Bots & Business

In a research project West Virginia University engineers are deploying robots to help workers by saving them from potential slips, falls and workplace hazards. Yu Gu and Jason Gross, associate professors in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, have received $367,000 from the National Science Foundation to study ways of reducing falling risk in retail environments.

Spot Release 3.2 features built-in data processing and review, improved data collection pipeline, and a better operator experience. As modern organizations use data to drive their business’ decision-making this data can come from a wide variety of sources. Spot moves from asset to asset across a facility to get real-time information on equipment including pumps, motors, compressors, and more, so plant managers can improve uptime while decreasing costs of downtime and maintenance.

The University of Michigan (UM) Computer Science and Engineering department’s works to advance the intersection of programming systems and artificial intelligence (AI). As UiPath provides semantic automation it supports the research of Xinyu Wang, Assistant Professor at UM, who has a goal of building fundamental intelligent programming techniques that are useful in practice.

Wrekin Council in the UK, deploying an AI Assistant, managed to cut extremely high waiting times by 50%, shifting many users to digital. A year into the AI assisted operations, new services are added to support residents and lessen strain on staff. The Council’s AI acceleration eliminated the need to employ additional headcount, which is important given the current struggle to recruit and retain staff in the sector.

Pudu Robotics unveiled its newest offering, the PuduBot 2. Featuring a range of upgrades, this new generation of universal delivery robots offers better environment adaptability, stronger sensors, higher battery power capacity, and superior stability to the first-generation PuduBot launched in 2017.

I have always loved technology. When I was young, growing up only a few kilometers from where the Universal Robots headquarters is today, I remember finding a bug in a soccer video game I played, and I tried for months and months to make a better game. Even though it turned out to be much harder than I thought, and I ended up with nothing, it got me into coding, which was a learned skill that followed me for many years ahead. 

ABB is expanding its FlexPicker Delta robot portfolio with the IRB 365. With five axes and 1.5kg payload, the IRB 365 is both flexible and the fastest in its class for reorientating packaged lightweight products such as cookies, chocolates, peppers, candies, small bottles, and parcels.  

UiPath has acquired Re:infer, a natural language processing (NLP) company focused on unstructured documents and communications. Founded in 2015 by Ph.D. scientists from the Centre for Artificial Intelligence at University College London, Re:infer uses machine learning (ML) technology to mine context from communication messages and transform them into actionable data. 

FANUC, supplier of CNCs, robotics and ROBOMACHINEs, announces a West Campus expansion that will push its operational space in Oakland County, Michigan to nearly two million square feet. The construction will include a 655,000 square foot state-of-the-art facility to house manufacturing, engineering and R&D projects.

Universal Robots has reported Q2 revenue of USD 83 million. Universal Robots highlights particularly strong growth in global welding demand as being key to its success in the first half of the year. The company has also increased its revenue from Original Equipment Manufacturer [OEM] channels.