Company Overcomes Manpower Problems with New Automated Stacking System
With the robotic board handling system, the company increased production an average of 20-30 percent and as high as 60 percent on some products.
Yale OpenHand Project
From Yale's OpenHand Project:
This project intends to establish a series of open-source hand designs, and through the contributions of the open-source user community, result in a large number of useful design modifications and variations available to researchers.
Based on the original SDM Hand, the Model T is the OpenHand Project's first released hand design, initially introduced at ICRA 2013. the four underactuated fingers are differentially coupled through a floating pulley tree, allowing for equal force output on all finger contacts.
Based on our lab's work with iRobot and Harvard on the iHY hand, which won the DARPA ARM program, the Model O replicates the hand topology common to several commercial hands, including ones from Barrett, Robotiq, and Schunk (among others). A commercial version of this hand is currently for sale by RightHand Robotics... (homepage)
Robo.Op: Opening Industrial Robotics
From MADLAB.CC:
Robo.Op is an open hardware / open software platform for hacking industrial robots (IRs). Robo.Op makes it cheaper and easier to customize your IR for creative use, so you can explore the fringes of industrial robotics. The toolkit is made up of a modular physical prototyping platform, a simplified software interface, and a centralized hub for sharing knowledge, tools, and code... (homepage) (github)
Changing Automation with Sensitive Robots
Critics of automation claim robots are out to replace people. The near future will show that people are definitely in control and will be able to leverage technology for greater profitability and professional satisfaction.
Why I Automate: MPI Systems
The latest figures show that 179,000 industrial robots were sold worldwide in 2013, according to the International Federation of Robotics. That was a 12 percent jump over 2012. The increase is expected to continue when the final numbers are tallied for 2014.
The Industrial Automation Exchange
New online tool connects manufacturers with industrial automation expertise, products
Why I Automate: Manufacturer Finds Promising Gains with Automation
Job loss was on everyones mind. Results showed that the opposite took place. Higher quality led to more orders and an increase in the number of jobs.
VERSABALL Beer Pong Robot
From Empire Robotics:
The VERSABALL is a squishy balloon membrane full of loose sub-millimeter particles. The soft ball gripper easily conforms around a wide range of target object shapes and sizes. Using a process known as “granular jamming”, air is quickly sucked out of the ball, which vacuum-packs the particles and hardens the gripper around the object to hold and lift it. The object releases when the ball is re-inflated. VERSABALL comes in multiple head shapes and sizes that use the same pneumatic base... (Empire Robotics' site)
Four Robotics Related Kickstarters For January
EVB: Replace the brain of your LEGO® EV3 with BeagleBone / X PlusOne: Your Ultimate Hover + Speed Aerial Camera Drone / The ProtoCam+: An easy way to build projects and prototypes around your Raspberry Pi Camera Module with your A+ and B+ Raspberry Pi / Tektyte: LogIT Specialised Circuit Testers
Robot Learning Manipulation Action Plans by "Watching" Unconstrained Videos from the World Wide Web
From Yezhou Yang, Yi Li, Cornelia Fermuller and Yiannis Aloimonos:
In order to advance action generation and creation in robots beyond simple learned schemas we need computational tools that allow us to automatically interpret and represent human actions. This paper presents a system that learns manipulation action plans by processing unconstrained videos from the World Wide Web. Its goal is to robustly generate the sequence of atomic actions of seen longer actions in video in order to acquire knowledge for robots. The lower level of the system consists of two convolutional neural network (CNN) based recognition modules, one for classifying the hand grasp type and the other for object recognition. The higher level is a probabilistic manipulation action grammar based parsing module that aims at generating visual sentences for robot manipulation.
The list of the grasping types.
Experiments conducted on a publicly available unconstrained video dataset show that the system is able to learn manipulation actions by “watching” unconstrained videos with high accuracy.... (article at Kurzweilai.net) (original paper)
2014 Robotics In A Word: "MORE"
The list of top stories in robotics for 2014 is a story of "MORE": MORE uses of and for robots; MORE serious discussions about robots; MORE robots in unusual places; MORE news in the financial press; MORE funding, acquisitions and IPOs; and MORE choices.
Intuitive Robot Programming for Flexible Aerospace Manufacturing
Robots are proving to be flexible tools for aircraft manufacturing and assembly. Their full potential however can be limited by the challenges of programming a robot in a CAD/CAM environment. Software that integrates offline programming, simulation, code generation, and path optimization makes the process seamless and error-free.
John Carmack On Modern C++
Winter break homework from John Carmack. Gamasutra reprint article "In-depth: Functional programming in C++":
A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in. In a multithreaded environment, the lack of understanding and the resulting problems are greatly amplified, almost to the point of panic if you are paying attention. Programming in a functional style makes the state presented to your code explicit, which makes it much easier to reason about, and, in a completely pure system, makes thread race conditions impossible... (full article)
Also "Lessons to learn from Oculus development team when using the “Modern C++” approach":
Modern C++ doesn’t imply necessarly the overuse of templates
Andrei Alexandrescu says about the Modern C++ design:
"Modern C++ Design defines and systematically uses generic components - highly flexible design artifacts that are mixable and matchable to obtain rich behaviors with a small, orthogonal body of code."
Modern C++ has a close relation with generic programming; probably it’s the reason that makes many developers neglect the modern C++ approach. They think that the code will be mostly implemented as templates, which makes the code difficult to read and maintain.
In the SDK, the templates represent only 20% of all types defined and most of them are related to the technical layer... (full article)
Interview with David Sands, ST Robotics International
We call our robots entry level for a very good reason. People can get started so easily with our robots. They are not the best robot arms on the planet but they are affordable and incredibly easy to use.
Kissing It Better: Lifting Ergonomically with Vacuum
By using the right suction and the right lips for the job, you really can "kiss it better" before lifting, rather than after.
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