When an elderly person needs dinner, “Herb” answers a command given on an iPad. He heads to the freezer, pulls out a frozen meal, microwaves it and brings it to the person—just like that. What's different about this situation is that Herb is not a person. HERB actually stands for Home Exploring Robotic Butler, and is developed out of Carnegie Melon University's Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Center. The center specializes in assistive robots for older adults and people with disabilities. Robots like HERB will have a "tremendous" impact on elder care, says the 34-year-old "father" of HERB, Siddhartha Srinivasa, an associate professor at Carnegie Melon's Robotics Institute. More
Tag Index / Showing 1 - 10 of 13 results for “robotics”
Energy & Green Tech Jobs Manufacturing
Deloitte’s Chris Park: 3D Printing for Cleaner and Leaner U.S. Manufacturing
Revitalizing manufacturing is essential to U.S. economic recovery, but it’s not clear yet how this new phase might look. One thing is certain: it won’t look anything thing like manufacturing did 15 or even 5 years ago. PARC CEO Stephen Hoover has spoken at Techonomy events about how innovations like 3D printing and crowdsourcing can drive a paradigm shift in manufacturing. But can a new American manufacturing approach also be eco-friendly? Techonomy spoke with Chris Park, a principal at Deloitte who helps clients with their environmental, social, and sustainability performance, about how next-generation manufacturing technology could reduce environmental impact and bring jobs back to the U.S. More
Making Robots Better Team Players
Humans are intelligent, yet unpredictable. Robots are programmed to be predictably logical. Can they get along? These days they don't have much of a choice, as robots increasingly perform human tasks and work with human teams. As reported in SmartPlanet, researchers at MIT are examining ways to establish trustworthy and efficient relationships between humans and robots, using a cross training approach to team building. Their research shows that teams in which a robot and its human partner swap roles on different days become more efficient. More
Can Robots Be Job Creators?
In their recent comments on "60 Minutes," and at the Techonomy 2012 conference, MIT economists Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfssonn may have given the impression that robots are poised to swipe the jobs of U.S. workers. As reported in The New York Times, robotics experts assembled at the Automate 2013 trade show in Chicago offered a different outlook. Henrik I. Christensen, Chair of Robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said that while he agrees that automation could make certain types of jobs obsolete, it will also create new, higher-paying jobs. The International Federation of Robotics reinforced this argument with the release of findings from a report that predicts the robotics industry will help create 1.9 million to 3.5 million jobs by 2020. More
Why Robots Might Boost Industry While Killing Jobs
Globalization is an easy culprit for the recent wave of U.S. unemployment, with domestic jobs shipped overseas to be replaced by cheap labor, often without adverse impact on the quality of a company's products or services. Apple is just one high-profile example of this trend. But automation and robotics may be contributing even more to our stubborn unemployment figures. Paradoxically, robots could also help bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. The Jan. 13 broadcast of 60 Minutes featured several Techonomists to help explain how this might happen. More
Techonomy SuperSession at CES Explores Networked Society
Techonomy hosted the SuperSession "New Network Effect Changes Everything" at CES yesterday, featuring Rodney Brooks of Rethink Robotics, Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas, and Ericsson President and CEO Hans Vestberg. Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick moderated the discussion, which explored the impact of a networked society on consumers, businesses, and industries ranging from farming to manufacturing, to automotive. More
Why Gangnam Style Marks a Triumph of South Korean Tech
When the sleek, sexy, preposterous world of PSY's “Gangnam Style” surged to become the number one video on YouTube, it offered us a glimpse of the new South Korea: an engineering powerhouse that rivals the West, a competitive economy that drives innovation, and an increasingly successful exporter of cultural memes. More
Apple to Revamp U.S. Manufacturing Efforts
Good news for U.S. manufacturing: Apple is bringing some of its computer manufacturing back to the United States, Timothy Cook announced on Thursday. The company plans to spend $100 million in 2013 on producing one of its existing Mac lines in America. Apple is often criticized for outsourcing almost all of its factory work to Asia in the late 1990s. More
Bio-Robots Swim, Swarm, Change, and Shed Light on Evolution
Talk of robots and robotics research tends to conjure worries about manufacturing and futuristic fantasies about the “singularity.” But new bio-robots are designed instead to help us understand our evolutionary origins, and are providing insights into biology. In a lab on the campus of Vassar College in upstate New York, biology professor John Long and his team are studying robots in a water tank as they fight for evolutionary supremacy. The researchers are using biomimetic autonomous robots to understand how fish-like vertebrates that lived 500 million years ago evolved into the fish of today. More
Manufacturing Techonomy 2012 Video
Where’s My Robot (Highlights)
Your children may prefer their company, you may “hire” robotic workers, they may do our dirty work, and one may care for you in your old age. The future for robots seems boundless. Is there a limit to the invasion? Rodney Brooks of Rethink Robotics, MIT’s Andrew McAfee, and John Markoff of The New York Times take a closer look at the present and future of robotics at the Techonomy 2012 conference in Tucson, Ariz. More
