Six-axis robotic arm called Eva, which weighs 2.3 kilograms and will cost $3,000
Suryansh Chandra claims the affordable robotic arm his company Automata is developing could lead to robots becoming as ubiquitous as desktop 3D printers.
"Today, every design studio has a 3D printer," Chandra says. "Soon, we hope to get to the point where every design studio has a robotic arm."
Chandra founded Automata together with Mostafa Elsayed five months ago, after they became frustrated by the expense and complexity of industrial robots while working at the research division at Zaha Hadid Architects.
"If you're out to get a robot today, you'd have to spend 50 or 60 thousand dollars," Chandra explains. "Our goal is to democratise robotics through a low cost hardware platform and easy to use software."
Automata's first product is a plastic six-axis robotic arm called Eva, which weighs 2.3 kilograms and will cost $3,000 (£2,000).
"Unlike industrial robots that are heavy and expensive, Eva is low cost and lightweight," Chandra says. "She can pick up 750 grams when fully outstretched and about a kilogram in a more recessed position." Cont'd...
Simplifying the Design of Robotic Systems
As manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing, robotic systems are getting a lot of attention; however, the engineering and expertise required to design these systems is holding back many manufacturers.
Rob Scharff's Soft Robotics 3D-printed hand responds to human grip
Dutch Design Week 2015: Delft University of Technology graduate Rob Scharff has created a soft robotic limb that can shake hands with people.
The hand was created as part of Scharff's Soft Robotics research project – which focuses on the ways robots can be integrated with more tactile materials, and so improve robot-human interactions. Cont'd...
FABTECH 2015 - Interview with Chahe Bakmazjian, Business Team Leader for Robotmaster
We have a new suite of specialized tools for cutting and welding which we will be demoing at Fabtech.
RoboticsTomorrow discusses FABTECH 2015 with Jan Abel of Stäubli
FABTECH gives Stäubli an opportunity to illustrate solutions that improve productivity while increasing profits.
Robot Can Pick and Sort Fruit
A robotics breakthrough by product design and development firm Cambridge Consultants is set to boost productivity across the food chain – from the field to the warehouse. It paves the way for robots to take on complex picking and sorting tasks involving irregular organic items – sorting fruit and vegetables, for example, or locating and removing specific weeds among crops in a field.
“Traditional robots struggle when it comes to adapting to deal with uncertainty,” said Chris Roberts, head of industrial robotics at Cambridge Consultants. “Our innovative blend of existing technologies and novel signal processing techniques has resulted in a radical new system design that is poised to disrupt the industry.”
Special Tradeshow Coverage for FABTECH 2015
FABTECH 2015 will be held from November 9th - 12th in Chicago, Illinois. This RoboticsTomorrow.com Special Tradeshow report aims to bring you news, articles and products from this years event.
Robots Learning Judo Techniques to Fall Down Without Exploding
By Evan Ackerman for IEEE Spectrum: The best and worst part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals waswatching all of those huge expensive humanoids topple over in a series of epic faceplants. Faceplants are called faceplants because you’re planting your face into the ground as a means of breaking your fall, which usually also breaks your face, among other things. This tends to happen when you’re unprepared for falling, which with most robots, is 100 percent of the time. Now researchers at Georgia Tech want to teach humanoid robots to fall more safely with techniques adapted from judo, which might protect them enough to actually be able to get up again.
Falling safely (or, as safely as you can), assuming that you have very little control over the nature of your fall, is all about controlling exactly when and how your body crashes down. During a fall, your body is busy converting potential energy to kinetic energy, all of which has to go somewhere when you hit the ground. If your face hits the ground first, then that’s where all the energy goes at once, but if you can manage to contact the ground with a bunch of different parts of your body at different times on the way down, the energy will be spread out. Ideally, the energy gets spread out to the point where each individual impact doesn’t do enough damage to hurt you in a permanent sort of way. Cont'd...
Vision-Enabled Robot Replaces Four Conventional Flame Treating Robots
Using vision instead of proximity sensors makes it possible for each fixture to handle a wider range of parts.
Where are the Top Robotics Employers?
The below table shows the location, the number jobs & the key employers. We only searched for jobs that had "Robotics" in the job title.
Cisco Teams Up with Robotics Firm Fanuc for IoT
by Zacks Equity Research: Technology giant and Dow component Cisco Systems, Inc. recently entered into a strategic alliance with a robotics company Fanuc America, thereby stepping up its efforts to make itself a key player in the Internet of Things (IoT) space.
Per the alliance, Fanuc and Cisco have built an IoT system that enables Fanuc to monitor every robot on the factory floor. This way it can be determined whether a robot is likely to fail, so that a service technician can fix the equipment before it stops working.
This could save companies hundreds of dollars of fixing cost. Per Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, downtime for these robots can cost a business $16,000 per minute. Therefore, the new system that offers predictive maintenance can be a big thing for some operations.
The companies are currently testing the system in a channel that comprises around 1,800 robots and includes Fanuc customer, GM. In this testing period, Fanuc says its customer has saved $38 million. Fanus has plans to expand the system to 2,500 robots by the end of the year. Cont'd...
Google robotics to become a separate entity under Alphabet?
By tech2 News Staff: Earlier this year, Google had released an interesting video of Spot, a 160-pound dog robot navigating an office and then heading outside on its own. It is a smaller version of the Big Dog that first popped its head when Google acquired Boston Company. As the new changes come into effect, Boston Company is now Alphabet-owned and not a part of Google.
It will continue to build robots, and falls under Google X Projects (for now), a subsidiary of Alphabet. The other subsidiaries include Google, Nest Labs, Google X, Calico, Google Ventures, Google Capital and Google Life Sciences.
A new report says that the “company will create a separate division for robotics within the renamed umbrella entity Alphabet”, citing a person related to the matter. Google has acquired roughly eight companies related to robotics including military grade robotics company Boston Dynamics. It will likely allow Boston Dynamics to operate with some independence. Cont'd...
Development of Battery-Free Multi-Rotation Absolute Encoder
In recent years, there have been many demands for equipment with high productivity to have a system that retains positioning information, even after the main power supply is turned off.
Advances in farming robotics could address shortage in agricultural workers
By Steve Brachmann for IPWatchDog: More and more, the agricultural world is looking towards the mechanization of labor processes through robotics as a way of potentially increasing their productivity. Robotics was identified as a sector of investment growth in agricultural tech by an April 2014 white paper on agriculture technologies published by the entrepreneurship and education non-profit Kauffman Foundation. Robotics is a regular focus of ours here on IPWatchdog, most recently visited in our coverage of the incredible advancements in walking and jumping robotics pioneered by Boston Dynamics, a Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) subsidiary. With American farmers already heavily involved in the regulatory conversation involving the commercial use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, we thought that it would be interesting to delve into the world of farming robotics and see the recent advances in that particular field.
It’s important to understand first that the robotics being developed for commercial use on farms won’t be stand-alone humanoid units ranging through fields to pick crops. Any piece of hardware implementing an algorithm which automates some of the manual work of farming falls under this heading. One good example of this is the LettuceBot, a precision thinning technology which works to visually characterize plants in a lettuce row, identify which plants to keep and eliminating unwanted plants to optimize yield. The unit doesn’t move by itself but is guided along by a tractor instead. The technology has been developed by Blue River Technology of Sunnyvale, CA, a company which has attracted $13 million in investment between 2011 and 2014 to commercialize this product. The LettuceBot’s creators hope toprovide the technology as a third-party service to farm owners before manufacturing the unit for commercial sale. Cont'd...
Special Tradeshow Report for PACK EXPO Las Vegas 2015
PACK EXPO 2015 will be held from September 28th - 30th in Las Vegas, Nevada. This RoboticsTomorrow.com Special Tradeshow report aims to bring you news, articles and products from this years event.
Records 1201 to 1215 of 1960
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Industrial Robotics - Featured Product
Helios™2 Ray Time-of-Flight Camera Designed for Unmatched Performance in Outdoor Lighting Conditions
The Helios2 Ray camera is powered by Sony's DepthSense IMX556PLR ToF image sensor and is specifically engineered for exceptional performance in challenging outdoor lighting environments. Equipped with 940nm VCSEL laser diodes, the Helios2 Ray generates real-time 3D point clouds, even in direct sunlight, making it suitable for a wide range of outdoor applications. The Helios2 Ray offers the same IP67 and Factory Tough™ design as the standard Helios2 camera featuring a 640 x 480 depth resolution at distances of up to 8.3 meters and a frame rate of 30 fps.
