China’s massive investment in industrial robotics has put the country in the top ranking of robot density, surpassing the United States for the first time.
The use of industrial robots in factories around the world is accelerating at a high rate: 126 robots per 10,000 employees is the new average of global robot density in the manufacturing industries, according to the 2021 World Robot Report.
Service robots hit double digit growth worldwide. The market for professional service robots reached a turnover of 6.7 billion U.S. dollars worldwide – up 12% in 2020. At the same time, turnover of new consumer service robots grew 16% to 4.4 billion U.S. dollars.
Robot mobility is booming worldwide: Unit sales of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) in the logistics sector e.g. will increase by 31% between 2020 and 2023 annually. At the same time, the use of AMRs i...
The average robot density in the manufacturing industry hit a new global record of 113 units per 10,000 employees. By regions, Western Europe (225 units) and the Nordic European countries (204 units) ...
The European Commission has published a report by an independent group of experts on Ethics of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs). This report advises on specific ethical issues raised by driverl...
It all started with 166 companies spread across 12 European countries appling for a “golden ticket” to ROBOTT-NET’s Voucher Program. 64 companies received a voucher and highly specialized consul...
The European Robotics League (ERL) announced the winners of ERL Emergency Robots 2017 major tournament, during the awards ceremony held on Saturday, 23rd September at Giardini Pro Patria, in Piombino,...
Spiders are truly amazing creatures. They have evolved over more than 200 million years and can be found in almost every corner of our planet. They are one of the most successful animals. Not less imp...
After reading the press releases for this batch of 24 research reports, although they vary widely in their forecasts, they almost all agree that most segments of the robotics industry are expected to...
America's retailers are closing stores faster than ever while demand for warehouse workers by online retailers is higher than ever. Retailers and logistics companies have been opening facilities at...
The Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects of Social Robots in Healthcare and Education Workshop (also called ELS Workshop) was held in Yokohama the 14th Nov 2016 during the JSAI-isAI Conference. The works...
Having been involved in roboethics for some years, I was delighted when the IEEE launched its initiative on Ethical Considerations in AI and Autonomous Systems, early this year. Especially so because ...
3-D printing has progressed over the last decade to include multi-material fabrication, enabling production of powerful, functional objects. While many advances have been made, it still has been diffi...
It’s super hard to find skilled people willing to work for robotics companies in Silicon Valley. Even though robotics is awesome and going to change the world. Because big companies with big payche...
A major study into European attitudes toward automation has found that while almost two thirds of people polled feel generally positive about robots, public acceptance of them in the EU is in dec...
Businesses, analysts and investors often need and are willing to pay for more facts than they can gather from their sales and R&D departments; detailed comparative reviews of the landscape of a pa...
A flurry of robotic research analyses and reports are being sold by a variety of vendors. Most show steady growth rates — and a few project spectacular growth....
Four recent research reports covering service robots, vision guided robotics, material handling robots, and robot component speed reducers, all predict steady growth, particularly in China....
While vacuum robots continue to dominate the ‘robots at home’ market, with Jibo taking on the role of the top 5 most funded Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign, and Pepper expected to arrive at ...
Will robots take away our jobs? Will we be better off with robots even if they do?
One Forbes article published last year by Chunka Mui focused the jobs issue on autonomous cars. In the article tit...
One of the most popular questions when it comes to discussing robotics is the jobs question. Will robots create more jobs, or replace them? Recently, we’ve seen a lot of discussions on the topic o...
The conventional cars that we drive today don’t really talk to one another. Sure, some of them connect to your cellphones and mp3 players. But they don’t form a communication network with neighbou...
A few of days ago, WIRED and Robohub covered a story about “Largest Swarm of Robots” and how self-organizing algorithms can be used by robots to form certain shapes. This inspired us to see wha...
For the past few months the Open Roboethics initiative and Robohub have explored the topic of autonomous cars in the form of biweekly polls. We were able to find out a lot of interesting facts about w...
A couple of months ago, we asked our readers whether three different unlicensed groups of individuals should be able to ride in autonomous cars alone. The individuals were: a child under the legal dr...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-MGQqaY3eo
Driving has become an integral component of our daily lives, especially in developed countries. Cars are not just a means for us to get from point A to p...
A few weeks ago, one of our readers, Javier Lopez, submitted a number of questions to the ORi team. He brought up many interesting points, and we won’t attempt to cover them all in one poll. But on...
Given a choice between crashing into a motorcyclist wearing a helmet vs. a motorcyclist who isn’t wearing one, which one should an autonomous car be programmed to crash into? What about the choice b...
Photo by Roland Dobbins, Wikimedia
A couple of months ago Dr. Patrick Lin, director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University, wrote an article on autonomous...
Those of you who watched the 80’s TV series “Knight Rider” might remember the dialogue between Michael Knight and its super-car, KITT. Some of you might be more familiar with scenes between “J...
You are travelling along a single lane mountain road in an autonomous car that is approaching a narrow tunnel. You are the only passenger of the car....
We interact with gadgets and devices everyday … some have blinking lights, some play sounds, and some can even decipher our voice commands. When it comes to interfacing with a device as exciting an...
Image credit: Craig Berry
Life and death decisions make interesting thought experiments. When you throw an autonomous car into the mix, things get even more interesting....
Image source: Karora via Wikipedia.
There may be times when an accident or a death is unavoidable while an autonomous car is controlling the wheel.
What should an autonomous car do when such ...