
Source: Robotic Gizmos
In the past few months, we have covered plenty of interesting projects involving the Baxter Robot. This video shows how this robot can cooperate with humans to complete assembly tasks. The robot can pick parts and hold them in place to help the operator screw.
A Kinect 2 is used for gesture and speech recognition. The code for Kinect 2 Server is available online.
Robotic Industries Association Posted 11/02/2016
(Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA) – Robot orders and shipments in North America set new records in the first nine months of 2016, according to Robotic Industries Association (RIA), the industry’s trade group.
A total of 23,985 robots valued at $1.3 billion were ordered from North American companies in the first nine months of 2016, an increase of seven percent in units and three percent in dollars over the same period in 2015, which held the previous record. Robot shipments to North American customers through September totaled 22,050 robots valued at $1.3 billion, breaking the previous record set in 2015 by three percent in units and 11% in dollars.
The record sales levels were driven primarily by strong growth in demand from automotive OE...

Photo: Disney Research Meet Jimmy, a robot puppet powered by fluid actuators.
Like other Disney creations, Jimmy looks rather magical.
While humanoid robots can be painfully slow, Jimmy moves with lifelike speed and grace. A video posted earlier this year shows the robot waving at people, doing a little dance, drumming on a table. Just as impressive, Jimmy can safely operate near people, and by “near” we mean in contact with them. In the video, the robot plays patty-cake with a kid and even pats her cheeks—something you don’t see very often in human-robot interaction experiments.
There’s no magic, of course, just beautiful engineering. Jimmy is not powered by the bulky electric motors and gears commonly used in humanoid robots; instead, it relies on a new kind of actua...

Kawasaki Robotics (USA), Inc. Posted 09/07/2016
The next generation duAro robot is designed to work alongside humans on material handling, assembly, machine tending and dispensing applications.
Kawasaki introduces the “duAro”, an innovative and collaborative robot, to the North American market to expand the breadth of applications that can efficiently and cost-effectively be automated with a robot. The dual-arm horizontal articulated robot has the flexibility to be applied to production lines with a short product cycle and frequent changeovers, and it can safely collaborate with humans in work operations. With a small footprint and low price tag, it offers robot automation possibilities to companies of all sizes.
The duAro is the first dual-arm SCARA robot to operate on a single axis...

Chinese consumer manufacturer Midea, after having spent over $4 billion to acquire 94% of German robot maker Kuka, is planning to spend an additional $1.5 billion to turn itself into China's preeminent robot powerhouse.
It plans to build a factory located in Foshan City to expand its capacity to manufacture and assemble robots and robot components. Much of the production will be to produce automatons for homes and individuals - robots similar to SoftBank's Pepper - which consumers appear to be enamored of. Midea expects to ramp up production at the new facility from an initial 7,000 robots annually to 17,000 or more within 10 years.
Midea is China’s biggest manufacturer of air conditioners, refrigerators and home appliances, employing around 135,000 people...

Locus Robotics founder Bruce Welty explains how his company is developing better warehouse robots from scratch
To enable safe and efficient human–robot collaboration in shared workspaces, it is important for the robot to predict how a human will move when performing a task. While predicting human motion for tasks not known a priori is very challenging, we argue that single-arm reaching motions for known tasks in collaborative settings (which are especially relevant for manufacturing) are indeed predictable. Two hypotheses underlie our approach for predicting such motions: First, that the trajectory the human performs is optimal with respect to an unknown cost function, and second, that human adaptation to their partner's motion can be captured well through iterative replanning with the above cost function. The key to our approach is thus to learn a cost function that “explains” the motion of ...
Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) have been largely used in manufacturing and supply chain management. With the development of Auto-ID technologies like radio frequency identification (RFID), AGVs’ positioning could be enhanced. This paper demonstrates using magnetic field lines in the AGVs for precise coverage locating based on the errors’ suppression positioning method. Dolph-Chebyshev antenna array is used to enable AGVs with more precise location implementation. It is observed that the far-field active RFID system positioning accuracy is higher, the movement is more stable, and the fluctuating rate is smaller.

Apple kicked off today’s event by introducing a free recycling program featuring Liam, its California-developed robot that will take old phones apart

ETH Zurich spin-off Aerotain has created the most agile balloon you’ve ever seen

Universal Robots, the Danish manufacturer of a line of collaborative robots (also called "co-bots"), recently published financial statements which provide valuable insights into the growth potential of collaborative robots.
At present, sales of collaborative robots represent just 5% of the overall robot market. The collaborative robotics sector, according to multiple pay-for research reports, is expected to increase roughly tenfold between 2015 and 2020, reaching over $1 billion from approximately $95 million in 2014.
Universal Robots
In financial statements released in February, Universal Robots (UR) reported 2015 revenue of $61.44 million, a 91% increase over 2014, and net profit of $9.6 million before taxes for the year, up 122% over 2014. Unit sales, which began in 2009, ha...
The automation of the fourth industrial revolution is accelerating: By 2018, around 1.3 million industrial robots will be entering service in factories around the world. In the high-revenue automotive sector, global investments in industrial robots increased by a record-breaking 43 percent (2013-2014) within one year. Viewed on a cross-sector basis, the international market value for robotic systems now lies at around 32 billion US dollars. So says the 2015 World Robot Statistics, issued by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR).
We are very glad to welcome our new IFR Association member the Russian Association of Robotics (RAR) and IFR Robot Supplier member Carl Cloos Schweisstechnik, who just joined the International Federation of Robotics.
The global federation of robot manufacturers, IFR, mourns the loss of Joseph Engelberger. The father of robotics founded the company, Unimation Inc. in 1961, where he developed the first industrial robot, Unimate. So it was, that he launched the global revolution in industrial manufacturing.
3-5 Feb, 2016
A3 Business Forum
Registration is now open for the Association for Advancing Automation (A3) Business Forum. More than 500 global leaders from the robotics, machine vision, motion controls, motors, and other automation industries are expected to attend.
more