He had to build low-cost devices using available tech, like cell phones to see bombs and explosives or infiltrators. Yifrach " built solutions for the toughest conditions and scenarios - to catch terrorists mainly. He's now using that same know-how to develop Eddy's proprietary system. Learn how your comment data is processed.FluxIoT cofounder Karin Kloosterman inside the startups pop-up biodome in Tel Aviv, Israel.įluxIoT, which launched in 2014, works out of a greenhouse in Tel Aviv (though it's also growing its US team in Colorado). The startup is led by cofounder and CTO Amichai Yifrach, who previously made special nano sniffers - computer sensors that detect explosives - and image processing tools to protect US troops at checkpoints in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is arguably the most public-facing collaborative robot application, but at $25,000, the arm won’t be on household kitchen counters anytime soon.
Makr Shakr, which provides the robot bartenders to Royal Caribbean, uses KUKA arms.Įven if you’re not nursing a hangover, at a Café X kiosk in Hong Kong or San Francisco, you can get a coffee made by a Mitsubishi cobot. (To be fair, some are caged off to avoid broken glass or drunk patrons.) Royal Caribbean Cruises has robot bartenders on several ships, and several hotels and pubs worldwide have used robot bartenders. Getting served by cobot bartenders, baristasĪside from demonstrations of industrial robots at trade shows such as CES, cobot arms mixing drinks was a novelty. The major fast-food and fast-casual chains are evaluating such robots to stay competitive, especially as they face escalating worker shortages. It was tested last year at CaliBurger, Walmart headquarters, and Dodger Stadium. Unlike most robots in factories, Flippy can work alongside people in any commercial kitchen. “They are made collaborative via our unique design made specifically for commercial kitchen work.” “While our systems are designed to work with just about any six-axis robotic arm, we are currently using Fanuc North America arms,” said David Zito, co-founder and CEO of Miso Robotics. The burger-flipping robot can work on a grill or fryer, comply with OSHA and food-safety standards, and run for up to 100,000 hours of continuous uptime, according to the company. Miso Robotics’ Flippy uses a cobot arm with a variety of end-of-arm tools, its Miso AI platform, and cloud-based monitoring functions. Do you want fries with that?Īs robots move from food processing into restaurants, the equipment must still be clean, consistent, and efficient. Although Rethink Robotics shut down last year, HAHN Group is continuing support.
Sena said Rethink’s software developer’s kit and foundation in the Robot Operating System made Sawyer a good fit for the project. “Additionally, growers typically will have several varieties in production to meet consumer demands in relatively small batch sizes, and will have different requirements for packaging and presentation for each consumer – a challenge which can come up even in high-volume production - adding further challenges to automation.” “Handling plants involves a great amount of uncertainty in sensing, and there’s a reasonably high performance requirement in terms of throughput,” said Aran Sena, a postgraduate student at King’s College London. It uses machine learning to flexibly automate the handling of seedlings, herbs, and other plants. The GROWBOT (Grower-Reprogrammable Robot for Ornamental Plant Production Tasks) project at King’s College London is using a Sawyer cobot arm to help greenhouse workers pick plants. GROWBOT is intended to let non- expert users work with robots for repetitive tasks and to help relieve shortages of seasonal labor. GROWBOT uses a Sawyer cobot arm to help greenhouse workers pick plants.