National Robotics Week delights kids
Greg Nichols for ZDNet: The seventh annual National Robotics Week, which kicks off this week, will see more than 250 events take place across all 50 states.
It's a pretty cool time to celebrate robots. A new generation of small, relatively inexpensive, and highly collaborative industrial robots brought new levels of automation to light industry last year. Home robots, in the form of vacuums and lawn mowers, continue to do well in sales, and drones--technically flying robots--are everywhere. I'm literally watching one fly over a park near my house as I write.
New kinds of bots are also making early strides. Companies like Savioke are bringing robots to hotels and others likeRevolve Robotics and Double are connecting people via affordable embodied telepresence--especially people whose disabilities prevent them from traveling to school or work. Cont'd...
Collaborative Robots Will Transform Logistics Says DHL Group
Patrick Burnson for Logistics Management: “Robots work in many industries but haven’t made an impact on logistics yet because of the complexity of the work – handling a wide array of different things in an infinite number of combinations, close to people and in confined spaces,” says Matthias Heutger, Senior Vice President Strategy for the Group.
“Current research shows that 80 percent of logistics facilities today are still manual. Recently, however, technology is just starting to catch up to meet demands for flexible and low-cost robots that could collaboratively work in logistics.”
The report highlights that the development of the next generation of robots that can see, move, react to their environment and work at precision tasks alongside people, is on a fast track powered by the explosion in labor-intensive e-commerce and diminishing and ageing workforces. Cont'd...
Man Vs Machine
The result of this rung-in change is intended to be that man and machine respectively do what they can do best. The weaknesses of one are compensated for by the strengths of the other.
The Changing Role of Robotics in Materials Handling: Industrial Journalist Thomas R. Cutler Interviews Steven Hogg of Bastian Robotics
Short-term, robotic integration will continue to grow as companies continue to establish automation plans, and long-term, robotic automation will be a standard in every facility. This will be a requirement for companies to compete in the global marketplace.
Amazon Hosted A Secretive Robotics Conference In Florida
Michael Grothaus for FastCompany: Amazon hosted a secret robotics conference in Palm Springs, Florida last weekend, reports Bloomberg. The conference, dubbed "MARS," which stands for "Machine-Learning (Home) Automation, Robotics and Space Exploration," was an invite-only event held at the Parker Palm Springs that brought together experts in the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, space exploration, and home automation.
Amazon has not publicly commented on the conference, but reports on social media from attendees leaked its existence. Bloomberg notes that the conference hosted some big names, including film director Ron Howard and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. The event was also attended by a number of academics from MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, and ETH Zurich, sources told Bloomberg. Also in attendance were some CEOs and representatives from companies including Rethink Robotics, Toyota Motor Corp., and iRobot. Cont'd...
2016: Six Trends Affecting Safety In The Workplace
Safety is a complex topic, but these six factors are helping to not only increase workplace safety this year but also efficiency, quality and employee well-being.
February Fundings And Acquisitions
It's too early to tell whether the record-breaking pace of 2015 fundings for robotic startups and the number of acquisitions will carry over into 2016, nevertheless here are the transactions that happened in February
18 months since the toolkit's release, soft robotics is flying
Gordon Hunt for SiliconRepublic: Pioneered in Ireland by the likes of Dr Dónal Holland, with a plethora of departments in Harvard University in the US involved, the Soft Robotics Toolkit has gone on to foster significant interest in an area exploding into the mainstream.
More than 76,000 people have engaged with the service since it was created, represented across 150 different countries, with the toolkit identified as having made one of the most significant contributions to the development of the nascent industry to date.
While robotics engineering used to focus much more attention on creating the rigid, hard-bodied prototypes like Bender from Futurama, for example, lately there has been a push towards soft, malleable structures that take their inspiration from nature. Cont'd...
Rethink Robotics Announces Major Distribution Partnerships in Germany
Sawyer is a smart, collaborative robot that can be trained by demonstration and change tasks quickly to fit the individual needs of the factory.
Carnegie Mellon robotics selected for research projects totaling more than $11 million
Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) has been selected as a prime contractor or subcontractor on four major new federal research projects totaling more than $11 million over the next three years. The projects range from research on a wheel that can transform into a track to automated stress testing for critical software.
Herman Herman, NREC director, said the center has hired 10 new technical staff members in the past six months and anticipates hiring another five-to-10 staff members in the coming months to augment its existing staff of about 100.
"For the past 20 years, NREC has been an important national resource, combining unique technical skills and testing capabilities to solve problems that other groups can't," said Martial Hebert, director of CMU's Robotics Institute, which includes the NREC. "These new projects are a reminder that NREC continues to advance the art and science of robotics and that it remains a vital part of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute." Full Press Release:
User Case Study: MapleSim Used To Speed Up Development Of High-fidelity Robotic Manipulator Models
Using MapleSim, engineers created multiple models of robotic manipulator in time previously required to create just one model.
Would you buy meat from a robot butcher?
Greg Nichols for The Kernel: In an era when hunks of cow and pig are packaged and distributed like Amazon Prime parcels, butchering has retained a surprising degree of its old-world craftsmanship. Workers armed with knives and hooks anachronistically slice flesh from bone the same way they have for hundreds of years. That’s because cutting meat—be it on an assembly line or in a niche shop in Santa Monica, California, or Brooklyn, New York—is a skill that requires exceptional dexterity, a good eye, and a honed tactile sense for texture and firmness. Industrial robots may be perfectly suited to welding chassis and painting cars, but they don’t have the touch to cut a succulent T-bone steak.
That’s likely to change. JBS, one of the country’s largest meat processors, recently acquired a controlling share of Scott Technology, a New Zealand-based robotics firm. Now JBS is looking at ways to automate its facilities. Robots don’t sleep, don’t collect overtime, and don’t suffer the horrific repetitive stress injuries that plague meat workers. Meat is already packed using machines, and if engineers can figure out how to make automated systems that approximate the deft hands of a butcher, there’s little question giants like JBS, Cargill, and Tyson will replace many of their line workers with robots. In the next decade, adroit robots that can see, feel, and move like humans may finally kill off the butcher. Cont'd...
Mercedes Boots Robots From the Production Line:
By Elisabeth Behrmann & Christoph Rauwald for Bloomberg Business: “Robots can’t deal with the degree of individualization and the many variants that we have today,” Markus Schaefer, the German automaker’s head of production, said at its factory in Sindelfingen, the anchor of the Daimler AG unit’s global manufacturing network. “We’re saving money and safeguarding our future by employing more people.”
Mercedes’s Sindelfingen plant, the manufacturer’s biggest, is an unlikely place to question the benefits of automation. While the factory makes elite models such as the GT sports car and the ultra-luxury S-Class Maybach sedan, the 101-year-old site is far from a boutique assembly shop. The complex processes 1,500 tons of steel a day and churns out more than 400,000 vehicles a year.
That makes efficient, streamlined production as important at Sindelfingen as at any other automotive plant. But the age of individualization is forcing changes to the manufacturing methods that made cars and other goods accessible to the masses. The impetus for the shift is versatility. While robots are good at reliably and repeatedly performing defined tasks, they’re not good at adapting. That’s increasingly in demand amid a broader offering of models, each with more and more features. Cont'd...
ROS Navigation Basics
If youve worked with ROS and robotics, youve probably heard of gmaping, localization, SLAM, costmaps and paths, but what does all this mean? They are more than just robot buzz words - these allow a robot to get from one point to another without bumping into obstacles, and in this tutorial, well be covering some of the key concepts in what makes up an autonomous robot.
Republican-Leaning Cities Are At Greater Risk Of Job Automation
By Jed Kolko for Five Thirty Eight: More and more work activities and even entire jobs are at risk of beingautomated by algorithms, computers and robots, raising concerns that more and more humans will be put out of work. The fear of automation is widespread — President Obama cited it as the No. 1 reason Americans feel anxious about the economy in his State of the Union address last month — but its effects are not equally distributed, creating challenges for workers and policymakers. An analysis of where jobs are most likely to face automation shows that areas that voted Republican in the last presidential election are more at risk, suggesting that automation could become a partisan issue.
So-called “routine” jobs — those that “can be accomplished by following explicit rules” — are most at risk of automation. These include both “manual” routine occupations, such as metalworkers and truck drivers, and “cognitive” routine occupations, such as cashiers and customer service reps.1 Whereas many routine jobs tend to be middle-wage, non-routine jobs include both higher-wage managerial and professional occupations and lower-wage service jobs. Cont'd...
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