International

Mobile Industrial Robots A/S (MiR) today announced a new integration partnership with CSi palletising, a Netherlands-based company that provides full end-of-line palletizing solutions to some of the world’s largest consumer packaged goods (CPG)/fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies.

Over the next two years, visual configuration, digital wallets, customer identity and access management (CIAM) and virtual customer assistants (VCAs) will have high impact on digital commerce as mainstream adoption of these technologies increases, according to the 2021 Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce.

Bad timing can botch a repetitive task that requires interaction between a robot and a human, a new study reports. Human participants in the study were less efficient at completing a pick-and-place task when their robot collaborators sent a signal to participants who were about to pick up an object, but fared much better when the robot provided the same cue shortly after participants had picked up an object and were about to put it down. 

Team Cerberus has won the DARPA Subterranean Robot Challenge. This event calls on teams to develop innovative robots that can explore diverse subterranean environments. The prize for the winning team is $2 000 000. The group is headed by an NTNU professor.

Asensus Surgical announced Sapporo Medical University Hospital, located in Hokkaido, Japan, has entered into an agreement to lease and utilize a Senhance Surgical System.

Salesforce rolled out three new Einstein Automate products to help every Salesforce customer, regardless of technical background, use low-code tools to automate time-consuming, manual processes and integrate data across systems right from their digital HQ. 

Digital ethics sits at the peak of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Privacy, 2021, as people become increasingly aware of the value of their personal information and frustrated by lack of transparency and continuing misuse.

A push to automate is changing the way humans and machines work together. The number of industrial robots installed in factories reached about 3 million units worldwide in 2020 – more than doubling in ten years. The IFR has researched how robotics training shapes current and future workforce education, enhancing skills development for employees.

One-third of technology and service provider organisations with artificial intelligence (AI) technology plans said they would invest $1 million or more into these technologies in the next two years, according to a new survey from Gartner. Most survey respondents (87%) with AI technologies as a major investment area believe industrywide funding for AI will increase at a moderate to fast pace through 2022.

RPA supplier Blue Prism is likely to be acquired by investor Vista Equity Partners in the near future, reports Bloomberg news agency. The news agency mentions a possible acquisition amount of 1.1 billion pounds (1.5 billion dollars), based on anonymous sources. After the acquisition, Vista could merge the software with that of the previously acquired Tibco Software.