2007 Robot Of The Year

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 24 of January , 2008 at 7:09 am

The 2007 robot of the year award (as decided by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry) went to FANUC’s dual arm, vision based industrial robot system. Take a close look at the arms operating in the video above, and you’ll notice that they’re plucking randomly positioned and oriented objects off of the conveyor belt. In other words, the robot isn’t just repeating actions, it has to think about every single thing it picks up. And it’s pretty damn quick about it, if you ask me, with the ability to pick up and position up to 120 items per minute. If only my arms could move that fast, just think of the possibilities! Or, on second thought, don’t.

[ FANUC ] VIA [ Pink Tentacle ]

Comments (3)

Category: Industrial

Add this post to

Del.icio.us -

Digg

3 Comments

Made Thursday, 24 of January , 2008 at 7:12 am

Well, as far as I can see, that task is not that difficult. At least it is just an object detection and a align engine involved. Or am I wrong here?

Comment by Evan Ackerman

Made Thursday, 24 of January , 2008 at 7:17 am

In principle, sure. But it’s going pretty fast, and getting it to make reliable decisions consistently in a variety of environments is no easy task… It’s able to work unsupervised 24/7 indefinitely.

Comment by Erik J

Made Tuesday, 1 of April , 2008 at 6:47 am

When I saw this back in January I thought of the ABB FlexPicker that you mentioned in march. I remember seeing an early prototype of the ABB picker and this one really is nothing compared. Sadly I couldn’t find it, it’s pretty well hidden on ABBs homepage.

But then again it’s probably just my nationalistic streak.