May 2026 Volume 8

EQUIPMENT & TECHNOLOGY

SEEING THE HEAT Why Robots, Machine Vision, Smarter Controls, and AI are Gaining Ground in One of Manufacturing’s Toughest Environments By Angela Gibian

theatrical. It looks like robots taking over the hottest and dirtiest material-handling tasks. It looks like vision systems helping locate and orient billets. It looks like better controls making aging equipment more consistent and safer to run. And increasingly, it looks like 3D sensing and AI helping manufacturers make better decisions in an environment long defined by variation. The timing is not accidental. Industrial robot adoption continues to climb worldwide: the International Federation of Robotics reported that the global operational stock of industrial robots reached 4,281,585 units in 2023, up 10% year over year. At the same time, labor pressure remains intense across U.S. manufacturing. Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute project a net need for as many as 3.8 million manufacturing workers between 2024 and 2033, with about 1.9 million of those jobs potentially going unfilled if workforce and skills challenges persist 1,3 . In that environment, automation has become less of a moonshot and more of a survival tool. Start Where the Pain Is One of the clearest entry points for automation in forging is also one of the least glamorous: billet handling. Manually unloading billets from bins and preparing them for furnace loading is repetitive, physically demanding work. It involves awkward reaches, repetitive motion, and constant exposure to a harsh operating environment. It is also exactly the kind of task many plants struggle to staff consistently. That is one reason billet handling has become such a logical starting point. Mario Trizzano of Adaptec Solutions puts the safety case bluntly: “Manual unloading of bins can lead to a very high injury rate with pinched fingers. We’ve worked with forgers that note this position as being the highest rate of injury across the entire plant.” There is often a productivity case as well. “Robots are much faster and more consistent than operators, resulting in up to 30% uptick in productivity,” Trizzano says. Other industry suppliers point to the same area as a common first automation target, though from a slightly different perspective. BiLLy Paris, Director of Sales, Aftermarket & Rebuilds for Ajax/ CECO/Erie Press said “Handling cold steel billets is typically the simplest function to automate because billets are uniform in size and shape, easier to detect, and easier to move reliably on conventional conveying systems. In many shops, automation is already well established through the heating stage, especially around induction systems, where a stable process depends on a consistent supply of billets at a steady line speed.”

F orging has never been an easy place to automate. Heat, scale, dust, vibration, inconsistent part presentation, and punishing cycle times make the forge shop one of the hardest environments in manufacturing for advanced automation. For years, that reality kept many essential jobs stubbornly manual: unloading billets, feeding furnaces, transferring hot parts, tending trim presses, and visually inspecting parts in difficult conditions. That is changing. Not all at once, and not in some dramatic leap to lights-out production. The shift happening in forging is more practical than

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