A small robot, developed by Toyota, capable of conversation and emotion will be available to the Japanese public. The car giant test-drove the tiny bot –Kirobo– on a space mission, keeping Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata company around the International Space Station. Proving successful, Toyota has developed a smaller version for sale. The robot is designed…
The use of robotics within watchmaking is not new; Seiko Epson has been using robots on its production lines since the early 1980s, however, there has been a recent surge in furthering the use of robotics in this field. The likes of Percipio’s Chronogrip robot, designed to facilitate micromanipulation, can manoeuvre and assemble mechanical parts…
A team of roboticists, led by Dr Elena De Momi, at Italy’s Politecnico di Milano have trained a robot to imitate a human being’s actions, specifically of emulating a nurse passing instruments to a surgeon, and related actions. The process involved taking photographs of humans performing the actions, feeding this into the robotic arm’s neural…
A world-first in robotic surgery has been successfully completed by a team at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford; BBC News had exclusive access. The team of surgeons used the ‘Preceyes’ surgical robot to operate within the human eye, removing a membrane from the back of the patient’s eye. The membrane was destroying the central vision of the patient,…
RoboticsandAutomationNews.com has compiled a list of the top robotics companies, based on the number of each company’s robots installed across the globe. RoboticsandAutomationNews.com has stressed this is an incomplete list, due to a lack of credible and/or up-to-date figures. Available figures place Fanuc in the lead, with 400,000 robots worldwide. Jeff Burnstein, President of A3 (Association for Advancing…
Uber have teamed up with Volvo to deliver self-driving cars to its consumers, initially with a ‘supervisor’ who can take control of the vehicle should the need arise. An Uber spokesperson told the BBC that “Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no…
Amazon will be opening its 13th UK fulfilment centre next year, in Tilbury, Essex, to keep up with customer demand. Robots slide under towers of shelves where products are stowed, lift them and move them through the fulfilment centre to human workers who can then collect or deposit items. In this way, robots improve the…
1,007 robots break world record for number of robots dancing together simultaneously, at the Qingdao Beer Festival in China. Image courtesy of HighSnobiety.com The robots danced together for 60 seconds, though some had to be “disqualified” for falling over or not dancing, but most completed the routine perfectly. The robots were controlled using just one…
A man suffered a pulmonary embolism behind the wheel of his car in the US, but instead of crashing Joshua Neally activated the autopilot on his Tesla Model X car and it took him to a nearby hospital. Tesla cars have autopilot built into them which enables the car to drive itself and sensors that…
Mike Hawes, chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), said several factors meant that post-Brexit Britain could be better suited to support the development of technology for autonomous vehicles than a UK inside the EU. UK has a more liberal approach to internet communications used by technologies like driverless cars –…