Boston Dynamics Enters Warehouse Robots Market, Acquires Kinema Systems

July 30, 2019

Source: Spectrum IEEE / by Erico Guizzo The company, famous for agile machines like Atlas and Spot, wants to unleash robots in the warehouse If you haven’t seen the latest Boston Dynamics video, released last week, it shows an upgraded version of the company’s Handle robot moving boxes in a warehouse. Handle is a mobile manipulator that integrates both legs and wheels, and the new version features a swinging “tail” that serves as a …Read More

Amazon Uses 800 Robots to Run This Warehouse

June 25, 2019

Source: IEEE Spectrum / by Evan Ackerman Amazon is adding even more robots to its already massive robotic workforce At Amazon’s re:MARS conference in Las Vegas today, who else but Amazon is introducing two new robots designed to make its fulfillment centers even more fulfilling. Xanthus (named after a mythological horse that could very briefly talk but let’s not read too much into that) is a completely redesigned drive unit, one of the …Read More

Yale’s Robot Hand Copies How Your Fingers Work to Improve Object Manipulation

February 12, 2019

Source: IEEE Spectrum / by Evan Ackerman These robotic fingers can turn friction on and off to make it easier to manipulate objects with one hand And yet, robots are learning to do such things. For example, OpenAI recently taught a five-fingered hand to manipulate a cube, which is great, if you have a lot of patience and/or computing resources, and the budget for a fancy hand and stuff. For those of us …Read More

Robots Getting a Grip on General Manipulation

November 19, 2018

Source: IEEE Spectrum (by Nikolaus Correll) How a new generation of grippers with improved 3D perception and tactile sensing is learning to manipulate a wide variety of objects. While robots have prepared entire breakfasts since 1961, general manipulation in the real world is arguably an even more complex problem than autonomous driving. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why, though. Closely watching the 1961 video suggests that a two-finger parallel gripper …Read More

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