ROBOTICS
Comau’s MATE is a robotic innovation you wear. Courtesy Comau.
Italian Robotics Enable True Speed and Efficiency
W
hen Ingersoll International was all but defunct 15 years ago, Tino Oldani saw enough potential in its machine tools division to take a chance on breathing new life into a company that was founded during the Industrial Revolution. He was so convinced, he persuaded the Camozzi Group SpA (Brescia, Italy; www.camozzigroup.com) to invest in Ingersoll Machine Tools, which had been part of one of the biggest companies in Rockford, IL. “I knew about them, and I knew they had problems, and at a certain point had filed for bankruptcy,” said Oldani, who owned a much smaller engineering company in the same city that competed with Ingersoll. “So, we put together the idea to take over (while keeping the old name).” Oldani, an engineer by training who’s been Ingersoll’s president and CEO ever since, has taken the company to new levels of success. Under his leadership, Ingersoll makes automated fiber placement machines and integrates them with robots to fabricate composite structures for aerospace. The company has also ventured into making 3D printers for big-area additive manufacturing, along with machinery for the wind power, defense, mining and primary metals processing industries. In 2014, Ingersoll engineered
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By Thomas R. Kurfess PhD, FSME, PE 2018 SME President
and built the base for the world’s largest solar telescope in its 500,000-square-foot facility. Ingersoll Machine Tools most recent yearly revenue was $70 million. “They make massive machines that no other company can make,” said Alex Gary, who was assistant business editor of the Rockford Register Star newspaper at the time of Camozzi’s acquisition of Ingersoll’s machine tool operations, the largest of its three divisions. While Ingersoll International had 4,500 employees in the U.S. and Europe in its heyday, the machine tool division alone now employs about 180 people.
1 in 4 packaging machines worldwide “Made in Italy” SIPA SpA (Vittorio Veneto, Italy; www.sipasolutions.com), a company founded to provide integrated systems for flexible automation, has almost 40 years of experience with making machinery for polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and all other bottle manufacturing and filling technologies. It sells machines to the food/beverage, chemical, detergent and health/beauty aids industries, according to its website. In addition to machinery, SIPA offers life-cycle services that can include data acquisition, line analysis, maintenance management, training and more.
Volume XII | www.machinesitalia.org
