Curiosity, the Mars Rover, will turn 10 next week. On its first birthday, the Rover sang “Happy Birthday” to itself, thanks to a whimsical bit of programming by its engineers. It was a one-time thing, though. In order to save batteries, Curiosity hasn’t had a birthday party since that first and only little celebration. This… Read more »
One thing you can’t help noticing if you follow news about automation in general and robots in particular is that robots in many industries are always just around the corner. Sometimes there are years of proof of concept experiments and early adopter stories and yet at the end of the day (or decade) robots can’t… Read more »
Back in the 1980s, Coca-Cola startled people who just wanted to buy a soda by greeting them with, “Hi! I’m a talking vending machine!” The machine also reminded people to take their change, but that was the extent of its smarts. In fact, that machine told everyone to take their change, whether they were actually… Read more »
An estimated 20,000 deaths a year in the United States can be traced to extreme heat, and it’s getting hotter each year. How can you keep your team safe and healthy in extremely hot weather? Set up your environment for heat safety In hot weather, workers need to drink plenty of fluids. Make sure that… Read more »
Jamba is installing Jamba Blendid smoothie machines in Love’s service stations, bringing artificial intelligence to smoothie production. Right now you can get your Caribbean Passion or Watermelon Breeze completely contactless AI smoothie only at a Walmart in California and a couple of colleges in Georgia, but Jamba plans to put kiosks in Love’s service station… Read more »
Factories and the automation they require have always created mixed emotions in human beings. Admittedly, we don’t know what emotions they would create in machinery, but people have an ambivalence toward automation. On the one hand, the conveyor belt and the assembly line did wonderful things for people. Goods could be made much more quickly… Read more »
A recent study claims that workers in manufacturing are 36% more likely to have mental health issues than Americans in general. Mental health and manufacturing have some kind of connection. Is manufacturing rough on mental health? Or is there some other explanation? Mansplaining More men work in manufacturing. Men are not more likely than women… Read more »
You may have heard of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and LaMDA, software that uses huge data sets and machine learning to generate convincingly human-like language. Now the BigScience project has released an open source, volunteer-created LLM called Bloom. Bloom stands for BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model. It can function in 59… Read more »
Producing your quality product and getting it out the door into the hands of customers is your ultimate goal. If you can’t meet demand, you’re not ready for the big time in mass market retailers. If your Rexroth servo motors or drives fail, that failure will leave you with slower production, missed shipments, and an… Read more »
In general, robots aren’t very good at picking vegetables. Asparagus-picking robots are the exception. In 2015, Joe Jones, the inventor of the Roomba, classified vegetables by how easy it would be for a robot to pick them. They ranged from asparagus, which grows upwards in single spears, to eggplants, which shelter shyly among their leaves…. Read more »
