It is not a matter if a hydraulic hose will fail, but a matter of when. When hydraulic hoses fail on a garbage truck or on heavy machinery, Eaton's customers spend millions of dollars on hydraulic fluid cleanup, fines, remote service and medical costs that result from injuries.

Customers of Nebraska Engineering Company (NECO) needed the capability to know the grain dryer’s status at all times while couldn’t afford to have someone at the dryer all the time to ensure it is doing what it is supposed to do.

The second-generation Robonaut, Robonaut 2 is a torso bolted to a pedestal and is connected to the station with wires for power and control. NASA wanted a solution to make the robot wireless so that it can move freely throughout the station and be more useful, and save astronauts' precious time.

A customer of MicroPower Technologies, a large public utility decided to evaluate video surveillance technologies wanted a solution to monitor remote distribution lines for adverse conditions over 4,000 square miles, in 25 cities and towns. Turbulent weather is a disruptive condition, which is why the utility employed three full-time meteorologists to provide early warnings of imminent risks to its ability to maintain uptime of its systems.

When you have up to 200 buses on the streets for 23 hours each day, it’s essential to constantly monitor your vehicles to ensure the highest levels of on-time performance and safety. For the Suburban Mobility Authority for Rapid Transit (SMART), that challenge was growing increasingly difficult as its automatic vehicle location (AVL) system aged. The AVL uses a radio network to create a two-way communication link between each vehicle and SMART’s operations center where dispatchers can monitor vehicle locations, schedule performance, and other metrics. “Our AVL was 20 years old,” explained Mel Evans, IT manager for SMART. “We were relying on a legacy analog radio network that used three leased towers and a slice of frequency that was being retired. While this infrastructure was satisfactory 20 years ago, it wasn’t keeping pace with SMART. We wanted more reporting and we wanted real-time information that we could share with our public ridership.” One option was to upgrade from analog to digital signals and increase the number of towers. Evans noted that this would be cost-prohibitive. “At approximately $1 million each, the upgrade strategy was too expensive for our agency,” he said. “It became clearer that we needed to consider a different strategy that involved an entirely new AVL solution.”

With new and more demanding regulations for radio communication in Europe, Olsbergs saw the opportunity to improve efficiency and safety for construction companies and crane operators. Typically, smaller cranes are constructed on the backs of trucks and operated by two workers. One person controls the hydraulics in the truck and the other acts as a spotter to ensure that the crane doesn’t bump into anything. Olsbergs recognized that the job could be done more efficiently and more safely with remote controlled hydraulics. But to construct such a controller would require a radio module that met both their extremely high standards as a company, and the tough ETSI standards.