Reasons to Utilize Automation

                                   

                               The use of automated manufacturing systems has been steadily increases over the past several years, and for good reason. Automation’s ability to process, assemble, inspect, and handle physical products in the manufacturing process can benefit your business in a number of ways. We’ve compiled a list of 8 reasons that you too should be utilizing automation. Here are 8 reasons to utilize automation in your manufacturing environment.

Increased labor productivity

Automated manufacturing operations increase production rates and labor productivity, giving your company greater output per hour of labor input. This increased production leads to greater gains for your business, which aids in your overall growth.

Reduces labor costs

Labor costs continue to slowly increase in all of the world’s industrialized societies. This has made higher investments in automation economically beneficial. While this does unfortunately reduce the need for laborers, which is at times not good for people, it does reduce unit production costs, which is very good for business. However, increased production does make it possible for companies to hire more people in the areas of production where automation is not necessary or feasible.

 Mitigates the effects of labor shortages

Many companies have experienced a significant shortage in both general and skilled labor forces. This has made the usage of automated operations not just possible, but necessary.

 Reduces or eliminates routine manual tasks

Automation of certain manual manufacturing tasks reduces or even eliminates the need to use employees for routine, menial, and quite often fatiguing tasks. This serves to improve labor energy and general working conditions.

Improves worker safety

The safety and physical well-being of the manufacturing workforce has been the focus of OSHA since 1970 and was an impetus for automation.Automating operations and transferring your workers from active participant to supervisory roles, you greatly increase their safety by removing them from situations and tasks that quite frequently lead to injury.

 Improves product quality

Not only does automation result in higher production rates than what you see with traditional manual operations, it also performs the manufacturing process with greater uniformity and conformity to quality specifications. This reduction of fraction defect rates is one of the primary benefits of automation.

 Reduces manufacturing lead times

Automation will reduce the elapsed time between ordering and product delivery, which provides you with a significant competitive edge in your market. Reducing manufacturing lead time, you also reduce your work-in-progress inventory, saving you precious operational space.

 Accomplishes processes that can’t be done manually

Finally, utilizing automation enables you to perform certain operations that simply cannot be done without the aid of a machine, such as processes that require optimum levels of precision, miniaturization, or complex geometry.

There is a significant competitive advantage to be gained by incorporating more automation in your manufacturing plant. Not only will it help you increase production and quality, reduce employee injury, and complete processes you could not do otherwise, it also leads to higher sales, customer and labor relations, and even a better company image.

Benefits of Automation

Automation is the use of control systems to control processes, reducing the need for human intervention. Putting this into context, automation is having technology do things for you so that you don’t have to.

Automation is all around us. When you’re at a set of traffic lights, there isn’t a traffic light operator that decides when to change the light from red to green. It is done automatically. The street lights come on at night automatically. There are no lamplighters running around turning each light on anymore. We can apply this same idea to our own life. Granted, most of us can’t create complex control systems, so we will have to do our best with what is available, but having the most mundane tasks automated will help free up some time.

Advantages of Automation

Visions of a mechanized world flourished long before the term “automation” was coined. The star of Westinghouse’s exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair was Electro, a robot that could walk, talk, and count on its fingers. Sadly, Electro and his kind were little more than demonstrations of remote control by human operators. By the early sixties, they had been replaced in the public imagination by something much more useful—the computer.

In movies and advertisements, these “electronic brains” hummed away in orderly surroundings, watched over by well-dressed individuals who seemed to have nothing to do except gaze at the flickering lights and occasionally change a reel of tape. However, the reality was quite different. Most machine room supervisors would trade their last box of punch cards for an “Electro” who could unfailingly schedule and manage jobs, deal with unexpected events, and resolve performance problems. The same is true today—and that’s where automated operations come in.

In the mainframe computing environment, the variety of software needed to perform essential functions has always posed a challenging operations management problem. Initial solutions relied on numerous human operators, whose salaries became a significant portion of the IT budget.

Operations became a monster that had to be fed constantly. Whole administrative structures were created to support it. This bureaucracy, and the nature of people, led to a system that was prone to errors— resulting in more expense and complexity. The situation was out of control and something had to be done. The answer turned out to be using the computer to control and manage itself.

The Beginnings of Automated Operations

Automated computer operations began about 45 years ago when IBM introduced the OS/360 operating system. Like other early operating systems, OS/360 was a supervisory program that managed system resources and provided automatic transition from one job to another. This was called batch processing. OS/360 could run batch jobs, but had only limited control over their sequence and no capability to schedule future jobs. It still required a high level of operator involvement.

Subsequently, IBM developed add-on components like Job Entry System 3 (JES3) that provided basic job scheduling. But, this capability remained weak in later IBM operating systems such as MVS, VM, and DOS/VE. The issues surrounding automating computer operations lie in the complexity of the various operating systems, databases, communications, and other software in use. Because each component was independent, they had to be manually integrated and controlled by the Operations staff.

The continuing need for people to perform complex, labor-intensive tasks led software developers to begin developing today’s automated operations software. The number and breadth of products has grown considerably to encompass scheduling, management of console messages, backup and recovery, printing services, performance tuning, and more.

5 Major Benefits of Automation

Given the right tools, automating computer operations can be surprisingly easy and can reap major benefits. Understanding these benefits—and some obstacles—will help you develop support for an operations automation project. A recent study by a leading trade journal asked the question, “What do you see as the most important benefits of an automated or unattended computer center?” The primary benefits of operations automation cited most often were cost reduction; productivity, availability, reliability, and performance.

Every business faces global pressure to increase their profitability. One approach is to reduce costs. But, reducing the capabilities of the computer center negatively impacts the entire company.

Automation software is a better and more intelligent approach to cost containment and reduction. The greatest opportunity is to increase service to the customer (end user) while systematically reducing costs. Management often overlooks this potential for savings. Most modern servers have a low operating cost and the total cost of ownership has been declining. Even so, the cost of the operations staff can be as high as 71% of the total cost.

Productivity

As an organization’s technology demands grow, productivity becomes a bigger concern. Typically, as other business areas were given tools to increase their productivity and effectiveness, IT operations took a back seat. The proliferation of desktop productivity software has created substantial gains in the office and HR environments. But, instead of alleviating workload for the IT professionals in the back room, the spread of PCs has meant more tasks to be accomplished.

As people use computers more, they place greater demands on the system. More users are generating more jobs, and printed output has increased despite efforts to reduce printed reports. In spite of the trend to online transaction-oriented and client/server systems, batch workloads continue to grow. Production batch jobs still consume the majority of CPU time, and in large shops, jobs are constantly being added.

Automated operations can resolve these issues in several ways.

Job scheduling software increases batch throughput by automating the production batch schedule. In the early days, computer throughput was limited by how fast operators could reset switches on the console. The solution for today is not to allow the computer to remain idle while waiting for the operator to release the next job. You save time and money by eliminating the lag time between jobs and minimizing operator intervention. In some instances, you can trim hours off your process, which lets you process more work and significantly improve system use.

Once the job schedule is established, the automation software executes the commands precisely and in the correct sequence, eliminating operator errors. Forecasting job completion and being able to perform “what if” analyses of schedule changes benefits operations by removing much of the guesswork from daily tasks.

Availability

Companies are continually more reliant on their computers. Day-to-day business is routinely conducted with online systems: order entry, reservations, assembly instructions, shipping orders—the list goes on. If the computer is not available, the business suffers.

Years ago, it was considered acceptable to have the computer unavailable for a few hours. Today, with the high volume of cloud computing, the outage of key systems can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue and tarnish a company’s reputation.

High availability is clearly one of IT management’s primary goals. Here too, automated operations can help. A disk drive may crash, but the situation becomes serious when there is not an adequate backup— or worse, the tape cannot be found. A key advantage to automation is the ability to automate your save and recovery systems to ensure protection from the potential disaster of disk loss, or inadvertent damage to system objects from human error.

In a networked environment, centralized management also makes sense. Remote resources can solve business issues while a single operator at a central console observes critical functions throughout the network. Continuous monitoring with a low CPU and communications overhead makes it easier to spot vital network performance trends.

Reliability

Productivity is an obvious benefit of automation. However, reliability is the real gem that sparkles with automation. It is the cornerstone of any good IT operations department and without it you have confusion, chaos, and unhappy users. IT operations require two opposed skill sets: On one hand, an operations person needs highly technical skills, such as the ability to understand the complexities of an operating system and to analyze and solve problems as they arise. On the other hand, this same person has to be content pushing buttons and loading paper. 

Let’s face it, off-shift operations include some of the most boring, repetitive, and error-prone tasks of an IT organization. But, when you remove the human factor, you eliminate most batch processing errors.

Automated operations ensure that jobs are not forgotten or run out of sequence, that prerequisite jobs are completed successfully, that the input data is correct, and that any special processing is performed.

All these types of errors occur in single-location organizations. Now, imagine a network of multiple systems, geographically dispersed that include multiple operating systems, communications issues, integrated local area network processing, and attached PCs. The chance for errors rises exponentially. The only way to make this type of environment work is automated operations.

Software can handle complex tasks dynamically and intelligently, based on predefined parameters. Yet, critical company functions such as releasing jobs, performing backups, and ensuring communications, are normally performed by entry-level individuals within the IT organization. The benefit of an automated system is that these functions are reliably executed by the automation software, relieving operations personnel from hours of tedious, boring and manual tasks.

Performance

Every company would like to have their enterprise perform like a thoroughbred. In reality, it is more likely to be overburdened with work. Even though advancements in computers make them faster and less expensive every year, the demands on them always catch up and eventually exceed the level of capability that a company’s computer infrastructure possesses. That leaves a lot of companies wanting to improve their system performance.

Two options to improve performance are to upgrade hardware or purchase a newer system—both expensive choices. It’s also possible to tune a system for better performance, but this takes a highly skilled person who is not normally available 24 hours a day. And, once a system is tuned for a specific workload, if the workload changes, the settings are no longer optimum.

Sony's Aibo.

Probably the oldest and best known robot dog in the world, Sony’s Aibo returns this year as the new ERS 1000 model, which the company says will be more like a real dog then ever before. With its fish eye lens cameras, Wi-fi connectivity, and location and mapping software, the robot will learn from its owner, develop its own personality and grow together with its owner as a partner. As it interacts with people over time, Aibo’s behaviour slowly changes and adapts in response to its unique environment. The robot can move along at a total of 22 axes to resemble smooth and natural movements of a dog, with its body language expressed through a combination of voices and eye, ear and tail movements.

Buddy by Blue Frog

With it’s a cheerful and sweet little face to express emotion, the Buddy by Blue Frog Robotics is the companion robot for the family. The fully mobile robot moves with two motorised wheels. With its sensors, cameras, and microphones, the robot is able to hear and speak. It is full of personality and reacts to its environment through a range of expressions (such as happiness, grumpiness, anger or sadness) that allow it to better engage with his family. The robot can help the family with daily tasks, protect the home, entertain the children, and interact with other smart connected devices in the home.

Honda's new 3E (Empower, Experience, Empathy) Robotics.

Better known for its ASIMO humanoid robot, Honda unveiled a family of robots under its new 3E (Empower, Experience, Empathy) Robotics Concept, which demonstrates the company’s vision of a society where robotics and AI (artificial intelligence) can assist people in a multitude of situations, from disaster recovery and recreation to learning from human interaction to become more helpful and empathetic. The family includes the 3E-A18, a companion robotics concept that shows compassion to humans with a variety of facial expressions; 3E-B18, a chair-type mobility concept designed for casual use in indoor or outdoor spaces; 3E-C18, a small-sized electric mobility concept with multi functional cargo space; and 3E-D18, an autonomous off-road vehicle concept with AI designed to support people in a broad range of work activities.

Ubtech Robotics’ Walker.

Ubtech Robotics’ Walker is the world’s first commercialised biped (walking on two legs) robot for the consumer market, offering a complete “home butler” service. The robot is designed to provide smart assistance and support across a wide range of people’s daily lives. Activated by voice or via a touch screen, it can perform a variety of functions for the home; including smart home control, video surveillance monitoring, security patrol monitoring, motion detection, instant alarm, video calls/conferencing, real time email integration, calendar/schedule management, playing music and videos and dancing. New functional arms and a variety of interactive control features are being developed.

The Aeolus Robot

The Aeolus Robot is one of the first household robot assistants. Equipped with an agile arm, it is able to move household objects and can recognize and adapt to changing environments. The robot can learn, navigate and complete tasks independently. With several key features and functionalities such as recognition of thousands of items, it can pick up items off the floor and put them away in their proper storage areas. The robot can use a vacuum or a dry mop to clean floors, and continually adapts to unique home layouts and routines. With advanced sensory and bio metric technologies, it can recognize and differentiate between family members, the physical living space and household items.

How to control robots with brainwaves and hand gestures

Getting robots to do things isn’t easy: Usually, scientists have to either explicitly program them or get them to understand how humans communicate via language.

But what if we could control robots more intuitively, using just hand gestures and brainwaves?

A new system spearheaded by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) aims to do exactly that, allowing users to instantly correct robot mistakes with nothing more than brain signals and the flick of a finger.

Building off the team’s past work focused on simple binary-choice activities, the new work expands the scope to multiple-choice tasks, opening up new possibilities for how human workers could manage teams of robots.

By monitoring brain activity, the system can detect in real-time if a person notices an error as a robot does a task. Using an interface that measures muscle activity, the person can then make hand gestures to scroll through and select the correct option for the robot to execute.

The team demonstrated the system on a task in which a robot moves a power drill to one of three possible targets on the body of a mock plane. Importantly, they showed that the system works on people it’s never seen before, meaning that organizations could deploy it in real-world settings without needing to train it on users.

This work combining EEG and EMG feedback enables natural human-robot interactions for a broader set of applications than we've been able to do before using only EEG feedback. By including muscle feedback, the gestures can be udes to command the robot spatially, with much more nuance and specificity.”

In most previous work, systems could generally only recognize brain signals when people trained themselves to “think” in very specific but arbitrary ways and when the system was trained on such signals. For instance, a human operator might have to look at different light displays that correspond to different robot tasks during a training session.

Not surprisingly, such approaches are difficult for people to handle reliably, especially if they work in fields like construction or navigation that already require intense concentration.

Meanwhile, the team harnessed the power of brain signals called “error-related potentials” (ErrPs), which researchers have found to naturally occur when people notice mistakes. If there’s an ErrP, the system stops so the user can correct it; if not, it carries on.

For the project the team used “Baxter,” a humanoid robot from Rethink Robotics. With human supervision, the robot went from choosing the correct target 70 percent of the time to more than 97 percent of the time.

To create the system the team harnessed the power of electroencephalography (EEG) for brain activity and electromyography (EMG) for muscle activity, putting a series of electrodes on the users’ scalp and forearm.

Both metrics have some individual shortcomings: EEG signals are not always reliably detectable, while EMG signals can sometimes be difficult to map to motions that are any more specific than “move left or right.” Merging the two, however, allows for more robust bio-sensing and makes it possible for the system to work on new users without training.

The team says that they could imagine the system one day being useful for the elderly, or workers with language disorders or limited mobility.

Trends in Robot Accessories

The right accessories can boost the flexibility and reliability of robotic assembly operations.

The efficiency and reliability of an industrial robot largely depend on its end-of-arm tooling (EOAT). However, we often forget that the interface between the end-effector and the robot arm also plays a critical role. Devices, such as tool changers, compensation units, and force and torque sensors, have a great influence on the robot’s performance, flexibility and fields of application.

Tool changers lend speed and flexibility to a robotic assembly line.Even an experienced operator requires 10 to 30 minutes to manually change the EOAT on a robot. With a tool changer, the same operation takes less than 10 to 30 seconds.

A tool changer consists of two components: a quick-change head, which is mounted on the robot arm, and a quick-change adapter, which is connected to the tool. The tool changer provides feed-throughs for electric, pneumatic and hydraulic connections between the arm and the EOAT. During a tool change, both components are automatically or manually coupled. When selecting a tool changer, engineers should look for a device with a low weight-to-force ratio, short change times, and precision-made energy-transfer points.

Integrating micro valves into a quick-change system can replace a complete valve terminal. At every cycle, the cylinder of the actuator will fill with compressed air, which saves a lot of time. If you are using a feeding hose that’s 3 meters long and 4 millimeters in diameter, micro valves will reduce air consumption by 90 percent. Instead of cable and wire bundles, just one pneumatic line for compressed air and power supply is required. Both lines can usually be fed through a center bore with a diameter of 12 millimeters, and they can be integrated into the arm of a SCARA robot.

To avoid problems during robotic insertion operations, compensation units provide some compliance between the end-effector and the robot arm. This prevents damage to the assembly or the EAOT and increases the reliability of the process. The latest compensation devices work without pneumatics. Compliance in two directions is adjusted via springs with adjustment screws. Compliance in three directions is adjusted via elastomeric elements. Because the units work without pneumatics, they are flat and particularly suitable for use in confined areas. Smooth-running roller guides compensate for smaller forces without stick-slip effects.

The latest trend in robotics is to equip the robot with force and torque sensors. Such sensors give the robot the ability to precisely adjust its path based on feedback. This is critical for obtaining consistent results in robotic grinding and finishing applications.

The Exoskeletons of the Future Might Just Be Comfortable Pants

When the term “exoskeleton” comes to mind, it’s easy to think about science fiction or bulky military enhancements. The idea of military driven by men with the strength of robots has conjured up dreams for decades. But what if the future of exoskeletons isn’t Iron Man or Master Chief, but grandma maintaining her self-reliance by getting some help with simple acts like walking up the stairs?

The soft exosuit uses a combination of sensors, including a hyper elastic strain sensor (1) and sensors around the wearer’s hip, calf and ankle (2)-(5), all secured by straps. Flexible membranes cover sensors and straps (6) 

“Soft” exoskeletons, developed by researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, certainly have military applications.  But these exoskeletons are pants. Comfortable pants. These pants would have a waist belt, two thigh pieces, and two calf straps. Cables are attached through to a motor placed on the wearer’s back in a backpack. The thigh pants monitor the human gait, which the researchers place into “human kinematics,” the study of the motion of multi-joint systems. The sensors use electro-myography, a procedure used to assess the health of muscles and the nerve cells that control them, and to determine the parts of the body that need the most assistance.

Participants in the experiments carried thirty percent of their body weight at three miles per hour on a treadmill, slightly faster than the average human walking speed of two and a half. They would walk normally, walk with the weight, and then walk with the weight and the exosuit. The efforts seemed to put a strain on the body that without the suit would be manageable but still noticeable. The results were also noticeable. Measuring the metabolism and strain of each participant, the researchers determined there was “a significant metabolic power reduction” while wearing the exosuit. The participants’ hips, knees, and ankles were also all working significantly less while the exosuit was on.

This wasn’t the Wyss Institute’s first foray into robotic wearable, they’ve also worked with exo gloves. And while their work has been put into a military milieu, it’s clear that the Institute has an eye towards commercial sales. “A key feature of exosuits is that if the actuated segments are extended the suit length can increase so that the entire suit is slack, at which point wearing an exosuit feels like wearing a pair of pants and does not restrict the wearer whatsoever.”

Meet the Tiny Origami Robots That Will Unfold in Your Stomach

Science often has a way of catching up with science fiction. While it never claimed the fan fervour of Star Trek, the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage offered a tantalizing promise: shrinking scientists down so they could extract information from a human body from the inside. MIT scientists haven’t gotten the shrinking figured out, but by making ingestible microscopic robots that can enter human organs, they’ve managed to get at least half of it down. The robots are based on the concept of origami. You take a capsule, and the robot unfolds itself into a more functional form. MIT first announced the development of these origami robots in 2014, with the hopes of making robots as small as possible. At the time, Daniela Rus, Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, talked about how gaining control of the geometry of the robots was crucial to the project: “We can do the sequencing, we have a lot more control,” she said.

The construction of the robot 

That control is on full display in the latest developments from Rus and her team. “In our calculation,” says Shuhei Miyashita, a lecturer in electronics at the University of Yorkwith whom work Rus worked, “twenty percent of forward motion is by propelling water—thrust—and eighty percent is stick-slip motion,” a method of locomotion where the robot sticks to a surface through friction when it moves and slips free when it changes its weight distribution. “In this regard, we actively introduced and applied the concept and characteristics of the fin to the body design, which you can see in the relatively flat design.” Once inside the body, the robot unfolds to a rectangular design with accordion folds. Crucial to the robot’s success inside the body is the magnet at its core. Outside magnetic forces are used to steer the robot through intestines, and the magnet was also critical to the robot’s success in its test mission.

The size is small enough to be easily ingested 

The team got pig intestines from Boston’s Chinatown and used them to construct a synthetic stomach, in which they placed a battery. It was a realistic situation; there were a reported 11,940 incidents between 2005 and 2014 of children under six swallowing batteries. After navigating the robot with outside magnetic fields, the robot used its central magnet to grab the battery. It’s a system which is very reliant on outside observation, which is what Rus and her team are hoping to work on next. They are working on adding sensors to the robot, redesign the robot so it can control itself. Watch the video. So while the chances of humans shrinking down to get things out of your body are slim, at least something with physical autonomy could be pulling batteries out some time soon.

MIT Device Makes You a Superhuman With a Third Hand

What if instead of one hand on each arm, you had two? That’s what Sang-won Leigh is trying to achieve with his Robotic Symbiotic wearable that he developed as a project for MIT’s Fluid Interfaces course. The robotic hand (described as a “body integrated programmable joints interface”) is equipped with 11 motors that can be rearranged and reprogrammed to satisfy different uses. The device can serve as a large extra finger or as an entire hand. It can sit below your wrist and clamp onto things to hold them still, or pick up objects while your fleshy human hand is left free to, I don’t know, play with your phone.

The robotic hand is controlled separately from your real hand 

The neat thing about Leigh’s robotic hand is that the machine is controlled separately from your real hand. You can hold your hand completely still and move the robotic appendage, and vice versa. How? The device senses electrical signals sent to the muscle in your forearm. This muscle is not used to move your hand, but after practicing for a few hours, you can flex and move it in ways that will cause the robot hand to respond. 

You can also use the device as a joystick or trigger, actually manipulating it with your hand to control a computer interface or play a video game. While there certainly could be applications for people who have disabilities or were injured in combat, Leigh has something else in mind for his human-augmentation device. “A lot of people think about machine augmentation in terms of rehabilitation,” Leigh says, “But we envisioned it as an assistive technology that wasn’t just for people with challenges, but which could turn people with normal physiology into super humans.”

IBM’s Librarian Bot Swaps Data Tapes Like a Madman

There’s no such thing as the cloud, the saying goes—there’s just other people’s computers. How intensely data-intense medium-sized companies—says, banks or insurance companies—can handle huge volumes of data on-site using an IBM system called TS 4500, which comes with a handy robot to fetch files for you.

Huge data storage enabled by one plucky machine

         The tape library in the data storage unit is meant to maximize the amount of 

1s and 0s a company can store in a small space, which is especially useful for organizations that must keep years of older data around. The IBM specs can house more than 16 petabytes (at 3:1 compression) in a 10-by-10-foot space and expand as needed. That’s at least 16 million gigs to organize and protect in roughly the area of a freight elevator, with all that hard storage existing on perhaps tens of thousands of tapes. It’s a job for the robots.

This Tactile Robot Diver Lets Explorers Feel Around Shipwrecks

Stanford engineers have built a robot scuba diver that’s just the sort of sturdy, sensitive sort that you need if you want to pick your way through a coral reef or a decaying shipwreck. Named Ocean One, the robot commands some of the most human like qualities of any remote-controlled machine designed to withstand ocean pressures at depths of hundreds of meters.

Ocean One transmits sensations back to its operator for delicate explorations 

The robot’s key traits: OceanOne is roughly person-sized (about 5 feet long), has binocular vision in a head that looks like Mega Man’s, and trawls the deep with the use of two arms and hands that send back haptic data to its operator. This allows a person controlling Ocean One with joysticks to feel, roughly, the weight of the objects the robot’s picking up. The computer scientist leading this project, Oussama Khatib, uses the word “avatar” to describe the relationship between the operator and Ocean One. Its seems apt, and it opens up a different frontier, perhaps, in how we explore the deep. More than a mere drone (no offense, Sentry) or a chunky human-occupied pod Ocean One is nimble, tactile, and seemingly intuitive. It can comb a fragile environment, in tight confines, and report its findings directly into the hands of its guide. Khatib told Stanford’s news service: “You can feel exactly what the robot is doing. It’s almost like you are there; with the sense of touch you create a new dimension of perception.”

 Its maiden voyage into the live ocean was to prowl a La Lune, a frigate of Louis XIV’s that sank off the southern coast of France in 1664 and was rediscovered only in 1993, some 300 feet below the surface. French underwater archaeologists have been probing the site for years, but it’s still striking to see OceanOne hustle down and retrieve a vase, with Khatib at the controls. No wonder the scientist hopes to build a small team of these robots in the near future. Watch the Ocean One.

Drones Are Already Delivering Packages in Germany

The Parcelocopter completes five mile trips within eight minutes

It may have been a while since DHL made headlines in the States, but it’s been focusing on shipping, shipping, and shipping. Now, it’s sent over a hundred packages with drones—beating mammoths like Amazon to the punch—and has no plans to stop any time soon. The international shipper stayed local with its trial runs, delivering 130 packages within the Bavarian town of Reitim Winkl, a small town mainly known for its skiing and forestry with added challenges of alpine geography and the potential for snow. Residents could drop off packages in “packstations,” essentially lockers, from which point on drones would control the entire shipping process.

Focusing the drones—which DHL adorably refers to as “parcelcopters”—within a small area allowed for quick speeds. Used from January through March of this year, the drones were able to complete five mile trips that usually take half an hour during the winter within eight minutes. DHL thanked the German government, saying that the creation of a special restricted flight zone was crucial to the success of the project. It’s something Amazon would surely kill to get out the U.S. government. Some say that Amazon’s famously aggressive stature has actually worsened its chance at a speedy approval, leading to severe pushback from unions and safety advocates. The company has threatened that it would move its drone program overseas, closer to the friendly environs seen by DHL. Regardless of where Amazon’s technology goes, though, it’ll never be able to say it was first. 

Meet EMILY, the Robot Lifeguard Launched From a Helicopter

                      

                           Swims through the water with the greatest of ease 

               

             If you thought bulletproof, jet-powered superheroes in colorful outfits exist only in the movies and comic books, then it’s time to reconsider. EMILY, a remote-controlled robot lifeguard, recently proved her value by rescuing some 300 Syrian refugees from drowning off the Greek island of Lesbos. The robot, full name Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard, is designed to be thrown out of a helicopter (or from a boat or a bridge) and then driven up to a person in the water. EMILY has propulsion similar to a jet ski with no propeller blades to cause injuries or get tangled. It zips along at a brisk 22 mph. Rough conditions are no problem; EMILY can handle 30-waves and survive collisions with rocks and reefs and keep going. “EMILY is made of Kevlar and aircraft-grade composites and is virtually indestructible,” says Tony Mulligan, CEO of marine robotics company Hydronalix and Emily’s inventor. EMILY is easy to spot thanks to its orange, red and yellow color scheme. It has lights for night rescues. A two-way radio system allows rescuers to talk to people in the water and see them via a video camera. While the bot’ most obvious use is an emergency flotation device for up to six people struggling in the water, the robot can also deliver life jackets, or can drag a rescue line 800 yards through surf or currents.

As with all superheroes, there is a cool origin story here. In Emily’s case this goes back to a 2001 project for a drone to track whales during Navy sonar testing.  In 2011, elements of the original drone were used to create a new machine for hurricane tracking and disaster response. Other components were incorporated from the Office of Naval Research’s mysterious SwampWorks program. The end result of this collaboration between Hydroanalix, the ONR, and the Navy’s Small Business Innovation Research is EMILY. Bob Smith of SBIR calls EMILY as “a classic overnight success story years in the making.” At just four feet long and twenty-five pounds, Emily may be a little on the small side for a superhero.  But unlike her fictional counterparts, she’s out there saving lives in the real world, with some 260 units in service with coast guards, navies and others, including the RoboticistsWithout Borders team that took Emily to Greece. Now that’s a marvel.

Swarms of Robot Spiders Could Be the Future of 3D Printing

The problem with most 3D printer’s “microwave from the future” design is that they have a limited capacity, you can’t make anything larger than the printer itself just like how you can’t print out a full-size poster on a desktop inkjet. If you could train a group of robot spiders to work together collaboratively though, size limits could effectively disappear. That’s the theory behind the latest project coming out of Siemens, anyway. A few years past the 100th anniversary of the first assembly line in a Ford factory, the principle still rings true: You can make something faster with many hands working on small parts individually. “The idea,” says Livio Dalloro, head of the company’s Product Design, Simulation & Modelling Research and leader of the robot spider program, “is really to make these flexible autonomous, communicating, general purpose machines.”

To do that, Siemens has created six-legged robots with depth-perception cameras and awareness of their surroundings. Each robot will take its own size into account and work specifically in its designated area. They’ll even work in shifts so they can reload printing material and recharge, downloading data into a fresh robot after two hours. Mobile robots could simply be given a design for a project and break it up amongst themselves.At this point, the robots are too imprecise to build anything yet. The collaborative process is a complex one, even for robot spiders that are operated by a hivemind. Each bot requires an understanding of its own abilities and those of fellow builders in order to work efficiently as a group. Siemens isn’t building the robots towards any specific goal right now, but sees the bots as the future of construction. Dalloro’s team has already got one robot to build a small plastic object, now they’re working on getting two together to build with concrete. Unleash the swarms.

Disney’s Clever New Transmission Can Give Robots the Most Delicate of Touches

Disney’s Clever New Transmission Can Give Robots the Most Delicate of Touches

              The new robotic transmission allows robotic arms a greater level of sensitivity and precision

Disney has engineered a new robotic transmission that allows robotic arms a greater level of sensitivity and precision. These arms combine hydraulic and pneumatic lines and offer virtually no friction, allowing for remarkable levels of control. Normally, a robot joint would have two hydraulic cylinders, balanced against each other. But Disney researchers differed from the norm, matching each water-filled cylinder with an air-filled cylinder. The pneumatic cylinder acts as a constant force air-spring, providing the required pre-load force, allowing the joint to move in both directions while cutting the number of hydraulic lines in half.

The result is a very soft touch. Currently the robots have to be controlled by humans, who sometimes are wearing Oculus Rifts to see through the robot’s camera-eyes. Human control allows for a great chance to show off the variations of sensitivity in touch, and the team behind the transmission expects “the same level of mechanical performance once the motions are automated.”

Domino’s Delivery Robot Heats Your Pizza on Its Way to Your House

Maybe we should be worried about robots taking our jobs—Domino’s has enlisted the help of machines to deliver its pizzas as part of a trial in Australia.

The Domino’s Robotic Unit (DRU) is a ground drone that is able to navigate to the customer’s doorstep with the help of sophisticated on-board sensors.And here’s the best part—it keeps the food piping hot by warming it in its on-board oven along the way.Domino’s created the robot with the help of Marathon Robotics. The design was based on a military drone and its cargo hold is PIN-code protected. DRU is undergoing early testing in Australia, which will hopefully lead to these things being deployed further afield.After all, drone deliveries are almost a thing. Amazon and its competitors have been testing the waters for a good while. But what good is a drone if it doesn’t deliver pizza?