Marco van der Hoeven

The NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) awarded the European leading robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) developer and system integrator Milrem Robotics a contract to provide RAS Concept Development and Experimentation (CD&E) Services to the Italian Army.

Reliable Robotics, vendor of automated aircraft systems, announced the appointments of David DeRose as Director of Finance and Lee Tomlinson as Director of Operations to the company’s fully owned Part 135 airline subsidiary in preparation for commercial cargo flights. DeRose and Tomlinson join Jeff Drees, Director of Cargo Strategy, to begin cargo services this year.

Eurofighters deployed by the Spanish airforce will receive avionics by Indra with the ability to self-diagnose the status of nearly twenty critical combat aircraft systems. Indra has been awarded the MP C16 R&D project, the use of a system based on AI for predictive maintenance of avionics in C.16 Eurofighter. The contract is worth more than half a million euros.

Building a team of digital employees successfully is more complex than putting one or two software robots in place. More and more organisations aspire to scale up, but run into challenges when attempting to do so and do not know how to tackle them. Ciphix has created the Digital Workforce Journey Framework for that very reason. Rocking Robots discussed this matter with managing director Marijn van de Poel.

CES 2022 is a wrap, following a week filled with thousands of product debuts. More than 2300 exhibiting companies from around the world, including more than 800 startups, launched products featuring innovation across artificial intelligence, automotive technology, digital health, smart home and more.

The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) team PoliMOVE from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and the University of Alabama  won the Autonomous Challenge at CES, making history as the first head-to-head autonomous racecar competition champion.

With an investment of DKK 335 million from A.P. Møller Holding, Blue Ocean Robotics will roll out mobile robot solutions globally.

Today, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicks off in Las Vegas. A total of 130 companies, including various robotics and AI providers, will present their offerings to a partly physical and partly online audience. A number of major tech companies have declined to participate due to the Covid pandemic, including Facebook/Meta, Amazon and Twitter.

Amphibious transport dock ship USS Portland has recently conducted a high-energy laser weapon system demonstration while sailing in the Gulf of Aden. During the demonstration, the Solid State Laser – Technology Maturation Laser Weapons System Demonstrator (LWSD) Mark 2 MOD 0 aboard Portland successfully engaged a static surface training target. Portland previously tested the LWSD when it successfully disabled a small unmanned aerial system while operating in the Pacific Ocean.

The vision of Rocking Robots is to report on the interaction between humans and robots. The interviews we published this year show that we as humans are increasingly successful in making robots work for us. However, it remains important to pay attention to pre-eminently human issues such as ethics, acceptance and safety. Where that happens, applications of technology arise that actually help us as humans.