The South China Morning Post published an interesting article today on the burgeoning maker movement in Hong Kong. In it, author Charley Lanyon writes about HackJam, a weekly do-it-yourselfer meetup in Hong Kong that got its start two years ago when its founder noticed a dearth of communal workspaces compared to the West. It’s one signal
One of the most attractive promises robotics as a forward-facing industry makes is savings in time and labor — and thereby costs — in a plethora of different fields. While online retail giant Amazon’s pursuit of economic efficiency through warehouse automation (as represented by their $775 million acquisition of Kiva Robotics in early 2012) is
As VentureBeat and several other sites noted this week, Amazon.com recently added a new section focused on 3-D printers and their related supplies, joining Staples as a major retailer supporting the technology. So far, 3-D printers aren’t exactly splashed across the Amazon homepage under “The Perfect Gift For Dad” heading — instead they’re tucked away
There has been a lot of movement by a broad range of technology firms and automotive manufacturers alike over the last few years to develop autonomous cars and “connected vehicle” technology (as well as a great deal of discussion about the innumerable policy and safety concerns to which these projects give rise). BMW and Honda
The Work Foundation’s annual debate, held yesterday at its headquarters in London, examined a hot topic in the robotics industry: Will robots steal our jobs? It’s a topic that has been in the news frequently in recent months, and you can find a roundup of articles on both sides of the issue here. The British
At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday, a robotics and artificial intelligence start-up made a surprise appearance during the opening keynote. The San Francisco-based company, Anki, is backed by $50 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and Two Sigma. Like Bossa Nova Robotics, Seegrid and a host of hot robotics companies, it was
Today at InfoComm in Orlando, iRobot announced its latest entry into the nascent telepresence market, a collaboration with Cisco Systems targeted at business users. The robot, called the Ava 500, essentially mounts Cisco telepresence technology on a mobile base from iRobot. The base is an enhanced version of iRobot’s Ava robotics platform, and the display
We recently wrote about the promise of the new Xbox Kinect sensor for robotics applications as well as the trend of using existing technologies to enhance the abilities of a new generation of robots. Researchers from the University of Washington have combined those two ideas with a new gesture-recognition system that uses the wireless signals
Research described in the latest issue of the journal Alcohol highlights the little-known field of “ethorobotics,” or the study of the interaction between biologically inspired robots and live animals. The interaction in this case was between groups of live zebrafish and a biomimetic robot fish designed to mimic certain zebrafish traits. In previous research, the zebrafish showed
Texas Instruments announced yesterday that it has become the first semiconductor company to install the AutoStore inventory management system. The company installed AutoStore in its Singapore product distribution center, which began ramping up this week and will be in full production by September. Texas Instruments says the installation represents the first such system in Asia. It was
