Crowdfunding Projects For April
Here are a few projects we think are worth looking into. Be careful... it is crowdfunding.
Bring 3D printed robots to life with 'Ziro' hand-controlled robotics kit
Benedict for 3Ders.org: Tech startup ZeroUI, based in San Jose, California, has launched an Indiegogo campaign for Ziro, the “world’s first hand-controlled robotics kit”. The modular kit has been designed to bring 3D printed creations to life, and has already surpassed its $30,000 campaign goal.
It would be fair to say that the phenomenon of gesture recognition, throughout the wide variety of consumer electronics to which it has been introduced, has been a mixed success. The huge popularity of the Nintendo Wii showed that—for the right product—users were happy to use their hands and bodies as controllers, but for every Wii, there are a million useless webcam or smartphone functions, lying dormant, unused, and destined for the technology recycle bin. Full Article:
US to sail submarine drones in South China Sea
Geoff Dyer for CNBC: As it watches China build up its presence in the South China Sea, one reclaimed island at a time, the US military is betting on a new technology to help retain its edge — submarine drones.
During the past six months, the Pentagon has started to talk publicly about a once-secret program to develop unmanned undersea vehicles, the term given to the drone subs that are becoming part of its plan to deter China from trying to dominate the region.
Ashton Carter, US defense secretary, made special mention of drone subs in a speech about military strategy in Asia and hinted at their potential use in the South China Sea, which has large areas of shallower water.
The Pentagon's investment in subs "includes new undersea drones in multiple sizes and diverse payloads that can, importantly, operate in shallow water, where manned submarines cannot", said Mr Carter, who visited a US warship in the South China Sea on Friday. Cont'd...
Interested in UAVs? Visit AUVSI Xponential 2016
This show has all of the tools to enable UAV developers, along with innovative software to manage your entire commercial UAS operation. It's a show you don't want to miss.
Upcoming Tradeshow, Conference & Exhibition Summary - May, June, July 2016
Here is a summary of what Tradeshows, Conferences & Exhibitions to look forward to in the coming months.
3D Robotics Undergoing Layoffs And Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up For Sale
3DR will now be focusing more narrowly on enterprise customers that are interested in using drones for such projects as utility line and pipeline inspections, and construction site inspections.
Over 1,000 Student-Led Robotics Teams Converge At VEX Worlds
VEX Worlds 2016 kicks off this week! Presented by the Robotics Education and Competition (REC) Foundation and the Northrop Grumman Foundation, this culminating event brings together the top 1,000 teams from around the world in one city and under one roof for one incredible celebration of robotics engineering, featuring the world's largest and fastest growing international robotics programs - the VEX IQ Challenge, the VEX Robotics Competition and VEX U. On April 20-23, at the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville, Ky., over 16,000 participants from 37 nations will come together to put their engineering expertise to the test as they seek to be crowned the Champions of VEX Worlds. Follow the competition here:
AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2016 - What to Expect from Micromo!
MICROMO was been part of XPONENTIAL/AUVSI since 2010. Our team of Application Engineers will be at the show.
Shockingly, Robots Are Really Bad at Waiting Tables
Evan Ackerman for IEEE Spectrum: According to Chinese newspaper Workers’ Daily, two restaurants in Guangzhou, China, that gained some amount of notoriety for their use of robotic waiters have now been forced to close down. One employee said, “the robots weren’t able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again.” Yeah, we can’t say we’re surprised.
As far as I can tell, all of these waiter robots can do essentially one thing: travel along a set path while holding food. They can probably stop at specific tables, and maybe turn or sense when something has been taken from them, but that seems to be about it. “Their skills are somewhat limited,” a robot restaurant employee told Workers’ Daily. “They can’t take orders or pour hot water for customers.” Those are just two of the many, many more skills that human servers have, because it’s necessary to have many, many more skills than this to be a good server. Cont'd...
Toyota Expands AI, Robotics Research to Third Facility
Kirsten Korosec for Fortune: Toyota will expand the footprint of its artificial intelligence and robotics research center by adding a third facility in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Gill Pratt, CEO of the Toyota Research Institute, made the announcement on Thursday during his keynote speech at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference in San Jose. The Ann Arbor facility will be located near the University of Michigan, where it will fund research in artificial intelligence, robotics, and materials science.
Last year, the world’s largest automaker said it would invest $1 billion over the next five years in a research center for artificial intelligence to be based in Palo Alto, Calif. The institute aims to bridge the gap between research in AI and robotics in order to bring this technology to market. The technology is largely being developed for self-driving cars, but the institute is also researching and developing AI products for the home. Cont'd...
Robots Helping Grads Get Jobs
Not many students can claim they have hands-on experience with automation and robotics going into an interview. Looking at the question with a macro lens, our students are offered job opportunities on being well-rounded, even at the sophomore-level when many accept summer/semester-long internships.
Efficient 3D Object Segmentation from Densely Sampled Light Fields with Applications to 3D Reconstruction
From Kaan Yücer, Alexander Sorkine-Hornung, Oliver Wang, Olga Sorkine-Hornung:
Precise object segmentation in image data is a fundamental problem with various applications, including 3D object reconstruction. We present an efficient algorithm to automatically segment a static foreground object from highly cluttered background in light fields. A key insight and contribution of our paper is that a significant increase of the available input data can enable the design of novel, highly efficient approaches. In particular, the central idea of our method is to exploit high spatio-angular sampling on the order of thousands of input frames, e.g. captured as a hand-held video, such that new structures are revealed due to the increased coherence in the data. We first show how purely local gradient information contained in slices of such a dense light field can be combined with information about the camera trajectory to make efficient estimates of the foreground and background. These estimates are then propagated to textureless regions using edge-aware filtering in the epipolar volume. Finally, we enforce global consistency in a gathering step to derive a precise object segmentation both in 2D and 3D space, which captures fine geometric details even in very cluttered scenes. The design of each of these steps is motivated by efficiency and scalability, allowing us to handle large, real-world video datasets on a standard desktop computer... (paper)
Robotics makes baby steps toward solving Japan's child care shortage
Roy Bishop for The Japan Times: Child care is a hard job, but somebody, or something, has got to do it.
Japanese researchers have developed androids to meet that need, which includes happily reading that fairy tale again and again and again.
The androids, which were created by a team of education and robotics specialists at a research facility in Abiko, Chiba Prefecture, are part of a larger system called RoHo Care. Short for Robotic Hoikujo (day care center), RoHo is being touted as a high-tech solution to the staffing crisis that forced the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry to announce emergency measures this week.
“I never thought I’d see this day, but we’re now confident that RoHo could blaze a trail for child care worldwide,” said team leader Makoto Hara.
At a briefing on Thursday, Hara introduced a “care-droid” prototype named Or-B, the core component of RoHo’s vision for day care assistance, and said it will undergo a trial run this summer before full-scale implementation in 2018. Cont'd...
Special Tradeshow Coverage for XPONENTIAL 2016
XPONENTIAL 2016 (formerly AUVSI) will be held from May 2nd - 5th in New Orleans, LA. This RoboticsTomorrow.com Special Tradeshow report aims to bring you news, articles and products from this years event.
Autonomous Driving Systems
Combining on-vehicle sensor data with high resolution maps adds another safety level to the autonomous driving system. The automotive industry is looking to its partners and suppliers as they develop HD maps.
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Zimmer Group - THE PREMIUM GRIPPER NOW WITH IO-LINK
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Robotics and Automation - Featured Company
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