United Kingdom

Aerobotix, a FANUC robotics integrator, today marked having supported the 40th restoration of air inlet ducts on F-22 Raptor aircraft, as part of a maintenance contract with the U.S. Air Force. With funding from the Air Force’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, Aerobotix developed an automated painting system.

A majority of companies have implemented or plan to implement a hybrid work model moving forward. However, supporting a hybrid work model creates new speed bumps for IT. VMware at Explore US has outlined how autonomous workspaces powered by data science will ease this burden. It also unveiled innovations across its Anywhere Workspace platform that will inject automation into organizations’ end-user computing environments, enabling IT teams to do more with less.

For the third-straight quarter, robot sales in North America hit a record high, driven by a resurgence in sales to automotive companies and an ongoing need to manage increasing demand to automate logistics for e-commerce. According to the Association for Advancing Automation, of the 12,305 robots sold in Q2 2022, 59% of the orders came from the automotive industry with the remaining orders from non-automotive companies largely in the food & consumer goods industry, which saw a 13% increase in unit orders over the same period, April through June, in 2021.

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.

Motional and Lyft announced the launch of Motional’s new all-electric IONIQ 5-based robotaxi, an autonomous vehicle (AV) designed for fully driverless ride-hail operation, on the Lyft network in Las Vegas. The launch is the next milestone in the lead-up to Motional and Lyft’s fully driverless service, planning to begin in 2023 and scaling to multiple U.S. cities.

The United States Army has selected AeroVironment, provider of multi-domain robotic systems, for it Future Tactical Unmanned Aircraft System (FTUAS) program. The contract encompasses the purchase, testing and delivery of one JUMP 20 medium unmanned aircraft system (MUAS) to a selected Army Brigade Combat Team (BCT) and associated services, training and support.

Norway and Britain have announced they will supply Black Hornet micro drones to Ukraine to aid in its war with Russia. The Teledyne Flir Black Hornet drones can be used for reconnaissance and target identification. The cost will be up to $9.26 million.

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.

A team led by scientists Dr. Maximilian Kückelhaus and Prof. Tobias Hirsch from the Centre for Musculoskeletal Medicine at the University of Münster has carried out the first completely robot-supported microsurgical operations on humans. The physicians used an innovative operating method in which a new type of operations robot, designed especially for microsurgery, is networked with a robotic microscope.