Disaster Recovery Robots Working Overtime

Since Labor Day, North America has been hit with an unprecedented wave of natural disasters, from forest fires still raging in California to multiple catastrophic hurricanes in the Atlantic to an earthquake shattering one of the world’s most populated cities. If there is one silver lining from these events, it has been the wide deployment … Read more

RoboBusiness 2017: What’s Cooking In Robotics?

Mike Toscano, the former president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, emphatically declared at the September RobotLab forum that “anyone who claims to know the future of the [robotics] industry is lying, I mean no one could’ve predicted the computing mobile revolution.” These words acted as a guiding principle when walking around RoboBusiness in … Read more

Descartes Revisited: Do Robots Think?

This past week, a robotic first happened: ABB’s Yumi robot conducted the Lucca Philharmonic Orchestra in Pisa, Italy. The dual-armed robot overshadowed even his vocal collaborator, Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. While many will try to hype the performance as ushering in a new new era of mechanical musicians, Yumi’s artistic career was short-lived as it … Read more

Reprogramming Nature Into Swarms Of Cyborgs

Summer is not without its annoyances — mosquitos, wasps, and ants, to name a few. As the cool breeze of September pushes us back to work, labs across the country are reconvening tackling nature’s hardest problems. Sometimes forces that seem diametrically opposed come together in beautiful ways, like robotics infused into living organisms. This past … Read more