Japan Virtual Robotic Challenge - Fostering Innovation
Many robotic competitions in the world including DARPA and JVRC have a homogeneous goal: to significantly impact the human society by their contributions.
The artist who turned his dead cat into a drone is now building a helicopter out of a cow
From Business Insider:
It all started in 2012, when his cat Orville got hit by a car. Jansen decided it would be a shame to simply bury his late feline friend, so he drew inspiration from his pet's namesake — Orville Wright, one of the Wright Brothers, the inventors of heavier-than-air flight. Jansen gutted Orville, preserved him, and turned him into a custom quadcopter...
... When a friend offered him a dead badger, he immediately accepted and soon settled on a use for it: a submarine. The project is called "Das Boot," a play on the famous German U-boat film "Das Boot," as well as the Dutch word for "badger" — "das." ( full story )
Five Open Source AutoPilot UAV Projects
Here are five open source Autopilot UAV projects that are helping accelerate the adoption of autopilot drones.
CES 2016 - Autonomous Cars Set To Dominate
BY DAVID GILBERT For International Business Times: As cars become less about horsepower and torque and more about the technology inside, CES has become one of the most important showcases of the year for auto manufacturers. It's a sea change in how cars are built and marketed, with technology now the core, rather than an added feature. Connected, autonomous and electric vehicles will all be on display at CES 2016, with some of the world’s most talk-about companies in the field looking to make a major impact.
First up will be Faraday Future, the secretive startup based in Los Angeles and backed by a Chinese billionaire. It is set to unveil its first ever concept design on Jan. 4, and while all the company has said so far is that it will be an electric vehicle, it is widely believed to feature autonomous capabilities.
While Faraday Future is a relative unknown, one of the world’s biggest automotive companies, Ford, will also be at CES announcing news about the autonomous car it has been testing internally for several years. Among the announcements expected is apartnership with Google to build some of Google’s fleet of self-driving cars. Cont'd...
Startup Gets $11M Funding for GPS-enabled Robots
In our automated future, the navigation capabilities of autonomous vehicles, devices and machines will demand high precision, stability and flexibility.
Google Attracts Top U.S. Automakers With Self-Driving Technology
Jack Clark for Bloomberg Business: Google’s self-driving car technology is attracting top U.S. automakers, as Ford, Fiat Chrysler and General Motors talk with the company while laying the groundwork for a future with autonomous cars.
Ford Motor Co. and Google are discussing working together, including in a joint venture to build cars using Google’s technology, said a person familiar with the talks who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.
That follows comments in October from Mark Reuss, product development chief for General Motors Co., that the automaker was “very interested” in exploring ways its manufacturing skills could complement Google’s system. Sergio Marchionne, chief executive officer of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, has said repeatedly the past few months that his company wants to work on autonomous driving with technology companies such as Apple Inc. and Google.
“We are entering the era of the technology and software-defined vehicle,” said Thilo Koslowski, a vice president in the automotive practice at Gartner Inc. “You’re just seeing the auto industry recognize the importance of that.” Cont'd...
2016 Will Be A Pivotal Year For Social Robots
There really is an unusual affinity for human-like robotic things - which is why so much money is flowing to adapt these new social robots to quickly speak Chinese and Japanese in addition to English and to provide localized apps for their software stores.
Drone Light Painting - The Christmas Edit
From Ascending Technologies' blog:
The moves of the LED drone were shot while taking a long exposure photograph of every scene. Up to 10 minutes exposure time were needed. Additionally the flights have been filmed with an A7S Mark ii. In post processing the stills from the original drone flights were visualized via VFX and combined with further video footage.
The Drone Light Painting flights have been performed at airspeeds of 2 m/s with the patented V-Form Octocopter AscTec Falcon 8. Santa Claus throwing the presents into the chimneys and the snowflakes in the starting sequence of course are animated GIFs, yet based on flown paintings. Probably it was possible to do any drone light painting you like... ( more )
Automating the Chemo Compounding Process
RIVA uses automation of sterile manipulations and isolation of the compounding area to solve major safety issues with manual compounding, which are accuracy of every dose measurements and assuring sterility of every finished compound.
Getting Started with Collaborative Robots - Part 3 - Get the team on board with robots
In this section, we'll discuss how to present the idea of automating your production with your workforce, and how to help diminish fears of working with robots.
Building the Steam Controller
From Valve:
When we first started designing hardware at Valve, we decided we wanted to try and do the manufacturing as well. To achieve our goal of a flexible controller, we felt it was important to have a similar amount of flexibility in our manufacturing process, and that meant looking into automated assembly lines. It turns out that most consumer hardware of this kind still has humans involved in stages throughout manufacturing, but we kind of went overboard, and built one of the largest fully automated assembly lines in the US. Our film crew recently put together a video of that assembly line, showcasing exactly why robots are awesome.
The New Family Member: A Robotic Caregiver
The issue of nursing care in an ageing society is a major social concern and will continue to be so. Therefore, we can expect to see robotic devices become the caregivers of the future.
Getting Started with Collaborative Robots - Part 2 - How to Identify Potential Processes for Automation
At this point, we need to discuss the strengths and limitations of process automation with collaborative robots.
Road to Robotic Parking Is Littered With Faulty Projects
From New York Times:
It seemed like the perfect night life accessory for the South Beach set — an automated robotic parking garage where trendy clubgoers could park their Porsches with a futuristic touch of a button.
Forget hiding your GPS and favorite Fendi sunglasses from a valet who might ding your new alloy wheels; this garage would park cars itself.
Instead, malfunctions lasted for hours. Cars were smashed, and faulty machinery fell several stories to the ground. Sometimes vehicles were stuck for so long that garage operators had to pay for customers’ taxis... ( full story )
Drone giant DJI launches crop-spraying drone
From BBC:
Billion-dollar drone company DJI is expanding from consumer and camera drones into the agriculture industry.
The Chinese firm's latest model is a crop-spraying drone, which it claims is "40 times more efficient" than manual spraying, despite having just 12 minutes of flight time.
It will be released in China and Korea where hand-spraying is more common.
DJI made $500m (£332m) in drone sales in 2014 and some analysts predict the firm will hit $1bn in sales this year.
The Agras MG-1 has eight rotors and can carry up to 10kg of crop-spraying fluids per flight.
The foldable device is also dustproof, water-resistant and made of anti-corrosive materials, the firm says on its website (in Chinese).
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ST Robotics Develops the Workspace Sentry for Collaborative Robotics
The ST Robotics Workspace Sentry robot and area safety system are based on a small module that sends an infrared beam across the workspace. If the user puts his hand (or any other object) in the workspace, the robot stops using programmable emergency deceleration. Each module has three beams at different angles and the distance a beam reaches is adjustable. Two or more modules can be daisy chained to watch a wider area. "A robot that is tuned to stop on impact may not be safe. Robots where the trip torque can be set at low thresholds are too slow for any practical industrial application. The best system is where the work area has proximity detectors so the robot stops before impact and that is the approach ST Robotics has taken," states President and CEO of ST Robotics David Sands.
