Although smart automation is a hallmark of manufacturing's digital age, one of its most influential innovations is now approximately a century old. In the early 1900s, Toyota founder Sakichi Toyoda developed an automated loom with a mechanism that stopped production automatically when a thread broke. The innovation helped his company, which eventually became Toyota, pursue two goals: improve quality by catching defects at the point of occurrence and, since the machines could run unsupervised, increase worker productivity.
展开▼
