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The entire production area in these silos will be managed with a robotic arm that travels up and down a central shaft performing all necessary tasks of planting,
which sunlight will be channeled to provide natural illumination for optimal plant growth as well as the primary rail for the robotic arm.
Robotic Earthworm Drivers The most valuable land on the planet will soon be the landfills
In the future, robotic earthworms will be used to silently mine the landfills and replace whatever is extracted with high-grade soil. 39.
Robot Polishers If we are going to have robots, they will need invariably to be polished. 54. Amnesia Surgeons Doctors who are skilled in removing bad memories or destructive behavior. 55.
Robotic Chef printing the ultimate cupcake and the ultimate banana At MIT, Amit Zoran has developed a series of digital devices that may one day be use to produce the food we eat.
The virtuoso mixer, the robotic chef and the digital fabricator all aim to bring the tools we use to make food up to date with digital technology.
the robotic chef handles the physical and chemical transformation of these ingredients into new compounds
#Global manufacturing is changing with a new wave of robots At the new Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif,
. a robot might do up to four jobs: welding, riveting, bonding and installing a component. On the coast of China at the Philips electronics factory hundreds of workers use the old way of working to assemble electric shavers by using their hands and specialized tools.
At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility.
One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see.
A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution.
it plans to install more than a million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in China.
has endorsed publicly a growing use of robots. Speaking of his more than one million employees worldwide, he said in January, according to the official Xinhua news agency:
#The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists
#But Bran Ferren, a veteran roboticist and industrial product designer at Applied Minds in Glendale, Calif.,argues that there are still steep obstacles that have made the dream of the universal assembly robot elusive.
I had an early naã vet about universal robots that could just do said anything, #he.
And these things are still hard for robots to do.##Beyond the technical challenges lies resistance from unionized workers
The ascension of robots may mean fewer jobs are created in this country, even though rising labor and transportation costs in Asia and fears of intellectual property theft are now bringing some work back to the West.
Yet in the state-of-the-art plant, where the assembly line runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are robots everywhere and few human workers.
and almost all of the precise work is done by robots that string together solar cells and seal them under glass.
where robots that zoom at the speed of the world s fastest sprinters can store,
Robots could soon replace workers at companies like C & S Wholesale Grocers, the nation s largest grocery distributor,
which has deployed already robot technology. Rapid improvement in vision and touch technologies is putting a wide array of manual jobs within the abilities of robots.
For example, Boeing s wide-body commercial jets are riveted now automatically by giant machines that move rapidly and precisely over the skin of the planes.
And at Earthbound Farms in California, four newly installed robot arms with customized suction cups swiftly place clamshell containers of organic lettuce into shipping boxes.
The robots move far faster than the people they replaced. Each robot replaces two to five workers at Earthbound, according to John Dulchinos,
an engineer who is the chief executive at Adept Technology, a robot maker based in Pleasanton, Calif.,that developed Earthbound s system.
Robot manufacturers in the United states say that in many applications robots are already more cost-effective than humans.
At an automation trade show last year in Chicago, Ron Potter, the director of robotics technology at an Atlanta consulting firm called Factory Automation Systems, offered attendees a spreadsheet to calculate how quickly robots would pay for themselves.
In one example, a robotic manufacturing system initially cost $250, 000 and replaced two machine operators,
each earning $50, 000 a year. Over the 15-year life of the system, the machines yielded $3. 5 million in labor and productivity savings.
The Obama administration says this technological shift presents a historic opportunity for the nation to stay competitive.
Moreover, robotics executives argue that even though blue-collar jobs will be lost, more efficient manufacturing will create skilled jobs in designing,
And robot makers point out that their industry itself creates jobs. A report commissioned by the International Federation of Robotics last year found that 150,000 people are employed already by robotics manufacturers worldwide in engineering and assembly jobs.
But American and European dominance in the next generation of manufacturing is far from certain. What I see is that the Chinese are going to apply robots too,
#said Frans van Houten, Philips s chief executive. The window of opportunity to bring manufacturing back is before that happens.#
The assembly line here is made up of dozens of glass cages housing robots made by Adept Technology that snake around the factory floor for more than 100 yards.
Video cameras atop the cages guide the robot arms almost unerringly to pick up the parts they assemble.
The next generation of robots for manufacturing will be more flexible and easier to train. Witness the factory of Tesla Motors,
Its fast-moving robots, bright Tesla red, each has a single arm with multiple joints.
While the many robots in auto factories typically perform only one function in the new Tesla factory a robot might do up to four:
welding, riveting, bonding and installing a component. As many as eight robots perform a ballet around each vehicle as it stops at each station along the line for just five minutes.
Ultimately as many as 83 cars a day#roughly 20,000 are planned for the first year#will be produced at the factory.
once the robots are reprogrammed. Tesla s factory is tiny but represents a significant bet on flexible robots,
one that could be a model for the industry. And others are already thinking bigger.
Hyundai and Beijing Motors recently completed a mammoth factory outside Beijing that can produce a million vehicles a year using more robots
The New Warehouse Traditional and futuristic systems working side by side in a distribution center north of New york city show how robotics is transforming the way products are distributed, threatening jobs.
They watch over a four-story cage with different levels holding 168 rover#robots the size of go-carts.
The robot gathers a box by extending two-foot-long metal fingers from its side
where it turns into a wide lane where it must contend with traffic#eight robots are active on each level of the structure,
From the aisle, the robots wait their turn to pull into a special open lane where they deposit each load into an elevator that sends a stream of food cases down to a conveyor belt that leads to a large robot arm.
The software is sophisticated enough to determine which robot should pick up which case first, so when the order arrives at the supermarket,
this robotic warehouse is inspired by computer designers who created software algorithms to efficiently organize data to be stored on a computer s hard drive.
the cases of food moving through the robotic warehouse are like the digital bits being processed by the computer.
requiring expensive reprogramming of robots. But that list is growing shorter. Upgrading Distribution Inside a spartan garage in an industrial neighborhood in Palo alto, Calif,
. a robot armed with electronic eyes #and a small scoop and suction cups repeatedly picks up boxes
Older robots cannot do such work because computer vision systems were limited costly and to carefully controlled environments where the lighting was just right.
this robot can quickly discern the irregular dimensions of randomly placed objects. The robot uses a technology pioneered in Microsoft s Kinect motion sensing system for its Xbox video game system.
Such robots will put automation within range of companies like Federal express and United parcel service that now employ tens of thousands of workers doing such tasks.
The start-up behind the robot, Industrial Perception Inc.,is the first spinoff of Willow Garage,
an ambitious robotics research firm based in Menlo Park, Calif. The first customer is likely to be a company that now employs thousands of workers to load
and unload its trucks. The workers can move one box every six seconds on average. But each box can weigh more than 130 pounds,
The engineers are confident that the robot will soon do much better than that, picking up and setting down one box per second.
Chaotic Moon Labs began testing a robotic shopping cart that acts a bit like a mind-reading butler.
Swarm-Bots-Swarm robotics involves the design and operation of multiple robots, or swarms, inspired by the behavior observed in social insects, called swarm intelligence.
and robots cultivate fruit and vegetables for home and overseas markets. In a world where technology has replaced people in many roles,
#oei m a robot.##What separates Levandowski from the nerds I knew is this: his wacky ideas tend to come true.#
As a sophomore, he won a national robotics competition with a machine made out of Legos that could sort Monopoly money#fair analogy for what he s been doing for Google lately.
It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy.##Levandowski understands the sentiment. He just has more faith in robots than most of us do.#
#oepeople think that we re going to pry the steering wheel from their cold, dead hands, #he told me,
#the roboticist Sebastian Thrun told me.##oethe sensors weren t there, the computers weren t there,
He went on to build robots that explored mines In virginia, guided visitors through the Smithsonian,
His favorite example is from a robotics contest at M. I t. in 1991. Tasked with building a machine that could shoot the most Ping-pong balls into a tube,
Charlie, this is robotics. Nothing actually works.##Finally, a year into the project, a Russian engineer named Alex Krasnov cracked the code.
Its robotic Humvee, Sandstorm, drove just seven and a half miles before careering off course. A helicopter later found it beached on an embankment,
the robots just weren t smart enough. In the wrong light, they couldn t tell a bush from a boulder, a shadow from a solid object.
a roboticist at Carnegie mellon, had hit upon an unusually efficient way to do this: he let his car teach itself.
The C. M. U. team was led by the legendary roboticist William (Red) Whittaker. Pomerleau had left the university by then to start his own firm.
His robots had crawled over Antarctic ice fields and active volcanoes, and inspected the damaged nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
putting something together that had never been done in robotics before, and some were insanely impressive.#
#And a few yards away in the laboratory, robotic arms mix together some compounds to produce the desired cells.
He has a chauffeur and it s a robot. Levandowski backs out of his suburban driveway in the usual manner.
The best way to execute that robot-to-human hand-off remains an open question.
#oeit ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy.##Google is still not saying much to reporters (including this one) about its plans,
and weight issues of previous prototypes. 9. Agriculture Robots Agricultural robotics are, somewhat surprisingly, still in their infancy.
Many companies worldwide are attempting to bring various types of robot farmhands to market, but in robotics (where government and academic projects still lead the way) it tends to take longer than in some other,
more commercial industries for such projects to obtain funding, produce a product, and prove its viability.
One Boston company that was able to raise nearly $8 billion in private funds in 2011 has developed a robot that it claims could perform 40 percent of the manual labor currently performed on farms.
A Japanese research company has developed a robot that performs stereo imaging of strawberries to determine their ripeness before picking them,
and MIT has a cherry tomato garden that is managed by a small crew of robots equipped with vision sensors.
the main advantage to robot farm workers is the fact that they can work around the clock and never get tired. 8. Sunscreen Pills An effective sunscreen that can be administered orally has been sought after for some time now.
Our discussion ranged from robotic rats and sheep laterality to the advantages of GPS imprecision and the possibility of high-tech herds bred to suit the topography of particular property.
and LEGO Robotics programs for youth. California alt+library:##oeour programming initiative designed for (but by no means limited to) people in their 20s and 30s.
New york Competitive LEGO robotics team (Fayetteville Free Library, Fayetteville, NY) Mad Men discussion group (Half Hollow Hills Community Library, Dix Hills and Melville
Who are some of todays best-known celebrities that would likely show up as downloadable personalities for your computer, car, or robot?
Robotic Earthworms The most valuable land on the planet will soon be the landfills because that is where we have buried our most valuable natural resources.
In the future, robotic earthworms will be used to silently mine the landfills and replace whatever is extracted with high-grade soil. 43.
#Top 15 emerging agriculture technologies that will change the world Automation will help agriculture via large-scale robotic and microrobots.
and potentially from producing meat directly in a lab. Automation will help agriculture via large-scale robotic
and microrobots to check and maintain crops at the plant level. Engineering involves technologies that extend the reach of agriculture to new means, new places and new areas of the economy.
Coupled with an intelligent network, such sensors could feed crucial information back to maintenance crews or robots.
Agricultural robots: Also known as agbots, these are used to automate agricultural processes, such as harvesting, fruit picking, ploughing,
Robotic farm swarms: The hypothetical combination of dozens or hundreds of agricultural robots with thousands of microscopic sensors,
which together would monitor, predict, cultivate and extract crops from the land with practically no human intervention.
and users of drones and other robotic equipment, predicts that 80%of the commercial market for drones will eventually be for agricultural uses.
A recent article in The Economist quotes Bill gates as saying at least a dozen job types will be taken over by robots and automation in the next two decades
Robotic Earthworm Drivers The most valuable land on the planet will soon be the landfills
In the future, robotic earthworms will be used to silently mine the landfills and replace whatever is extracted with high-grade soil. 147.
Turnbull's most recent Op-Ed was Why Robots May be the Future of Interplanetary Research.
by making engineered nanobots that are dependent on a proprietary raw material. In a strange twist of fate, terminator technology has begun to look more appealing to environmentalists.
But if you send a robot to mine the surface and send the minerals back you would own the area in
and it's a robot. Levandowski backs out of his suburban driveway in the usual manner.
It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy. Google is still not saying much to reporters (including this one) about its plans
#The Robotic Search For Lost WORLD WAR II Airmen Click here to see the galleryon a bright morning in Mid-march Pat Scannon stands on the deck of a 40-foot catamaran looking for an airplane hidden in the waters of Palau
With data from the robotic vehicles Palau can add downed aircraft to an inventory of the country's rich underwater sites something previously unattainable for an office that can barely afford to buy gas for a boat.
Its robotic arm moves briskly: It hovers lowers and then repositions a pair of syringes over six petri dishes.
In the film set in the 23rd century an automated pod with two robotic arms uses cells from a severed human hand to print
@Robot--I think the way I stated the 3000-year record was misleading. The tree-ring record actually goes back 12000 years
and sends them to robotic wood or steel routers which shape panels with millimeter precision.
The robots you know tomorrow are going to look like nothing you know today. More likely they will look like the animals around you.
Charles Ellington a Cambridge zoologist and former Weis-Fogh student built a robotic wing that could precisely mimic the movements of a hawk moth.
At the University of California at Berkeley neurobiologist Michael Dickinson built a robotic fruit-fly wing that likewise mimicked a fly s natural motion
Dickinson and electrical engineer Ron Fearing won a $2. 5-million DARPA grant in 1998 to apply these principles to a fly-size robot.
On the workbench sat a 60-milligram robot with a three-centimeter wingspan and a thorax roughly the size of a housefly.
and watched as the wings of his tiny creation began to vibrate lifting the robot into the air for several seconds.
Wood has pioneered microscale robotic flight; other researchers have used flapping-wing dynamics to reduce the size of aerial vehicles capable of carrying payloads.
Techject a company that spun off from work done at the Georgia Institute of technology recently unveiled a robotic dragonfly with a six-inch wingspan.
And then there s Dickinson who initiated the project to build the robotic fly. Today he runs a lab at the University of Washington and works with advanced imaging systems to study insect flight.
and resolution of time-lapse photography with the use of a novel robotic camera mount and software--enabling the detailed visualization of plant movements across a wide panoramic view.
and colleagues at the Robotics Institute Carnegie mellon University the Gigapan EPIC Pro is a robotic camera system that makes it possible to create time-lapse sequences of panoramas that also allow the viewer to zoom in at an incredible level of detail e g. from a landscape
Using a robotic mount high-resolution images were captured across a panorama and stitched together with software developed by Sargent
and when using a robot milking system in the worst-case scenario when a cow has failed to enter the robot for milking
or when it has failed several milking attempts in its history. Kauppi's doctoral dissertation sought to identify critical points in cow behaviour pointing to deterioration in the cow's health.
The study also investigated alterations in cow behaviour in relation to successful completion of robotic milking procedure as well as in dairy management practices
#University students developing robotic gardening technologyfor more than a half-century NASA has made the stuff of science fiction into reality.
Researchers are continuing that tradition by designing robots to work in a deep-space habitat tending gardens and growing food for astronaut explorers.
It is a concept for producing edible plants during long-term missions to destinations such as Mars. Heather Hava who is working on a doctorate in aerospace engineering sciences explains that the goal is to have robots do much of the monotonous tasks saving time
The robots and plants are networked together and the SPOTS have the ability to monitor their fruit's
ROGR is a robot on wheels has a forklift to move SPOTS a mechanical arm for manipulating the plants
The ROGR robots can visit a specific plant to deliver water or to locate and grasp a fruit or vegetable.
I had been working on developing robotic farming systems he said. Now I have an opportunity to bridge Earth farming systems to space.
and the potential future use of robotic spine surgery with computer navigation. The special issue of the journal can be accessed at:
As the plants within all those chambers grow a camera attached to a robotic arm takes thousands of images of cells seeds roots and shoots.
Are we ready for a robotic barista? Humans have proven to be highly adaptable when it comes to replacing personal service with that of a computer.
when a robot supplants our barista? One company is betting that humankind will actually dig it.
Austin-based Briggo has spent the last 18 months testing a robotic barista at the University of Texas at Austin's Flawn Academic Center.
About the only thing the Briggo robot doesn't do is ask you how your day's going.
and entered Melanie as the pick-up name so the robot would announce that the drink he was about to order was for me.
The order goes up into the cloud and lands with the robot, who then sends a reply,
educating them about the process and physically picking up the cup from the robot to hand to the customer.
Pierce is now responsible for feeding the robot high-quality ingredients, like coffee beans roasted within the week
Inside the robot, every cup of coffee is ground fresh. Brewed coffee takes 15 to 30 seconds per drink,
I heard the sound of water--like any good robot, it cleaned itself after every order.
The right place for robotic coffee Terry Mahlum, regional director for Delaware North Companies Travel Hospitality Services,
It's the right place for robotic coffee. The kiosk is slated for a central location across from Gate 13 in the American airlines terminal.
Nahmias is no stranger to food robots. He grew up in Mexico city, and his private school had a French fry machine.
But he likes the fact that Briggo's robot stores drink preferences so customers can easily repeat an order--which is advanced more than machines like the Rubi,
A new conversation, new coffee culture I stepped outside of the robot vortex and Nater pulled out his ipad,
showing me renderings of the new Briggo robot, which was designed by an internationally recognized industrial design firm.
People really wanted to see the robot, so there is a window to watch the inner-workings of the machine.
By early this year, Briggo had raised about $9 million for the next generation robot and expansion, almost exclusively from angel investors in Austin.
As for Nater, he's fired up about the robot and the drinks, but he's also eager for Briggo's next step in social media.
And just like the neighborhood barista, the robot remembers what they like. Everything else I consume in life I want variation,
Tech, sustainability meet on the robotic marijuana farmmr. Greenthumb's latest gardening tool may just be...
the robots are comingon a windy morning in California's Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants.
Researchers are now designing robots for these most delicate crops by integrating advanced sensors, powerful computing, electronics, computer vision, robotic hardware and algorithms,
Farmers say farm robots could provide relief from recent labor shortages, lessen the unknowns of immigration reform,
so the robots can come and alleviate some of that problem, "said Ron Yokota, a farming operations manager at Tanimura & Antle,
Another company, San diego-based Vision Robotics, is developing a similar lettuce thinner as well as a pruner for wine grapes.
The pruner uses robotic arms and cameras to photograph and create a computerized model of the vines,
it allows the robot to make a choice based on fruit color, quality and size. The berries are plucked
Futurist Fixes 1. Non Human (Robotic) Transportation: The same drone technology that the U s. military is using in Afghanistan could be put to use in the United states to transport goods between locations safer and faster than human drivers.
This could potentially free up roadways for humans as robot drivers could take a different route,
soldiers guarding borders may see an army of remotely controlled robots rushing toward them. Cummings reports that oeseveral U s. government agencies are seriously considering how to use unmanned vehicles in first strike or initial invasion settings.
we send in robots on the beach and let the robots take the fire, and then set up a logistics camp
so that Marines could go in. If a robot can launch an invasion, how long before they re delivering our goods and services automatically?
Check out clips: oebig Dog Robot, The Stanley self-driving car (originally covered in THE FUTURIST in May-June 2006.
irobot Packbot, covered in THE FUTURIST, March-April 2007.2. Air-powered Cars and trains: As we featured in THE FUTURIST, September-October 2008,
go-karts sporting air-powered engines whizzed around a racetrack in a test of mechanical engineering students prowess at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova scotia.
the capsules would contain thousands of microscopic robots called nanorobots. These would be in the range of a billionth of a meter in size
They would be robotic in that they would be programmed to carry out complex and specific functions in three-dimensional space.
The gadolinium-powered robots would make sure that the person body was absorbing the energy safely and consistently.
Freitas has two other nanobot solutions. oenutribots floating through the bloodstream would allow people to eat virtually anything, a big fatty steak for instance,
A nanobot Dr. Freitas calls a oelipovore would act like a microscopic cosmetic surgeon, sucking fat cells out of your body and giving off heat,
Futurist Fixes 1. Telemedicine and Robotic Surgery. As originally covered in the FUTURIST: Allison Okamura of the Johns hopkins university Department of Mechanical engineering says the real potential of robotic surgery
or rather computer-enhanced surgery is to reduce the impact of surgeries (make them less invasive,
Haptic systems are a particularly promising area of research in the field of robotics. Haptics involve making robotic surgical instruments more sensitive to human touch and,
reciprocally, allowing robot tools to convey sensory tactile data to the doctors who wield them.
Okamura and her team have developed a haptic system that helps doctors view how much pressure their robotic instruments are applying to a given area.
This sort of research will enable surgeons to better perform minimally invasive surgeries. Surgical robots can also photograph,
survey and collect data in ways that humans cannot and give surgeons a better sense of how the operation went,
after the fact. oewhen you do assisted robot surgery, you re already tracking the tools that are inside the patient,
You can model tissue health based on the data you acquired during operation by the robot.
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