With light sabres, Yaskawa equipped robots. Hmmmmmm.
For this year’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics, the robotic company equipped two robotic arms with Jedi and Sith light sabres and taught them to fight. OK, maybe not to fight but it makes a nice fight choreography as shown in the video below.
This is much better than the first time Yaskawa gave Light sabers to their robots and simply made them dance (without fighting at all). The dance is shown below.
Via IEEE Spectrum.
Robotiq Gripper with Yaskawa Arms
It is always exciting to see Quebec robotic innovation. Robotiq is a Quebec company that developed a very interesting robotic gripper that can adapt to various types of objects as shown in the video below.
Even more impressive, when the Adaptive Gripper is combined with the Motoman SDA10D dual-arm robotic system by Yaskawa, the result is a very powerful robot capable of manipulating a large variety of objects very precisely. The kitting example below illustrates the system capabilities very well.
Robot arms skilled at wielding knives and carving meat, can be a bit scary, specially for us fleshy humans.
Nevertheless, the HAMDAS-R by Mayekawa Manufacturing is a very impressive machine. It is capable of de-boning ham using a razor sharp knife by adapting to the shape and size variations of the meat pieces. Having such a great adaptability for a robot is remarkable since usually they perform very structured tasks that do not tolerate too much variation.
Via BotJunkie.
By combining one of their holonomic (omnidirectional) youBot mobile platforms with the Titan, their largest and strongest robotic arm, Kuka created the strongest mobile robot ever. Giants planet-defending robots, here we go!
Via Hizook.
Nao Close-up
Nao keeps making headlines and becoming more and more popular. The little humanoid has been featured on Fox News.
As reported by the anchors, University of Hertfordshire is developing the robot’s response to human emotions. This aims to create better communication between robots and humans. This way, very similar to human children, Nao could learn form the emotional response of a human to a particular situation and act in a very accordingly.
A well known robot with this sort of capabilities is Leonardo from the MIT Media Lab (shown in the video below).
Via Singularity Hub.
According to an article in Usine Nouvelle, the robotics market largely picked up in 2010 as opposed to 2009.
Growth is very strong especially in industrial robotics.
The large crowds at the Automatica 2010 exhibition in Germany confirmed the trend.
Robotization in German is also stronger than in countries like France for example.
The International Federation of Robotics has announced that 2009 saw a drop of -45 % in orders but that 2010 is currently seeing an increase of +50 %.
Watch the speed and accuracy of this industrial robotic arm.
Developed by MIMIX Motion, this Delta (a parallelogram) robot has 4 axes that converge into one where the gripper is located.
The latter always stays correctly orientated in the same way thanks to 4 arms (we talk about a parallel robot.)
In the video below, look closely at what the arm does. It goes to search for balls in order to place them around or in the center circle.
The speed is already quite extraordinary, but more impressive is how the Delta gets around the balls without ever touching them and always at full speed.
Could a human do the same thing? : -) It would be difficult.
The manufacturer of the Kuka industrial robotic arm has unveiled a mobile platform with open interfaces and open source software.
It’s a first: a manufacturer of industrial robots heading towards consumer robotics.
The arm has a multidirectional mobile platform, a hand with 5 degrees of freedom and two fingers for gripping.
KUKA, a giant in industrial robotics wants to take a step forward in education and research.
What’s more, a dedicated site has been created: www.kuka-youbot.com
The company, Adept, a leader in industrial robotics has just acquired MobileRobots Inc, a specialist in mobile robotics.
This is a significant take-over because it’s unusual.
MobileRobots, a New Hampshire company with annual revenues of 5 million dollars, provides autonomous robot and self-guided vehicle solutions.
Adept, with this acquisition, will be able to increase the productivity of its robots, especially in an unstructured environment.
Founded in 1983, Adept which specializes in vision-guided robotics systems with annual revenues of 50 million dollars. It’s the leading manufacturer in industrial robotics based in the United States.
See the press release on Adept.com.
The German Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics has run some experiments on man-machine collisions.
Here, it’s rather a case of a Kuku robotic arm against a mannequin head (the same as those you see in car crash-tests).
This type of experiment enables the development of anti-collision and safety mechanisms to be implemented in industrial robots in order to minimize the number of potential injuries.
These tests follow those we mentioned to you two weeks ago in this blog.
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