The upgraded CVGC carbon vacuum gripper has a variety of customizations, including sizing, configurability, and compatibility. | Source: Coval

Vacuum grippers are a popular option for manufacturers and warehouse operators hoping to get the most payload capacity out of their robots. These grippers can provide between four and 10 times more power than their electromechanical counterparts, making them good at lifting heavy weights, said Coval Inc. The provider of vacuum automation technology has released its redesigned CVGC carbon vacuum gripper. 

Coval it designed this upgraded gripper with feedback from its customers, integrators, manufacturers, and operators. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company said it also took into account current and future trends in the collaborative robot market. These trends include greater application diversity, growth in the number of manufacturers, increased co-presence with operators, and handling of heavier loads. 

The new CVGC offers a number of advantages, claimed Coval. First, thanks to its carbon design, the gripper is ultra-light and compact. It’s also compatible with a wide range of cobots and has a range of configuration possibilities, making it highly versatile, said the company, whose global headquarters are in France.

Coval offers two standard versions of its grippers: the M2 Version with a vacuum generator, and the CVGC GO Version without a vacuum generator. The M2 version is a plug-and-play system that Coval designed to adapt to all models of cobots. It integrates the necessary gripper functions under a protective cover for optimal use, the company noted. 

The CVGC gripper is designed for versatile configurations. Source: Coval

The GO Version can be used with an independent vacuum generator, said Coval. It is equipped with a VRU-series vacuum rotary union, which the company said ensures vacuum supply to the gripper via an external source. From these two versions, customers have different options when it comes to size and configurability. 

Coval aims to provide maximum flexibility

On request, Coval said its design team is available to develop customized vacuum grippers. The CVGC is available in three sizes to meet customer’s precise needs — 240 x 120 mm (9.45 x 4.72 in.), 320 x 160 mm (12.6 x 6.3 in.), 350 x 250 mm (13.78 x 9.84 in.).

The gripper is available with a choice of three mounting options and six connection cables. It also has comes with suction cups or foam gripping interfaces.

Coval built its foam Interface for the handling of rigid products and gripping textured or uneven surfaces. It has flow control nozzles and two standard hole diameters, 12 mm (.47 in.) and oblong 27 x 12 mm (1.06 x 0.47 in.). 

The CVGC Suction Cup Interface can handle flexible products and comes with a wide range of cup options. It also offers flow-control nozzles in multiple diameters and has two types of standard suction cups measuring 25 mm (0.98 in.) and 33 mm (1.3 in.). 

Coval added that its upgraded CVGC vacuum gripper is aimed at a range of industries, including food processing, packaging, plastics processing, and more. The company said it designed the gripper to be a versatile tool for all manufacturers, integrators, and users of cobots for palletizing, gripping boxes, plastic parts, and a wide variety of other applications.

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The Robotics Manufacturing Hub is modular, adaptable, and multi-use, with OEM diversity. Source: The ARM Institute

When the ARM Institute launched its Robotics Manufacturing Hub about a year ago, it quickly realized that U.S. manufacturers weren’t looking at robotics and automation because they weren’t interested in the technology. Instead, the barriers to automation loomed so large that it was impossible for small and midsize firms to know where to start.

When the ARM Institute announced its no-cost Robotics Manufacturing Hub for manufacturers in the Pittsburgh region, its pipeline of interested manufacturers rapidly filled. With the ARM Institute offering a pathway to minimize the risks they associate with robotics and automation, U.S. manufacturers were, and still are, eager to explore the possibilities.

Larger manufacturing firms can more easily navigate the process of implementing automation. With greater general resources, in-house R&D, financing to invest in the upfront costs, and more time to explore solutions, they’ve more successfully been able to see the process through from start to finish.

Small and midsize manufacturers (SMMs) have to navigate more risk. They need to spend more time understanding how the changes will affect their operations. They often lack in-house robotics expertise, and they need systems that will dynamically meet their needs without requiring constant upkeep when, in many cases, their workforce is already strained.

The ARM Institute’s Robotics Manufacturing Hub is a free resource to help manufacturers navigate these barriers and others by identifying the best business cases for robotics, testing the systems within the manufacturer’s budget, and offering a path to implementation. Part of this solution includes the ability for SMMs in Southwestern Pennsylvania to work directly with the institute’s team of robotics engineers and get hands-on with advanced technologies in the institute’s Pittsburgh facility.

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ARM Institute shares case studies

Since the Robotics Manufacturing Hub’s creation, the ARM Institute has worked with several manufacturers in the Pittsburgh region to explore their challenges and help them understand where robotics can address these challenges.

For example, the ARM Institute worked with a manufacturer of castings and forgings to automate its manual quality-inspection process. Partnering with FARO and NEFF Automation through the Robotics Manufacturing Hub, the ARM Institute performed a proof-of-concept of a Universal Robots cobot controlling a FARO laser scanner. The manufacturer plans to pursue implementation.

The ARM Institute also worked with a company that needed to package heavy iron and steel parts into shipping containers, creating an ergonomically uncomfortable task for a human worker. In this situation, requirements for the robotic end effector were highly specific, and it’s critical to calculate the correct pick place on the parts and speed limitations of the robot to move heavy parts and prevent failure or injury.

The ARM Institute is working with its member CapSen Robotics on a solution.

CapSen Robotics has designed end effectors to sort metal parts. Source: CapSen Robotics

Inside the Robotics Manufacturing Hub facility

Much of this work is completed using the ARM Institute’s headquarters as a neutral ground for exploration and prototyping, giving manufacturers access to equipment before they commit to installing any system.

This facility is modular, adaptable, and multi-use, with OEM diversity to directly meet each manufacturer’s individual needs. ARM Institute engineers work directly in the lab and interface between suppliers and manufacturers to act in the SMM’s best interest and ensure that the work will address the specific challenges the company is facing.

Below is a brief overview of the equipment available through the Robotics Manufacturing Hub and application areas that can be addressed using this equipment:

Collaborative robots:

• Universal Robots (UR) 5e
• Yaskawa HC10
• FANUC CRX-10 Ai/L
• FANUC CRX-20 Ai/L

The cobots can be configured for the following applications:

• Small part handling
• Pick and place
• Vision-guided grasping for pick-and-place applications
• Machine tending
• Process tasks including gluing and dispensing
• Inspection with Faro ARM Quantum with Laser line probe and CMM
• Inspection with Cognex 2D imaging
• Inspection with Cognex 3D imaging

Industrial robots

• Epson VT6L
• Yaskawa GP-88
• Yaskawa GP-180
• Yaskawa Weld Cell with positioner

The industrial robots can be configured for the following applications

• Large part handling
• Large part palletizing
• Large part pick and place
• Force controlled grinding and polishing
• Welding

Get involved with the Robotics Manufacturing Hub

Small and midsize manufacturers in the Pittsburgh region can get a free automation assessment and use the Robotics Manufacturing Hub at no cost, thanks to funding from the Southwestern Pennsylvania Region’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge Award. Now is a great time to get started with the hub, as the ARM Institute is looking to work with more manufacturers.

In the future, the ARM Institute hopes to expand these services to manufacturers beyond this region and encourages those with interest in using or housing these services to reach out. In addition, the ARM Institute’s member ecosystem can use the Robotics Manufacturing Hub as a benefit of membership.

According to the ARM Institute’s “Future of Work” study released last week, industry trends include keeping people in the loop and the need for organizations to learn how to use data as artificial intelligence increases in importance. As a result, the institute noted that manufacturers and training centers must develop programs to help workers develop the skills needed to stay competitive and adapt to new technologies.

U.S. manufacturing resiliency is the cornerstone of our national security. The ARM Institute’s Robotics Manufacturing Hub addresses a critical need in helping to provide SMMs with the resources that they need to explore and implement automation, enhancing their competitiveness and benefiting the full manufacturing ecosystem.

About the author

Larry Sweet last year became director of engineering at the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute in Pittsburgh. He has experience in bringing emerging technologies into production by increasing their Technology Readiness Level, concurrent with improvements in factory floor processes and workforce skills.

Sweet was previously the director for worldwide robotics deployment at Amazon Robotics, leading technology transition and system integration for all internally developed automation into Amazon’s global network. He has also held senior manufacturing and technology roles at Symbotic, the Frito-Lay, United Technologies, ABB, FANUC, and GE. Sweet spoke at the 2024 Robotics Summit & Expo in May.

Editor’s note: This article is syndicated from The Robot Report sibling site Engineering.com.

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The Robot Report recently spoke with Ph.D. student Cheng Chi about his research at Stanford University and recent publications about using diffusion AI models for robotics applications. He also discussed the recent universal manipulation interface, or UMI gripper, project, which demonstrates the capabilities of diffusion model robotics.

The UMI gripper was part of his Ph.D. thesis work, and he has open-sourced the gripper design and all of the code so that others can continue to help evolve the AI diffusion policy work.

AI innovation accelerates

How did you get your start in robotics?

Stanford researcher Cheng Chi. | Credit: Huy Ha

I worked in the robotics industry for a while, starting at the autonomous vehicle company Nuro, where I was doing localization and mapping.

And then I applied for my Ph.D. program and ended up with my advisor Shuran Song. We were both at Columbia University when I started my Ph.D., and then last year, she moved to Stanford to become full-time faculty, and I moved [to Stanford] with her.

For my Ph.D. research, I started as a classical robotics researcher, and I started working with machine learning, specifically for perception. Then in early 2022, diffusion models started to work for image generation, that’s when DALL-E 2 came out, and that’s also when Stable Diffusion came out.

I realized the specific ways which diffusion models could be formulated to solve a couple of really big problems for robotics, in terms of end-to-end learning and in the actual representation for robotics.

So, I wrote one of the first papers that brought the diffusion model into robotics, which is called diffusion policy. That’s my paper for my previous project before the UMI project. And I think that’s the foundation of why the UMI gripper works. There’s a paradigm shift happening, my project was one of them, but there are also other robotics research projects that are also starting to work.

A lot has changed in the past few years. Is artificial intelligence innovation is accelerating?

Yes, exactly. I experienced it firsthand in academia. Imitation learning was the dumbest thing possible you could do for machine learning with robotics. It’s like, you teleoperate the robot to collect data, the data is paired with images and the corresponding actions.

In class, we’re taught that people proved that in this paradigm of imitation learning or behavior, cloning doesn’t work. People proved that errors grow exponentially. And that’s why you need reinforcement learning and all the other methods that can address these limitations.

But fortunately, I wasn’t paying too much attention in class. So I just went to the lab and tried it, and it worked surprisingly well. I wrote the code, I applied the diffusion model to this and for my first task; it just worked. I said, “That’s too easy. That’s not worth a paper.”

I kept adding more tasks like online benchmarks, trying to break the algorithm so that I could find a smart angle that I could improve on this dumb idea that would give me a paper, but I just kept adding more and more things, and it just refused to break.

So there are simulation benchmarks online. I used four different benchmarks and just tried to find an angle to break it so that I could write a better paper, but it just didn’t break. Our baseline performance was 50% to 60%. And after applying the diffusion model to that, it was like 95%. So it was a jump in terms of these. And that’s the moment I realized, maybe there’s something big happening here.

The first diffusion policy research at Columbia was to push a T into position on a table. | Credit: Cheng Chi

How did those findings lead to published research?

That summer, I interned at Toyota Research Institute, and that’s where I started doing real-world experiments using a UR5 [cobot] to push a block into a location. It turned out that this worked really well on the first try.

Normally, you need a lot of tuning to get something to work. But this was different. When I tried to perturb the system, it just kept pushing it back to its original place.

And so that paper got published, and I think that’s my proudest work, I made the paper open-source, and I open-sourced all the code because the results were so good, I was worried that people were not going to believe it. As it turned out, it’s not a coincidence, and other people can reproduce my results and also get very good performance.

I realized that now there’s a paradigm shift. Before [this UMI Gripper research], I needed to engineer a separate perception system, planning system, and then a control system. But now I can combine all of them with a single neural network.

The most important thing is that it’s agnostic to tasks. With the same robot, I can just collect a different data set and train a model with a different data set, and it will just do the different tasks.

Obviously, collecting the data set part is painful, as I need to do it 100 to 300 times for one environment to get it to work. But in actuality, it’s maybe one afternoon’s worth of work. Compared to tuning a sim-to-real transfer algorithm takes me a few months, so this is a big improvement.

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UMI Gripper training ‘all about the data’

When you’re training the system for the UMI Gripper, you’re just using the vision feedback and nothing else?

Just the cameras and the end effector pose of the robot — that’s it. We had two cameras: one side camera that was mounted onto the table, and the other one on the wrist.

That was the original algorithm at the time, and I could change to another task and use the same algorithm, and it would just work. This was a big, big difference. Previously, we could only afford one or two tasks per paper because it was so time-consuming to set up a new task.

But with this paradigm, I can pump out a new task in a few days. It’s a really big difference. That’s also the moment I realized that the key trend is that it’s all about data now. I realized after training more tasks, that my code hadn’t been changed for a few months.

The only thing that changed was the data, and whenever the robot doesn’t work, it’s not the code, it’s the data. So when I just add more data, it works better.

And that prompted me to think, that we are into this paradigm of other AI fields as well. For example, large language models and vision models started with a small data regime in 2015, but now with a huge amount of internet data, it works like magic.

The algorithm doesn’t change that much. The only thing that changed is the scale of training, and maybe the size of the models, and makes me feel like maybe robotics is about to enter that that regime soon.

Two UR cobots equipped with UMI grippers demonstrate the folding of a shirt. | Credit: Cheng Chi video

Can these different AI models be stacked like Lego building blocks to build more sophisticated systems?

I believe in big models, but I think they might not be the same thing as you imagine, like Lego blocks. I suspect that the way you build AI for robotics will be that you take whatever tasks you want to do, you collect a whole bunch of data for the task, run that through a model, and then you get something you can use.

If you have a whole bunch of these different types of data sets, you can combine them, to train an even bigger model. You can call that a foundation model, and you can adapt it to whatever use case. You’re using data, not building blocks, and not code. That’s my expectation of how this will evolve.

But simultaneously, there’s a there’s a problem here. I think the robotics industry was tailored toward the assumption that robots are precise, repeatable, and predictable. But they’re not adaptable. So the entire robotics industry is geared towards vertical end-use cases optimized for these properties.

Whereas robots powered by AI will have different sets of properties, and they won’t be good at being precise. They won’t be good at being reliable, they won’t be good at being repeatable. But they will be good at generalizing to unseen environments. So you need to find specific use cases where it’s okay if you fail maybe 0.1% of the time.

Safety versus generalization

Robots in industry must be safe 100% of the time. What do you think the solution is to this requirement?

I think if you want to deploy robots in use cases where safety is critical, you either need to have a classical system or a shell that protects the AI system so that it guarantees that when something bad happens, at least there’s a worst-case scenario to make sure that something bad doesn’t actually happen.

Or you design the hardware such that the hardware is [inherently] safe. Hardware is simple. Industrial robots for example don’t rely that much on perception. They have expensive motors, gearboxes, and harmonic drives to make a really precise and very stiff mechanism.

When you have a robot with a camera, it is very easy to implement vision servoing and make adjustments for imprecise robots. So robots don’t have to be precise anymore. Compliance can be built into the robot mechanism itself, and this can make it safer. But all of this depends on finding the verticals and use cases where these properties are acceptable.

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The 2FG14 (left) and the 3FG25 (right) grippers are designed for plug-and-play handling of heavy payloads. | Source: OnRobot

CHICAGO — As collaborative robots get bigger for tasks such as palletizing, the end effectors needs to keep up. OnRobot A/S showed two new, heavy-duty grippers at Automate this week.

“As cobots grow more powerful, OnRobot customers are scaling up their collaborative applications,” stated Enrico Krog Iversen, CEO of OnRobot. “Building on the success of our existing, industry-proven gripper range, the new 3FG25 and 2FG14 grippers deliver unrivaled gripping and payload power while also providing customizability for heavy-duty applications, including [in] harsh environments.”

Founded in 2018, OnRobot was formed with the merger of three end-of-arm tooling (EOAT) companies: Perception Robotics, OptoForce, and OnRobot. The Odense, Denmark-based company also acquired Purple Robotics in 2018 and Blue Workforce in 2019.

The provider of hardware and software for collaborative applications said its grippers help small and midsize manufacturers optimize processes such as palletizing, packaging, pick and place, sanding, and screwdriving.

Several leading cobot brands now offer models that can handle around 30 kg (66.1 lb.), and industrial robot arms are being deployed in collaborative applications, observed OnRobot. To address these applications and enable improved workpiece adaptability, the company plans to officially launch the 3FG25 gripper later this month, while the 2FG14 gripper made its North American debut this week. 

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OnRobot aims to add flexibility with heavier grippers

OnRobot said both of its new electric grippers can handle larger parts without the bulk or power constraints of pneumatic systems. The three-fingered 3FG25 provides 25 kg (55.1 lb.) of payload capacity in a compact, all-electric, lightweight form factor, said the company.

The 3FG25 is a larger version of the 3FG15 gripper, which has already been widely adopted for CNC (computer numerical control) machine tending, said OnRobot. Both are capable of handling cylindrical and oddly shaped items, and the 3FG25 has new fingers for heavier metal workpieces. It is available for preorders.

Similarly, the 2FG14 doubles the payload and gripping force of the popular 2FG7 gripper, while also providing 30% more total stroke, according to the company. It has a payload of 14 kg (30.8 lb.), making it suitable for machine-tending applications, OnRobot said.

In addition, the 2FG14 has a compact base and is designed for challenging work environments where workpieces are frequently exposed to oils or cutting fluids. 

“The 2FG14 is a great gripper. It’s easy to use and allows our cobots to maintain maximum payload,” said Alex Pinkerton, mechanical engineer at Gosiger. “OnRobot products have intuitive, operator-friendly user interfaces, and the 2FG14 maintains this tradition. It’s perfect for demanding packaging, machine tending, and assembly applications.”

In addition, OnRobot said its grippers, connectors, and software “offer an all-round plug-and-produce experience.” They include fingers with multiple configurations, flange adapters, cabling, and software to reduce the complexity of robot programming. OnRobot supports multiple robot arms and is part of the UR+ ecosystem as a certified offering with Universal Robots cobots.

“The flange is not new, but we’ve used a new material to reduce the weight,” Kristian Hulgard, general manager of OnRobot, told The Robot Report. “It’s really about the flexibility; cobot users should still do safety assessments of their payloads and applications, such as welding.”

Ellison Technologies launches AutoPilot powered by D:PLOY

OnRobot also announced that it is collaborating with Ellison Technologies Inc., a provider of advanced machining systems. The companies are releasing AutoPilot powered by D:PLOY, which aims to simplify the process of deploying CNC machine-tending applications.

OnRobot’s D:PLOY is an automated platform for building, running, monitoring, and redeploying machine tending applications. By automating the development process, it can cut deployment times and enable deployments to take place on the factory floor, with zero programming and zero simulations required, asserted the companies. 

“Companies racing to plug labor gaps and meet growing demand in an uncertain economic climate can’t afford to spend weeks deploying and redeploying CNC machine tending automation,” said Greg Haley, vice president of automation at Ellison Technologies.

“D:PLOY is the perfect software for Ellison’s AutoPilot solution, as it decreases the programming complexity and makes part changeover a snap,” he added. “This puts automated CNC machine tending in reach for more customers than ever, even those with high-mix, low-volume part runs.”

The post OnRobot releases two electric grippers for heavy payload cobots appeared first on The Robot Report.

InductOne is designed to handle a wide range of parcels with high throughput. Source: Plus One Robotics

CHICAGO — As items pass through warehouses and other facilities, they are often handled as packages rather than as eaches. Plus One Robotics yesterday launched InductOne, a two-armed robot designed to optimize parcel singulation and induction in high-volume fulfillment and distribution centers.

“Parcel variability is a significant challenge of automation within the warehouse,” stated Erik Nieves, CEO of Plus One Robotics. “That’s why InductOne is equipped with our innovative individual cup control [ICC] gripper, which can precisely handle a wide range of parcel sizes and shapes.”

“But it’s not just about what InductOne picks, it’s also about what it doesn’t pick,” he added. “The system avoids picking non-conveyable items, allowing them to automatically convey to a designated exception path and preventing the robots from wasting precious cycles handling items which should not be inducted.”

“We’ve doubled down on parcel handling; we’re not an each picking company,” Nieves told The Robot Report. “Vision and grasping for materials handling is hard, and Plus One continues to focus on packaged goods, which spend most of their time as parcels and can be picked by vacuum grippers.”

InductOne engineered for ease of integration, efficiency

InductOne’s dual-arm design “significantly outperforms single-arm solutions,” claimed Plus One. “While a single-arm system typically tops out at around 1,600 picks per hour, the coordinated motion of InductOne’s two arms can achieve sustained pick rates of 2,200 to 2,300 per hour. InductOne’s peak rate maxes out at a rate of 3,300 picks per hour, 10% faster than the leading competition.”

Plus One Robotics said its engineering team designed InductOne to be capable but as small as possible for easy integration into brownfield facilities and to minimize the need for costly site modifications.

“The engineering approach behind InductOne has been focused on efficiency and flexibility,” said Nieves. “We designed the system to be as compact and lightweight as possible, making it easier to deploy in limited spaces, including on existing mezzanines. The modular and configurable nature of InductOne also allows it to seamlessly integrate into a variety of fulfillment center layouts.”

InductOne includes the PickOne vision system, the Yonder remote supervision software, pick-and-place conveyors, integrated safety features, analytics, and training and ongoing support. The modular system is also offers configurable layouts for cross-belt or tray sorters.

It can handle parcels weighing up to 15 lb. (6.8 kg) and up to 27 in. (69 cm) in length, 19 in. (48 cm) in width, and 17 in. (43 cm) in height. InductOne supports boxes, clear and opaque polybags, shipping envelopes, and padded and paper mailers.

InductOne includes vision and grasping refined by millions of picks of experience. Source: Plus One Robotics

Plus One Robotics touts experience and trust

Founded in 2016 by computer vision and robotics industry experts, Plus One Robotics said it combines computer vision, artificial intelligence, and supervised autonomy to pick parcels for leading logistics and e-commerce organizations. The San Antonio, Texas-based company has offices in Boulder, Colo., and the Netherlands.

Plus One said it applied its experience from more than 1 billion picks to develop InductOne. The company said it has learned from handling over 1 million picks per day, and achieving the reliability required for such high-volume operations led to its new parcel-handling machine.

“ICC and InductOne are the culmination of our learnings from these picks,” said Nieves at Automate. “It’s not just vision but also grasping and conveyance. I push back against those who say, ‘Data, data, data,” because we also need to appreciate the things above and below our system. We’re applying our expertise to the problem, but we’re not trying to be an integrator or just a hardware maker.”

Nieves noted that the value of robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) models is not recurring payments but the option they give users to scale deployments up or down as needed.

“As Pitney Bowes’ Stephanie Cannon said in a panel, it’s important [for automation providers] to get to 70% confidence and then work with customers who trust that you’ll work with them to get the rest of the way,” he said. “Our relationships with FedEx and Home Depot for palletization and parcel handling are built on that trust.”

The post Two-armed InductOne from Plus One Robotics designed for parcel induction appeared first on The Robot Report.

The Gentle Duo Mini soft grippers are suitable for food handling. Source: Ubiros

Reliable and delicate robotic grasping has long been a challenge, but Ubiros Inc. said it can solve the problem without the bulky pneumatics or complex coding of previous approaches.

The company’s electrically driven and modular grippers are easier to deploy and use than other soft grippers, according to Onder Ondemir, president of Ubiros. He is also a professor in the engineering department at Northeastern University.

Ubiros offers the Gentle Flex Module and Gentle Flex CC for users that want to build their own grippers. The spinout of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) also offers Gentle Duo with two soft fingers and Gentle Pro with four fingers, as well as Touch models for both that include force control, part sensing/confirmation, and a low-power mode.

The Natick, Mass.-based company said its compliant grippers are suitable for food handling and packaging, textiles, and some warehouse applications. Ubiros, which is a resident startup at MassRobotics, already has distributor agreements in China, South Korea, Turkey, the U.K., and the U.S.

Founder fascinated by technology

“I loved Knight Rider as a kid and asked my mom, ‘Who makes [smart car] KITT? What do I need to become to make something like that?’” recalled Ondemir. “She said ‘mechanical engineer.’”

“I grew up and became an industrial engineer, but I’ve always been fascinated with mechanical systems,” he told The Robot Report. “I worked at an insurance company modeling the capacity of systems and demand forecasts, and I became a vice president.”

Ondemir later ran into a friend [Cagdas Onal] who was doing post-doctoral associate work at MIT and collaborating with Harvard University researchers working on soft robotics.

“We knew the limitations of pneumatics – precision is low, control is hard, and the equipment needed to generate compressed air uses a lot of electricity,” he said. “After spending years in the lab, one day, he came to me and said, ‘Onder, I think I have groundbreaking technology for packaging and gripping in general, but I don’t want to run the company.’ Becoming the CEO was a no-brainer to fulfill my desire to build machines and work with my friend.”

Ubiros President Onder Ondemir at MassRobotics. Source: Ubiros

The genesis of Ubiros

Ubiros has largely focused on food handling.

Automating the handling of fruit and baked goods is not easy, because such delicate food items are easily damaged, Ondemir noted. Rigid grippers typically don’t have sufficient sensitivity, and many other companies are trying to solve problems such as object detection and singulation, he said.

“In farming, crops are being left to rot in the field, which is a huge waste,” added Ondemir. “A key barrier to getting automation is handling food with a soft touch.”

“But the real problem we’re solving is the worker shortage,” he said. “Harvesting and packing jobs aren’t interesting to people, and there are the issues of efficiency for the employer – most people work one shift – and also injuries and finally the cost of food.”

Fingers versus suction cups

For most applications where similar items are picked, suction cups are sufficient, said Ondemir. However, when there’s clutter, such as in e-commerce bins, or tight spaces like bookshelves, picking then requires a combination of sensing to identify each object and the ability to singulate that object.

Suction cups are versatile, but porous, dusty, fragile, or oddly weighted items are not always suitable for suction cups, Ondemir observed.

“We’re proud to be one of the few companies developing individual finger actuation rather than the whole hand,” he said. “For singulation, it can provide alternatives in complex picking situations.”

Ubiros Gentle grippers promise benefits

Ubiros’ Gentle grippers use electric servo motors and a cable-driven system similar to the tendons of the human hand.

“The difficulty in designing the system was maintaining softness while mechanically operating the finger – that’s where our patent is,” Ondemir said. “Our technology allows the finger unit to be flexible in the grasping direction but very rigid in twisting or bending sideways.”

Electric end-of-arm tooling (EOAT) removes the need for tubes, valves, and compressors, he said. Also, while pneumatic systems need to cycle to attempt another grasp, an electric one can reposition more quickly.

In addition, electric grippers have instant torque rather than needing to build up pressure for heavy payloads as hydraulic or pneumatic systems do, said Ondemir.

Up to 35% of the electricity bill in factories is spent on pressurized air, and 40% of the battery life of a mobile manipulator is consumed by a suction cup, he asserted. Thus, Ubiros’ grippers could save a lot of battery power for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) or drones, Ondemir said.

Is Ubiros looking at mobile manipulation?

“We’ve had serious conversations with Staubli,” Ondemir replied. “Our gripper would be in addition to its existing arm and base, unlike others.”

In addition, United Robotics Group has integrated Ubiros’ gripper with a mobile manipulator that will be demonstrated at Automate.

Ondemir surveys tech trends

Beyond mobile manipulation, Ondemir relied on his experience in robotics development to comment on current tech trends.

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning allow us to implement predictive maintenance,” he said. “Our electrical micro-controller is partly a system for force control and partly sensing. It’s able to collect temperature data from inside the gripper, plus cycle counts and electric current to build models to predict failures. That’s in our roadmap.”

Ubiros is not currently working with digital twins because it’s difficult to know the actual deflection of soft objects and where something is in space, acknowledged Ondemir. A lot of research is being devoted to this topic, he said.

What about humanoids? “They’ll have to have soft components for safety and to guard against falling,” Ondemir said. “This will be a key use for soft robotics in general, not just soft grippers. Because we’re a spinoff of WPI, we already have soft 3D sensors and a patented design of a soft arm, but there’s a lot still to do.”

Mechanical intelligence for manipulation

“The idea behind what we call ‘mechanical intelligence’ is that if you can mechanically achieve something, you need expensive programming, motion control, and vision less,” said Ondemir. “We built something that is under-actuated, with fewer motors to move the joints. Electric actuation allows us to have full-bodied fingers rather than hollow ones that can be punctured or leak in otherwise sanitary environments.”

“Depending on the shape of the object, the gripper can automatically conform to it. It’s more forgiving of inaccuracies, and you don’t need extreme precision,” he continued. “Because the grippers bend themselves over an object like an egg or an apple, the force is distributed over a larger area.”

Ubiros did build some force control into its Gentle grippers, allowing users to increase or decrease pressure, but it’s not necessary in most cases, Ondemir said.

Ubiros and its partners recently participated in a MassRobotics Demo Day. Source: Ubiros

Ubiros looks ahead

The Gentle gripper is initially tackling labeling and grading of tomatoes and cucumbers, and Ubiros has received a lot of interest recently from bakeries, said Ondemir. A hygienic gripper could then address handling of raw beef, poultry, and fish.

To that end, Ubiros is looking for funding to make its grippers more hygienic and robust against cleaning agents. It is working on safe-food handling certifications.

On the industrial side, Ubiros is conducting a pilot with Mitsubishi to handle a variety of objects and manage robot grasping through Mitsubishi’s teach pendant.

“Down the road a few years, we want to focus more on the data side, allowing customers to access data through the end effectors,” Ondemir said. “We plan to eventually bring other patented technologies into the workplace – 3D sensors, haptic gloves, human-in-the-loop systems, remote manipulation, and soft arms.”

Ubiros will be at the Robotics Summit & Expo next week and Automate the week after that.

Register now.

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HowToRobot is combining its marketplace with Gain & Co.’s expert advice. Credit: Adobe Stock

HowToRobot.com ApS, a provider of a global automation market platform, and Gain & Co., a robotics and automation advisor, announced a merger last week. The newly formed company has also received an investment from Sagitta Ventures, which will be taking a seat on its board. 

Now operating under the name “HowToRobot,” the combined company said that while the need for robotics is stronger than ever, most businesses still struggle to automate. By combining its automation market and vendor-independent advice, HowToRobot said it will support businesses with every aspect of their automation journeys.  

“Businesses need automation and robotics like never before to make up for labor shortages and supply chain disruptions and simply to protect them in the long run,” stated Søren Peters, now co-CEO of HowToRobot. “But without help, only few are able to fully take advantage of the technology. The merger and investment allow us to extend that help to every business that needs it.”

Founded in 2017, HowToRobot said it offers companies with an overview and easy access to automation and robotics suppliers globally. It also offers advisors that give guidance on everything from getting started with automation to technology selection and implementation.

Register now.

HowToRobot to help companies keep up with innovation

Global robot installations have more than tripled over the past decade, according to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). This demand has resulted in more innovation, making it difficult for prospective customers to keep up with the industry, said Peters. 

“Robotics is developing so fast that it can easily seem overwhelming,” he said. “What most need is often just someone to talk to who knows the market and who they can trust for reliable and impartial advice. By letting our two companies join forces, we can now provide all that in one place.”

The Copenhagen, Denmark-based company claimed that the new HowToRobot provides the support that businesses need when looking to automate. At the R-24 event earlier this year in Odense, Denmark, Gulshan Akhtar Din, a senior advisor then at Gain & Co., explained how it worked with hospitals to properly integrate automation with both physical infrastructure and business processes.

Despite global robot installations hitting a record high in 2022, according to the IFR, HowToRobot said it has found that the average business has explored only about 5% of its addressable potential for automation. Peters asserted that this is mainly due to limited expertise and knowledge about automation. 

“Most businesses have still only scratched the surface of what is possible and makes sense to automate,” he said. “With the right guidance and easy access to potential solutions, robot adoption can reach a whole new level.”

Inside the merger

With the merger, Peters, the former CEO of HowToRobot, and Søren Pap-Tolstrup, the former CEO of Gain & Co., will serve as co-CEOs. The company did not disclose financial details of the merger or investment from Sagitta Ventures. 

“The world of robotics is still new to many, and most need help to some extent – from technical advice to finding solutions and building the business case or simply finding the best place to start,” noted Pap-Tolstrup. “When combined, our platform and advisory have the depth, reach, and flexibility to support businesses where and when they most need it.”

HowToRobot said its latest investment will enable it to expand its platform, advisor team, and partner network across the world, adding expertise and the capacity for conducting on-site automation screening. The company said it also plans to broaden its market understanding of robotics and automation to better provide expert advice.

The post HowToRobot merges with Gain & Co., brings in investment appeared first on The Robot Report.

New offerings include the igusGO AI-driven app and more low-cost automation. Source: igus

At its annual press conference last week, igus GmbH previewed numerous new products in advance of the Hannover Messe trade show. The Cologne, Germany-based company announced 247 new products, including  lubrication-free drives using motion plastics and new robots for educational, service, and industrial applications.

“We’re offering a mobile manipulator for small companies,” said Alexander Mühlens, head of automation technology and robotics at igus. He touted the company’s low-cost automation approach.

“ReBeL on Wheels” combines a collaborative robot arm with an autonomous mobile robot for €17,999 ($19,202 U.S.). An educational version is available for €14,699 ($15,682). igus said that is 10x more affordable than other models, and it is starting to offer the systems in the German market. 

The company, whose U.S. headquarters are in Rumford, R.I., won a 2024 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award for a finger gripper to go with the ReBeL cobot. igus will be exhibiting at next week’s Robotics Summit & Expo at Booth 414 in Hall C in the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

In addition, Mühlens will present a session at 2:45 p.m. EDT in Room 50 on Wednesday, May 1, on “Automate Your Factory for $2,799.” Registration is now open for the event.

Register now.

Tools make robots easier for SMEs to configure

Users can easily add sensors, the igus Robot Control programming software, and a sound bar to ReBeL on Wheels, said Mühlens. The mobile manipulator includes gearboxes using the company’s patented motion plastics.

To help people “try before you buy,” igus allows for free remote testing. “You can scan a QR code into your mobile phone for to test the robot butler,” Mühlens noted.

In addition, the “Envisioner” in igus Robot Control can help robotics developers and integrators, he said. The Configurator in the RBTX online marketplace shows the center of gravity for every part in a delta robot cell, allowing the system to easily pick and place them.

“It automatically knows the center of gravity, and you can just buy the webcam for under €100 [$106.67],” said Mühlens. “We’ll be picking RBTX chocolates at Hannover Messe.”

“Everyone is looking for solutions for screwing and gluing in the furniture industry, for instance,” he said. “Now with RBTX and our 3D machine planner, you can combine robots with grippers and conveyors into cells for one fixed price.”

In fact, igus uses AI so that if a user uploads a photo, it can give a 3D recommendation.

“With the Configurator, a customer can take a few steps and get a live price,” Mühlens explained. “For example, you could choose ReBeL and a gripper for a cell, get measurements within the program, download files, and check out all the parts and prices. You can also choose an installation and buildup service or do it yourself.”

igus said its new machine planner offers small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) the ability to define cobot workspaces, build around its robots, and choose robot housings.

Motion-plastic parts get four-year guarantee

Machine failures due to insufficient lubrication cost $750 billion annually, and more than 24 million tons of lubricant seep into water and soil every year, according to igus. The company said its self-lubricating, high-performance polymers, as well as the use of artificial intelligence and virtual reality in design, can reduce such costly waste.

This year, igus is extending its four-year product guarantee to all of its dry-tech products. It also offers free replacement of bearings, drives, 3D-printed parts, and linear actuators.

These moves demonstrate the company’s confidence in their long service life and consciousness of the importance of sustainability in Industry 4.0, said Stefan Niermann, vice president and head of the drylin division, and Rainer Rössel, vice president and head of the chainflex division at igus.

“The performance of motion plastics is often underestimated,” added Lars Butenschön, business unit manager for iglidur bearings at igus. He cited their utility in construction and agriculture. The company is also offering new high-load bearings for heavy machinery in its “Zero Lubrication” range. 

In addition, lubrication-free bearings are suitable for food and packaging applications, said Michael Offner, vice president and head of industry management at the family-owned company.

“An enormous range of applications could use them,” noted Tobias Vogel, igus’ CEO of bearings and linear technology. With the igusGO app, machine builders can use voice controls and AI chat to configure excavators with such parts, he said.

As electrification garners more interest worldwide, particularly in e-mobility, battery production, and shore power, motion plastics can be an enabling technology, asserted Martin Tiling, head of igus’ shore power business unit.

igus reports €1.13B turnover, launches bike brand

After generating €1.15 billion ($1.23 billion) in 2022, igus reported €1.13 billion ($1.21 billion) for 2023. While the global economic slowdown affected the company, it is still approaching its goal of 1 million industrial customers per year, stated Michael Blass, managing director of e-chain systems.

“We are therefore pleased that we have at least come a little closer to this goal in a difficult year,” he said. “We have invested €433 million [$464.6 million] in this plan over the last three years, €210 million [$224.8 million] of which at the Cologne site.”

igus has invested in expanded production in Germany and the U.S., accelerating fulfillment of orders to within a few days, and continuing research and development, according to Blass. It is also planning construction in China, Taiwan, India, Italy, Spain, Poland, Mexico, and Turkey.

To demonstrate its motion plastics at human rather than industrial scale, the company has developed the igus:bike from recycled materials. The bicycle, which won’t rust and can be recycled itself, is now going into serial production under the new brand name RCYL. It will go on the market in Germany for €1,200 ($1,284) this year.

The post igus to show affordable automation at Hannover Messe, Robotics Summit appeared first on The Robot Report.

Goodbye to the hydraulic version of Atlas and hello to the electric model designed for commercialization. That’s the message from Boston Dynamics Inc., which yesterday retired the older version of its humanoid robot after 15 years of development and today showed a preview of its successor.

“The next generation of the Atlas program builds on decades of research and furthers our commitment to delivering the most capable, useful mobile robots solving the toughest challenges in the industry today: with Spot, with Stretch, and now with Atlas,” said the company in a blog post. Spot is a quadruped used in facilities inspection and other tasks, and Stretch is designed to unload trucks.

Boston Dynamics began with humanoids by sawing one of its pneumatically powered quadrupeds in half back in 2009. By 2016, the Waltham, Mass.-based company showed that its robot could walk, open a door, and maintain its balance while being shoved by a person holding a hockey stick, all without a tether.

Roboticists continued to improve Atlas, giving it a smaller form factor and more sensors, training its artificial intelligence, and enabling it to do increasingly impressive feats. They ranged from parkour and dancing to taking tools through a mock construction site.

In fact, it was that demonstration of Atlas manipulating a plank, picking up a bag of tools, and taking it to a worker that earned Boston Dynamics an RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award. The company will be exhibiting at the RBR50 Showcase at the Robotics Summit & Expo on May 1 and 2.

Register now.

Boston Dynamics evolves with the times

As capable as the YouTube darling was, the older version of Atlas still had limitations, both in range of motion and in terms of size and power usage. Boston Dynamics noted that it designed its legged robots to operate in unstructured environments, and it acknowledged that Atlas was initially a research and development project rather than a commercial product.

In the meantime, the company itself changed owners, from Google in 2013 to SoftBank in 2017 and most recently to Hyundai in 2020. Along with those changes came an increasing focus on robots such as Spot and Stretch serving industrial needs. To continue pure research, Hyundai founded the Boston Dynamics AI Institute in 2022.

“The AI Institute recently launched a new version of Spot with an API [application programming interface] designed for researchers,” said Robert Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics. “We’re talking about how to jointly solve some big challenges — the diversity of manipulation tasks we need to do with this robot [Atlas] is huge, and AI is essential to enabling that generality.”

Playter told The Robot Report that Boston Dynamics needs results within two to three years, while the AI Institute has more of a five-year timeframe.

Robot lessons apply to fleets, new Atlas

“It takes a solid year from a clean sheet to a new robot,” said Playter. “We wanted to know that we could solve essential dexterous manipulation problems before releasing the product.”

Boston Dynamics learned numerous lessons from commercializing Spot and Stretch, he said. It has improved control policies, upgraded actuation, and minimized joint complexity. The new Atlas has three-fingered grippers.

The Orbit fleet management software, which initially applies to indoor deployments of Spot, could also help supervise Stretch and Atlas.

Atlas gets ready for mobile manipulation in industrial settings. Source: Boston Dynamics

“Everything we understood, from the time of launching Spot as a prototype to it being a reliable product deployed in fleets, is going into the new Atlas,” Playter said. “We’re confident AI and Orbit will help enhance behaviors. For instance, by minimizing slipping on surfaces at Anheuser-Busch, we proved that we can develop algorithms and make it reliable.”

“Now, 1,500 robots in our fleet have them running,” he added. “It’s essential for customers like Purina to monitor and manage fleets as a vehicle for collecting data. As we develop and download new capabilities, Orbit becomes a hub for an ecosystem of different robots.”

Safety and autonomy are basic building blocks

Boston Dynamics has considered safe collaboration in its development of the new Atlas. ASTM International is developing safety standards for legged robots.

“We recognized early on that Atlas is going to work in spaces that have people in them,” said Playter. “This sets the bar much higher than lidar with AMRs [autonomous mobile robots].”

“We started thinking about functionally safe 3D vision,” he recalled. “We started with Stretch inside a container, but ultimately, we want it going everywhere in a warehouse. Advanced, functionally safe, remote vision and onboard systems are essential to solving safety.”

While Spot and Atlas are often teleoperated, Playter said this is a necessary step toward greater levels of autonomy.

“Making the robots knowledgeable about different types of objects and how to grasp them, teleoperation is just a tool for providing examples and data to the robot,” he explained. “It’s not a useful way of building intuition, but it’s easier if you can operate robots at a higher and higher level. Like you don’t need to tell Spot where to plant its feet, you don’t want to tell Atlas where to grasp.”

In the new video below, the previous version of Atlas handles automotive parts and real products weighing up to 25 lb. (11.3 kg).

Atlas ready for rivals in the humanoid race

Over the past two years, the number of humanoid robots in development has rapidly grown. It now includes Agility Robotics‘ Digit, Tesla’s Optimus, and Figure AI‘s Figure 01. In the two past weeks alone, Rainbow Robotics, Sanctuary AI, and Mentee Robotics have all made announcements.

Investment has also been flowing to humanoid companies, with 1X Technologies raising $100 million in January, Figure AI raising $675 million in February, and Accenture investing in Sanctuary AI in March.

Humanoid robots have advanced in parallel with generative AI, and Playter said he welcomes the competition.

“There were three seminal events: Boston Dynamics got acquired for $1 billion, interest in Tesla’s robot validated what we’ve done for a long time, and the emergence of new AI holds the promise of generalization of tasks,” he said. “They’ve inspired lots of new players, but having new tech isn’t all you need to have a commercial product. You need to focus on a use case, build a reliable machine, and manufacture it in a way to build a business. We want to avoid a ‘humanoid winter,’ so rollouts have to be real.”

Playter added that practical design and proper implementation of AI will help differentiate robots rather than focusing on making them more human-like. The new version of Atlas demonstrated that point in how it stood up in the video at the top of this article.

“It’s not talking to a robot that moves the needle, but whether you can build a robot that eventually does 500 tasks,” he said. “Anthropomorphism blows things out of perspective. We did not want a human-shaped head for Atlas. We want people to remember it’s a machine and that it can move in ways humans can’t.”

The financial stability of the businesses involved will also be relevant for commercial success, said Playter. 

“It takes sustained investment; these are expensive products to launch,” he noted. “Having products already out helps build momentum.”

Atlas is humanoid — to a point. Source: Boston Dynamics

When will we see the new robot in the wild?

Boston Dynamics will begin testing the all-electric version of Atlas with parent company Hyundai and select partners next year, said Playter.

“We’re beginning in their factory,” he told The Robot Report. “In addition to the target application of a lot of parts movement — a special kind of logistics in automotive production — I think that will evolve as the dexterity of the robots improves over time.”

“We see robots in the workplace as an evolution, a continuum from Spot to Atlas,” asserted Playter. “Each product in the series informs the launch of the next.”

“Industries will have to figure out how to adapt and incorporate humanoids into their facilities,” he said. “We’ll actually see robots in the wild in factories beginning next year. We want a diversity of tasks.”

The post Boston Dynamics debuts electric version of Atlas humanoid robot appeared first on The Robot Report.

Here are the top 10 most popular stories on The Robot Report this past month. Subscribe to The Robot Report Newsletter or listen to The Robot Report Podcast to stay updated on the latest technology developments.

10. Robotics Engineering Career Fair to connect candidates, employers at Robotics Summit

The career fair will draw from the general robotics and artificial intelligence community, as well as from attendees at the Robotics Summit & Expo. Past co-located career fairs have drawn more than 800 candidates, and MassRobotics said it expects even more people at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center this year. Read More

9. SMC adds grippers for cobots from Universal Robots

SMC recently introduced a series of electric grippers designed to be used with collaborative robot arms from Universal Robots. Available in basic and longitudinal types, SMC said the LEHR series can be adapted to different industrial environments like narrow spaces. Read More

8. Anyware Robotics announces new add-on for Pixmo unloading robots

Anyware Robotics announced in March 2024 an add-on for its Pixmo robot for truck and container unloading. The patent-pending accessory includes a vertical lift with a conveyor belt that is attached to Pixmo between the robot and the boxes to be unloaded. Read More

7. Accenture invests in humanoid maker Sanctuary AI in March 2024

In its Technology Vision 2024 report, Accenture said 95% of the executives it surveyed agreed that “making technology more human will massively expand the opportunities of every industry.” Well, Accenture put its money where its mouth is. Accenture Ventures announced a strategic investment in Sanctuary AI, one of the companies developing humanoid robots. Read More

6. Cambrian Robotics obtains seed funding to provide vision for complex tasks

Machine vision startup Cambrian Robotics Ltd. has raised $3.5 million in seed+ funding. The company said it plans to use the investment to continue developing its AI platform to enable robot arms “to surpass human capabilities in complex vision-based tasks across a variety of industries.” Read More

5. Mobile Industrial Robots launches MiR1200 autonomous pallet jack

Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are among the systems benefitting from the latest advances in AI. Mobile Industrial Robots at LogiMAT in March 2024 launched the MiR1200 Pallet Jack, which it said uses 3D vision and AI to identify pallets for pickup and delivery “with unprecedented precision.” Read More

4. Reshape Automation aims to reduce barriers of robotics adoption

Companies in North America bought 31,159 robots in 2023. That’s a 30% decrease from 2022. And that’s not sitting well with robotics industry veteran Juan Aparicio. After working at Siemens for a decade and stops at Ready Robotics and Rapid Robotics, Aparicio hopes his new startup Reshape Automation can chip away at this problem. Read More

3. Mercedes-Benz testing Apollo humanoid

Apptronik announced that leading automotive brand Mercedes-Benz is testing its Apollo humanoid robot. As part of the agreement, Apptronik and Mercedes-Benz will collaborate on identifying applications for Apollo in automotive settings. Read More

2. NVIDIA announces new robotics products at GTC 2024

The NVIDIA GTC 2024 keynote kicked off like a rock concert in San Jose, Calif. More than 15,000 attendees filled the SAP Arena in anticipation of CEO Jensen Huang’s annual presentation of the latest product news from NVIDIA. He discussed the new Blackwell platform, improvements in simulation and AI, and all the humanoid robot developers using the company’s technology. Read More

1. Schneider Electric unveils new Lexium cobots at MODEX 2024

In Atlanta, Schneider Electric announced the release of two new collaborative robots: the Lexium RL 3 and RL 12, as well as the Lexium RL 18 model coming later this year. From single-axis machines to high-performance, multi-axis cobots, the Lexium line enables high-speed motion and control of up to 130 axes from one processor, said the company. It added that this enables precise positioning to help solve manufacturer production, flexibility, and sustainability challenges. Read More

The post Top 10 robotics news stories of March 2024 appeared first on The Robot Report.

Glacier’s recycling sorting robot is able to sort up 45 items a minute. | Source: Glacier

Amazon.com Inc.’s Climate Pledge Fund recently invested in Glacier, an artificial intelligence and robotics company that aims to help the recycling industry work toward a world without waste. The investment firm said the funding is part of its ongoing commitment to support entrepreneurs and female-led companies in climate tech.

“Nearly 70 million tons of recycling are processed annually in the U.S. alone. This is already an immense undertaking, but we can recover so much more material by building accessible automation processes and then scaling it across our country’s recycling infrastructure,” Areeb Malik, co-founder of Glacier, said in a release. “That’s what Glacier is doing.”

The San Francisco-based company uses AI-powered robots to automate the sorting of recyclables. It collects real-time data on recycling streams fore recycling companies and consumer brands.

Glacier has also announced that it will be collaborating with Amazon to enhance traceability and recovery processes for recyclables. Its latest funding round, totaling $7.7 million, also included participation from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), AlleyCorp, Overture Climate VC, and VSC Ventures.

Register now.

Glacier aims to help recycling industry reach its full potential

Malik and Rebecca Hu said they co-founded Glacier to make a positive impact on the climate crisis. Despite the potential of recycling as a climate solution, today only 21% of residential recyclables in the U.S. are actually recycled. This is often due to a lack of recycling infrastructure, they said.

“After researching a variety of climate solutions, we discovered that applying novel advances in AI and robotic automation to help the recycling industry run more efficiently is a powerful way to reduce waste, which has a direct link to reducing carbon emissions,” stated Hu.

Glacier said its robots can improve sorting and recycling rates to help prevent valuable materials, like metals and plastics, from ending up in landfills and oceans. The company’s approach to recycling innovation combines two core technologies.

The first is Glacier’s proprietary AI model, which is capable of identifying more than 30 categories of recyclable materials in real time. This includes things as broad as PET plastic and as narrow as a toothpaste tube. The company said the combination of this AI model with its custom-designed robot delivers consistent recyclable sorting power with minimal implementation costs.

Glacier added that its potential impact on the circular economy extends beyond its sorting robot. Its software and AI are generating a recycling data set to help recycling facilities and brands make better-informed decisions.

“We’re constantly looking for ways to improve recycling, and developing robots is just the first step,” said Malik.

“Our recycling AI is a powerful tool for everyone in the circular economy, and it couldn’t come at a more important time,” said Hu. “As we see mounting legislative, economic, and social pressure to recycle better, brands are using our data to measure and improve how their packaging is being recycled, while recycling facilities are using our data to improve their operations and rescue more recyclables from landfill. We’re thrilled to be collaborating with a circular-economy leader like Amazon so that we can accelerate our mission to end waste.”

Keeping plastic out of landfills and oceans

Glacier claimed that just one of its robots can prevent over 10 million items per year from ending up in landfills. In the near term, the company said its technology can help improve the quality of recycling content. This way, more post-consumer material is available for use in new packaging.

In the longer term, Glacier’s founders said they hope to enable recycling for more types of packaging and materials that are not currently recycled. This is why Amazon is collaborating with Glacier to pilot a sortation project for novel biomaterials.

Amazon said its vision is to reduce plastic use and shift toward materials that are bio-based, as well as those that are biodegradable and compostable. This includes testing new biomaterials for applications without other sustainable solutions, such as some flexible plastics, and then recycling them.

The post Recycling automation startup Glacier brings in $7.7M appeared first on The Robot Report.

SMC recently introduced a series of electric grippers designed to be used with collaborative robot arms (cobots) from Universal Robots (UR). Available in basic and longitudinal types, SMC said the LEHR series can be adapted to different industrial environments like narrow spaces.

The new series offers gripping forces between 60 to 140 N and have M8, 8-pin plug-and-play connectors. SMC said it can be operated with the connection of 1 electrical wire. The grippers feature a battery-less absolute encoder and a motor type rated 24VDC.

SMC said that by using the dedicated software certified for Universal Robots, URCap, the teach pendant can conduct various operations of SMC grippers intuitively, allowing for sensor signals to be easily incorporated. SMC also said all that’s needed to install the software is to save a copy of the URCap software to a USB flash drive and insert it into the cobot’s teach pendant.

SMC will be exhibiting in booth 301 at the Robotics Summit & Expo, which takes place May 1-2 in Boston. Produced by The Robot Report and parent company WTWH Media, the Robotics Summit will have 5,000 attendees from the commercial robotics development ecosystem and 200+ exhibitors. The event will feature 75-plus speakers in 45 technical sessions, including keynotes from Agility Robotics, Amazon, Disney, Medtronic and Teradyne, which owns UR. Register by March 8 to save 25% on full access passes to the Robotics Summit & Expo.

SMC’s new LEHR grippers are design for Universal Robots’ collaborative robot arms. | Credit: SMC

SMC said the new LEHR series has a durable and flexible design with IP20-rated housing with a rounded protective cover and simplified tool changing. SMC added that the durable design makes the gripper resist vibration and impacts and is also able to work in relatively harsh environments.

UR is the world’s leading developer of cobot arms. The Denmark-based company generated $304 million in revenue in 2023. While its sales were down 7% year-over-year from the record $326 million generated in 2022, the cobot maker ended the year on a high note. The fourth quarter of 2023 was UR’s largest revenue quarter ever. This represented 21% growth from Q4 2022 and 47% growth from Q3 2023, which the company attributed to demand for its the UR20 and UR30 cobots.

Ujjwal Kumar, who was named president of Teradyne’s robotics group in mid-2023, will deliver a keynote at the Robotics Summit. Kumar has a 25-year career spanning multiple industries and major multi-national corporations, including General Motors, General Electric, and Honeywell. He has a Master of Business Administration from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland and Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology.

The conversation with Kumar will discuss ways to drive the transformation of the robotics industry. He will share some lessons he has learned and how they can be applied to accelerate the transformation of industry with robotics.

The post SMC adds grippers for cobots from Universal Robots appeared first on The Robot Report.

Bosch Rexroth’s Smart Flex Effector its in between the robot and its gripper to make it more flexible and precise. | Source: Bosch Rexroth

In 2022, there were 3.9 million operational robots in the world, an all-time high, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Bosch Rexroth said it expects that number to grow in the coming years as new innovations make it possible for robots to do more tasks more successfully. 

The Buchanan, Mich.-based company creates intelligent systems for factory automation, mobile and machining applications, and engineering. It said it hopes to help the industry keep up with rising demand by making robots more flexible and easier to use. 

Brad Klippstein, a product manager at Bosch, gave insight into the company’s Smart Flex Effector. This end effector, which sits between the robot and its gripper, gives a robot tactile feedback. This allows a robot to know when it’s touching an object and how to get into position to best pick that object. 

“We’ve had vision systems for robotics for a number of years,” Klippstein told The Robot Report. “Now, we’re adding tactile sensing to that process to increase accuracy, increase repeatability and process transparency, and do some of these operations that were incredibly difficult or impossible before.”

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Bosch Rexroth makes industrial arms more adaptable

Robots, particularly large industrial robots, can be inflexible and difficult to train on new tasks, noted Bosch Rexroth. Robots used in picking processes typically have “teach positions,” which are ideal positions for the robot and the item it’s picking to be in.

Industrial robots will typically pick the same item over and over again, so when the item or the robot is slightly off position, the robot may struggle to complete the task. 

“Lots of things can happen to make that teach position be a little bit misaligned or off position,” said Klippstein. “The Smart Flex Effector gives you the ability to feel the environment.”

“So now I don’t have to know the exact position of an object or location,” he added. “I can get somewhat close and then have the Smart Flex Effector tell me exactly where to go based on tactile sensing or touch.” 

While vision systems can provide important feedback for robots, tactile feedback adds a new level of flexibility to robots, asserted Bosch Rexroth.

“As soon as the robot touches the workpiece you get that feeling, that feedback. And that can tell the robot that it’s in position,” explained Klippstein. “For high picking and placing operations, we don’t need to be exact. With all of these teach positions we can get somewhat close and the smart flex effector adds flexibility to that process so that you don’t have to reteach that position each and every time.” 

“So if we know that the position is off half a millimeter in the X direction, three-quarters of a millimeter in the Y direction, and 2.5 degrees about the X-Y axis, and we know all of those dimensions immediately, we can send that information back to the robot,” he said. “Then it knows the exact position to correct.”

Designing a tool that can work with any robot, in various use cases

The Smart Flex Effector can work with any robot or gripper, according to Bosch Rexroth. The system simply uses an adapter plate that allows end-users to connect any equipment. It’s also designed to benefit robots in a variety of use cases, not just picking. 

Klippstein said Bosch’s end effector is used in assembly operations, the electronics industry, machine tending, welding, and various other industrial applications. It wasn’t easy for the company’s team to create something that can work in so many scenarios. 

“We needed to make something that was compact, durable, and that, of course, performed this operation by taking in all of this data,” said Klippstein. “And by the way, this data is six degrees of freedom, or six degrees of rotation about the robots. We needed to be able to provide compensation for each one of those six axes in almost real-time, because we don’t want to slow down operation.”

“So we needed to quickly determine the offset, the positional deviation from where that robot currently is in all six degrees, and then quickly send that result back to the robot control so that it can make a compensation move,” he said.

“The engineering challenge was we needed to obtain this information,” Klippstein said. “So how do we even get that?”

“We need to be able to process that and determine the position, not just the force or the torque or anything like that,” he said. “You program a robot with position, so it’s very easy to tell the robot how far to move if you know the exact degree or the millimeter that it needs to move to. We get that information, send it to the robot, and it knows the exact position to move to for the correct movement or to find the nominal position.” 

While the tool has primarily been used in six-axis robots, it can be implemented in any robot that needs more flexibility and accuracy, Klippstein claimed. 

Why flexibility is necessary for the industry as a whole

As robots become more and more mainstream, flexibility and ease of implementation have become increasingly important topics for the industry. 

“As far as trends, I would say it’s making [end effectors] easy to implement into whatever robot the customer wants to use,” Klippstein said. “As far as establishing the communication, making it really easy to program from that teach pendant is a really big trend and something that is necessary to allow customers to quickly implement the solution.”

Klippstein also said that recent advances in artificial intelligence should help end-of-arm tooling like the Smart Flex Effector become more accurate over time. 

“[More information] gives you insights to what is actually going on so that you can either program around it, or have a better understanding of that process in general, and find new ways to implement that solution or that process in other areas as well,” Klippstein said. 

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The range of manipulation tasks that robots can carry out is growing, according to FAULHABER. It includes everything from grasping and holding to clamping and screwing, as well as foaming and welding, said the German company.

When it comes to standardized mass production, specialized robots can perform the same tasks day and night. But many processes require flexibility, such as when it comes to batch size 1. This is also important to save on investment costs. The greater the range of tasks that a robot can carry out, the better, FAULHABER said in a blog post.

Tool changer with brushless flat motor. Source: FAULHABER

Intelligent Peripherals for Robots (IPR) aims to solve these problem with its TKX tool changer. Mounted to the end of a robot arm, it can remove a variety of tools from a rack, according to IPR.

For example, TKX enables the robot to first grip and position a workpiece, then process it with tools, and finally check and document the quality with a contour sensor or a camera. For this, the adapter needs suitable feed-throughs for the corresponding tool functions.

The TKX series provides options, as well as several lateral screw-on surfaces for additional modules. However, the main task of the tool changer is to securely lock the tool when it is picked up and to quickly and consistently release the lock again when it is set down after use.

Applications determine chose of pneumatic or electric

Traditionally, many industrial applications use pneumatic power transmissions, said FAULHABER. Compressed-air technology has proven itself over decades, and it is suitable for handling very heavy objects, the company noted. But a pneumatic system requires compressors, lines, and its own control system with numerous mechanical components – a considerable investment in new systems.

In industries with increased demands on cleanliness and hygiene, such as microelectronics or food, pneumatics are out of the question because of the unavoidable emission of compressed air. And pneumatics are an absolute no-go in clean rooms. Eppingen, Germany-based IPR said it has seen a significant trend towards the use of electric drives instead of pneumatic ones.

“In addition to the hygienic safety, electric motors are much more flexible in use,” said the company. “Unlike compressed air connections, power sockets are available almost anywhere.”

“In newly built industrial plants, pneumatic systems are generally no longer installed,” IPR added. “For cobots and smaller robots as well as for decentralized locations, the electric version is almost always the better solution.”

The fact that the electric drive is a real alternative to pneumatics today also has something to do with motor technology, explained Roman Batz, development engineer at IPR.

“Great strides have been made in recent years,” he said. “For our applications, we basically need a lot of power with very small dimensions. FAULHABER offers motors that can easily hold their own compared to pneumatic drives.”

FAULHABER motors to open, close, and hold

Holding up is also meant quite literally here. Currently, the most powerful electric model in the TKX series, the TKE 300, is suitable for handling objects weighing up to 300 kg (661.3 lb.), said IPR.

In metal processing, robots can handle heavy loads such as cast blocks or large forged parts. The pulling force of their overall mass then acts upon the locking ring in the TKX changer.

The torque supplied by the motor in standby mode would be enough for safe holding. But to ensure particularly reliable fixation, IPR has also installed self-retaining kinematics, which were developed in-house.

“A brushless motor from the FAULHABER BXT family provides the driving force for opening, closing, and holding,” FAULHABER said. “With its external rotor technology, it achieves a ratio of torque to weight and volume that is unrivaled on the market. This power density is one of the prerequisites for the unique selling point of the new product family from IPR.”

“The TKX series are the first tool changers on the market that are available on the same platform with both pneumatic and electric drives – we also have a manual version in the product range,” Batz said. “This means that the entire range of accessories can be used with all drive types without retooling. And switching to electric operation is also quite easy. This opens up new possibilities for robotic automation.”

IPR’s TKX tool changer includes an electric FAULHABER motor. Source: FAULHABER

Components designed to be reliable, easy to combine

The TKE changers will be available in seven sizes for handling workpieces from 3 to 300 kg (6.6 to 661.3 lb.), according to IPR. The electric variant of the product family thus covers a wide range of applications, from lightweight robots to stationary applications. The dimensions of the BXT motors used are adapted to the application.

“The range of sizes and the large selection of suitable gears for the optimum reduction in each case was an important criterion for us,” Batz said. “Robots should be able to achieve seven-digit cycle numbers without maintenance. So only a brushless motor with the highest possible processing quality can be used. It should be easy to control and manage without additional control – the integrated speed controller takes care of that. Last but not least, the components have to be able to withstand temperatures of up to +80°C.”

IPR procures all of its micromotors from FAULHABER. “We started working together many years ago, long before my time,” Batz said. In addition to the unique quality of the products, other aspects play an important role for him.

“It starts with the very simple design of motor-gear combinations on the FAULHABER website,” said Batz. “It takes just a few clicks to get a comprehensive overview. The technical details are very well documented, and when it comes to precisely calculating the finer points – efficiency, power consumption, temperature development over time, etc. — I always get the support I need.”

An example IPR workcell with the robotic tool changer. Source: FAULHABER

Editor’s note: This article was syndicated with permission from FAULHABER’s blog.

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Top row, from left to right: the Ella smart stroller, Soft Robotics’ food packer, and the TM25S. Bottom row: Salidrone, M4, and Zipline’s delivery drone. | Source: NVIDIA

Outside the glare of the klieg lights that ChatGPT commanded this past year, a troupe of autonomous machines nudged forward the frontiers of robotics, according to NVIDIA.

Ella smart stroller makes a splash at CES

Ella — a smart stroller from Glüxkind Technologies, a startup in Vancouver, Canada — kicked off the year when it was named an honoree in the CES 2023 Innovation Awards.

The canny carriage uses computer vision running on the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform to follow parents. Its AI-powered abilities, like smart braking and a rock-my-baby mode, captured the attention of media outlets like Good Morning America and The Times of London as well as an NVIDIA AI Podcast interview with its husband-and-wife cofounders.

A member of NVIDIA Inception, a free program for cutting-edge startups, Glüxkind was one of seven companies with NVIDIA-powered products recognized at the Las Vegas event in January. They included:

• John Deere for its fully autonomous tractor
• AGRIST for its robot that automatically harvests bell peppers
• Inception member Skydio for its drone that can fly at a set distance and height without manual intervention
• Neubility, another Inception member, for its self-driving delivery robot
• Seoul Robotics, a partner in the NVIDIA Metropolis vision AI software, for its Level 5 Control Tower that can turn standard vehicles into self-driving care
• WHILL for its one-person vehicle that automatically guides a user inside places like airports or hospitals

mGripAI dexterously packs food

Bedford, Mass.-based Inception member Soft Robotics introduced its mGripAI system to an $8 trillion food industry hungry for automation. It combines 3D vision and AI to grasp delicate items such as chicken wings, attracting investors that include Tyson Foods and Johnsonville.

Soft Robotics uses the NVIDIA Omniverse platform and NVIDIA Isaac Sim robotics simulator to create 3D renderings of chicken parts on conveyor belts or in bins. With help from AI and the ray-tracing capabilities of NVIDIA RTX technology, the robot gripper can handle as many as 100 picks per minute, even under glare or changing light conditions.

“We’re all in on Omniverse and Isaac Sim, and that’s been working great for us,” David Weatherwax, senior director of software engineering at Soft Robotics, said in a January interview.

TM25S provides a keen eye in the factory

In a very different example of industrial digitalization, electronics manufacturer Quanta is inspecting the quality of its products using the TM25S, an AI-enabled robot from its subsidiary, Techman Robot.

Using Omniverse, Techman built a digital twin of the inspection robot — as well as the product to be inspected — in Isaac Sim. Programming the robot in simulation reduced time spent on the task by over 70%, compared with programming manually on the real robot.

Then, with optimization tools in Isaac Sim, Techman explored a massive number of program options in parallel on NVIDIA GPUs. The end result, shown in the video below, was an efficient solution that reduced the cycle time of each inspection by 20%.

Saildrone takes to the seas for data science

Saildrone, another Inception startup in Alameda, Calif., created uncrewed watercraft that can cost-effectively gather data for science, fisheries, weather forecasting and more.

NVIDIA Jetson modules process data streams from their sensors, some with help from NVIDIA Metropolis vision AI software such as NVIDIA DeepStream, a development kit for intelligent video analytics.

The video below shows how three of Saildrone’s smart sailboats are helping evaluate ocean health around the Hawaiian Islands.

Caltech M4 sets its sights on Mars

The next stop for one autonomous vehicle may be the red planet.

Caltech’s Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot, or M4, can configure itself to walk, fly, or drive at speeds up to 40 mph (see video below). An M42 version is now in development at NASA as a Mars rover candidate and has attracted interest for other uses such as reconnaissance in fire zones.

Since releasing a paper on it in Nature Communications, the team has been inundated with proposals for the shape-shifting drone built on the NVIDIA Jetson platform.

Zipline delivery drones fly high

The year ended on a high note with Zipline announcing that its delivery drones flew more than 55 million miles and made more than 800,000 deliveries since the company’s start in 2011. The San Francisco-based company said it now completes one delivery every 70 seconds, globally.

That’s a major milestone for the Inception startup, the field it’s helping pioneer, and the customers who can receive everything from pizza to vitamins up to seven faster than by truck.

Zipline’s latest drone uses two Jetson Orin NX modules. It can carry 8 lb. of cargo for 10 miles at up to 70 mph to deliver packages in single-digit minutes while reducing carbon emissions 97% in comparison with gasoline-based delivery vehicles.

NVIDIA notes maker machines that inspire and amuse

Individual makers designed two autonomous vehicles this year worth special mentions.

Goran Vuksic with his AI-powered droid. | Source: NVIDIA

Kabilan KB, a robotics developer and student in Coimbatore, India, built an autonomous wheelchair using Jetson to run computer vision models that find and navigate a path to a user’s desired destination. The undergrad at the Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences aspires to one day launch a robotics startup.

Finally, an engineering manager in Copenhagen who’s a self-described Star Wars fanatic designed an AI-powered droid based on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit. Goran Vuksic shared his step-by-step technical guide, so others can build their own sci-fi companions.

More than 6,500 companies and 1.2 million developers — as well as a community of makers and enthusiasts — use the NVIDIA Jetson and Isaac platforms for edge AI and robotics.

To get a look at where autonomous machines will go next, see what’s coming at CES in 2024.

Editor’s note: This blog reposted with permission from NVIDIA.

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