Tag Archives: industrial

Baxter Industrial Robot is Human-Friendly (Thank Goodness.)

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Would you believe that friendly-looking robot giving that guy a hug is an industrial robot? You probably thought they were all just arms that weld and move heavy objects. Well, most are. Baxter obviously is different.
baxter robot

Baxter is the work of roboticist Rodney A. Brooks of Rethink Robotics, and he was obviously designed to be human-friendly. The robot is made to be easily trainable by an assembly line worker, and if you grab Baxter’s hand, it will turn its head and its cartoon eyes on it’s tablet-sized face will look at you as if to say “Hey there, human.” And that’s the point.

The company is betting that in the future robots will work side-by-side with humans. Naturally, they want to be at the forefront here and are working hard to make normally dangerous bots more friendly. It sounds good, until a hug from this guy tears someones head off.

[via NYT via Neatorama]


This Meat Slicer Gets Equal Slices, Every Time, With Frikkin Lasers!

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By David Ponce

Butchers are pretty masterful sometimes, but a human hand will never be as precise as a machine. And the above Natsune Libra 165C is one scary mother. It is able to make slices of meat that are of perfectly equal weight, every time, and it does so by using lasers. Yes, the lasers do the cutting. Big deal you say? Ok: it makes up to 100 slices a minute! First the uncut meat goes through their 3D laser scanner. Once the scanning is done, the machine gets to cutting; it ensures equal slices by varying the thickness of the slice, based on its initial scan and known densities of meat. While it could be used for several types of meat, it specializes in pork. Specifically (at least judging from the video) pork chops.

But the Natsune Libra 165C is clearly not the kind of machine you’ll have at home. Or even in a restaurant. It costs $160,000 for one. And it’s pretty darn big. We imagine that large scale meat processing centres would love them, and they’ll get their chance at ownership at the end of this month.

[ DigInfo ] VIA [ DVice ]


RunCore’s Mini DOM packs single-chip, SATA-based SSD into tiny places

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Fitting a truly quick solid-state drive into a small space isn't easy, and for that reason RunCore's new Mini DOM (Disk On Module) stands out from the crowd. It's billed as the first single-chip SSD to use a SATA interface (SATA II, to be exact), giving it that much more bandwidth than the pokey IDE and PATA DOMs of old while remaining under half the size of a regular mSATA drive. RunCore's own tests show it hitting about 113MB/s sequential reads and 47MB/s writes. Neither figure will knock the socks off even a mainstream budget SSD like Intel's SSD 330, but they're more than brisk enough for embedded gear. The drives can survive brutal conditions, too: an Industrial Grade trim level can survive temperatures as chilly as -40F and as scorching as 185F. So, the next time you pry open some military equipment and see one of these sitting inside, in three different formats and capacities from 8GB to 64GB, you'll know exactly what you're looking at.

Continue reading RunCore's Mini DOM packs single-chip, SATA-based SSD into tiny places

RunCore's Mini DOM packs single-chip, SATA-based SSD into tiny places originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 May 2012 14:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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