Automate 2013 held last week in Chicago seemed all about integrating vision capabilities into robotic tasks. The epitome of this was the Industrial Perception robot quickly choosing and grabbing randomly sized and stacked boxes from the back of a truck.

The new collaborative cage-free robots from Rethink Robotics and Universal Robots drew large crowds.

Another crowd-pleaser was Adept’s new mobility platform, Lynx, which doesn’t require floor or ceiling markings for it to safely guide itself from place to place.

The vendors at ProMat don’t call their robots robots; they referred to them as being automatic or autonomous material handling devices and systems.

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