Safety is paramount in a factory. Everyone wants their team members to be healthy and available to perform their jobs. Injuries are the most undesirable outcome, typically falling into two categories: immediate and progressive. Immediate injuries, such as a cut, burn, or broken bone, require prompt medical treatment. Manufacturing facilities have personal protective equipment (PPE) and safety protocols to prevent these injuries. Alternatively, progressive injuries build up over time and may be harder to mitigate. Some of these progressive injuries include hearing loss, respiratory issues, and ..read more

News briefs for the week take a look at NVIDIA's annual GPU Conference 2024 and the seminal impact that NVIDIA's announcements will have on the future of robots, cobots, and AMRs. NVIDIA’s watershed moment for robotics Brave, new, AI world for robots, cobots & AMRs One corporate event for 2024 has tremendous significance for all of robotics: Santa Clara-based NVIDIA’s annual GPU extravaganza. This week’s What’s New in Robotics? spends most of its digital ink covering the event. Autonomy now means “intelligence”. If you are a robot, cobot, or AMR, the jig is up unless you can pick up a few ..read more

News briefs for the week take a look at the IFR’s forecast for Top 5 Trends in Robotics for 2024, how Covariant is marrying a ChatGPT-like chatbot to a smart cobot, how MODEX showed off eight cobot debuts of which Schneider Electric’s Lexium is an exemplary case study, and Staples trying to stay more than relevant contracting with RightHand Robotics to pitch in with its automation prowess. IFR: Big year for cobots! The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) has made five big predictions for robots in 2024. Each of the five looks to be as exciting as they are doable and should have major i ..read more

News briefs for the week take a look at the new trend in manufacturing called microfactories—where robots rule, a first-ever, ready-to-use 3D printing cabinet, T-skin safety sheathing for cobots and industrial robots, and a do-it-yourself 3D printed cobot for desktop production. Microfactories: Where robots rule! Are microfactories the future of manufacturing? There’s a factory automation trend that’s just beginning to take hold that deviates radically from the standard assembly line, especially those in auto plants. Korea’s Hyundai has built such a totally different auto plant for its electri ..read more

Will Automation Solve the Manufacturing Labor Shortage? The answer is yes.  People want jobs that require something other than demanding, manual tasks. Repetitive, heavy lifting is both physically taxing and mentally unsatisfying. The aversion to labor-intensive jobs appears in economic statistics where 45% of durable good manufacturing positions remain unfilled in the United States, highlighting a significant gap between available opportunities and the workforce's inclination to accept injury-prone and hard work. We know that not having enough people to fill roles is especially acute in ..read more

News briefs for the week take a look at BMW announcing the first-ever Factory in a Box as an add-on to its production lines, cobots braving gamma rays to make medical radioisotopes, highly dexterous, deep-sea cobots saving human divers from harsh environments, ABB does it again with yet another acquisition for AMR leadership, and Mujin Robotics and Accenture partner in hope of jumpstarting robot-AI automation in Japan.   Factory in a Box Mobile manufacturing just got an interesting boost in what’s being hailed by carmaker BMW as a Factory in a Box, which is literally a small, robot-driven ..read more

News briefs for the week take a look at CES2024 with its fewer robots but much more AI (artificial intelligence), Doosan Robotics at CES getting an early entry into the AI-infused cobot market for 2024, cobots for 2024 pursuing the "final solution" in the hunt for perfect palletizing in a projected $2.2 billion global market, ABB Robotics cutting in two new directions with its robots (logistics and home building), and a small North Carolina entrepreneur stick-building complete homes with factory robots. CES2024: Few cobots, lots of AI Strangely, the Wall Street Journal sent zero reporters to ..read more

News briefs for the week take a look at what’s happening with cobots at the International Robot Exhibition 2023 in Tokyo, called simply IREX. The convergence of cobots with genAI is continuing briskly. Many cobots, the important ones (over 30 specialized cobot manufacturers are sporting nearly 125 cobot models) are now racing to acquire genAI capabilities. IREX was a perfect event to showcase the best and to see what has happened so far. Cobots showcase “new-age” tech at IREX The recently concluded IREX International Robot Exhibition 2023 (Tokyo) 29 November to 2 December 2023, with over 600 ..read more

News briefs for the week take a look at Christmas in Milton Keynes with Santa handing off gift deliveries to reindeer-painted robots, then to the first robot factory ever for rural Indiana’s farmers, then to preventing failures and explosions within industrial storage tanks using wall-climbing robots, to ABB creating a much-needed factory-built homebuilding industry in partnership with Porsche, and then to Chipotle adding “climate-smart fertilizer” to its menu.   Santa comes to town as a mobile reindeer robot If the Ghost of Christmas Past ever appears in downtown Milton Keynes, UK, he’ll ..read more

News briefs for the week take a look at UPS’s new warehouse that greatly maximizes the headcount of robots over workers, decades-old farm tractors modernized for autonomy via a retrofit, WeedBot’s “weeding as a service” that eliminates herbicides, the U.S. Navy leveraging Gecko Robotics to build new ships, and robots and AI for 2024 spearheading a “Productivity Mega Cycle”.   UPS says more robots, fewer workers UPS Supply Chain Solutions, Big Brown’s warehousing, distribution, customs clearance, global freight forwarding, and logistics services division, which is different from the e-comm ..read more