Automation is a big win for many kinds of tasks. There are jobs that machines can do better because they require greater speed, precision, or power than human beings can achieve. There are jobs that should be done by machines because they’re unsafe or unsatisfying for human workers. And, increasingly, there are jobs that are… Read more »
Russian robot Boris impressed a lot of people with its dance moves… but it turns out that it isn’t a robot at all. Boris was part of the show at a tech conference for students in Russia. Then Russian state TV showed footage of the robot’s antics, claiming major technical breakthroughs. The video went viral…. Read more »
The Robot Science Museum in Seoul will be opening officially in 2022. Its first exhibit, however, will get started next year when robots publicly build the museum. The building will be egg-shaped and covered in metal plates which the robots will form, assemble, weld, and polish while admiring humans look on. A second team of… Read more »
Rexroth HCS drives, the IndraDrive C models including HCS202 and HCS203, use firmware which might need to be replaced at some point. Are you updating or upgrading? If your old firmware — say MPH04V06 — is replaced by a new release of the same firmware, such as MPH04V08, then you’re updating. If you decide to… Read more »
Self-driving cars and trucks, hands-free driving, driverless cars — whatever you call them, they’re an example of technology people thought would be further along by now. Rexroth is taking big step forward with automated guided vehicles or AGVs for the factory floor. One of the big issues in modern factories is intralogistics — getting materials… Read more »
Self-driving cars haven’t been making the kind of progress people expected. This might be about the nature of cars, though. Arstechnica points out that the problem with self-driving cars is the people. People take up space, and so do the airbags they need. Their luggage, too. They also want to get where they’re going fast…. Read more »
We wrote a while back about why we don’t think you should buy Indramat on eBay even if it looks like a bargain. We recently had a conversation with an eBay insider that makes us question whether it’s actually a bargain or not. “I don’t make money when I sell,” the eBay veteran assured us…. Read more »
Robots were all over yesterday’s Super Bowl ads… but not the way we usually see them. There were robots regretting their inability to drink beer or taste chips. There was a retrospective of Alexa skills that didn’t work out as planned. Humans worried about robots taking over in one ad, in which robots and devices… Read more »
Babies don’t get the idea of ownership. First, they don’t think about what’s theirs and what belongs to others at all. They don’t mind being passed around to total strangers, they don’t get attached to their toys, and they don’t care whose clothes they’re wearing. Then they realize that some particular woman is their mother,… Read more »
