How Baxter—a Safer and Smarter Industrial Robot—Works. Rethink Robotics’ new creation is easy to interact with, but the innovations behind the robot show just how hard it is to get along with people. see inside baxter close. ABB's FRIDA Offers Glimpse of Future Factory Robots. This headless, two-armed robot may be tomorrow's factory worker. Its name is FRIDA, and it's a creation of ABB, the Swiss power and automation giant, which introduced it early this month at the Hannover trade show, Europe's largest industrial fair. Designed for assembly applications, FRIDA is capable of using its human-like arms to grasp and manipulate electronic components and other small parts.
The machine is a concept robot that ABB created to show off its vision for a new kind of industrial robot. Traditional industrial robots are big, expensive, and hard to integrate into existing manufacturing processes. They're also difficult to reprogram when production changes become necessary and they can't safely share spaces with human workers. This barrier to entry has kept small and medium companies "robot-less" -- at a time when robots, more than ever, could boost productivity and ameliorate labor shortages. So what can FRIDA do? What do you think? More images: That's it. Foxconn To Replace Human Workers With One Million Robots. Foxconn, an electronics manufacturer from Taiwan with huge factories in China, generates about 40 percent of the global consumer electronics revenue by creating things like iPhones and computer components on giant assembly lines staffed by humans.
Until recently, you'd probably never heard of Foxconn, but a series of worker suicides made us all take a hard look at where our electronics were coming from. Foxconn has made some improvements (including nets around tall buildings), but by all accounts, the core of the problem (the work) remains "repetitive, exhausting, and alienating. " Yesterday, Foxconn announced (at an employee dance party of all places) that they're planning on buying some robots to replace their human workforce. And by some robots, they mean one million robots over the next three years. So for every one robot Foxconn currently has working at their manufacturing plants, they're going to buy a hundred more. So, in a nutshell, this might be great news for ABB. ABB Concept Robot FRIDA. With Two Arms and a Smile, Pi4 Workerbot Is One Happy Factory Bot. Is this robot the factory worker of the future?
The pi4 Workerbot is a new industrial robot capable of using its two arms to perform a variety of handling, assembly, and inspection tasks. It's designed to work alongside human workers -- and the robot's LCD face even displays a broad smile when things are running smoothly. The robot is a creation of German firm pi4 robotics in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology, in Berlin. One of the innovative things about the robot is its control system. The Workerbot, which made its debut at the Automatica show last June, relies on a method known as impedance control, which allows the robot's arms to cooperate as they handle objects, keeping forces at desired levels and adjusting to disturbances -- a crucial capability when it comes to bimanual manipulations. That's not to say that the automotive industry hasn't been good to robotics. Quite the opposite. Watch the robot in action: Tue, January 25, 2011.
Pi4_workerbot demo at VISION 2010. Little Helper Robot Wants to Be Big Help on Factory Floor. The manufacturing industry in many countries, facing labor shortages and pressed to become ever more efficient, can certainly use a little help. Or how about a Little Helper? Mads Hvilshøj, Simon Bøgh, and their team at Aalborg University in Denmark have been working on an industrial robot, which they named Little Helper, designed for handling parts and moving them around on a factory floor. The robot consists of a manipulator arm mounted on a mobile platform. Manipulator arms like those manufactured by KUKA, ABB, and others have been around for decades. The Danish researchers equipped Little Helper's mobile platform with an array of on-board sensors (laser range, ultrasonic, and motor encoders), which help with navigation and safety. To program Little Helper for operation, users have to load its computer with digital layouts of the work areas and let the robot scan the environment with its sensors.
Watch a demo of the machine at work: Image and video: Mads Hvilshøj/Aalborg University. The mobile manipulator "Little Helper" - ISR/AUTOMATICA presentation. Harvest Automation Inc.