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Software robots assisting humans is no longer a utopian scenario: we have seen the multiple benefits of automation in various industries and especially in highly regulated industries like finance and accounting. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is becoming mandatory for businesses worldwide – especially throughout the pandemic, since they have seen dramatic changes in businesses processes because of work-from-home strategies.

FLIR Systems has received more than $70 million in new orders for its ground robots from the U.S. Armed Services. The U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps placed orders for nearly 600 FLIR Centaur robots, including additional spares, antennas, and payload mounting kits. As a result, the U.S. Army awarded FLIR a $31.6 million contract increase for its Man Transportable Robot System Increment II (MTRS Inc. II) program. The new award raises the ceiling value of the original MTRS Inc. II contract from roughly $158 million to $190 million.

To observe the swift neuronal signals in a fish brain, scientists have started to use a technique called light-field microscopy, which makes it possible to image such fast biological processes in 3D. But the images are often lacking in quality, and it takes hours or days for massive amounts of data to be converted into 3D volumes and movies.

Robotic Research is named by the Association for Unmanned Vehicles Systems International (AUVSI) as a finalist for an XCELLENCE Award in the category of Innovation. AUVSI selected Robotic Research for its Pegasus Mini, a lightweight, compact unmanned system that can fold out of a backpack and transform from a tracked ground robot to quadcopter-type drone, and then back again.

Robot orders in the first quarter of 2021 were up 20% over the same period in 2020, with substantial increases in purchases coming from companies in metals (up 86%), life sciences/pharmaceutical/biomed (up 72%), food & consumer goods (up 32%), and other non-automotive industries (12%).

US Medical Innovations (USMI) announced today that it is developing the first robotic delivery system used for cancer surgery. The new Canady Surgical System (CSS) is a solution for Robotic Assisted Surgery during open, laparoscopic/mini-invasive, endoscopic, thoracoscopic and trans-oral surgical procedures.

Robots, be it softwarerobots (RPA) or physical robots, do not function without an adequate infrastructure. One of the largest infrastructure providers in the world powering robotics is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Rocking Robots had the opportunity to talk to Eric Anderson, general Manager AWS Robotics and Autonomous Services at AWS about their strategy supporting robotics.

Manufacturing at Ford Motor Company uses a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and industrial robotics. Symbio Robotics announced it will work with Ford Motor Company to deploy an AI-controlled robot at the automaker’s Livonia Transmission Plant. The robot is programmed and managed with Symbio’s robot-agnostic platform, SymbioDCS, to assemble transmissions for the Bronco Sport, Escape and Edge, to name a few.

IBM announced the acquisition of Turbonomic, an Application Resource Management (ARM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) software provider based in Boston, MA. The acquisition give IBM a full stack application observability and management to assure performance and minimize costs using AI to optimize resources – such as containers, VMs, servers, storage, networks, and databases.

Woven Planet Holdings, a subsidiary of Toyota, announced the acquisition of the autonomous vehicle division of Lyft, Level 5,  in a $550 million deal. Level 5, researchers from Toyota Research Institute and Woven Planet were already working together. The acquisition leads to a team of approximately 1,200 people working on autonomous driving at Toyota.