissioning. So of course, yeah, that's that's all included. We won't leave you alone. We'll support you.

15:48

Yeah? Any, any problems that might arise

15:51

later? Yeah, okay, so,

15:55

maintenance, zero maintenance. See, I was just getting, I'm trying to find that little thing that needs to be maintained. But everything is solid, static, doesn't it's just, it's

16:06

That's right. Nothing's touching, nothing's touching,

16:09

no wear and tear,

16:10

components, zero maintenance.

16:14

You're You're awesome. If I was somebody that wanted a dose of that awesomeness, and I wanted

16:21

to contact, to connect with Marian. How would I do that?

16:24

Yeah, you can reach out to us at solutions, at Plano motor, calm or find me on LinkedIn. Marian Schneider, Plano motor,

16:32

all right, sir.

16:36

Planar, what's the sort of story behind that name?

16:39

Um, well, you know how a linear motor exists, right? Yeah, and it moves in one direction, therefore it's linear. We move in any direction, so we are a planar motor.

16:52

You have an answer for everything. I like that. You are wonderful. Thanks. Thank you for having a heck of a technology out there. Now I'm a big fan. I'll be the president of your fan club, please. All right, we're going to have all the contact information out on Industrial Talk. Reach out to Mary and you will not be disappointed, as you can tell. You need to check out this technology. You need to be able to just experience it. It's real. It's fantastic. It's It's amazing. Once again, we're broadcasting at MD&M West brought to you the you know, we're News and Brews. We got to be able to sort of make sure that you are here next year. So get to meet people like Marian and then get dazzled by his technology. All right, we wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back. You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network. You

17:45