Two NY Times articles expose details about the treatment of 400,000+ Chinese workers involved in the production of Apple products: (1) In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad and (2) How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work. Editorial: Two solutions to the question of what can and should Apple and other companies…
The Future of Chinese-manufactured Apple Products
China’s economic miracle has lifted countless millions of supremely poor people out of poverty. But this progress has come at a price. The Apple Corporation’s experience in manufacturing its popular iPhones, iPods and iPads in China – recently described in the N.Y. Times – has subjected many of those making Apple products to unsafe and…
Doing More In the US
The old business school motto, doing more with less, can have some interesting applications. American manufacturing is going through a renaissance of sorts. Across many industries there are substantial efforts to bring more manufacturing back to the US. A lot of it is precisely ‘doing more with less’. How do we make the same […]
Stocks of Robot Manufacturers Still Recovering
Click image to enlarge The latest ROBO-STOX™ chart – covering the four year period from 12/31/2007 to 12/31/2011 – shows that worldwide stock performance of robotic stocks over the last four years has been disappointing for investors. Robotic industrials are still down 28% from their 2007 highs and did poorer than the Dow Jones Industrial…
Divergent Views on Communicating with Machines
Most products at CES were demonstrating “smart” in that they are connected to the Internet, have sensors or AI that gather and process data and make decisions. The Apple iPad has already changed our expectations as to how we interact with our computers, tablets and phones. And Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Kinect are leading us…
Servo or Drive?
When does a rotating load require a drive or a servo? I run into this issue on a weekly basis. Everyone has their own answer. As much as this may be a matter of opinion for most people, there are some guidelines that can help make this question more straightforward. Some people define servo’s […]
Podcast: Divergent Views on Communicating with Machines
Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft and Dr. Dieter Zetsche, Chairman, Mercedes Benz Much of what I saw at CES 2012 was about products being upgraded to “smart” under the premise that smart connectivity enables consumer convenience. It was definitely on the minds of most of those attending. That’s why the CES keynote speeches were so well attended:…
Nippon Pulse Introduces Green Drive Linear Actuator
Nippon Pulse has announced the introduction of its newest linear servo product, the Green Drive linear actuator. The Green Drive is an all-inclusive linear direct drive actuator suited for high-performance applications requiring high force, accuracy, and precision. Features of Nippon Pulse’s Green Drive include: • Acceleration (peak) force of up to 600N for 40 seconds […]
Minarik Drives Announces Distribution Agreement with Kaman Industrial Technologies
Minarik Drives is very pleased to announce that it has signed and implemented a National Distribution Agreement with Kaman Industrial Technologies. This agreement will further enhance a partnership that will provide Minarik Drives with 200 new locations and will provide Kaman Industrial Technologies a premier DC drive and drive systems product line. “We are very […]
My kind of movie: Robot and Frank
Shown at Sundance and starring Frank Langella, Susan Saradon, James Marsden and Liv Tyler. Offbeat buddy movie about an ex-jewel thief whose grown kids install a robot as his caretaker.
Competition for Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci Surgical System
Funded by a NSF grant, seven identical Raven II open source surgical robots using open source software (ROS), will be placed in seven universities. Four more universities are in line waiting to get their own Raven II robots. “These [seven or eleven universities] are leading labs in the nation in the field of surgical robotics,…
Consumer Robots at CES 2012
25+ robotic vendors; a few hits; some duds; and, except for Nathan’s hotdogs, bad food. CES is always a wonderful experience. This year the unadvertised theme was digital to smart to every type of consumer product. Lots of pictures and links. Read the review.
CES 2012 and Consumer Robotics: Informative yet confusing… and bad food!
CES 2012 was a mammoth display of the trend toward smart, connected devices for every form of consumer activity: toys, appliances, entertainment, health, mobility, etc. More than 20,000 new products were launched at this year’s CES and a large portion of them could be considered “smart.” “Smart” (robotic-like) products profess to add value, assure safety,…
The Next Industrial Revolution
Modern manufacturing is largely the result of Henry Ford’s innovation, assembly line mass production. The goal of which was primarily to make cars available to large numbers of people due to significantly lowered costs. No other single innovation has contributed as much to increase the quality of living conditions throughout the world. Mass production has […]
Next Generation Manufacturing
As a follow on to the last post, I have been investigating the cost of manufacturing equipment. The classic machine tool is the most widely used piece of equipment for fabricating just about anything made out of metal. The machine tool has been quietly undergoing it’s own revolution since it’s inception in the 1950’s. The […]
Disappointing 4-years for robotic stock investors
Year-end ROBO-STOX® results show that robotic industrials are down 28% from their 2007 highs and did poorer than the Dow Jones Industrial Average which is also still down 8.5%. Service robotic stocks are down 15% from 2007 while the NASDAQ is down 2.5%. Industrial robot companies represent 62% of the $9.3 billion industry revenue; service is…
Is 2012 The Year That Robot Applications Take Root?
Three competing ideas on a theme of using the cloud to provide apps, updates and libraries of robotic data are reviewed in depth here. – MyRobots, by Canadian RobotShop, will attempt to be a combination app store and Windows-like environment to permit robotics products to be monitored, repaired, and updated seamlessly. – Robots App Store,…
Is 2012 The Year That Robot Applications Take Root?
By Frank Tobe, Editor/Publisher, The Robot Report Tell us what apps you want. In July of 2008, the app store concept was launched by Apple and it has dramatically changed the mobile industry. Over 1.2 billion apps were downloaded between Christmas and New Year according to Flurry Analytics. That’s about 60 percent higher than every…
Study shows positive attitude toward healthcare telepresence robots
In a study to assess how surgical intensive care patients and their families perceived robotic telepresence, 92% of respondents were comfortable with the robot and 84% believed that communication was “easy.” Further, 90% did not perceive the robot as annoying and 92% did not believe that “the doctor cared less about them” because of the…
ABC Nightline Interviews Lifelike Hanson Robot
“It feels weird to be a robot sometimes,” the robot said in the interview. “You know, like I shouldn’t exist outside of a science fiction story. It makes me wonder if this is actually real like if it isn’t a dream or a story being written by a science fiction writer.” Throughout the interview and…
2012, Year of Opportunity
2011 was a difficult year for many sectors of the US economy. World markets were about the same as at home. The general weakness was felt world wide with currencies, especially the dollar and the Euro, declining due to bank failures in EU, financial crises in Greece and Italy, unrest in the Middle east creating […]