Information briefs for the week check out robotic COVID fighters coaching for the upcoming Beijing Olympics (100 days to go!) and one other robotic that screens Olympic water for security, then it’s off to see how cobots take care of misplaced & discovered duties, adopted by high-rise, window-cleaning robots, then how robotic laborers automate leaf pruning of tomato leaves, and robotic grape harvesters that make wine style higher (sure, style higher!).

Robots to maintain Winter Olympics secure

The Winter Video games are 100 days off. The large Wukesong Area is on the brink of host the ice hockey occasions for February’s Beijing Winter Olympics 2022 (February 4 to twenty). For 16 days, over 30 robots will likely be deployed to assist maintain the gamers, workers, and hundreds offans secure from COVID.

Shenzhen-based Kangfeng Air Purification Expertise Firm’s massive cellular air purifiers will help the Beijing Olympic Video games.

Moreover, cellular robots will likely be used to sanitize the air by spraying a disinfecting fog able to treating 387 sq. ft with every spray; and carries sufficient disinfectant to cowl 10,000 sq. ft with every deployment (see video).

One other robotic named Little White, is supplied with facial recognition sensors that may scan the venue for followers not sporting a masks and remind them to take action.

Robots monitor Olympics’ water provide

One among most vital water sources for the Beijing Olympics is Guanting Reservoir (in-built 1951), situated about 65 miles from Beijing. With no safe water provide, it might be unattainable to hold on the Video games’ two-week program. So early on, Hefei Institutes of Bodily Science (HFIPS) has had its unmanned floor automobile monitoring the reservoir’s water high quality.

Because the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Video games method (February 2022), it is pressing to safe the water high quality of The Guanting Reservoir, one of many water assets essential for the Video games.

“We’ve got been engaged on this mission for greater than three years,” stated Dr. Yu Daoyang. “The present floor water monitoring system in China is principally on-line monitoring and guide sampling for laboratory evaluation.”

The brand new management expertise is exact and quick, particularly as it’s 5G enabled, and ensures fast, in-situ and on-line monitoring for the unmanned vessel, even in complicated environments.

Manufactured from high-quality chrome steel to forestall corrosion, the autonomous floor vessel is about 4 meters lengthy by 2 meters, is battery powered and might function for greater than eight hours.

“That is the most important unmanned, water-quality monitoring floor vessel in China, ” Dr. YU defined, “with essentially the most full features and superior clever software program.”

Cobot-style misplaced & discovered

Think about a decide & place cobot has simply stuffed a delivery carton with twenty-five totally different gadgets, when all of a sudden the shopper logs on to the ecommerce retailer to cancel one of many gadgets. Good customer support says to get the merchandise out of the field earlier than it’s shipped to the buyer.

Decide and place robots are generally utilized in trendy manufacturing and warehouse environments; and, as their identify implies, they decide up objects and rapidly place them into packaging, delivery cartons or at different areas for additional processing.

May the identical decide & place robotic return into the delivery carton and retrieve the cancelled merchandise? Not likely: decide & place is a one-way journey. Properly, that’s, till now.

MIT researchers, utilizing a cobot arm with a digital camera and radio frequency (RF) antenna connected to its gripper, have solved the issue.

The bottom line is the usage of cheap RFID tags ($.03 every). RFID or radio-frequency identification tags comprise an built-in circuit that may establish itself to an antenna and tag reader.

RFusion, because it’s referred to as by the researchers, “is a robotic system that may seek for and retrieve RFID-tagged gadgets in line-of-sight, non-line-of-sight, and fully-occluded settings. RFusion consists of a robotic arm that has a digital camera and antenna strapped round its gripper.” As well as, “novel reinforcement-learning …makes use of the fused RF-visual data to effectively localize, maneuver towards, and grasp goal gadgets.”

Excessive-rise, window-cleaning robots

Even one avoidable dying is simply too many. On common, information from the Worldwide Window Cleansing Affiliation confirmed that one high-rise window cleaner was killed yearly over the previous 4 years.

Osmo, the high-rise, window-cleaning system from Tel Aviv-based Skyline Robotics, is answering the decision to the plain want for security through automated window cleansing…plus, pace and effectivity.

Ozmo, says the startup developer of the expertise, “is an automatic window-cleaning robotic that maps constructing surfaces to scrub home windows of various configurations and keep away from obstacles with out human steering.” 

The system combines synthetic intelligence, machine studying, and laptop imaginative and prescient with a robotic arm designed by KUKA. The robotic system makes use of pressure sensors to measure how fragile glass is, and “AI helps the system stay secure, even in gusty situations. The system makes use of lidar, scanning a constructing’s façade, memorizing surfaces and planning a cleansing path — which it frequently updates.”

Developments engineered by KUKA embrace on-the-fly management of the KUKA robots by way of stress utilized throughout the cleansing course of, in addition to the power to compensate for a transferring scaffolding as a consequence of climate and altering architectural constructing options.”

With the window-cleaning trade at $40 billion yearly and with 74% of all window cleaners within the US over the age of 40, robots seem like the up-and-coming replacements for folks excessive up on scaffolding.

Automated leaf pruning for tomato crops

The world loves tomatoes. A lot so, over 180 million metric tons are harvested yearly, with China’s 33% share by far the most important worldwide.

Though crucial for photosynthesis, a tomato plant’s leaves expend a whole lot of vitality that might in any other case be used for fruit manufacturing. Pruning the foliage is finest for fruit growth, nevertheless, it’s backbreakingly sluggish and tedious. A robotic to do the pruning could be ideally suited for pace, effectivity and optimum fruit development for hundreds of thousands of acres…and make stoop-labor, guide selecting pointless.

Enter, Dutch firm Priva and its automated Kompano leaf-cutting robotic, which, in keeping with Priva, is “the primary robotic worldwide that gives customers with an economically viable different for de-leafing tomato crops by hand.”

Designed to de-leaf tomato crops solely in greenhouses, Kompano is a battery-powered robotic that may function on a 24/7 foundation. The 6-foot by 2-foot auto-pruning robotic weighs 900 lbs. and is 85% efficient at pruning 2.5 acres per week.

A sequence of fifty Kompano robots are in manufacturing (no pricing but out there).

Robots as wine connoisseurs!

“New analysis at UC Davis is displaying robots might help change guide laborers and even change the best way wine tastes (for the higher!).”

And as for the price of robotic vs. guide: “We’re going from $1.20 to about 12 to 22 cents per vine.”

Wine growers, historically averse to machines harvesting their grapes, are turning to automated grape harvesting in rising numbers.

In Italy, “final yr was the worst labor scarcity of his half-century profession in wine. Use of harvesting machines among the many group’s members elevated 20% this yr in response.”

In California, with a wine trade threatened by pests, drought, and wildfires, now provides an absence of labor to the ever-growing checklist of worries.

“Our estimate is we have now two-thirds much less folks working in wine grapes now,” stated Prof. Kaan Kurtural, of the UC Davis Viticulture and Enology Division.

Researchers say that the stress is on to stabilize all of the uncertainties of wine rising, and that automation and robotics and synthetic intelligence are offering that consolation zone.