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The sexrobot industry should include older adults with disabilities in the design and marketing of its products, to support their emotional health and wellbeing and help counter ageism and stereotyping, argues Dr Nancy Jecker in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Pudo Robotics announced today the release of Puductor2, an anti-pandemic robot. This intelligent robot has two disinfection modes of ultra-dry mist and UV-C ultraviolet ray, featuring large domain of walk, long detection distance, high positioning accuracy, and stronger environmental adaptability. Puductor2 further expands its scope of application to include such locations as government halls, schools, medical institutions, waiting rooms, airports, subways, banks and other public places.

Percepto, provider of autonomous inspection by industrial robotics, announced a strategic investment of $45 million led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) to launch a solution for remote, fully autonomous, asset monitoring, inspection and compliance of industrial sites. This includes the partnering of autonomous robots with drones.

As our working lives have changed, we have also seen the increased use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) across every sector of the economy. It has made the difference between organizations being able to continue operating and falling apart. A new report delves into the way in which RPA has turned a corner and is now one of the most important technologies available to us as we continue to deal with the crisis.

Rising integration of IoT in robots for cost-efficient predictive maintenance is one of the drivers for the Smart Robot Market, which is expected to grow rapidly the coming years. According to a report by Research and Markets  the global Smart Robots Market is expected to grow from USD 6.1 Billion in 2020 to USD 23.0 Billion by 2025.

Northwestern University researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence (A.I.) platform that detects COVID-19 by analyzing X-ray images of the lungs.

The MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, a multi-disciplinary initiative examining how emerging technologies are changing the nature of work, has released three research briefs focused on manufacturing. The briefs examine the adoption of new technologies by U.S. manufacturers as well as the development of new transformative manufacturing technologies: additive manufacturing (AM) and industrial robotics.

Cognite, vendor of  Global industrial AI software-as-a-service (SaaS), has partnered with exploration and production company Aker BP to deploy Spot, the quadruped robotic dog, to pioneer the remote controlled offshore mission on the Skarv installation, 210 kilometers offshore in the North Sea.

The finalists of the 16th Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Robotics & Automation (IERA) showcase the latest skills robots have acquired to assist humans at work: OnRobot’s applicant is an intelligent gripper named RG2-FT: With the fingertips it “feels” and picks up delicate materials like thin glass or test samples and passes them on to humans. The second finalist is Photoneo’s high resolution MotionCam-3D. This 3D scanner captures quick moving objects and delivers the sharpest eyes in the world for industrial robots – even under sunlight.  

In research recently published online in Medical Image Analysis, a team of engineers demonstrated how a new algorithm they developed was able to successfully predict whether or not a COVID-19 patient would need ICU intervention. This artificial intelligence-based approach could be a valuable tool in determining a proper course of treatment for individual patients.