We're gonna do it! On the unemployment line.

Back in the old days, a particular product would come down a conveyor. A person or people would take items off of the conveyor and place it in  a box or other appropriate packaging. This concept was so iconic that it was used in everything from I Love Lucy to Laverne and Shirley.

This image, however, is about to change in a big way. Enter: The Adept Quattro. This robot is insanely fast. It can pick up items off of a conveyor and place them in any configuration that is needed. It can do this with virtually any item – no matter how delicate – with shocking speed. According to Adept, they have broken what was previously viewed as a barrier to robotic speed. This robot can break the 300 cycle per minute barrier.

Check out this video below. As you are watching it, think about this: This is in real-time. This is not in high-speed. At the 1:30 mark, you can see the robot at its top speed.

(via gizmodo)

For those of you in New York City, you can check out this marvel on Pike Street in Chinatown from now until November 14th.

Pike Loop from Storefront for Art&Architecture on Vimeo.

(via FastCompany)

It runs on electricity as well, certainly making it a nice alternative to gas-powered cleaners that are currently in use.

Now, I can certainly see this running in a shopping center after it is closed. It would make a lot of sense and be incredibly efficient. However, I am not so sure this could be used on city streets. What would stop someone from just picking it up an taking it? Or running over it in their car on accident (or, if you are a former street sweeper – on purpose).

Still, this is  a fantastic design.  This is just conceptual at this phase, so no details like cost, when/if it will be available or who will even make it.

Still, very impressive design from Olga Kalugina. It would be great to see this become a reality someday.

Check out more pictures of this awesome robot below.

(via Tuvie)

Time to work off that hamburger buddy!

According to Pink Tentacle, Taizo is a robot that can help teach people how to properly stretch. It can operate for 2 hours per charge. Taizo can respond to voice commands, provided those voice commands are about exercise and not, say, dominating the earth. It is a small robot, standing at just 28-inches tall. What makes the robot appear even shorter is that it is sitting down for most exercises, though is can stand up if it needs to.

General Robotix, Inc is a maker of humanoid robots and humanoid robot parts. They even have a linux-based operating system for their robots. Best of all you can purchase all of these items from them so you can build your own robot … if you live in Japan. They do not ship outside of Japan right now.

The robot certainly looks very chipper and ready and willing to teach the elderly how to get their groove on. However, I do question having the Jack in the-Box Mascot teaching people how to stretch. Though perhaps after eating enough of their awesome hamburgers, it is for the best.

Below is a video of Jack, I mean Taizo, showing off his awesome moves.

Additionally, this is a battery-powered robot, so it is friendly to the environment. The Automower can mow up to 3/4 of an acre and knows to stay on the grass. Even the blades are deep inside the robot and it will shutoff automatically if tipped, greatly reducing the chance of injury.

The New York Daily News did have some advice from the Park Commissioner on what to do if encountering this robot in a park, despite the safety features:

“If you see a strange machine coming toward you,” he said, “it’s a good idea to walk away from it.”

This is great advice when encountering any robot, I believe.

Below is a video of the robot mower in action – as a bonus there is a rubber duck riding on top and the theme song from the old show “Convoy” is playing. No, I do not know why.

This garage is 100% automated and uses robots to park the bikes and then to return them to their owners. The robots are based off of industrial robots.

Getting all 800 bikes into the structure took a lot of research as well. It was determined that a zig-zag pattern of parking the bikes was ultimately the best method, though even that took a lot of refinement so that no bike would hit another bike on its way out.

The construction of the garage is also innovative. Using their method they are able to build such a structure quickly and fairly cheaply.

Be sure to watch the video below – this really is an incredible feat of engineering.

This amazing unit can dribble a ball, use tweezers to pick up a grain of rice, throw a ball into a target and flip a cell phone up in the air and catch it. It can do all of this and do it scary fast.

It uses a 2-dimensional membrane which covers the fingers and provides tactile pressure feedback so the hand can adjust its grip. I can clearly see this as an important step into the getting automation into agriculture.

According to the U.S Apple Association 62 percent of the total cost of apple production is from labor. If these robotic hands were made to track and harvest apples this would mean a significant cost savings to apple growers. Robots don’t need to rest and can do things very fast with a high degree of accuracy. Combine this feat of engineering with the work NLP is doing with Vegetable Harvesting Systems building intelligent harvesting robots and you could have a completely unmanned farm working 24/7.

This is something I would think any food industry consisting of manual harvesting should be investing in especially with their shrinking labor resources.

Of course, this triggers more robots to show up. What if too many robots show up to feed and there isn’t enough food? Would the robots learn not to signal?

In this Wired article that is exactly what happens. The robots learn to conceal their signal so that they can feed and survive.

A true survival instinct can now be placed in the minds of robots.

This kind of breakthrough is huge.

Robots are expensive – they represent a huge investment to a company that buys them. If the company knows that the robots will actively work at ensuring their own safety, than corporations will be more willing to buy. Robots as they are now in industry and other applied areas are largely “dumb” – they do their job and do it as assigned. By giving them the ability to decide the best way to move and to act, they can do more complex tasks and do so without harm to themselves.

While this experiment might seem small, it really represents a large leap forward in robotics.

A multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, engineers, and biologists at Harvard received a $10 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Expeditions in Computing grant to fund the development of small-scale mobile robotic devices. Inspired by the biology of a bee and the insect’s hive behavior, the researchers aim to push advances in miniature robotics and the design of compact high-energy power sources; spur innovations in ultra-low-power computing and electronic “smart” sensors; and refine coordination algorithms to manage multiple, independent machines.

So what this team hopes to accomplish here is the creation of tiny robots that not only share data but work together like bees in a hive. So in this way, a whole group of small robots could all communicate and work together to complete a larger task.

I can only imagine this is the first step of many of creating nanobots that can do the same thing – not only communicate, but work together as a hive to accomplish something that an individual nanobot could not do alone.

Another development that the team hopes comes out of this is a “smart sensor” that allows the robots to detect each other, objects, their targets and more. It would send this signal back to its “brain” which would then adjust its flight pattern and speed based on this data.

So, for example, the bee could go out on a mission to discover some kind of resource, relate this to the other bees and then fly back to a docking bay which would then allow us to pull the data from it and see what it, and others in the collective, learned.

For more information be sure to read their news release.

I highly recommend reading this article. He brings up excellent points about why we are not perceiving this as a threat (robots are dull, not sexy/visibly dangerous like in books and movies) and how even when the economy was roaring 8 years ago, unskilled jobs were still hard to find.

This is getting closer to what I called for yesterday – a true look at the effects of robotics on the workforce. This constant demagoguery of blaming off-shoring isn’t what we need to hear. We need a real, hard look at technology and how it is changing manufacturing.

I am not being doom and gloom here – I do believe more and better jobs can come from all of this, but before that can happen we must have full-awareness as to why the jobs are disappearing – then we can have a real plan.

We need to stop listening to Lou Dobbs and starting looking at actual facts in regard to the reasons why unskilled labor jobs are disappearing.