United Kingdom

Mobility supplier DENSO has deployed six MiR250 autonomous mobile robots to transport materials in its 800,000 square foot powertrain component production facility in Athens, Tennessee. According to a case study from Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR), DENSO has successfully executed more than 500,000 missions since deploying its first MiR robot in 2020, recognizing a return on investment (ROI) in less than a year along with an ongoing need for more AMRs for additional logistics applications.

Search and Destroy, is the mission of LANIUS, a highly maneuverable and versatile drone-based loitering munition by Elbit Systems. The robot is designed for short-range operation in the urban environment, and can autonomously scout and map buildings and points of interest for possible threats, detecting, classifying and syncing to Elbit Systems’ Legion-X solutions. LANIUS can carry lethal or non-lethal payloads, capable of performing a broad spectrum of mission profiles for special forces, military, law enforcement, and HLS.

Despite some minor setbacks, the number of cities where robot taxi ‘s are deployed keeps growing. Recently both Cruise, Waymo, Motional and Lyft announced expansion of their activities in autonomous transport of people.

Last week the City of Amsterdam received the 2022 Softbot Award for their innovative use of RPA. This award celebrates innovation in automation, with a broad spectrum of use cases from both public and private sector.  “A few years ago, RPA was mainly seen as a technology with which organizations started experimenting on a small scale. Now we see that we are in discussion at board level about organizing organizations differently with intelligent process automation.”

Last week, the fifth edition of the National Cobot Day took place at Olmia in Tiel. Visitors could network and exchange knowledge about the rapidly growing cobot market in a relaxed atmosphere. ‘We see that robots are not used to replace people, but to enable them to do other, more challenging work.’

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and the University of California, Berkeley, have designed a robotic system that enables a low-cost and relatively small legged robot to climb and descend stairs nearly its height; traverse rocky, slippery, uneven, steep and varied terrain; walk across gaps; scale rocks and curbs; and even operate in the dark. 

Miko, an AI robot for kids, gets its own streaming series. Produced by Moonbug Entertainment and available on YouTube, Miko: The Animated Series follows six-year-old Liza and her companions Red and Blue — two robot characters based on the Miko 3 robot.

OSARO, provider of AI-driven robotics for e-commerce, announced a partnership with SVT Robotics to accelerate the integration of pick-and-place robotics systems for e-commerce and logistics businesses. SVT Robotics’ SOFTBOT Platform enables companies to integrate and deploy the robots, automation, and IoT devices they need in just days or weeks.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a ring-shaped soft robot capable of crawling across surfaces when exposed to elevated temperatures or infrared light. The researchers have demonstrated that these “ringbots” are capable of pulling a small payload across the surface – in ambient air or under water, as well as passing through a gap that is narrower than its ring size.

Beneath our streets lies a maze of pipes, conduits for water, sewage, and gas. Regular inspection of these pipes for leaks, or repair, normally requires these to be dug up. The latter is not only onerous and expensive – with an estimated annual cost of £5.5bn in the UK alone – but causes disruption to traffic as well as nuisance to people living nearby, not to mention damage to the environment.