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All robots or automated multiaxis machinery needs a series of drives for each axis. A simple casepacker or wrapper may contain 16 Kinetix drives, one for each movement. Each drive then has to communicate to a virtual master so all the stuff moving up / down / left/ right/ at coordinated times don't crash into each other. The controllers also have torque limit settings, range of travel limits, velocity profiles, acceleration and deceleration values. Also a bunch of real techie stuff involving auto tuning and such, but I won't bore you with that.

Such drives also are programmed with safe-off features. That being a hand reaches in, a door opens, temperaature is exceeded, product jams in movement, etc.....Now all that is integrated with a prorammable logic controller processor which operates at very-very high speeds. Things like time to hold something to weld, glue, twist, fold, insert into a case folded open by another multiaxis controller, glue shut, wrap, and convey to a palletizing multiaxis controller are what goes on.

During this time, shop floor real time data is reported to proficy or some other sort of shop floor data collection database. The machine cycles, raw materials in, finished goods out, trouble events and # of times they took place, the amount of down and reset times, etc....Then those items are automatically consumed from inventories for the purposes of real time raw material reordering.

It's all really sweet when old school brains step back and let things go the way they should. Problems reall happen when manager A wants his run of widgets to run on tuesday, but the system cannot be reprogrammed and all the raw materials be in place by then. As a result they try to force the system and productivity goes right down the $hitter. Your prerequisites must all be met before an order becomes work in process.

“How are people trained for such jobs?”

Short form: They are not being trained. The U.S. education system is broken and at the mercy of “educators” and unions like the AFT and NEA. Americans, born and raised here, are being victimized by an education system that produces an unusable product.

The answer is NOT to import tons of illiterate third world peasants (and their kids) to provide slave labor for U.S. corporations. The Big Business, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and WSJ solution of increasing third world immigration makes things exponentially worse and not better.

Unfortunately, such work is something EE Engineers run away from. The typical electrician also runs away from it. It's a combination of 24 VDC and 120VDC control voltages into what they consider "black box" controllers. It's very high exposure and pressure when it comes time to show functionality which A) Increases productivity, B) Reduces costs, and C) Improves Mean time between failures. Thus engineers run away because it has real tangible strings attached. The ideal staffer to support such function is a bored electrician. The devices run on high voltage, but are controlled by very low voltages. This makes entry to control cabinets somewhat safer for a person who knows what they are doing.

My advice would be for a person wanting such a job to first obtain an electrician's journeyman's license. Next take a bunch of Rockwell software courses at a local distributor. They will only do this for employees of their established accounts, so that means just taking a journeyman's job as a light fixture dope, motor changer, etc....

A person who is proven efficient at E&I (Electronics and Instrumentation makes about $30 to $45 per hour. With overtime and weekend phone coverage, if you're not pulling in $120K per year you're an idiot. All that with a high school education.

Very few engineers will be visible when it's time to prove their work. That's when the E& I guys start debugging and fixing it to make it run.

Hope that helps.