All capabilities

ENGINEERED AROUND YOUR PROCESS

Controls & Machine Vision

One PLC coordinating robots, presses, inspection, and the people running the line. Built to your plant standards, documented so your team can own it.

Discuss your application
Ethos engineering and shop-floor work supporting controls & machine vision
ENGINEERING IN PRACTICE / INSIDE ETHOS

The problem this solves

Controls is where a good machine becomes a usable one, and it is the part most often treated as the last step.

You know the symptoms. A cell where the robot has its own logic, the press has its own, the vision system has its own, and nobody can tell you why it faulted. An HMI that makes sense to the integrator who wrote it and to nobody on your floor. A machine that runs well until the one person who understands it takes a week off. Documentation that arrives as a folder of PDFs nobody can act on.

None of that is a programming problem. It is a decision about who is expected to own the equipment after handover, made early and usually by default.

We assume your team owns it. That assumption changes what we build.

What we actually do

PLC and cell control.
One control system coordinating robot motion, presses, riveting, inspection, and packaging as a single sequence. On one aerospace cell, that meant a single PLC managing three robots, a third-party conveyor system, and two process booths as one coordinated process rather than five systems negotiating with each other.
Built to your standards.
Your PLC platform, your network architecture, your safety standard, your naming and tag conventions. If your plant runs a specific brand and a specific structure, the machine arrives speaking it. Adopting our preferences is not part of the deal.
Robot programming and integration.
Offline programming where it saves commissioning time, and on-floor work where the part will tell you something the model will not.
Machine vision and inspection.
Presence and absence checks, orientation verification, measurement, and guidance. In line rather than after, so a fault stops one part instead of a shift. Vision earns its place when it prevents a defect from travelling, not when it generates a report nobody reads.
Operator interfaces built for operators.
Screens that tell someone on the floor what is wrong and what to do about it, in the words they use. Fault messages that name the station and the condition, not a code that requires a manual.
Safety.
Guarding, light curtains, interlocks, and safe zones designed with the process rather than fitted around it afterwards.
Documentation and handover training.
Your maintenance team should be able to clear a fault at 2am without calling us. That is the standard, and it is worth stating plainly because it is not the industry norm.

Proof

When the robot OEM did not have the answer

On an aerospace project, the cell hit robot faults that the robot manufacturer, FANUC, could not resolve.

Two of our automation team worked the problem themselves rather than waiting on the OEM or passing it back up the chain. They figured out what was wrong and how to fix it.

That is worth saying because it answers a question every buyer has and few ask directly: when something goes wrong that nobody has seen before, does your integrator solve it or escalate it? On that project the answer was on record.

Coordinating three parties in one control system

The same cell had to coordinate Ethos robots and tooling with a tractor-and-conveyor system from the shot peen equipment manufacturer, inside process booths the customer already owned.

Three parties, three sets of equipment, one sequence. The control system is what makes that behave as one machine instead of three that happen to share a floor, and the interface definitions between them are what get negotiated first and changed most.

Starting a conversation

  1. Your plant standards. PLC platform, HMI, network, safety standard, tag conventions. If there is a controls specification document, that is the single most useful thing you can send.
  2. Who owns the equipment after handover, and what you expect them to be able to do unaided.
  3. What has to be inspected, and what happens to a part that fails.

THE NEXT MOVE IS YOURS.

What could we
build together?

Bring your part, your process, or the problem you haven’t solved yet.

Download the capability sheet One page. No form.

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