Navy pilot turned college professor jokes back and tells how MIT lab is enabling the use of inexpensive quadcopters with surveillance packages and tablet or smartphone front-end controllers for soldiers and first responders.
20 US Stocks Involved in the Robotics Industry
Is it time to invest? Check this list of 20 US stocks involved in the robotics industry. Read Q&A on the subject by CNET’s Tim Hornyak. List also includes stock symbols and nine additional European and Japanese robotic manufacturers.
Differentiating Motion Control Products
One of the major topics among motion control professionals is the number of applications that are stand-alone, single axis systems with little or no external interaction between other motion systems. There is great debate about how much of the overall market is single axis and how much is multi-axis. The industry has always engineered high […]
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…
Hansen Medical’s Magellan Robotic System receives EU CE Mark approval
US FDA go-ahead for Magellan’s vascular intervention system still pending.
Us and Them: Informative and wonderfully graphic, from National Geographic Magazine
A visual overview of developments in social robots from National Geographic in their August issue. Wonderful pics; good overview; full of questions. (Much like the industry.)
Recent breakthroughs enabling consumer and commercial robotics
partnering into healthcare and other fields with it’s AVA robot. Other vendors (Vgo, Luna, BiliBot, etc.) also making inroads with low-cost telepresence robots. The use of
Korea robotics industry booming and receives additional governmental stimulus
Korea’s robotics industry is accelerating with record growth in output, sales and exports. According to a government survey of 395 firms, their combined sales nearly doubled to $2.1 billion last year from a year earlier. Total production volume and exports shot up 75% and 137% respectively. In January, seven ministries involving industry, education and the…
The Cost of Control
In the computer industry we hear interesting metrics about the ever increasing capabilities of processors and hardware. That capability is usually measured in a performance metric such as MIPS or Million Instructions Per Second. We don’t generally talk about capability per dollar spent. However, the cost of control is a major metric when evaluating control […]
Teledyne to provide Navy with 150 marine gliders for $53 million
The Navy plans to use the fleet of deep and shallow water gliders with their relative low cost, minimal power usage and longevity at sea, to acquire critical oceanographic data to improve positioning of fleets during naval maneuvers.
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…
Hardware, Software and Performance
In the industrial control world, its all about performance. With every year that passes control system performance improves. This is heavily influenced by the computer industry’s ever increasing cost effectiveness which has driven the convergence of so many industrial control products to PC based solutions. As control technology has progressed over the last few decades, […]
Putting the “Mecha” into Mechatronics
Motion control, machine automation, mechatronics, actuator technology, whatever you want to call it, the thing you have to keep in mind is that in motion control, tasking is mechanically bounded. The boundary conditions of the system are defined by the mechanical solution. It is generally impossible for the control system and power electronics to cause […]
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…
Driverless Cars and Trucks Demoed in Sweden; New Law Allows Driverless Cars in Nevada
The EU’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. VW and Volvo demoed driverless cars and trucks and compared their systems to Google’s driverless car (which last fall drove 140,000 driverless miles on California highways). In support of all…
American Robots in Japan Highlight Nuclear Safety Myth
Japan’s nuclear power authority didn’t have any emergency robots ready to assist with damage and control. Why were they caught unprepared? The ‘safety myth’: From the NY Times: “It’s a fact that there was an unreasonable overconfidence in the technology of Japan’s nuclear power generation.” The seniority system: Both iRobot and QinetiQ, companies that volunteered…
Reflections on Freedom
July 4th holiday weekend. A paid vacation day for most people, and a great day to hang out with friends and enjoy your favorite pastime. It is also a good day to pause and reflect on the freedom that we enjoy. The very fact that we are able to take a day off of […]
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…