-Manufacturing & Cobot Roundup
-AlphaGone? Meet AlphaGo Zero.
-Australia's Burrito Delivery Drone
-Giant Robot Battle
...and much more! 

Manfacturing & Cobot Roundup 

Cambridge, Mass.-based Veo Robotics announced that it has raised US$12 million for its vision of an "harmonious human-robot workplace." Veo Robotics specializes in collaborative systems that could one day see humans working side by side with large, industrial robots. 

If you do use complete automation and no people in a factory, you end up with an inefficient system and quality problems,” Sobalvarro says. “We want to give you big robots that are very precise and very strong without taking away the intelligence that people bring to manufacturing.” 

As for the robot takeover, [Veo Robotics CEO] Sobalvarro says don’t buy it.

“That worker on the line is actually key,” he said. “Their intelligence and their creativity is actually key to creating any new product. We see the presence of human workers becoming more valuable and that’s what we hear from manufacturers.” 

The product is expected to be commercially available in 2019. Venture Beat reports that the firm is "working closely with customers in several verticals, including automotive, consumer-packaged goods, and household appliance manufacturers." Controlled pilot tests are scheduled for next year.  

Exapro uploaded video of one of Fanuc's M10iA/10S palletizing robots in action... 

Car maker Alfa Romeo uses automation systems deveoped by Comau to handle lightweight materials, according to a really in-depth feature published in Advanced Manfacturing this week: 

Alfa Romeo asked Comau to [...] become an integral part of a cooperative co-engineering and design team. Its first task was to define the project requirements in terms of production, engineering, and process manufacturing. Comau developed a complete solution based on the modular, flexible, and expandable OpenGate framing system. The compact and lean architecture features up to 18 overhead-mounted robots and up to six dedicated model gates.

Cobot maker Rethink Robotics released a nice video montage of Sawyer in action... 

Bloomberg ran a fascinating, long feature piece about Japanese industrial robot giant Fanuc, which takes the rearder on a journey from the company's beginnings through to the ifuence its having on the globa industrial robot market: 

More and more, it’s Fanuc’s industrial robots that assemble and paint automobiles in China, construct complex motors, and make injection-molded parts and electrical components. At pharmaceutical companies, Fanuc’s sorting robots categorize and package pills. At food-packaging facilities, they slice, squirt, and wrap edibles.

Sales to China amounted to about 55 percent of the $5 billion Fanuc’s automation unit generated in the fiscal year ended March 2017.

French bank Rosbank teamed up with Japanese robot manufacturer Hello Computer to create a robot artist using an industrial robot arm... 

Sorting non-ferrous metal scraps has proven a real challenge for automated systems. But with the rise of hyperspectral cameras and improved pick and place technology, that's all about to change.

Now a team of Belgium-based researchers has created an automated system that combines multiple sensors, cameras, and programmable logic controllers designed to improve the metal sorting process. 

Caption: Combining multiple sensors, cameras, programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and robotics allow metallic materials to be automatically sorted. (Via Vision Systems Design.) 

Vision Systems Design reports: 

To perform the task of sorting non-ferrous metals first requires the material to be located and then classified based on its spectral signature. These spectral signatures can then be used to identify the material. Aluminum, copper, zinc, stainless steel and brass metal all exhibit different spectral response characteristics in the visible and near infrared (VNIR) spectrum. 

Elsewhere, Integro Technologies and Universal Robots announced that they are set to launch a new 3D Pick-N-Place system at South-Tec 2017; U.S. industrial production rose a "solid" 0.3 percent in September; ZDNet identified 'programming by demonstration' as a "huge opportunity in robotics for early career computer scientists and serious software engineers"; and Chinese firms including high-end equipment maker Jiangsu Hagong Intelligent Robot Co are rumoured to be planning a bid for German industrial company FFT, likely to be valued at up to US$712 million. 

China's national robot and artificial intelligence competition closed last weekend in Guangdong Province...

China's government "spending spree lifts Japanese manufacturers," according to Nikkei Asian Review. 

Apple and GE are launching a software development kit for iOS that will allow firms to "build apps that let people manage factories and power plants from iPhones and iPads," MIT Technology Review reported. 

Finally, a nod to The New Yorker for running a fantastic feature about industrial robots with the cobot influenced tagline: "Once, robots assisted human workers. Now it’s the other way around." 

AlphaGone? Meet AlphaGo Zero. 

 It seems like only yesterday that the world of artifcial inteligence (AI) was all abuzz over AlphaGo, an AI developed by Google's DeepMind researchers.

AlphaGo was trained on a vast library of Go games played by humans and was soon beating the world's best players.  

Well, things got a little more 'alien' (as the BBC put it) this week with news that DeepMind has created a new AI, dubbed AlphaGo Zero, that was able to learn Go autonomously without  reference to any past games. 

Via Discovery: 

AlphaGo Zero is different. Researchers didn’t feed its neural network any data from past games played by humans. The AI started from scratch with an entirely blank slate, its imagination confined only to the rules of the game. AlphaGo Zero began its training by making utterly random moves in simulated games against itself, learning a little more from each outcome, and improving its neural network each time.

When pitted against the original AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero came out on top 100-1, leading the researchers to suggest:  

“ [...] that AlphaGo Zero may be learning a strategy that is qualitatively different to human play…AlphaGo Zero discovered a remarkable level of Go knowledge during its self-play training process. This included not only fundamental elements of human Go knowledge, but also non-standard strategies beyond the scope of traditional Go knowledge.”

The Verge: 

"By not using human data — by not using human expertise in any fashion — we’ve actually removed the constraints of human knowledge,” said AlphaGo Zero’s lead programmer, David Silver, at a press conference. “It’s therefore able to create knowledge itself from first principles; from a blank slate [...] This enables it to be much more powerful than previous versions.”

The Guardian has more. 

Australia's Burrito Delivery Drone   

Alphabet X has been testing burrito deliveries in Australia. 

According to Engadget: 

Alphabet X's experimental project is now dropping burritos (and medicine) from the skies of Australia as part of a series of tests to figure out how to run a drone delivery service efficiently. Project Wing Co-Lead James Ryan Burgess said they've teamed up with Australia Mexican food chain Guzman y Gomez and pharmacy chain Chemist Warehouse to drop off orders to testers living in a rural area. These testers usually have to take a 40-minute round trip by car to get to the nearest grocery or restaurant, making them the perfect subjects for Wing's experiments.

James Ryan Burgess, Co-Lead of Project Wing, has all the detaills in his blog post. 

Giant Robot Battle 

Finally, America’s MegaBots Inc. took on Japan’s Suidobashi Heavy Industry in a giant robot duel streamed on Twitch this week. More than two years in the making, the giant robot duel was eventually won by...  

 The Verge reports: 

MegaBots Inc has always been hopeful that this initial match would just be the first in an international series of duels. Their dream? A whole league of giant fighting robots. Let’s see if anyone else is going to step up to the plate.

I don't need a giant robot to tell me that I'll be back next week with more news from the world of robotics. Until then, please enjoy these videos and links! 

This Robotic Surgeon Cuts Cleaner Than a Human (MIT Technology Review)
The other question: Can and should robots have rights? (Ethics and Information Technology)
Robots will touch more tenderly when they wear this sensitive skin (TechCrunch)
What CMU's Snake Robot Team Learned While Searching for Mexican Earthquake Survivors (IEEE Spectrum) 
Army Grant Supports Development of Intelligent, Adaptive and Resilient Robot Teams (Georgia Tech)
The 10 Top Recommendations for the AI Field in 2017 (Medium)
Scientists develop robot with learned motor control (PhysOrg)
Soft robotics will pick fruit with finesse and save your life too (TNW) 
Robotics, manufacturing lab opened at ICC-Belden (Daily Journal) 
This Robotics Startup Wants to Be the Boston Dynamics of China (IEEE Spectrum)