"Dawn of a robot revolution as army of machines escape the factory"
From the Financial Times:
Cleaning
the Sydney Harbour Bridge used to be a dangerous, dirty and laborious
job. As soon as a team of workers, operating a sandblaster, reached one
end of the iconic structure they had to start again to keep 485,000
square metres of steel pristine.
Now two robots called Rosie and Sandy, built by SABRE Autonomous Solutions, blast away paint
and corrosion all day long without a break. They determine which area
needs most attention via a laser scan and move about on rails.
“A
sand blaster can slice through flesh. Automating jobs like that is a
good thing, it helps improve the quality of human work,” says Roko
Tschakarow, head of the Mobile Gripper Systems Division at Schunk, which
supplies the lightweight robot arm for the Sydney robots.
Rosie
and Sandy are at the forefront of a wave of new autonomous robots that
have broken out of the factory and could be coming to your workplace
soon.
At the Automatica robot and automation fair in Munich this week the
organisers devoted a whole section to so-called “service robots” for the
first time.
Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for manufacturing, engineering and automation demonstrated a Care-O-Bot that sweeps office floors and empties waste paper bins. Pal Robotics showed Stockbot, which walks the aisles in a shop or warehouse to check inventory at night.
Oppent’s autonomous vehicles ferry laundry or waste around hospitals, Yaskawa Motoman’s dual arm robot prepares laboratory samples and OC Robotics, a Bristol-based company, supplies snake-arm robots to inspect hazardous or confined spaces such as nuclear power plants and inside aircraft wings.
Compared to the size of the industrial robotics market, service robot
applications are still somewhat niche. Robot researchers are also wary
of overpromising after several false technological dawns in the past....MUCH MORE
