Drones' Good, Bad: Keep Your Eyes to the Skies as Drones Fly Out of Stores
Drones were sold by the squadron this past holiday as intelligent machines but theyre really just tricked out remote-control planes. Few have the common-sense necessary to detect/avoid obstacles, figure out where theyre at or how to get home.
A problem-solving approach IT workers should learn from robotics engineers
Greg Nichols for ZDNet: Google-owned Boston Dynamics got some bad news in the final days of 2015. After years of development and intensive field trials, the Massachusetts-based robotics company learned that the U.S. Marines had decided to reject its four-legged robotic mule, Big Dog. The reason? The thing is too damn noisy for combat, where close quarters and the occasional need for stealth make excess machine noise a liability.
The setback reminded me of a story another group of robotics engineers told me about the development of their breakthrough machine, a robotic exoskeleton that enables paraplegics to walk and soldiers to hump heavy packs without wearing down. It also reminded me of a powerful approach to solving problems and dealing with setbacks that I've encountered again and again reporting on robotics.
Ekso Bionics, which went public in 2015, invented the first viable untethered exoskeleton, one that doesn't need to be plugged into an external power source. Their achievement rests on one engineering breakthrough in particular, and to arrive at it Ekso's engineers had to do something that's surprisingly difficult but incredibly instructive for non-engineers--they had to change the way they thought about their problem. Cont'd...
Fighting for Life: Why Drones are Infiltrating Emergency Services
If machines are a reflection of their creator, then their ability to save the imperilled arises from our pursuit of empathy, our willingness to throw our chips behind the right cause when and where the money matters.
DroneOS - Drone Management Software
DroneOS is a new hardware/software commercial standard for reliably managing drones. The combined ground/air solution is a fully integrated, one stop shop for managing all prosumer and enterprise grade drones.
New Product - P-Rob 2 Second Generation of the Collaborative Robot
P-Rob 2 is an all-in-one robotic solution combining robot arm, sensor technologies and software including an embedded PC as control unit. So all that needs to be done is plug-in and run.
Factory Automation Will Speed Forward with A.I., Says Bernstein
By Tiernan Ray for Barron's: Bernstein Research’s Alberto Moel, who follows tech-industrial companies such as Corning(GLW) and AU Optronics (AUO), this afternoon offered up a thinks piece on robotics andfactory automation, arguing that some of the costs of automation beyond the basic cost of the robot are about to get dramatically cheaper, thanks in large part to artificial intelligence akin to what Alphabet (GOOGL) and others are doing.
Moel notes that the basic components of factory robots are only falling by perhaps 6% per year, their cost reduction bounded by things such as casings and servomotors and reduction gears that don’t rapidly fall in cost.
But, writes Moel, the cost to install and adjust these machines on a factory floor is ten times their component cost and that stuff can be reduced more dramatically:
How much this integration costs varies widely. An often-cited rule of thumb is that a $50,000 robot will need $500,000 of integration costs before it is all said and done. Of course, these integration costs can be amortized over many robots, so perhaps a better estimate would be 3-5x the robot cost [...] But I do believe we are at an inflection pointthat will materially increase the capability of automation systems and substantially reduce programming, setup, and fixturing costs which are the largest cost element in most automation efforts. So instead of a measly 6% YoY cost reduction , we get 25-30% YoY declines, and automation Nirvana. Cont'd.. .
Alphabet Shakes Up Its Robotics Division
From The New York Times:
Google’s robotics division has been plagued by low morale and a lack of leadership since the unit’s founder left abruptly in 2014. Now Alphabet is cleaning it up.
Over the last two months, Alphabet, the new holding company that separated Google from its collection of speculative projects, has reframed the robots effort, moving it from a stand-alone division inside Google to a piece of the X research division. The company has also hired Hans Peter Brondmo, a technology industry veteran who last worked at Nokia, to help with management...
... After starting the robotics division, Mr. Rubin quickly went on a buying spree, purchasing a number of promising companies, including Boston Dynamics, the of experimental military robots, and Schaft, an elite group of Japanese roboticists from the University of Tokyo...
... Google’s robotics effort stalled after his departure, going through a variety of leaders, including James Kuffner, a Carnegie Mellon roboticist who has since joined Toyota’s research and development laboratory in Palo Alto, and Jonathan Rosenberg, who is a troubleshooter for Larry Page, the Google co-founder who is Alphabet’s chief executive... ( full article )
Drones in Commercial Use
Several states and businesses are competing to become a test zone in hopes of gaining traction in what promises to be a mushrooming industry. Businesses and State agencies are promoting the technology to improve their operations. Soon the friendly skies will be filled with drones.
Most Popular Articles for 2015 - Did some of them predict the future?
Smart Homes, Robotics, Automation, Unmanned Vehicles, Solar and Wind Energy. Regardless of where you work or what you do, these topics are affecting your life and will continue to do so in the future.
Robotics, reshoring, and American jobs
By Charles Orlowek for The Hill: Good news? Boston Consulting Group foresees more large manufacturers boosting production for the American market by adding capacity in the U.S. itself, compared with any other country. It cites “decreasing costs and improved capabilities of advanced manufacturing technologies such as robotics." Under this optimistic scenario, how much value would American workers add? When robotics and other automation gets built for, and installed in American workplaces, where are jobs created?
Increasingly, these jobs are being created and sustained outside the United States, even for domestic factories.
The first industrial robots were developed and manufactured by Americans, and General Motors became the first user, in 1961. Over recent decades, however, the domestic robot industry has declined. A Commerce Department national security assessment from 1991 asserted that American robot manufacturers lost market share throughout the 1980s, with shipments of U.S.-manufactured robots falling by 33 percent between 1984 and 1989, despite robust domestic demand and a weak dollar. Cont'd...
Robotics at the Distributed Intelligent Systems Lab at GE Global Research
At GEs Global Research Center, were also looking at the next generation of robotics - drones for aerial-based surveillance and inspection, small scale crawlers for in-situ inspection, and mobile collaborative robotics for things like machine tending in our factories.
Upcoming Tradeshow, Conference & Exhibition Summary - Feb, Mar, April & May 2016
Here is a summary of what Tradeshows, Conferences & Exhibitions to look forward to in the coming months.
Getting Started with Collaborative Robots - Part 4 - Assess Your Potential Applications
Documenting the actual process will allow you to evaluate if the process can be automated. This will also give you a starting point on cell performance and improvement opportunities.
Special Tradeshow Coverage for Advanced Manufacturing Conference & Expo 2016
Advanced Manufacturing Conference & Expo 2016 will be held from February 9th - 11th in Anaheim, California. This RoboticsTomorrow.com Special Tradeshow report aims to bring you news, articles and products from this years event.
Looking for a few good robots
By Adam Zewe for Harvard News: If you have a soft spot for robotics, this competition is right up your alley.
The 2016 Soft Robotics Competitions offer anyone with an interest in robotics the chance to design and build their own soft robot using the resources available in the open-source Soft Robotics Toolkit.
Now in its second year, the competition was developed by Conor Walsh, assistant professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Dónal Holland, visiting lecturer in engineering sciences, as a way to encourage individuals to take advantage of the resources provided in the Soft Robotics Toolkit.
The toolkit, which incorporates contributions from researchers from Harvard and other institutions, provides a set of intellectual tools that one can use to design and construct a robot using soft, flexible materials. It includes resources such as step-by-step instructions on building actuators and sensors, lists of suggested materials, and how-to fabrication videos.
The ultimate goal of the competition is to encourage others to find innovative applications for soft robotics technology and continue expanding interest in this relatively new field. Cont'd...
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