BOSTON—Rethink Robotics, the pioneering manufacturer of the Baxter and Sawyer collaborative robots, closed for business Oct. 3, just 10 years after it started.
ASSEMBLY was born in October 1958 with the name Assembly & Fastener Engineering. Although its name was later shortened to Assembly Engineering, and subsequently to ASSEMBLY, it was then, and is today, a magazine of ideas and methods.
The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has launched a Collaborative Robotics Laboratory to deliver advanced automation technology to the heavy industry and manufacturing sectors.
Collaborative robots are an important element of Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing initiatives. Many engineers are intrigued by these next-generation machines that can control force and work safely next to people on assembly lines without traditional safety guarding.
More than 46,000 manufacturing engineers and managers from 47 countries attended Automatica 2018, which took place June 19-22 at the New Munich Trade Fair Centre in Germany.
Traditionally, some manufacturers have avoided robots because of the cost. However, a new robots-for-hire business model is changing that misperception and enabling many types of companies to benefit from automation.
SAN FRANCISCO--Ken Goldberg, a professor at UC Berkeley, and one of his graduate students, Jeff Mahler, recently demonstrated the latest version of a dexterous collaborative robot at EmTech Digital, an event held here this week organized by MIT Technology Review (MTR) and dedicated to artificial intelligence. The key to the robot's dexterity is not in its mechanical grippers but in its brain, reports the MTR website. The robot uses software called Dex-Net to determine how to pick up even odd-looking objects with incredible efficiency.