They want to communicate more accurately, resolve issues faster and with higher levels of satisfaction than at present. They also want to enable more complex communication. And they want to do it amiably. As we move toward the Internet of Things, more players will enter the fray – all having the same goal. Google appears…
Agricultural robot market anticipated to reach $16.3 billion by 2020
In a new $7,800 report by Wintergreen Research, significant growth is anticipated over the remainder of this decade in every aspect of farming, milking, food production and animal control. Automated and robotic processes will achieve crop-yield increases, alleviate illegal worker practices, reduce the use of herbicides and can open up agriculture to 24 hour days.…
Overhead Transmission Line Inspection Robots
Japanese start-up HiBot, a maker of various types of robots for commercial use such as industrial pipeline cleaning, also developed a high transmission line inspection robot name Expliner. Last week HiBot announced a partnership with Hitachi High-Tech Group to expand the development and distribution of that robot. Hitachi High-Tech has been inventing and manufacturing railroad track/wire…
Competing Sales Reports for Industrial Robotics
Research and Markets, an online market research store, is offering a new $3,000 report, Global and Chinese Automotive Industrial Robotics Industry Report 2013-2014, with figures that differ sharply from the data provided by the International Federation of Robotics. Excerpts from the Research and Markets report: Global industrial robotics market valued around $11.1 billion in 2012…
In the news: Intuitive Surgical
Mini-tender offer: TRC Capital Corp, a private firm founded by a Canadian securities lawyer, has made a mini-tender offer to purchase 250,000 shares of Intuitive Surgical stock at a price slightly below the current market price. Mini-tender offers, because they are offers to purchase less than 5% of the company’s securities, are not governed by…
Future Robots
The robot revolution is upon us. There should be no misconception about this. Robot development has expanded to an audience of tinkerers, college degree programs, industrial developers and major suppliers of hardware. The robot industry in North America is estimated to be a $1.3 billion market and growing rapidly. The concept of the robot has […]
Bloomberg Businessweek says: “Factory Jobs Are Gone. Get Over It.”
Although politicians and economists may have been aggravated by the article, the figures are impressive and worthy of study. Manufacturing makes up 12% of the U.S. economy with only 10% of the non-farm workforce. Also, during the period from 1980 to 2012 there was a 189% gain in manufacturing output and a tripling of manufacturing…
Beam+ remote presence robots getting affordable
Suitable Technologies just announced their new Beam+ remote presence robot and is offering the first 1,000 units at a price of $995 (thereafter it will be $1,995). First shipments are scheduled for Summer, 2014. The new Beam+ clearly separates from the corporate Beam in their advertising videos on their website: Beam has a leasing plan and…
Lasers and Mechatronics
I am certainly no expert on the subject of lasers, but I have recently been involved in a couple of projects that involve their application and I am quickly coming up the learning curve. Using light energy to produce heat is probably not as miraculous-sounding as doing precision surgery to destroy cancer cells, stereo lithography […]
Brainlike computing – something big is happening
This infographic on the state of AI by Best Computer Science Degrees doesn't reflect the recent Nest Labs acquisition by Google. Nevertheless one can see that speedy computers and libraries of digital experiences are starting to crack human skills like information summarization and language processing. A new series of chips facilitating biological machine learning will be coming…
Harvest Automation rolls out bots for nurseries
Harvest Automation, a Massachusetts-based start-up, has begun shipping their robots. After five years and an A, B and C round of equity funding, plus some debt, totalling almost $25 million, their HV-100 mobile robots are finally coming to market. One Florida nursery said: Robot operating cost alone was quite competitive, but when we considered all…
Google acquires Nest for $3.2 billion
In another surprise release to the press, Google announced the acquisition of Nest Labs, the inventor and manufacturer of the stylish learning thermostat device, for $3.2 billion. According to Aaron Tilley of Forbes, Google has attempted several times to gain access to “connected home” type systems – including its own energy monitoring service. The smart thermostat…
New-tech grippers hit the market
Empire Robotics, a Boston-based start-up, is beginning to sell their VERSABALL kits, a new-tech jamming gripper enabling adaptive gripping operations with a single inexpensive tool. Filled with a granular material, in one mode it is squishy enough to envelop an object. Then, when a vacuum is created inside the ball, the granules get pulled together,…
Everything is Mechatronic
My brother-in-law says “Surgeons operate, lawyers litigate.” His way of saying that we tend to deal with everything based on our areas of expertise. I plead guilty as charged, to me, everything seems to be mechatronic in nature. Some of the most unlikely things are mechatronic. Chicken nuggets? Yup, you bet. Especially the dinosaur shaped […]
Are investments in robotics capital intensive?
In a recent post in IEEE Spectrum Automaton, Robert Morris abstracted a paper he wrote with Richard Green, a finance professor at CMU. The thesis is that robotic ventures are not capital intensive but instead are capital efficient. Both are financial terms. capital-intensive (of a business or industrial process) requiring the investment of large amounts of money…
What is Engineering?
Einstein said “Scientists investigate that which already is; engineers create that which has never been”. What engineering consists of can be hard to define because it covers so much. Everything man made is the result of engineering in some form. In a broad sense, engineering has been a part of life since creation, man is […]
Snap 2014: Aerial drones and 3D mapping software for civil engineering surveying
An Irish surveyor tested results (and had those results peer reviewed through the local university) of surveys done by drone and software vs. doing it by hand (which took days longer). The surveyor is now prepared to stand by drone and software results in a court of law. The Irish surveyor used a Slovenian UAS…