Using robots to perform medical treatment has been the thing of science fiction for decades, but an operation completed in Paraguay this month has made the stuff of fantasy a reality. In what is thought to be the first in human use of a miniaturized robotic device for surgery, the tiny robot, developed by California-based company Virtual Incision, helped cut away potentially cancerous growths and lesions in the patient’s lower gut.
Apple now makes robots. What’s more, the company’s new recycling robot, called Liam, may be evidence of a push to automate the production of the iPhone.
At Apple’s slightly humdrum event on Monday, the company showed a video of Liam carefully pulling iPhones apart for recycling. The cutesy clip showed the robot unscrewing and removing the device’s case and pulling apart different electronic chips with suction cups before tossing an iPhone shell into a bin.
Inside a modest-looking office building in Tokyo lives an unusually clever industrial robot made by the Japanese company Fanuc. Give the robot a task, like picking widgets out of one box and putting them into another container, and it will spend the night figuring out how to do it. Come morning, the machine should have mastered the job as well as if it had been programmed by an expert.
Tokyo-based LifeRobotics, the Japanese startup behind a cooperative working robot called Coro, announced today that it has closed a series A round having fundraised about 5 million yen ($4.4 million). The company had secured 270 million yen ($2.2 million) before they announced the start of the series A fundraising last November.
The world’s population is aging — in America alone, 10,000 people turn 65 everyday and 70 percent of those will require long-term care. To cope with demand, the caregiving industry will need to triple its workforce to 6 million people. To provide assistance, Luvozo has developed SAM, a robotic concierge, which can provide some of the services to care home residents and take the pressure off the staff.
The cute little robot rolls around your home and performs chores as commanded by the Raspberry Pi computer that serves as its brain. It’s an awful lot of technology on wheels, and Robit is hoping to cash in on the new consumer craze for artificial intelligence and household robots.
Over the past few years, iRobot’s business has been shifting away from military applications and towards home robots and other areas. Today the company is making a clean break.
The “fourth industrial revolution,” centering on advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence, was the theme of the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this month.
“We stand at the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another,” wrote Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of WEF.
