Technology and skills
The HDS Group distinguishes technology and skills. Technology is advanced by new creativity, while skills are built up by the time and effort of tireless refinement standing in tradition.
Skills are experience stored as implicit knowledge. Some new technologies are created by taking the skills that are implicit knowledge and turning them into formal knowledge, while others are created by giving substance to theory.
Technology progresses through the advancement of skills as implicit knowledge. Then when skills as implicit knowledge are made into numerical data and quantified, such as by measurements, the engineer's senses are stimulated, awareness and standards undergo change, and higher targets are set in areas such as precision processing. Moreover, the implicit knowledge that becomes formalized through quantification, physical and theoretical analysis, and development into theory is transformed into technology in the form of manufacturing methods, design, and procedures. In such ways technology and skills influence each other as they develop on an upward spiral.
Deployment in business
The HDS Group, based on the precision processing and control technologies built up to date, is working toward the further advancement of total motion control with the aim of achieving a higher order of positioning accuracy.
In order to make speed reducers such as our HarmonicDrive® and AccuDrive® products smaller, lighter, more powerful and more accurate, we are not only enhancing precision processing technology and skills, but are also taking on the challenge of developing peripheral technologies for maximizing the performance, shape, lightness and other characteristics of these reducers. By making smaller motors with higher torque, motors and sensors with faster response and greater accuracy, drivers and controllers enabling more precise position and speed control, and other system elements, we are expanding applications beyond industrial robots, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and machine tools to medical equipment and oil drilling as well as leading-edge science and technology fields such as Mars exploration and astronomy.
R&D with a view to solving industry issues
Raising the level of technology and skills does more than result in advanced products. It also opens up new possibilities for R&D and encourages the creation of new businesses.
Through fundamental research looking ahead to the future, progress is made in building up core technologies and in cultivating and expanding fundamental technologies. Moreover, making research results public offers hints for solving the issues of industry and leads to demands for us to produce new products in answer to latent needs. While there is a lag of several years between the publishing of research results and their application to industry, even as we seek to uncover latent issues in industry and build up our new product development capabilities for swiftly meeting market needs, the HDS Group is committed to R&D efforts from a medium to long-term view and to expanding our business.
Hand module as an example of progress from the research stage to application to industry
