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,…
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…
Lively international innovation summit about robotics
In Lyon, France, 14th to 16th March, 2012. Save the date! By Frank Tobe, Editor/Publisher, The Robot Report (www.TheRobotReport.com)and Catherine Simon, General Secretary, French Federation of Robotics Today’s devices are becoming smarter and connected. They sense their environment, process the data collected and act upon their decisions autonomously or semi-autonomously. The transformation is beyond productivity and enters…
Robotics is a Highly Fragmented Industry With Few Common Standards or Platforms
by Frank Tobe, Publisher, The Robot Report with Manoj Sahi, roboticist and educator, India Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies, wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell highly specialized devices for business use, and a fast-growing number of start-up companies produce innovative…
Huge employer in China makes big step toward robots
Copied and cross-linked with permission from: The New Economy, November 17, 2011Foxconn, a big contractor for Apple and others, breaks ground for robot facilities. It plans to replace 500,000 workers with 1 million robots. Workers are seen inside a Foxconn factory in the township of Longhua in China’s southern Guangdong Province in this 2010 photo. After a spate…
Lots of robots coming onboard in 2013, 2014 and 2015
Pure science is an integral part of robotics and often leads to solutions for strategic needs for an audience of willing buyers. Here are a few examples of that process from companies with products scheduled to hit the marketplace in the next four years. Harvest Automation Servicing ornamental horticulture market ($35 billion industry) Focused on…
Emerging Underwater Businesses: Three Companies to Note
By Frank Tobe. Publisher, The Robot Report Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s Sentry ROV We’ve read about their use in last year’s Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill and their underwater repair work, traipsing the corridors and collecting rubble at Fukushima nuclear power plants, the exploits of James Cameron and his amazing underwater photos and movie…
Robotic Gift Suggestions for the 2011 Holiday Season
This holiday season, people are looking to get their money’s worth from gift giving. Gifts need to be either truly phenomenal, practical or inexpensive. In the phenomenal category, what’s more exciting than getting a robot as a holiday gift? The Robot Report, a site which tracks the business of robotics, has prepared this list of…
Notes from IROS 2011 San Francisco
San Francisco city view from aboard the IROS 2011 sunset dinner cruise party boat By Frank Tobe. Publisher, The Robot Report The week long IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2011) was host to more than 1,500 roboticists and robot-interested people from 40 different countries, including a prominent group of well-known speakers and…
“ROS Everywhere!” says Willow Garage’s Steve Cousins
Pieter Abbeel was one of this year’s MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 (TR 35) award winners as was Brian Gerkey of Willow Garage. Pieter and his team at UC Berkeley programmed a robot to learn how to perform tasks such as folding laundry without detailed instructions. Brian oversees development of the Willow Garage open…
China’s Mammoth Intro to Robotics
by Frank Tobe and Manoj Sahi According to Xinhua, the official press agency of the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will deploy 1 million robots over the next three years to improve efficiency and reduce labor for tasks better suited to a robot. The robots will be used…
Recent Breakthroughs Are Enabling Consumer and Low-cost Commercial Robots
by Frank Tobe and Manoj Sahi The consumer robotic market has been on a roller coaster ride of evolution and market penetration. The amount of money companies and consumers were paying for robots and the features that they were getting ultimately did not match up. Low-cost service robots have similar problems. The technologies and robot…
Robot Industry Stock Information Lacking
In early 2008 I asked my Merrill Lynch broker for a list of stocks of American robot manufacturers. He couldn’t provide me with more than two. So I went online with Bloomberg and found a list of 120 companies involved with automation. When I researched them, there were only a few in the U.S. and…
Driverless cars Demonstrated in Sweden
Test Vehicles Demonstrated at HAVEit’s Final Event, June 21-22, 2011 Last month in Borås, Sweden, the European Union’s HAVEit (Highly Automated Vehicles for Intelligent Transport) consortium, celebrated the final event of their multi-year research project by displaying driverless cars and trucks. HAVEit was set up to develop and demonstrate future driving possibilities. Volvo demonstrated Road Trains. Platooning…
An Inspiring Conversation with Amir Abo-Shaeer
Amir Abo-Shaeer is a high school physics teacher in Santa Barbara, California. But he is not just any physics teacher. He is the founder and Director of the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy, is the 2010 recipient of a $500,000 MacArthur Fellow award, and is the lead character in the book The New Cool by Neal Bascomb which tells the…
Robots at the Tepco Nuclear Facility in Fukushima, Japan
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Facility – Before Twin Disasters How did it come to be that Japan’s nuclear power authority didn’t have any emergency robots ready to assist with damage and control? Why were they caught unprepared? In the days after a giant tsunami knocked out Fukushima Daiichi’s cooling system, the prime minister’s office and…
If machines can’t eat it, machines shouldn’t make it!
So says the ad for Carl’s Jr. (promoting their chicken patty sandwich). The robot in Carl’s Jr’s new ad is one of many ads and films which attempt to portray robots as symbols for the evil, giant, alien machines that apply crumbs and other not-nice stuff to chicken patties, hot dogs, tortillas and other food,…
Pres. Obama Launches AMP with $70 million for Robotics
Manufacturing is not merely about giving people jobs. The next generation of technological innovations is intimately tied to production processes. (MIT Technology Review) This new partnership will make sure that tomorrow’s breakthroughs are America’s breakthroughs. (President Obama at CMU) With much fanfare, and a trip to the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, President Obama launched a…
Tough Transition from Industrial to Consumer/Service Robotics
Will big industrial robot makers such as ABB, Fanuc and Kuka, transition and begin making products for the consumer and service markets? I’m beginning to think not. And here are a few of my reasons: I’ve been impressed by the possibilities for power companies to reduce costs and expand safety and efficiency by adapting robots…
Coolest of the Cool – New Japanese Ball Drone
Just when we mastered our AR.Drone – playing games and taking pictures and videos of our flights – along comes a new Japanese entry: a spherical reconnaissance scout – with a single engine and eight movable “wings.” The drone can do 40 mph and is a lot of fun to boot. Over 1 million people…
The Critical Next Step In Robotics: AI
Thus far, the biggest hitch in the development of commercially feasible and consumer-friendly robots is not the robotic devices themselves, but the artificial intelligence that manages their activities and communicates with their users and managers. Andrew Ng, an Associate Professor at Stanford U’s AI Lab, made a wonderfully illuminating 16-minute video about the problems and…
Dissecting the Controversy About the Robotics Industry
Where are the robots? Where’s that $100 billion industry we’ve seen in the forecasts? Since the 1980’s we’ve seen robots outside of the factory – vacuums, drones, bomb disposal devices, embedded systems for cars, hazardous materials and location monitoring bots – but expected to see more. Our expectations are so much higher than what’s thus…