United Kingdom

When performing monotonous, mundane tasks, humans naturally become prone to errors, which could lead to delays and operational inefficiency, but robotic process automation (RPA) is here to change the way logistics companies do business, enhancing the accuracy of their processes.

How do you turn “dumb” headphones into smart ones? Rutgers engineers have invented a cheap and easy way by transforming headphones into sensors that can be plugged into smartphones, identify their users, monitor their heart rates and perform other services.

An international collaboration led by Philip Walther, a team of experimental physicists from the University of Vienna, together with theoreticians from the University of Innsbruck, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Leiden University, and the German Aerospace Center, have been successful in experimentally proving for the first time a speed-up in the actual robot’s learning time.

There is a lot of buzz around citizen developers. Most of the time it i presented as an easy process. But it is still change, which requires proper change management. In this video Sidney Madison Prescott, VP Global Intelligent Automation initiative at music streaming powerhouse Spotify, shares some of her insights on this phenomenon.

The Zeeuws Museum in Middelburg has a world premiere. From the 18th of March onwards, the museum will host virtual tours using the latest telepresence robot ‘GOBE’ from Smartrobot.Solutions.

Finance employees of AZ Groeninge were faced with repetitive administrative tasks related to the processing of bank statements. To eliminate this manual task and in order to work more efficiently the hospital implemented a robot that now processes bank statements automatically.

Smart speakers, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, have proven adept at monitoring certain health care issues at home. For example, researchers at the University of Washington have shown that these devices can detect cardiac arrests or monitor babies breathing. But what about tracking something even smaller: the minute motion of individual heartbeats in a person sitting in front of a smart speaker?

With the recruitment of Swiss distributor Robo Meier, Dutch firm Smartrobot Solutions will now offer its successful care robot Maatje in Switzerland as well. In addition to the approximately 300 copies of this robot that are already active in the Netherlands, there are now editions for many different countries in various languages, from German and French to Finnish and Turkish.

Did you ever meet someone with real anxiety? It’s tough. There is no real reasoning behind it. Panic is at the door. I used to work at an airline, and a common fear is the fear to fly. It could be a combination of multiple anxieties, like fear of heights and claustrophobia. Or an irrational fear the plane will somehow malfunction and crash when you are on it. Just explaining that a plane is a safer way to travel than driving a car will not do the trick.

Dutch agricultural robot AgXeed won first prize at the European event Pitch your Robot, which took place last week. The aim of the agROBOfood event was to allow SMEs to present solutions for the agri-food sector to investors so that they can obtain funding to continue their work. Wageningen University & Research was coordinator of this European program.