The skies are full of them in 2018 - drones flying around amusement parks, job sites and even your own backyard. There are drone racing leagues on ESPN, drones capturing wide angle shots over film locations and government drones keeping a bird's eye view on the Mexican/America border.

In the design of an automatic transmission gearbox, the variation of one parameter can result in different system performances due to the strong interdependencies among all components. For given transmission ratios, component lifetimes and safeties, or space restrictions, improvements in efficiency, noise, and weight can be achieved.

Health monitoring or condition monitoring has been used for many years on machines and in plants where the cost of an outage is high. It allows failures to be anticipated and maintenance or repairs to be scheduled for the least loss of production, as well as avoiding unnecessary periodic maintenance.

Ask any exhibitor at Pack Expo International and the co-located Healthcare Packaging Expo (Oct. 14-17 at McCormick Place, Chicago) why they're there, and you'll probably get the same response: end users.

Approximately one quarter of all servo motors around the world require some type of gear reduction in their applications. From large satellite dishes to precision medical devices, gearboxes boost torque and reduce speed for servos in order for them to be sized more efficiently. While gearbox fundamentals haven't changed much over the past 20 years, their effectiveness has improved significantly, driven mostly by the need to accommodate advancements in servo technology.