Collaborative robots (cobots) are designed to operate around humans in a factory environment and to execute tasks in a human-like fashion. Interestingly, assembly tasks that are simple for humans to perform such as gripping, grasping, turning and rotating items require highly sophisticated reinforcement learning (RL) protocols and tactile sensors for cobots to repeatedly successfully perform. […]
The Ingenuity Helicopter sits exposed under the Perseverance Rover on Mars. Perseverance released the debris shield that protected Ingenuity during landing. | Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA is preparing to launch its Ingenuity Helicopter on Mars. Ingenuity is a demo to test the first powered flight on another planet. NASA is targeting no earlier than April […]
Multiple drones move a single box | Image Credit: Georgia Tech Many parcel delivery drones of the future are expected to handle packages weighing five pounds or less, a restriction that would allow small, standardized UAVs to handle a large percentage of the deliveries now done by ground vehicles. But will that relegate heavier packages […]
Many of the world’s great technologies realize their full potential only 50-100 years after invention. Consider the printing press. During the first century after the Gutenberg press was invented, books were printed in impressive quantities but lacked their current level of utility. Why? It was simply because the pages lacked consistent numbers. The post Innovation […]
MIT built a deep learning neural network to aid the design of soft robots, such as these iterations of a robotic elephant. | Photo Credit: MIT There are some tasks traditional robots – the rigid and metallic kind – simply aren’t cut out for. Soft-bodied robots, on the other hand, may be able to interact […]
Exyn Technologies’ drone is autonomously piloted and can go where other drones cannot. | Image credit: Exyn Technologies Exyn Technologies announced it has achieved level 4A autonomy, on the aerial autonomy scale of 1 to 5. This capability enables the deployment of Exyn drones into applications that were previously difficult to pilot, or risky for […]
SICK and Universal Robots (UR) announced a new safety solution for the safeguarding of accessible cobot applications for the URe Series of cobots. When combined, the sBot safety system and URCap from SICK increase productivity with immediate automated restart and profit from an easy configuration of the safety system directly from the UR teach pendant. […]
NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter unlocked its rotor blades on Mars. | Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU I’ve been captivated by the NASA Ingenuity Helicopter in the past month. I was curious to know more about the helicopter’s localization and state estimation technology – what sensors and software does the helicopter use to figure out its position and orientation? Luckily, […]
The race was on – safely – for more than 50,000 spectators Saturday at the 147th Kentucky Derby in part thanks to Pittsburgh-based AERAS. The company used its patented charged-electrostatic drone technology to sanitize Churchill Downs against COVID-19. This in part helped allow fans to return to the oldest sporting event in the United States. […]
Robot orders in Q1 2021 were up 20% over the same period in 2020, according to the Association for Advancing Automation (A3). There were substantial increases in purchases coming from non-automotive industries, including metals (up 86%), life sciences/pharmaceutical/biomed (up 72%), food & consumer goods (up 32%), and others (12%). The post Robot orders for non-automotive […]
