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Sarcos Robotics announced it has successfully demonstrated its SenSuit controller garment. As part of the next-generation technologies designed for enhanced teleoperation of the Guardian XT highly dexterous mobile robotic system, this leveraged Sarcos’ proprietary motion caption controller to enable enhanced teleoperation of the robot’s dexterous arms. Capable of lifting and manipulating up to 200 lb. (90 kg), the Guardian XT robot is aimed at accomplishing precision tasks and performing work in unstructured environments.

The European Robotic Arm (ERA) is set for launch from the Russian launch base Baikonur on a Proton rocket to the International Space Station on 15 July at 19:18 CEST. The latest robot to service the Space Station has a length of over 11 m, and the ability to anchor itself to the Station in multiple locations, moving backwards and forwards with a large range of motion. ERA is 100% made-in-Europe. A consortium of European companies led by Airbus Defence and Space Netherlands designed and assembled it for ESA.

According to a report by Reuters SoftBank Group is reducing its global robotics business, and has stopped the production of Pepper. According to sources of Reuters sales of the humanoid robot, built by Foxconn in China, did not meet expectations. Allegedly a total of 27,000 Peppers were produced.

Insurance can profit hugely from automation like RPA. But to do so, a few conditions must be met. It is important to align automation initiatives with business strategy and goals, while at the same time keeping projects within reasonable limits. And, most importantly, execution has to follow the same principles as change programs. People are at the centre of enabling and unlocking the benefits of this technology. They need to embrace the ‘what’ and ‘why’ to make automation programs go beyond task automation to enterprise-wide automation.

FANUC, a supplier of CNCs, robotics, and factory automation has announced the production of its 750,000th industrial robot. Currently, FANUC is capable of producing 11,000 robots per month in fully automated factories that use its own robots to make robots, controllers and machine tools that offer world-renowned reliability, precision, speed and easy operation.

Seegrid Corporation, provider of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for material handling, announced the addition of a Robots as a Service (RaaS) subscription model. The additional purchasing model provides customers with more alternatives to get access to the latest Seegrid Palion AMR fleet and enterprise software solutions.

Democratization of IT and citizen developers are a hot topic, especially in RPA and low code. Although the trend is not new, we now see a rapid take up, in a ‘perfect combination of people, process and technology’. This leads to a situation which in the end is beneficially for both the business and IT.

The preliminary World Robotics data for China released by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) shows a sales increase of industrial robots by 19% in 2020.

Turkish bank Yapı Kredi is one of the early adoptors of RPA. In 2018 they started with automating repetitive activities with robotic process automation (RPA). Since then they have experimented with a range of different automation solutions, and they are now even looking at the possibilities of adding AI to their robots.

A research team from Northwestern Engineering and the University of Messina in Italy have developed a new magnetic memory device that could lead to faster, more robust Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Composed of antiferromagnetic materials, the memory technology is immune to external magnetic fields and could one day improve a variety of computing systems, including AI hardware, cryptocurrency mining, and space exploration programs.