GERMANY ROBOT EXHIBITION

  GERMANY ROBOT EXHIBITION

High-tech trade fair show in Germany, news from robots from Mars, the latest developments and new tricks of already familiar robots! All the technology news of the week in one issue! HANNOVER MESSE Digital Edition 2021 was held in Germany. The format was, unfortunately, dgital, but still some interesting things were shown there.For example, KUKA Robotics presented a new operating system for its collaborative and industrial robots. The iiQKA.OS is designed so that anyone can learn to use robots as easily as a cell phone. That is, new KUKA robot operators do not need any special training. Programming the robot is now possible in a 3D visual environment. And this will really increase the availability of robots for non-specialized industries.  DFKI talked about its main project - building robotic systems with artificial intelligence for manufacturing - and presented some interesting developments. The AdEPT project - a tool for learning, teaching and collaboration based on augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Project BIONIC - smart workwear with sensors to record the physical exertion of workers. 

The CoMem project - an intelligent ecosystem of knowledge services and interfaces for everyday work in the enterprise, and a number of other innovations. SEW-EURODRIVE presented SEW-EUROPE, a mobile assistance system that integrates individual production and assembly processes. The system allows you to design a smart maximum autonomous factory of the future in a simulation that can be tested. It then creates real automated modular production. Dassault Systèmes also presented its 3D EXPERIENCE virtual universes for design, apparently in Germany or Europe as a whole everything will soon be designed with AR, VR and IoT.But the most interesting presentation was by Festo. The company, known for its bio-inspired robots, presented its latest innovations on the key trends of digitalization, customized manufacturing, climate protection and continuous learning 4.0. One of the innovations was a robotic gripper capable of lifting both solid objects and working with the most delicate objects.Festo also presented numerous industrial solutions, one of which was, for example, a system for precisely dispensing liquids. 

It can produce flows of up to 2 liters per minute as well as droplets of 1 microliter. Researchers at Ohio University have created a package for modeling robots from strands of DNA. MagicDNA allows such robots to be constructed in two ways: "bottom-up" and "top-down." In the first case, DNA fragments are sequentially glued, to assemble the robot. And in the second, the designer creates only the general scheme of the robot, and the software package "invents" how to assemble this scheme from the strands. The simulation is done immediately in 3D, and after creation the robot is tested in simulation to see if it is successful before running the complex and expensive real implementation of the project. The package allows the simulation of fairly complex robots consisting of several dozen DNA fragments. It is planned to use such robots to collect pathogens in human blood and point delivery of drugs to diseased organs and tissues.   The American company Lockheed presented the project of a network of military satellites capable of coordinating the actions of land, sea and air forces from space. The new line of military ISR satellites is based on the LM 400 device, a low-cost solar-powered vehicle with an open architecture. The satellites will need to leverage a variety of resources to quickly and efficiently accomplish tasks to locate, coordinate and even destroy a target. The platform can adapt quickly to changing threats and has an enhanced data processing system. Space may become a new battlefield in the future and it is necessary to prepare for this now.  Disney Research engineers created a robocopy of Groot from "Guardians of the Galaxy. The robot was part of Project Kiwi to create robots for Disney's theme parks. The robot's movements look realistic enough and it has enough charge for 45 minutes. The engineers use a cable to transmit data to the robot, and the robot communicates with the world around it using built-in sensors. 

The robot is still a prototype, we hope, but there should be more such developments in the parks in the future.An experimental device the size of a toaster aboard Perseverance called the Mars Oxygen In-situ Resource Utilization Experiment or simply MOXIE (moxie) was able to mine oxygen on Mars. For the first time ever. The 5 grams of oxygen extracted could provide the breath of 1 astronaut for 10 minutes. Real missions to Mars would require much more oxygen. 1 metric ton for a 4-person expedition to live there for a year, and another 25 metric tons to lift the rocket that would take them back to Earth. That much oxygen could have been produced by a larger MOXI unit, weighing 1 ton. NASA's Ingenuity helicopter made two more successful flights to Mars on April 22 and 25. The third time, the helicopter climbed 5 meters and flew 50 meters sideways at 2 meters per second. NASA engineers are now parsing the mass of information collected by the helicopter, which will enable the construction of new drones for Mars in the future. The Digit robot is getting smarter and more autonomous. A new video from Agility Robotics shows the robot moving without pre-mapping or markers, with dynamic obstacle avoidance. Waypoints are determined relative to a global reference system determined when power is turned on. The company reports that no trash cans were damaged during the filming. Near Earth Autonomy is developing a system for drones to help them avoid obstacles independently and quickly. The company showed the results in a video of a drone flying through a forest. 

When planning a path, the drone uses a library of trajectories with pre-set correspondences to check for collisions. Decisions are made in two to three-tenths of a millisecond, providing a flight speed of 10 meters/second without a pre-made map. The ANYbotics robot is on probation as a regular rolling stock inspector for Stadler Service. It has 50 service stations across Europe, but it's not clear if it's ready to buy 50 robots for each of them. Time will tell if the robot can justify its cost on such a job, given that it can only check trains, but will still have to call in a human for maintenance.   Kiwa Inspecta engineers used the Elios 2 drone to inspect a huge decommissioned oil well. What's remarkable about this news is that the inspection would have taken six months and a million euros if done manually. But with a drone, it took a few days and required much less money. Right Hand Robotics unveiled the next generation of its parts and order picking platform, RightPick 3. The smart system is data-driven and should provide flexible and scalable order picking automation. Apparently robots will indeed soon replace humans in warehouses, but not all at once. In addition, robots will have to be programmed and maintained.  

For people to understand what and why robots do now, and to learn to trust them, the Italian researchers decided to teach the robot Pepper to speak its thoughts aloud. So, in one experiment, Pepper was asked to put a napkin not according to the rules of etiquette, although he was originally supposed to follow them. The robot began asking itself a series of independent questions and came to the conclusion that the user might be confused. Pepper followed the command anyway, but it became an excuse to have a further conversation with himself. "Um, this situation upsets me. I would never break a rule, but I can't upset him, so I do what he wants," the robot said to herself as she executed the command.