I stumbled on some amazing videos of advanced machine tool centers at the European Machine Tool show in 2011. These machining centers were demonstrating some very high performance software called hyperMill developed by Daishin Seiki of Japan. The company’s website is in Japanese, but you will find some high profile video on YouTube, and it […]
Robotics And The Mountain Of Things We Throw Away
“Cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash – surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.” John Steinbeck, Travels with…
Remote Presence Products Proliferating
Y-Combinator’s Spring 2012 success story Double Robotics, which has already sold 600 units in pre-orders, just received another $250,000 from the new Grishin Robotics Robotic Investment Fund, a fund whose strategy is to invest in consumer-oriented products at the scale-up stage of their development. Double Robotics’ mobile iPad stand sells for $2,499 and utilizes the…
I.T. Plus Control means Profits
Information Technology (IT) departments are expected to have a dramatic impact on the companies they work for. Worldwide spending for IT is expected to be approximately $2.7 trillion. Across 12 departments of the US government IT spending was just over $50 Billion. Yes, that’s billion with a “b” and it’s your tax dollars and […]
iRobot Acquires Competitor Evolution Robotics for $74 million
Mint floor cleaning robots produced by Evolution Robotics differ from iRobot's methods; plan is for them to be developed and marketed as complementary. Evolution's CEO Paulo Pirjanian will become the new iRobot CTO. Financial downside of the acquisition is that iRobot must sell off Evolution's inventory at breakeven plus they acquired a loss of $7…
Is Baxter the Biggest Story in Robotics?
Is all the news coverage because it’s a good product and the market is ripe to buy that product? Let’s hope this is so. Every major newspaper, magazine and online service aired the launch and described Baxter, the shop-assistant robot. For my personal observations about my trip to Boston to see Baxter, and also a…
Rethink Robotics Launches Baxter the Robot
By Frank Tobe, editor/publisher, The Robot Report Yesterday was the launch of Rethink Robotics’ Baxter shop assistant robot. Many reporters, including myself, saw Baxter at Rethink’s headquarters in Boston in the past two months but were embargoed from writing about it until today, the launch date. Looking at the stories – as they appear all…
The Future of Manufacturing
The future of manufacturing is going to be based on parameters that we are not used to. The cost per unit is always a factor, but the enabling of new markets will be based on lowering the threshold to production. Most manufacturing processes have been focused on scaling up to very large volumes of parts […]
Tech Shop Comes to Town
I had read about Tech Shop in the trade press a few months ago. This is a great new concept in bringing the tooling necessary to turn any new idea into a functioning prototype. That functioning prototype can be converted into a volume manufacturable product. That product, depending on level of complexity, can be used […]
2011 Industrial & Service Robotics Statistics
The Intl. Federation of Robotics has released their 2012 books reflecting 2011 results, and projections for 2012-2015. Bottom line: 2011 was very successful for industrial robot manufacturers and growth rates will be in double digits for years to come. 2011 sales of industrial robots 166,000 units; $8.5 billion in sales are up 38% from 2010…
A Frank Review of the movie ‘Robot & Frank’
I hate to break this to you but the robot wasn’t a robot after all. It may have looked like Asimo, but it was really Rachael Ma dressed up in a robot costume; the robot’s voice wasn’t AI interaction but an actor reading lines to sound a little inhuman. But the movie itself was a…
A Frank Review of the movie ‘Robot & Frank’
By Frank Tobe, Editor and Publisher, The Robot Report My friends have been kidding me for months about the movie Robot & Frank (because my name is Frank, I’ve got gray hair, and I’m way into robots — I research, edit and publish The Robot Report and this blog). I have a Photoshop’d poster with…
Rexroth EasyHandling brochure describes approach to designing and implementing handling systems
Bosch Rexroth has published a brochure describing the EasyHandling solution, a comprehensive platform of components, drives and engineering software. Rexroth’s EasyHandling system is more than a modular set of mechanical components, it completes the evolutionary transition from high-quality electrical and mechanical elements to a comprehensive system solution built on standardized interfaces and interoperable controls. The brochure […]
Buyer Beware
This paid-for ad appeared in the Huffington Post. Investing in robotic stocks is complicated and some stocks aren’t worth that investment. I wrote about that, and about Quantum International, in a recent post. Read that article.
Control Hardware and Software
There has never been a single answer to the question of how we program control systems. This is because people write control programs that are designed to run on processors which are programmed by other people. Invariably personal preferences and subjective evaluations of what is important, what is necessary, what is preferable in the creation […]