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by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | As the new head of the Robotics Industries Association, Trevor Jones faces the challenge of raising the visibility of robotics in all manufacturing sectors. |
As an engineering student at McMaster University in the late 1970s, Trevor Jones was at the right place at the right time to launch a fast-rising career in robotics. The university in Hamilton, Ontario, was a hotbed of robotic research at the time, and a couple of years after leaving school Jones hooked up with academic associates to found CRS Robotics, where they designed and brought to market one of the first tabletop robots with software features that rivaled the big industrial robots of the time. CRS was acquired in 2002 by Thermo Electron Corp. (Burlington, Ontario), where Jones is now director of OEM business development. In December, Jones was named president of the Robotic Industries Association (RIA), an industry trade group. It's fortuitous timing for Jones and the industry, which, according to the RIA, is on pace to set a record for units shipped in 2005. Recently, Managing Automation caught up with Jones to discuss trends in the robotics industry. [Click to continue] |