Рубрика: Robotics

In the cusp of building animal-like features (including humans) in robots and other machinery, the scientists have built the artificial flight mechanism for robots, which are naturally present in birds. Even if Pigeons may be considered rats of the sky, some scientists have found greater value in these urban birds while developing a PigeonBot.

Till now the features that used to differentiate between rigid drones and birds – modifying the shape of their wings by fanning out their feathers or shuffling them closer together or adjustments allowing birds to cut through the sky more nimbly – have become narrow. Making the use of new insights into exactly how pigeons’ joints control the spread of their wing feathers, scientists have created a robotic pigeon or PigeonBot, whose feathered wings change shape like the real one.

Researchers at Stanford University invented PigeonBot that has a pair of “biohybrid morphing wings.” The robot is being used to test out new control principles. One of the most interesting aspects of the PigeonBot is that the scientists fitted the flying robot with real bird feathers.

According to David Lentink, a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, the motions that bird wings make are seen as far superior to those of an aircraft: “it actually enables birds to fly further, longer, maneuver much better.” He further added, “I really love aircraft as well, but it just doesn’t compare to a bird.”

As per a report, to formulate the robotic design principles for soft feathered morphing wings, the researchers measured the kinematics of feathers as a function of both wrist and finger angle in animated pigeon cadavers using high-resolution motion capture (Materials and Methods). From these measurements, they derived the most parsimonious principles that explain how a bird articulates its flight feathers during wing morphing using the left and right wrist and finger joints as four independently controlled degrees of freedom.

Next, researchers used these design principles to develop a biohybrid morphing wing with 40 underactuated pigeon feathers, which are soft, robust, and light compared with previous robot feathered wings made from carbon and glass fiber. To test the effectiveness of their underactuated soft biohybrid morphing wing, researchers flexed and extended the wing dynamically in a wind tunnel and determined the robotic feather transfer functions under aerodynamic loading. Last, they demonstrated how asymmetric wing planform control via wrist and finger motion initiates turning flight in their new soft biohybrid aerial robot: PigeonBot.

As noted by BGR, the aim of the project wasn’t to just create lifelike bird bots that scientists could send into the skies for fun, but rather to give researchers an easier way to study how the wings of a pigeon work to keep it aloft. That plan has apparently worked splendidly, as a second study using the robotic wings revealed one of the secrets of how pigeon wings move during flight.

The researchers in that study, published in Science, explain that the feathers themselves have “hooks” that latch on to neighboring feathers as the bird flaps its wings. These hooks are so small that you can’t see them with the naked eye, but they were revealed using microscope technology.

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As the world advances with growing technologies, more people are becoming fearful about losing their jobs to robotics and automation technologies. However, experts have pressed over the need and potential of collaborative technologies, say cobots or collaborative robots.

Collaborative robots are a relatively new invention in the robotics industry, but already, there are several different kinds. Their instant success in a wide range of industries has spurred rapid product innovation, resulting in four major types of collaborative robots. Moreover, the different types of collaborative robots are defined by their safety and programming features. They are also categorized by the way in which they avoid potentially dangerous encounters with human workers. Each type of collaborative robot deploys unique methods and technologies to maintain a safe operating space – this difference defines which environments they’re best suited for.

According to Robotics Online, here are the four types of collaborative robots that are defined as safety monitored stop, speed and separation, power and force limiting, and hand guiding.

Safety Monitored Stop – Collaborative robots defined as safety monitored stop are intended for applications that have minimal interaction between the robot and human workers. Typically, these types of collaborative robots actually leverage an industrial robot with a series of sensors that stop robot operation when a human enters the work envelope.

Speed and Separation – These types of collaborative robots are similar to safety monitored stop collaborative robots in the fact that they leverage an industrial robot. However, speed and separation collaborative robots use more advanced vision systems to slow operations down when a human worker approaches and stops operation altogether when a worker is too close to the robot.

Power and Force Limiting – These types of collaborative robots are built with rounded corners and a series of intelligent collision sensors to quickly detect contact with a human worker and stop operation. These collaborative robots, which use collaborative robot arms, also feature force limitations to ensure any collisions are unlikely to result in injury.

Hand Guiding – These collaborative robots are equipped with a hand-guided device by which an operator directly controls the motion of the robot during the automatic mode. While in automatic mode, the robot performing hand-guiding collaboration responds only to the operator’s direct control input. This allows the robot, for example, to support the weight of a heavy workpiece while the operator manipulates it into position, thereby reducing the operator’s risk of repetitive-stress injury. Similar capabilities can be used to “teach” or program a robot, but properly speaking, hand guiding as a collaborative operation occurs while the robot is in automatic mode, during normal production, whereas programming is not done in automatic mode nor used during production.

According to a market report, the Asia-Pacific collaborative robots market will grow at a 2020-2026 CAGR of 45.46% with an addressable cumulative market value of US$13.17 billion over the next 7 years in terms of cobots hardware. This region is expected to become the largest cobots market in the forecast period.

Overcoming Industrial Challenges

As noted by Robotics and Automation News, even as cobots continue to become popular in the present scenario, there are still certain challenges that pose a hindrance to the implementation of these systems in major manufacturing plants. One of these is the requirement for fine dexterity, for instance for picking up and handling delicate or small parts.

Moreover, the ability to make quick decisions to facilitate smooth production processes is also important. It has been observed that in order to overcome these hurdles, market leaders are working towards creating robots that feature integrated vision systems and faster processors which would allow modern collaborative robots to work around the obstacle and adapt to a change in the environment, without simply stopping their action, as is the case with traditional robots.

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Given a labor pool that is not increasing at the rate required to meet the accelerating demand, enterprises are looking for technological solutions like intelligent automation that can enable the automated smart tasking of their workers empowered via prescriptive analytics and mobile software to overcome their challenges. As noted by Deep Agarwal, Regional Sales Director – Indian Sub-continent at Zebra Technologies, “Given the complexity of their workflows, finding the right domain expertise for the job is key to a successful digital transformation. So too will be orchestrating human and robot workflows in a synergistic way across the warehouse and distribution center as well as the retail store.”

He further adds, customers are asking for automation and workflow augmentation solutions to optimize the performance of their limited and in some instances, shrinking, skilled labor pool. Given the growing complexity of workflows and the need for digitalization to enable automation, the need for domain expertise has become critical to success.

Today, more and more organizations are experiencing the benefit of the combination of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), not only for the back office but also for the front office processes. Intelligent Automation, as a perfect blend of both the technologies, has given rise to no fewer than 6 million digital employees who have time to focus on creative aspects of the business rather than spending their precious time on dull and mundane tasks.

The technology increases the understanding, reasoning, problem-solving, learning, and interaction abilities of the IA bot, or more accurately the digital agent. As noted by a report, this potentially enables a higher degree of so-called Straight Through Processing (STP) and in effect further optimization of business processes. Intelligent Automation enables organizations to bring the cost savings of the back-office process to the benefit of the front-office process and customer satisfaction. Moreover, greater flexibility and agility can be achieved for larger organizations with Global Business Service centers. Finally, intelligent automation can contribute to larger employee satisfaction, because the boring repetitive administration work and administrative burden are taken over by the digital colleague. Especially of value in the current time of resource scarcity.

According to Deep, computer vision, augmented reality and robotics are some other significant technologies that are making the automation process efficient while capturing, aggregating and democratizing data to further augment and empower the human worker experience.

Computer Vision focuses on creating a digital business ecosystem through modalities such as scanners, robots, and other edge solutions. Moreover, as camera technology becomes “intelligent”, customers will be able to monitor their environments and workflows and make automated decisions to improve customer experiences (such as frictionless checkout, automated shelf inventory control, loss prevention, quality control, and object/item/action recognition) and improve the understanding of their operations.

Using augmented reality to direct workers to task assignments, guide new workers or find lost items by overlaying information on the information from the camera – on their mobile computers or wearable devices, businesses can introduce whole another interactive and innovative level of human-machine collaboration.

Furthermore, the industry is marching towards an era where, instead of replacing workers, robots will assist workers by guiding workers through their workflow and transporting items and completed work, taking away mundane travel time to give back to the worker for high-value tasks. In this way, robotics solutions can “take the robot out of the human” and allow companies to reallocate their human labor force toward the greatest area of need and highest value. However, workflow optimization solutions today typically focus on either human tasks and workflows or robotic tasks and workflows, with little to no crossover (and therefore, synergy) between the two.

“Cooperative orchestration between automation systems and human workers” through any intelligent technology will be critical to achieving the highest levels of productivity improvement in the not-too-distant future.

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The coronavirus, that emerged out from Chinese city Wuhan, has now started to spread across several countries. The disease now has reached over 20 countries. Even, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared a global emergency after the virus causing severe lung disease and fever, followed by a dry cough and shortness of breath. Considering reports, the new coronavirus, which has been code-named 2019-nCoV, has now surpassed 24,000 confirmed cases.

As many patients now are suspected to have this disease around the world, doctors in the US have been leveraging a telehealth machine to treat the first person in the country admitted to hospital confirmed with 2019-nCoV.

Currently, the patient is being held in a specially designed two-bed isolated area at Providence Regional Medical Center in Washington. Using a robot equipped with a camera, microphone and stethoscope, the clinicians have been able to treat the patient without coming into direct contact with him.

This is not the only robot that is being utilized to interact with quarantined people to prevent infectious disease. In Hangzhou, a Chinese city, a hotel is using a robot to deliver food to guests’ bedrooms in order to isolate over 300 people suspected to have the virus. Multiple food delivery robots have been deployed on all 16 levels of the hotel.

Similarly, the Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital in Guangzhou City is also making use of autonomous delivery robots to transport drugs around the hospital. Being loaded up with medicines, these robots roam around the hospital with given instructions on where to go to. These robots are able to open and close doors and take the lift without any human intervention.

Along with minimizing the potential spread of new coronavirus infection, some robots are being used for disinfection purposes. Xenex robots are the robots from Xenex, manufactured in San Antonio, which use pulsed xenon ultraviolet-C (UVC) light to wipe out pathogens. These cleaning robots are currently being utilized to clean hospital rooms where there have been suspected cases of the new coronavirus, according to the company. These robots are able to clean a room in as little as five minutes.

Also, Dimer UVC Innovations, a Los Angeles-based company, which has built a germ-killing robot to sanitise airplanes, has offered its services to three US airports to dodge the coronavirus outbreak. The robot, named GermFalcon, uses UVC light to kill viruses and bacteria and is designed to be pushed down the aisle of an aeroplane. It also has wings that can hang over the seats to open all surfaces to the light.

GermFalcon is currently being utilized at the Los Angeles International Airport, San Francisco International Airport and John F. Kennedy International Airport as part of their emergency response efforts.

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As robotics is getting smarter, more and more investors are coming forward to raise funds for emerging robotics companies in order to catalyse their robotics innovation journey.

In January 2020, Robotics Business Review tracked a total of US$1.16 billion in corporate transactions related to robotics. While there were fewer deals around autonomous vehicles than in past months, investors continued to support supply chain and logistics, surgical robots, and agricultural automation.

By comparison, Robotics Business Review and sibling site The Robot Report reported US$1.9 billion in transactions in December 2019, and US$644 million in January 2019. The number of investments climbed to 40 last-month, compared with 24 in the previous month and 25 a year ago.

Here are the top 10 robotics funding/investments that took place in January 2020.

Trifo

The Santa Clara, California-based robotics perception company (with offices in Shanghai and Beijing), whose bread and butter is autonomous vacuum cleaners, took the wraps off Lucy, a US$799 robot equipped with cameras that enable it to surveil rooms while recognizing and cleaning them. Alongside this news, Trifo announced that it has raised US$15 million in a series B round led by Yidu Cloud, with participation from Tsinghua AI Fund and Matrix Partners. This brings its total raised to US$26 million, following an US$11 million series A last November.

“Lucy reflects the evolution of our products from robot vacuums to AI IoT-enabled home robots that can assist with a wide range of features that help people with their life and work,” said founder and CEO Zhe Zhang, who added that the fresh capital will bolster Trifo’s hardware and software development, as well as its expansion to European and U.S. markets.

Vecna Robotics

Vecna Robotics, the workflow orchestration and self-driving forklift provider, has raised US$50 million in Series B funding. With double-digit annual growth forecast for the mobile robot market over the next five years, the new capital will expand Vecna Robotics’ industry-leading footprint and accelerate the development of new product offerings.

This round is led by Blackhorn Ventures, with participation from new investors Highland Capital and Fontinalis Partners, and additional funding from existing investors Drive Capital and Tectonic Ventures.

Trevor Zimmerman of Blackhorn Ventures, says: “Vecna Robotics’ focus on the Pivotal platform and innovative AMRs to create unprecedented resource productivity for industrial applications is strongly aligned with our investment strategy. We are excited to be a part of their growth.”

Virtual Incision

Virtual Incision Corporation, a medical device company pioneering a first-of-its-kind miniaturized surgical robot, announced it has raised US$20 million in a Series B+ financing led by returning investor Bluestem Capital, with participation from returning investor PrairieGold Venture Partners, as well as from Genesis Innovation Group and other affiliated investors. The funds will support regulatory and clinical programs leading to the commercialization of the company’s MIRA (“miniaturized in vivo robotic assistant”) Surgical Robotic Platform.

“We designed the MIRA Surgical Robotic Platform with the fundamental understanding that minimally invasive procedures offer tremendous benefits to patients. We believe our portable and affordable abdominal robot has the potential to bring these benefits to many more patients,” said John Murphy, president and CEO of Virtual Incision. “The planned IDE clinical study of MIRA is the critical next step for the company.”

Naio Technologies

Naio Technologies SAS closed a €14 million (US$15.53 million) Series A funding round. The French agricultural robotics company has been developing field robots for weeding. They are intended to reduce physical strain on farmers and reduce reliance on chemical herbicides, which can harm the environment.

Bpifrance led the Series A round, with participation from impact investor Pymwymic and historical shareholders Demeter and Capagro. Naio Technologies said the new investment will help it “further capitalize on its position as a leader in agricultural robotics and reach the next level of technology maturity in order to prepare the robots for mass production.”

The promise of contributing to more sustainable agricultural practices, combined with the company’s ability to demonstrate market readiness over the past 18 months, contributed to the successful closing of the funding round, claimed Naio.

Soft Robotics

Robotics startup company Soft Robotics has closed its Series B round of funding, raising US$23 million led by Calibrate Ventures and Material Impact, and including participation from exiting investors including Honeywell, Yahama, Hyperplane and more. This round also brings in FANUC, the world’s largest maker of industrial robots and a recently announced strategic partner for Soft Robotics.

The company said in a press release that the round was oversubscribed, which suggests it isn’t looking to glut itself on capital investors, given that this US$23 million follows a similarly sized US$20 million round that closed in 2018 which it also referred to as “oversubscribed.” Prior to that, Soft Robotics had raised US$5 million in a Series A round closed in 2015.

This round will specifically help Soft Robotics spend on growth, looking to increase its variability even further and work on expanding its food packaging and consumer goods applications, as well as diving into e-commerce and logistics – specifically to help automate and improve the returns process, a costly and ever-growing challenge as more retail moves online.

Berkshire Grey

Robotics and artificial intelligence company Berkshire Grey has raised US$263 million in Series B financing to continue providing global Fortune 100 companies with retail, eCommerce and logistics fulfillment automation. SoftBank, Khosla Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Canaan all participated in this financing round, Berkshire Grey said in a press release. The funds will empower Berkshire Grey’s worldwide growth, acquisitions, and internal team expansion. The company seeks to enhance its growing reputation as a global provider for AI and robotics solutions.

Berkshire Grey utilizes intelligent robot and AI solutions to automate tasks previously not done in commercial settings by logistical machines. Its products automatically pick, pack and sort items, inner packs, cases, and parcels to automate omnichannel warehouse and distribution operations.

“Our customers from leading enterprises in retail, eCommerce, and logistics are selecting Berkshire Grey as a competitive differentiator,” said Tom Wagner, founder and CEO of Berkshire Grey in a statement. “With our intelligent robotic automation, our clients see faster and more efficient supply chain operations that enable them to address the wants of today’s savvy consumer.”

ZAP Surgical Systems

ZAP Surgical Systems, Inc., a medical technology company developing a next-generation radiosurgical robot for non-invasive tumor ablation, announced the completion of an equity financing round that raised an aggregate total of US$81 million. The round was led by Primavera Capital Group, with participation from GT Healthcare Capital Partners, Chow Tai Fook Enterprises, ShangBay Capital, and Hogy Medical, who joined existing investors Foxconn Technology Group and Varian Medical Systems. The company has now raised more than US$160 million in financing capital to date. Funds from the latest financing round will be used to accelerate the commercialization of the Company’s FDA cleared ZAP-X® surgical robot for the treatment of cancer and other brain disorders.

“Although over the past 3-decades stereotactic radiosurgery has become a well-established non-invasive tool for treating a broad array of human pathologies, globally more than 2 million people who suffer from brain, head & neck cancer annually go untreated,” said John R. Adler, MD, Stanford Professor of Neurosurgery and founder & CEO of ZAP Surgical Systems. “ZAP Surgical welcomes this group of world-class investors in our now common quest to transform the lives, and very often cure, millions of patients each year by means of the ZAP-X surgical robot.”

Clobotics

Clobotics Corp. has received a US$10 million investment from Tiger Management Fund for its Pre-B+ series round. The total amount raised to date by the company is US$53 million. Clobotics will use the funding to further support the development of its AI-enabled Smart Wind and Smart Retail solutions. It also plans to accelerate the mass-deployment of its solutions in the global marketplace.

Clobotics is known for combining smart hardware, computer-vision-based photo recognition, analytics, and deep learning to deliver fast and accurate data-driven insights. These rich insights let customers reduce their pain points and increase their business and profitability.

“Clobotics has spent the past three years using tightly-integrated hardware and software to provide AI services for retail and wind energy industries,” stated Founder and CEO George Yan. “With the new funding, we’re now ready to blitz-scale the service to customers across the globe.”

DFRobot

China’s STEM Education Service Provider “DFRobot” rasied Tens of Millions of Yuan in a Series B round funding led by Cash Capital. Genesis Capital was as the sole financial adviser. This investment will mainly be used for ChuangKe Education.

Established in 2008, DFRobot aims to the development and production of open source hardware, robot products, STEM education, ChuangKe education and artificial intelligence education, and involved in the STEM and ChuangKe education industry. It has entered more than 8,000 schools in more than 200 countries and regions, serving more than 20,000 teachers and millions of students around the world.

Skilancer Solar

Noida-based Skilancer Solar recently raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Venture Catalysts. The latest round of fundraising follows an undisclosed amount the company had raised in May 2019 from an angel investor and serial entrepreneur Dhianu Das’s Venture Capital fund, Alfa Ventures.

Speaking on where the funds will be utilised, Manish Das, Co-founder of Skilancer Solar, said, “This investment will allow Skilancer Solar to make upgrades to its design and technology platform, geographical expansion, team building, and to develop a competitive edge in the market.”

The solar cleantech sector in India is still at a nascent stage as compared to its western counterparts, Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Founder – Venture Catalysts said, adding that this funding will help Skilancer Solar realise its ambition of becoming a renowned brand and the go-to name in the cleantech sector through its technology and innovation-based solutions.

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The absolute greatest names in artificial intelligence, including two godfathers of the machine learning boom, are wagering that clever algorithms are going to change the capacities of industrial robots. Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, who shared the current year’s Turing Prize with Yoshua Bengio for their work on deep learning, are among the AI illuminating presences who have invested resources into Covariant.ai, a startup creating AI innovation for warehouse bin-picking bots.

Covariant has now left stealth mode and is reporting its work with Knapp, a major provider of warehouse logistics technologies today. Its algorithms have just been deployed on Knapp’s robots in two of Knapp’s clients’ warehouses. One, handled by the German electrical provider Obeta, has been completely in production since September. The co-founders state Covariant is additionally close to hitting another deal with an industrial robotics giant.

Covariant claims its bots can do what others can’t: work 24 hours every day, picking things without whining. This doesn’t imply that picking is a tackled issue. Covariant’s robots utilize suction cups not robotic fingers, making the task simpler. Yet, it unlocks a great deal of potential. This is especially valid in the realm of warehouses and logistics, where experts state it’s hard to discover human workers and they need all the robots they can get.

A lot of this publicity has been created by the promise of machine learning. Today’s industrial robots can pick with extraordinary speed and accuracy, however, only if what they’re getting is similarly predictable: customary shapes with easy-to-grasp surfaces. That is fine in manufacturing, where a machine needs to hold a similar item again and again, yet horrible in retail logistics, where the objects being stuffed for shipping fluctuate immensely in shape and size.

Hardcoding a robot’s every move, similarly with conventional programming, works extraordinary in the first situation yet awfully in the second. In any case, if you use machine learning to sustain a system information and let it create its own principles on the most proficient method to pick instead, it does a whole lot better.

Getting ordinary boxes and plastic packages may sound trifling, and it is for most people. Laborers in manufacturing plants and warehouses are regularly given new objects to deal with, or a bunch of various things combined, however, it’s misleadingly hard for a machine to rapidly turn out how to get the next doodad. Workplace robots are still extraordinarily imbecilic and cumbersome, and instructing them to get a handle on new items or those with complex shapes stays a holy grail of AI and robotics research.

Lately, various organizations have jumped up offering robots that utilize less complex algorithms to perform valuable warehouse tasks, including limited product picking. Fruitful players incorporate Plus One Robotics, Picnic, and RightHand Robotics.

More secure robot arms, custom grippers, off-the-rack sensors, and open source code for robot vision and control have made it simpler for new companies to deploy robots in new jobs, for example, shipping items around warehouses or taking boxes off pallets.

There are two types of tasks in warehouses: things that require legs, such as moving boxes from the front to the rear of the space, and things that require hands, such as getting things and putting them in the perfect spot. Robots have been in warehouses for quite a while, however, their prosperity has principally been constrained to automating the former type of work. Moving stuff between the fixed points is an issue that mechatronics is extremely incredible for.

Yet, automating the movements of hands requires something other than the correct hardware. The innovation should agilely adapt to a wide variety of product shapes and sizes in ever-evolving orientations. A customary robotic arm can be programmed to execute the equivalent precise movements over and over, yet it will bomb the minute it experiences any deviation. It needs AI to “see” and change, or it will have no expectation of staying aware of its advancing environment. It’s actually the skill part that requires intelligence.

Covariant uses a scope of AI procedures to show robots how to get a handle on new products. These incorporate reinforcement learning, wherein an algorithm trains itself through experimentation, similar to the manner in which creatures learn through positive and negative feedback.

Reinforcement learning has driven awesome recent breakthroughs in AI, including the superhuman game-playing algorithms created by Alphabet’s AI subsidiary, DeepMind. The methodology can enable a robot to make sense of what shape an item is from a video picture and where to grasp it, regardless of whether it has just been trained on objects of an alternate shape. This might be done in simulation with the goal that the procedure can be accelerated.

Demand for robots is commonly developing at a rapid clip, as per the International Federation of Robotics, an industry body. It says that 422,000 robots were deployed in 2018, a 6% increase over 2017, with establishments of more intelligent, progressively collaborative robots increasing 23% over a similar period. The IFR additionally anticipates an average development of 12% for all robots somewhere between 2020 and 2022.

Covariant.ai has already intrigued some seasoned players in robotics technology. A year ago, the Swiss-Swedish robotics technology monster ABB started looking for organizations to assist it with moving into warehouse automation. It sent Covariant.ai and different organizations boxes of articles for their frameworks to try to pick in a controlled experiment. Marc Segura, worldwide head of service robotics at ABB, says Abbeel’s organization was the only one ready to pick everything over and over.

For all the certainty, investor and otherwise, Covariant’s operation is inconceivably small at the present time. It has only a bunch of robots in activity full time, in America and abroad, in the clothing, pharmaceutical, and electronics enterprises. In Germany, Covariant’s picking robot (there’s only one for the time being) is packing electronics components for a firm named Obeta, yet the organization says it’s excited for more robots to make up for a staff lack, a circumstance normal in logistics.

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Japan is currently leading the world in the field of robotics with highly competitive research, development and applied technologies. The country has continuously maintained its position in industrial robotics as the world’s top exporter of robots in terms of the value of shipments and the number of operating units. Considering industry reports, Japan deploys more than a quarter of a million industrial robot workers. Also, the number is anticipated to jump to over 1 million in the next 15 years. The country has also predicted revenue for robotics to value around US$70 billion by 2025.

As we all know robots can perform tedious and repetitive tasks, sometimes surpassing human workers and freeing them to do other invaluable tasks. Considering these values, Japan is incessantly capitalizing on robotics and has been at the world’s cutting edge of industrial robotics since the 1970s.

The Widening Use of Robots

The increasing landscape of robotics use begun with the aim of freeing human workers from perilous and monotonous tasks across industries. This led to the prevalent use of industrial robots as they performed various kind of simple and physically challenging jobs, from assembling parts to transporting heavy items in harsh and dangerous environments.

The wide array of Japanese robotics includes Humanoid Entertainment Robots, Social Robots, Androids, Animal Robots, Guard Robots, among others. As these robot-types offer a diverse number of advantages, Japan is rolling out them in hospitals, offices and schools as the country’s population ages and workforce shrinks.

On one hand, some experts worry robotics can steal human jobs, while on the other hand, some argue that the creation of robots will complement, instead of replacing human beings.

In Japan, the robots have already made their way into areas like suburban nursing homes to government agencies, which announced an investment of 100 billion yen (US$100 million) in robot development a few years ago. Even, some entities are emphasizing robotic colleagues as a selling point to young, new recruits.

This year, the country is going to host the 2020 Olympics game in the capital Tokyo, where companies like Toyota will demonstrate new humanoid robots that will interact with guests and assist athletes on the field. Along with human staffs, the event will see massive numbers of robots as the world’s attention turns to Japan.

Robots to Solve Social Issues

Japan is facing a rapidly aging population against the backdrop of a low birthrate. Thus, the use of robots in the fields of caregiving and welfare is expected to not just lessen the burden experienced by caregivers but also to provide the elderly as a companion that has a high capacity for communication.

In Tokyo’s Silver Wing nursing home, for instance, nearly two dozen seniors sit in the common area as pudding cups are distributed. And in the middle of the room is a staff member and a humanoid robot, named Pepper, who leads the room in group games and exercises.

This kind of robot is not only utilized in the common room. Staffs have also access to robotic exoskeletons that fit around the waist and lower back. These machines are able to ease severe body strain as they aid their elderly clients to get in and out of bed.

In a crux, this is the kind of innovation in Japan that is helping in addressing several of the challenges the society faces that can teach other countries facing the same issues.

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Robotics has reached out to various industries to redefine their work ethics and methodologies. Its innovation has transformed many for the better. In even the field of farming, robots today plays an effective role. Farmers have always required several data and information to grow their fields; despite the general idea that considers agriculture far from high tech, indeed robotics is fundamental to improve farming, especially in this 4.0 industry era.

In fact, Big Data is necessary for agriculture, where there are way too many variables and huge territories to keep monitored. For this reason, technology and robotics are the keys to support farming in innovating and turning into a sophisticated business; at the same time, those technologies could improve farmers’ quality of life, boosting their business and products.

Agriculture is now facing several challenges, and innovating is the only way to keep up with times: people aging and working in hard conditions even over 50; higher labor costs; climate change… For these reasons, there is robotics working on improving the future of agriculture.

Here are the ways in which robotics is redefining the future of farming.

Exoskeletons

Indeed, the average age is rising and from the latest data, the average farmer’s age is between 50 and 58, causing major problems in small farms, where there are no young generations available to work on the fields. Therefore, the solution comes from engineering. Several multinational corporates have design special exoskeletons able to support workers (or farmers, in this case). How does it work? This kind of robot follows the farmer’s movements, without interfering, and eases the pressure on back, arms, and knees, with general support in lifting weights.

Weed Pullers

Weeds are one of the biggest issues in agriculture; it is impossible to pull them one by one and, at the same time, using too much herbicide implies chemical-resistant weeds, which are stronger. To protect plants from pests, now there is a special robot that can clear brush. It required a combined work of mechanical engineering, machine learning, and robotics to create such a robot; it is able, thanks to machine learning, to recognize the center of the crops and removes weeds only once mature.

Fruit Picker

The traditional view of robots is that they’re clumsy and bulky—certainly not nimble enough to gently pluck a strawberry off its stem, right? However, that’s exactly what the Belgian company Octinion’s Rubion robot can do. Strawberry plants continue producing berries throughout the growing season, but currently, there aren’t enough workers to continually pick every berry that every plant produces. Typically, as Nell Lewis reports for CNN, a farmer can hire workers to clear the field once, leaving any fruit that became ripe before or after that time to rot on the fields.

So, of course, a robot that can pluck berries continuously has appeal. The Rubion bot uses a special vision system to detect when a berry is ripe and then plucks it with a soft 3D-printed hand. Octinion has already commercialized the robot, which is being used in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Ideally, the bot would scour rows and rows of strawberry plants indoors. One of the biggest challenges for robots like these is to withstand the elements in traditional farm fields.

LiDAR for Farm fields

Small rover-like bots are designed to tackle problems on a variety of terrain, from our living room carpeting to our lawns. Now, they’re in farm fields too. EarthSense’s TerraSentia rover is about the same size as a robotic lawnmower, but souped-up with the machine learning and visual programming of NASA’s moon and Mars rovers.

TerraSentia, developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with support from the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E, uses LiDAR—or light detection and ranging—technology to collect data from a field’s hard-to-reach understory. Combined with other on-board technology systems, TerraSentia can “collect data on traits for plant health, physiology, and stress response,” according to the EarthSense website. Its creators hope to soon program the bot to measure young plant health, corn ear height, soybean pods, plant biomass as well as detect and identify diseases and abiotic stresses, according to the site. So far, it’s been deployed in corn, soybean, wheat, sorghum, vegetable crops, orchards, and vineyards.

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The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a study that will use gamers’ brain waves to teach hives of defense robots how to swarm together to complete missions. DARPA has given a US$ 316,000 federal grant to the University at Buffalo Artificial Intelligence Institute to study gamers’ brain waves and eye movements. The aim is to improve organization and strategy among autonomous air and ground robots.

Why would the US want to invest in robot swarms? Because bevies of bots are already being pursued elsewhere in the world, like Russia. Flock-93, for example, is a vision of 100 kamikaze-like drones, each armed with an explosive charge, swarming targets like vehicle convoys. In theory, these hordes of robots are drastically more difficult to defend against, so the US certainly doesn’t want to lag behind.

“The idea is to eventually scale up to 250 aerial and ground robots, working in highly complex situations. For example, there may be a sudden loss of visibility due to smoke during an emergency. The robots need to be able to effectively communicate and adapt to challenges like that,” said Souma Chowdhury, the grant’s principal investigator.

Other co-investigators include David Doermann, director of the university’s artificial intelligence institute and innovation professor of computer science and engineering at SUNY Empire, Eshan Esfahani, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Associate Professor Karthik Dantu.

Research into swarm robotics owes inspiration to a wide scope of natural organisms, like ant colonies and schooling fish. But however fascinating these creatures may be, only humans have the potential to improve AI systems to new tactical heights, according to Chowdhury who is also a member of UB’s sustainable manufacturing and advanced robotic technologies (SMART) community of excellence.

“The project is ongoing, at a pretty aggressive pace,” Chowdhury said. “We are around the halfway mark.” At present, they’ve yet to start the data-gathering phase of the project, although Chowdhury has a good idea of the format that it will take. The plan is to carry out experiments with around 25 participants. Each participant will play between six and seven games with different randomized settings and levels of complexity. Unlike games such as StarCraft, which can last for hours, in this case each game will last only between five and ten minutes. That will be sufficient to measure decision-making strategies, and for these features of interest to be extracted using algorithms and scripts developed by the team.

Ultimately, the researchers hope to end up with an AI that can guide the actions of groups of 250 robots on the ground and in the air, giving the fleet the ability to autonomously navigate unpredictable environments. “Humans can come up with very unique strategies that an AI might not ever learn,” Chowdhury told Digital Trends. “A lot of the hype we see in AI are in applications that are relatively deterministic environments. But in terms of contextual reasoning in a real environment to get stuff done? That’s still at a nascent stage.”

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In an effort to reinforce surgical robotics, Medtronic, a medical device company, has acquired Digital Surgery, a London-based privately-held pioneer in surgical artificial intelligence, data and analytics, and digital education and training program for the operating room. The acquisition is aimed at strengthening Medtronic’s robot-assisted surgical platform and its broader portfolio.

Considering reports, Medtronic is making a big leap to compete against robotic surgery’s dominant player, Intuitive Surgical and its da Vinci SP. The medical device giant last year divulged its much-awaited Hugo RAS system. Digital Surgery intends to digitize surgical protocols using cutting-edge computing and support the delivery of consistent, data-driven, and evidence-based surgical care, the company officials said. Its products include Touch Surgery, an award-winning interactive training platform downloaded over 2 million times, and GoSurgery, an operating room efficiency platform.

Digital Surgery also plans to retain its current leadership and headquarters in the UK, albeit it will operate under the robotics arm of Medtronic’s Minimally Invasive Therapies Group, which aims to invest and expand the workforce of the company. However, the financial deal has not been disclosed.

With this acquisition, Digital Surgery and Medtronic will co-develop digital solutions that will be featured in future Medtronic soft tissue robotic-assisted surgery systems. The acquisition is also intended to advance minimally invasive surgery and expand patient access to high-quality surgical care.

The Medtronic-Digital Surgery deal involves Digital Surgery’s education app, Touch Surgery, with its on-demand library of hundreds of videos and procedure simulations for training surgeons and students outside the operation room. Digital Surgery also provides a HIPAA-certified surgical video sharing platform using AI to automatically identify and blur out images that could be leveraged to recognize patients or staff. This enables surgeons to interpret and edit videos for post-procedure team assessments, institutional training or use at conferences.

In a statement, Digital Surgery’s Co-founder Jean Nehme said that the company aims to apply computing and AI to surgery on a meaningful scale through its deal with Medtronic.

Last year, Medtronic had planned tools with multiple medical specialties, including bringing robotics to bear on virtually in every area as the company’s CEO Omar Ishrak laid out his intentions to develop and apply computer-guided surgery. Its robotics division has been focused on building four main technology vectors that cover Medtronic’s work across open surgery, laparoscopic and robotic procedures. Those vectors include visualization and navigation, instrumentation and implants, data and analytics, and the robotics platforms themselves.

As part of the latest acquisition, the announcement of the deal comes the same week when robotic products developer Intuitive Surgical move to acquire Orpheus Medical, an Israeli company that offers clinical video capture and archiving plus imaging documentation solutions.

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