Manufacturing & cobot roundup, the Tertill launch, Softbank-Boston dynamics deal, 2060: It begins and much more! We hope that the news we have selected will interest and amuse you. Enjoy!

Manufacturing & Cobot Roundup 

ABB's YuMi cobot rang the NASDAQ opening bell this week.

The Robotics Industries Association reported: 

YuMi joins a diverse and prestigious group of 2017 opening bell ringers that includes recent Indianapolis 500 winner Takuma Sato, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and representatives from Amazon, Cisco Systems and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

“ABB is honored to have YuMi join with ROBO Global to ring the NASDAQ opening bell,” said [President of the America’s region for ABB] Greg Scheu. “Increasingly, robotics is playing an essential role in improving industrial productivity, and the presence of YuMi represents the emergence of collaborative robots in the automation sector.”

Industrial robots have helped "breathe new life" into a 74 year old metal hanger manufacturer...

Google-backed robotics fast food startup Momentum Machines raised $18m in funding in May, according to a new SEC filing. And SoftWear Automation --a firm that makes sewing robots-- raised $4.5 million. 

Caption: Momentum Machines/The University of Pennsylvania

New video of the TM5 cobot was released this week. According to Techman, the TM5 is "the UK's first Cobot with integrated vision as standard." 

"With our powerful built-in vision system and TM flow, TM5 can see, think and work like a human with complete visual pick & place teaching within as little as 5 minutes.

TM5 complies with the ISO 10218 human-robot safety requirement. All our efforts to make the robot safer bring the production and manufacturing into an era of human-robot collaboration." 

DigiTimes reported that Quanta Storage, which makes collaborative robots under the Techman brand, will expand production capacity in June by moving to its new plants with larger space. Ready Robotics unveiled its robots-as-a-service offering. 

We got a chance to see how MET integrates collaborative robots to work with people: 

Asian Robotics Review investigated the proliferation of Asia-made robots in US manufacturing, asking: 

Is it important that of the 34,606 industrial robots purchased by North American industries in 2016 (10 percent increase over 2015) that zero were made in North America?

Is it important that the $1.9 billion paid (another $516 million in 1Q2017) for those industrial robots is controlled by Tokyo, Zurich, and Beijing (formerly Augsburg)?

Check out this video, which shows cobot control via wearable sensing: 

Automotive World reported on 'ready2spray,' an automated painting solution for general industry jointly developed by Dürr and Kuka:

Together they have developed an integrated solution for automated paint application in the form of a compact robot for general industry. While the robot comes from Kuka, Dürr provides the paint application technology. Pre-installed and ready-to-spray, the robot contains fully compatible, tried-and-tested components and offers a unique combination in the market. It is perfectly suited for the requirements of general industry. Areas of application include the painting of wood, plastics, glass and metal. 

ABB spoke robots... 

The emergence of cobots is one of the top three emerging trends driving the global robotic flexible part feeding systems market, according to industrial automation research analysts Technavio. 

“Vendors are providing great emphasis towards the development of collaborative robots capable of lifting higher loads. The increasing demand for these collaborative robots with higher lifting power will greatly drive the market growth,” says Raghav Bharadwaj Shivaswamy, a lead analyst at Technavio for robotics research.

The Tertill Launch 

Joe Jones, co-creator of the Roomba and the founder and CTO of Franklin Robotics has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund his latest creation --a solar-powered, weed-killing robot, dubbed "Tertill."  

At time of writing, $64,197 has been pledged of the campaign's $120,000 goal, with 27 days to go. 

Via The Verge:

The round, 2.5-pound bot uses sensors to identify weeds in a vegetable or flower garden. It then uses a spinning string trimmer to cut off weeds near the ground. But it’s not using any fancy cameras or artificial intelligence to identify weeds. Instead, chief technology officer Joe Jones says, it’s relying on cheap capacitive sensors to determine whether the plants it has brushed up against are tall or short.

Softbank-Boston Dynamics Deal    

 As the robotics world digests the significance of last week's news that Softbank had acquired Boston Dynamics, some interesting articles have emerged, exploring various aspects of the deal. 

Caption: This artist's impression (via Robohub) cannot be unseen. 

 Robohub noted: 

If walking is the expertise of Raibert’s team and Softbank is the leader of cognitive robotics with a seemingly endless supply of capital, the combination could be the first real striding humanoid capable of human-like emotions.

MIT Technology Review also examined the striding angle, while a former Boston Dynamics employee told Reuters that the technology is not yet ready for primetime and Robotics Business Review observed that  this transaction marks the end of an era for Alphabet.  

2060: It begins 

According to a survey of industry leaders and academics, A.I. will be capable of performing any task "as well or better than humans–otherwise known as high-level machine intelligence–by 2060 and will overtake all human jobs by 2136."

aitrends has the details: 

The experts polled in the study predicted that A.I. would become better at driving trucks than humans in 2027. The surveys were completed before robotics startup Otto successfully sent a self-driving truck on a 120-mile journey in October.

A.I. will surpass humans in a number of other milestones, the experts suggested: translating languages (2024), writing high-school level essays (2026), and performing surgeries (2053). They estimated that it would be able to write a New York Times bestseller in 2049. 

In other AI-related news, AI agents have been working together in a Microsoft-organized competition, Alphabet's AI robot is set to replace The New York Times' Public Editor, according to Fast Company, and DeepMind might be able to replicate human ingenuity in learning using algorithms based on relational reasoning. 

Oh, and an Ai achieved the highest ever score in Ms. Pac Man:

Finally, Hanson Robotics' Sophia made a fresh appearance this week too:  

You don't have to wait until 2060 for the next batch of robotics news, because I'll be back next week. Until then, I hope you enjoy these videos and links! 

Five Chinese robots at CES Asia that won hearts (South China Morning Post)
The Robot Academy: Lessons in image formation and 3D vision (Robohub) 
Are Robots Going to Steal Our Jobs? (Reason) 
Energy-efficient cleaning robot (Science Daily) 
The Chinese Robots Are Coming (SupChina) 
FDNY Uses Drone To HelpFight 4-Alarm Fire (Drone360) 
Swimming robot to probe damage at Japan nuclear plant (ABC News) 
The Robot Takeover Is Greatly Exaggerated (Bloomberg) 
Robots roll out to help stop oil spills (Dultuh News Tribune) 
Sony Adds Toio Cubes to Its Arsenal of Strange Robotic Toys (IEEE Spectrum)