A diagram from Amazon’s patent application shows a power-charging robot offering a charging cable and a stick of gum for sale. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO)
Have you ever scrambled around at an airport, hunting down a power outlet for your laptop or smartphone? Amazon’s inventors have the answer: a power-charging robot that’ll come to your side and let you plug in, for a price.
It’ll even sell you chewing gum.
The robot is the subject of a patent published today, which is based on an application filed by a Seattle-based Amazon team back in 2015.
The idea may seem wacky, but the inventors contend that such robots would fill a need that’s currently unmet.
A humanoid Furo robot guides Sea-Tac travelers through the intricacies of the security screening process in multiple languages. (Port of Seattle via YouTube)
I, for one, welcome our cute new robot overlords at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport – as long as they don’t boss me around.
Two types of humanoid robots are getting tryouts this week at Sea-Tac: One is SoftBank’s Pepper robot, which is programmed to help travelers find food and drink establishments at the airport. The other is a Furo robot, which provides tips to get through the security lines faster.
Robot 2, built by Electroimpact, places fasteners into precisely drilled holes in the fuselage for a 777 jet at Boeing’s Everett plant. In this case, a human worker inside the fuselage hooks up the other part of the fastener. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
EVERETT, Wash. – Some manufacturing workers may worry that robots will be stealing their jobs, but not Boeing’s Jordan Northrup.
He’s glad to work with Robot 1 and Robot 2, the industrial-strength machines that drill holes and hook up fasteners in the metal panels of a Boeing 777 jet’s fuselage.
“Instead of blowing my shoulder out, shooting 300 fasteners a day or countersinking 300 holes a day, I get to learn a new skill. … I get to run a robot,” said Northrup, structures team lead for midbody at the Fuselage Automated Upright Build facility in Boeing’s Everett plant.
The facility, known as the FAUB, is just one of the places where Boeing is upping the ante for automation in the airplane industry. Boeing showed off the FAUB and other robotic hot spots at its Everett plant as a preview for this month’s Paris Air Show.
As Boeing gears up to start building 777X airplanes, the company is building on its experience with robot-assisted assembly for the widebody 787 Dreamliner and single-aisle 737 MAX.
A two-diagram sequence shows how an Amazon cleanup robot could open its robotic arms and pull a box into its storage pod. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO)
How does Amazon plan to keep automated warehouses free of debris? With automated cleanup robots, of course.
At least that’s a scenario laid out in a patent granted to the Seattle-based online retailer today. There’s no guarantee the cleanup robots will become a reality. But it makes a weird sort of sense to have robots pick up after messy robots.
Artwork shows the Digital Construction Platform at work in an icy environment. (MIT Illustration)
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a double-armed, laser-guided robot that can basically 3-D print a 50-foot-wide house in less than 14 hours with almost no human intervention. The Digital Construction Platform, described today in Science Robotics, consists of a large hydraulic arm mounted on a platform with motorized treads, plus a smaller electric-powered arm for finer movements.
A researcher gives the next-generation Atlas robot a good, hard push. (Credit: Boston Dynamics)
Newly published research runs counter to the hope that the rise of automation should create as many jobs for human workers as it destroys. Computer modeling suggests a downward trend, and real-world statistics from the 1990-2007 time period confirm the effect, MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Boston University’s Pascual Restrepo say. A report on the research in The New York Times says blue-collar men without college degrees are hit especially hard, which helps explain the angst behind last November’s Rust Belt support for Donald Trump’s presidential run.
“Why do I feel so much like Sigourney Weaver?” Bezos can be heard saying in a video clip from the demonstration, which took place at a hush-hush conference organized by Amazon in Southern California.
This robot isn’t meant to fight off scary xenomorphs like the one that menaced Weaver’s character in the movie “Aliens.” And it’s not designed to deliver packages, either. It’s the 14-foot-tall Method-2 robot, developed at Hankook Mirae Technology’s lab near Seoul in South Korea.
The robots that are part of Boeing’s Fuselage Automated Upright Build system work inside and outside a 777 jet fuselage during assembly. (Boeing via YouTube)
Automation isn’t just a job for the robots: It takes flesh-and-blood workers to make robotic manufacturing work, as shown in a new video about the machines that set fasteners on Boeing’s 777 jets.
Boeing’s Fuselage Automated Upright Build, or FAUB, works with operators and mechanics at the company’s plant in Everett, Wash., to do some of the heavy lifting for 777 assembly. So far, more than 40 jets have gotten the FAUB treatment.
The job begins when teams of mechanics move the panels that form the forward and aft sections of the fuselage into place. Pairs of robots, inside and out, move in unison to “drill and fill” the thousands of fasteners required to secure the panels.
In Boeing’s feature about FAUB, mechanic Mike Jennings says all that drilling and filling used to be done by hand – a task that was “really tough and stressful” on his back, neck, shoulders and arms.
Now Jennings is a robot operator – monitoring views from a camera mounted on the robot arm, maintaining the system and making tweaks to optimize performance.
Microsoft researcher Ethan Jackson sets up a robotic mosquito trap in Grenada. (Microsoft Photo)
BOSTON – Microsoft’s robotic mosquito trap is so smart it can tell one insect species from another – and that’s good news for scientists fighting the Zika virus, dengue fever and other mosquito-borne maladies.
It can also tell if you’re buzzing an electric toothbrush in its vicinity.
The toothbrush was used to dramatic effect today by Ethan Jackson, a Microsoft researcher from Redmond, Wash.
Otto Robotics’ co-founder and chief, Garett Ochs, told GeekWire that the lead investors for the seed round are Draper Associates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital.
