Pieter Werner

Rice University mechanical engineers are using legs of deceased spiders as mechanical grippers that can blend into natural environments while picking up objects, like other insects, that outweigh them. An open-access study in Advanced Science outlines the process by which Preston and lead author Faye Yap harnessed a spider’s physiology in a first step toward a novel area of research they call “necrobotics.”

As the number of UiPath users in its automation ecosystem exceeds 1.5 million Gartner has for the fourth consecutive year named UiPath a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation.

Teradyne, owner of both MiR and Universal Robots has announced its second quarter results. It reported revenue of $841 million for the second quarter of 2022 of which $541 million was in Semiconductor Test, $135 million in System Test, $64 million in Wireless Test and $101 million in Industrial Automation (IA). Collaborative and mobile robots are part of its Industrial Automation offerings, which experienced ‘slowing growth’.

Shenzen, a city in the south of China with a population of 17.5 million people, has officially allowed autonomous vehicles on the road. This is, however, based on strict rules regarding vehicles and safety.

This fall Global Robot Expo, a major professional event for industry 4.0, automation, artificial intelligence and robotics, will take place from 30 November to 1 December at IFEMA MADRID. It will include the GR-EX World Congress, a congress and exhibition in which visitors can find innovations for industry and advanced production, as well as the first edition of the congress GR-EX Intelligence, a trade fair for innovations in artificial intelligence.

Accenture buys Canadian Eclipse Automation, provider of manufacturing automation and robotics solutions. With this acquisition Accenture will be able to offer automated production lines that combine cloud, data and artificial intelligence (AI).

Ecoppia has won the Top Product of the Year Award for their H4 robot in the elite Environment + Energy Leader Awards program. The autonomous H4 robotic cleaning solution addresses scalability and remote management for large scale solar PV sites. To further bolster the solution’s smart, effective, and safe features, the H4 introduces helix technology into PV cleaning.

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.5 trillion in 2022, an increase of 3% from 2021, according to the latest forecast by Gartner. While IT spending is expected to grow in 2022, it will be at a much slower pace than 2021 due to spending cutbacks on PCs, tablets and printers by consumers, causing spending on devices to shrink 5%.

In a new study published by Science Robotics, Columbia Engineering  researchers demonstrate how their robot created a kinematic model of itself, and then used its self-model to plan motion, reach goals, and avoid obstacles in a variety of situations. It even automatically recognized and then compensated for damage to its body.

The US Government has stated it believes Russia is trying to get “hundreds” of unmanned aerial vehicles, including weapons-capable drones, from Iran to use in the war in Ukraine.