Agile Automation for Small-Batch Manufacturing
While the popular view of robots may be car assembly, in fact, 90 percent of manufacturing today is not automated and takes place in small and medium size companies.
2019 Robot Launch startup competition is open!
It’s time for Robot Launch 2019 Global Startup Competition! Applications are now open until September 2nd 6pm PDT. Finalists may receive up to $500k in investment offers, plus space at top accelerators and mentorship at Silicon Valley Robotics co-work space.
Winners in previous years include high profile robotics startups and acquisitions:
2018: Anybotics from ETH Zurich, with Sevensense and Hebi Robotics as runners-up.
2017: Semio from LA, with Appellix, Fotokite, Kinema Systems, BotsAndUs and Mothership Aeronautics as runners up in Seed and Series A categories.
Flexibility of Mobile Robots Supports Lean Manufacturing Initiatives and Continuous Optimizations of Internal Logistics at Honeywell
Three mobile robots from Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) are helping Honeywell Safety & Productivity Solutions keep its manufacturing processes lean and agile and optimizing workflows by automating the transfer of materials throughout the facility.
How Drones Are Disrupting The Insurance Industry
Insurance companies already employ 17% of all commercial drones. Drones can play a part in all the stages of the insurance lifecycle, especially claims management and fraud prevention.
#292: Robot Operating System (ROS) & Gazebo, with Brian Gerkey
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Brian Gerkey, CEO of Open Robotics about the Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo. Both ROS and Gazebo are open source and are widely used in the robotics community. ROS is a set of software libraries and tools, and Gazebo is a 3D robotics simulator. Gerkey explains ROS and Gazebo and talks about how they are used in robotics, as well as some of the design decisions of the second version of ROS, ROS2.
Brian Gerkey
Brian Gerkey is the CEO of Open Robotics, which seeks to develop and drive the adoption of open source software in robotics. Before Open Robotics, Brian was the Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage, a computer scientist in the SRI Artificial Intelligence Center, a post-doctoral scholar in Sebastian Thrun‘s group in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. Brian did his PhD with Maja Matarić in the USC Interaction Lab.
Links
Piab’s Kenos KCS Gripper
Piab’s Kenos KCS gripper enables a collaborative robot to handle just about anything at any time. Combining Piab's proprietary air-driven COAX vacuum technology with an easily replaceable technical foam that molds itself around any surface or shape, the gripper can be used to safely grip, lift and handle any object. Standard interface (ISO) adapters enable the whole unit to be attached to any cobot type on the market with a body made in a lightweight 3D printed material. Approved by Universal Robots as a UR+ end effector.
Industrial Robotics Companies to Watch Out for in 2020
The role of robots is increasing in the automation of business processes. Robots are even touching human life and are also being used in customer-facing roles.
6 Disrupting Trends in Industrial Robotics Poised To Transform Manufacturing
As it is clear that industrial robotics would continue to transform every sector in several ways, here are some of the prominent trends that would play a vital role in the coming years.
What You Need to Know to Work With a Collaborative Robot System
Each of the four types of collaborative robot operation permit varying amounts of interaction between people and robots. Based on the risk assessment, each type will also allow you to remove a portion or all of the safety fencing.
Evolution of Embedded Vision Technologies for Robotics
The traditional vision architecture is changing, with an evolution from cameras and sensors to networked and smart-enabled, compact embedded devices with the processing power required for real-time analysis.
Will Creating Robots for Space Travel Become More Necessary in the Near Future?
The good news is that space-based exploration, travel and research are all ramping up not just at renowned organizations like NASA, but also at privatized operations such as Space-X and Made In Space.
The Power of Adaptive Robotic EOAT
The challenge is that traditional robots have been designed to perform a single task extremely efficiently. But when the item or the task changes these traditional machines need to be reintegrated and reprogrammed.
Acura Provides All Access Look into the Performance Manufacturing Center (PMC)
"Inside PMC" is an all-access pass to one of the world's most advanced manufacturing facilities and home of the second-generation Acura NSX supercar
Making sense of vision and touch: #ICRA2019 best paper award video and interview
PhD candidate Michelle A. Lee from the Stanford AI Lab won the best paper award at ICRA 2019 with her work “Making Sense of Vision and Touch: Self-Supervised Learning of Multimodal Representations for Contact-Rich Tasks”. You can read the paper on arxiv here.
Audrow Nash was there to capture her pitch.
And here’s the official video about the work.
Full reference
Lee, Michelle A., Yuke Zhu, Krishnan Srinivasan, Parth Shah, Silvio Savarese, Li Fei-Fei, Animesh Garg, and Jeannette Bohg. “Making sense of vision and touch: Self-supervised learning of multimodal representations for contact-rich tasks.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.10191 (2018).
Bringing Robotic Surgery to Places Where Others Don’t Want to Go
Our concentration is to develop a surgical robot to go where it is needed the most, bringing the best competencies to where the injury happened. After all, if we can pilot a drone we should be able to operate a surgical robot.