Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Four-fingered robot hand as dexterous as a human's.

Researchers at Sandia don't stop to impress. A robot hand recently unveiled in Nature publication shows some impressive skills. What is even more impressive is the price tag: an estimated $10K instead of the usual $250K for this type of a robot.

Target profession: bomb squad

Monday, August 20, 2012

NY Times writes about a new wave of smarter camera-equipped robots that are already replacing the manufacturing workers for Philips electronics. The article provides an easy to understand example "... a robotic manufacturing system initially cost $250,000 and replaced two machine operators, each earning $50,000 a year. Over the 15-year life of the system, the machines yielded $3.5 million in labor and productivity savings.". As I reported earlier, FoxConn and the likes are next in line to replace their human workers with robots.

There is a nice chart over at econfuture that illustrates an ongoing drop in manufacturing jobs in US and highlights automation (aka robots) as one of the main reasons. One of takeaways from the article could be: expect serious problems with unemployment in China and other manufacturing-heavy economies.

It makes me glad that more and more people will finally be able to occupy themselves with more creative tasks other than operating a machine assembly line.

Target profession: assembly line workers