The ABC of RPA: What is robotics and automation in the office?
Robotics and automation in the office is actually much more subtle, and typically works behind the scenes.
Sushi Robots and Vending-Machine Pizza Will Reinvent the Automat
Leslie Patton for Bloomberg: Decades from now, historians may look back on 2016 as the year Earthlings ate pizza from vending machines, bought burritos from a box in New York’s Grand Central Terminal and devoured sushi rolled by robots.
“Automation is coming whether we want it to come or not,” said Andy Puzder, chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants Inc., which owns the Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. fast-food chains. “It’s everywhere. It’s in everything.”
At a time when more consumers are embracing hand-made artisanal foods, 24/7 Pizza Box, Burritobox and Sushi Station are headed in the other direction. Vending-machine pizza will start popping up in Florida later this year and chipotle-chicken burritos, accompanied by guacamole and salsa, can now be ordered from an automated box. Sushi-making robots from Japan are already operating in U.S. restaurants and university cafeterias. Cont'd...
New Muscle-Inspired Actuators Hold Potential to Build Safer, Soft-Bodied Robots
Robots should be safer and softer in order to make them more cooperative and execute tasks in close contact with humans. George Whitesides, Ph.D., a Core Faculty member at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), along with his team, has created a new actuator that moves like human skeletal muscles by using vacuum power for automating soft, rubber beams.
These actuators are soft and shock absorbing similar to real muscles, and do not pose any danger to their surroundings or the human beings working along with them or the future robots containing them. This study was published in the June 1 issue of the Advanced Materials Technologies journal. Cont'd...
Robot wars: Boston Dynamics fell out with Google over humanoid Atlas
Mary-Ann Russon for International Business Times: When former Boston Dynamics employees released video of humanoid robot Atlas – walking unassisted over difficult terrain, such as rocks and snow – Google was reportedly displeased; despite the research receiving high praise from roboticists while wowing the public.
And the real reason Google is selling off Boston Dynamics is, by and large, due to insiders telling Tech Insider that the robotics firm was unwilling to fall in line with the internet giant's vision of a consumer robot for the home.
Google reportedly envisioned the firm as one of nine in a division called Replicant. Initially, under the guidance of Android co-founder Andy Rubin, the firms would continue with existing research and Google would see what ideas and innovations they came up with. Cont'd...
Safety for Collaborative Robots: New ISO/TS 15066
Collaborative robots are the latest technology, and may provide just the solution you are looking for to improve your production process, but you must still make sure any risks associated with your robotic application are recognized and managed appropriately.
Types of Robotic Actuators
Actuators have become a crucial part of the automated system, as they help with controlling equipment using hydraulic, pneumatic or in some of the cases electronic signals.
Chrysalix partners with Dutch RoboValley on €100 million robotics fund
Terry Dawes for Cantech Letter: Vancouver-based Chrysalix Venture Capital has announced a €100 million fund aimed at driving the global robotics revolution, in partnership withRoboValley, a centre for robotics commercialization based at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
The RoboValley Fund is Chrysalix’s first robotics fund, and will concentrate on disbursing seed and Series A rounds of funding to early-stage companies developing component technology, intelligent software, and other breakthrough robotics technologies.
“Robotics is predicted to be the next big step in the digital revolution having an unprecedented impact on the way that we live, and provides an answer to some of the grand challenges of the 21st Century,” said RoboValley managing director Arie van den Ende. “Together with Chrysalix long-standing expertise in commercializing early stage industrial innovations, the RoboValley Fund will bring much needed capital and accelerated paths to market for our most promising next generation robotics technologies.” Cont'd...
Robotic Pickers and Forklifts
The new robotic movers no longer need to travel fixed routes, as they can be programmed while on the move. Focusing on automated materials handling processes, and the underlying robot perception technology, companies will be employing this sophisticated, state-of-the-art artificial intelligence now and in the future.
Symmetric Multiprocessing or Virtualization: Maximizing the Value and Power of a Soft-Control Architecture
For a truly simplified and streamlined architecture that is high-performing, scalable, efficient. and built for long-term value, an SMP-enabled Soft-Control Architecture is recommended.
OpenAI Gym Beta
From the OpenAI team:
We're releasing the public beta of OpenAI Gym , a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. It consists of a growing suite of environments (from simulated robots to Atari games), and a site for comparing and reproducing results.
OpenAI Gym is compatible with algorithms written in any framework, such as Tensorflow and Theano . The environments are written in Python, but we'll soon make them easy to use from any language. We originally built OpenAI Gym as a tool to accelerate our own RL research. We hope it will be just as useful for the broader community. Getting started: If you'd like to dive in right away, you can work through our tutorial ... (full intro post)
Foxconn Replaces 60,000 Labourers With Robots in China
Subhrojit Mallick for GIZMODO India: Apple and Samsung phone manufacturer, Foxconn has already taken a step towards the dystopian future. The South China Morning Post reported the manufacturing giant has replaced 60,000 laborers with robots. The total strength of Foxconn factory workers reduced from 110,000 to 50,000, marking a huge shift towards automation of routine jobs.
The Foxconn technology group confirmed to the BBC that they are automating many of the manufacturing tasks associated with their operations by introducing robots. However, they maintained the move will not affect long-term job losses. Cont'd...
Weiss Enters the Octagon: Unique Shaped Dial Plate Accomodates Robotic Inertia Performance and Ergonomic Efficiencies
By collaborating with WEISS on their intricate medical part subassembly system, Jerit Automation was able to achieve its next-generation octagonal design and performance goals.
Forget self-driving cars: What about self-flying drones?
Tina Amirtha for Benelux: In 2014, three software engineers decided to create a drone company in Wavre, Belgium, just outside Brussels. All were licensed pilots and trained in NATO security techniques.
But rather than build drones themselves, they decided they would upgrade existing radio-controlled civilian drones with an ultra-secure software layer to allow the devices to fly autonomously.
Their company, EagleEye Systems, would manufacture the onboard computer and design the software, while existing manufacturers would provide the drone body and sensors.
Fast-forward to the end of March this year, when the company received a Section 333 exemption from the US Federal Aviation Administration to operate and sell its brand of autonomous drones in the US. The decision came amid expectations that the FAA will loosen its restrictions on legal drone operations and issue new rules to allow drones to fly above crowds. Cont'd...
A Soft Control Architecture: Breakthrough in Hard Real-Time Design for Complex Systems
In the relentlessly changing world of technology, several important advances and trends have emerged that allow OEMs to transition to a soft control architecture that will not only move them away from dependence on FPGAs and DSPs, but also change the basis of competition in the equipment and machine tool industries.
SUNSPRING by 32 Tesla K80 GPUs
From Ross Goodwin on Medium:
To call the film above surreal would be a dramatic understatement. Watching it for the first time, I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing—actors taking something without any objective meaning, and breathing semantic life into it with their emotion, inflection, and movement.
After further consideration, I realized that actors do this all the time. Take any obscure line of Shakespearean dialogue and consider that 99.5% of the audience who hears that line in 2016 would not understand its meaning if they read it in on paper. However, in a play, they do understand it based on its context and the actor’s delivery.
As Modern English speakers, when we watch Shakespeare, we rely on actors to imbue the dialogue with meaning. And that’s exactly what happened inSunspring, because the script itself has no objective meaning.
On watching the film, many of my friends did not realize that the action descriptions as well as the dialogue were computer generated. After examining the output from the computer, the production team made an effort to choose only action descriptions that realistically could be filmed, although the sequences themselves remained bizarre and surreal... (medium article with technical details)
Here is the stage direction that led to Middleditch’s character vomiting an eyeball early in the film:
C
(smiles)
I don’t know anything about any of this.
H
(to Hauk, taking his eyes from his mouth)
Then what?
H2
There’s no answer.
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