The Henn-na hotel will open its doors next summer at the Huis Ten Bosch theme park in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. The hotel features the latest advanced technology, various roboticized services, and a facial recognition system that will replace room keys.
The newly opened UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay incorporates a fleet of 25 TUG autonomous robots made by Aethon for the transportation of medicines, medical equipment, bedding, food and waste. This is the largest deployment of autonomous carrier robots in hospital facilities in the world.
The city of Barcelona has been selected to develop a pilot project for the robotic inspection of underground drainage and sewerage systems, as part of the innovation program of the European Union ECHORD++. This project, which began in 2014 and will end in 2018, is a response to a challenge that every urban settlement in the world has to face.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (IML), a German research center, has presented its InventAIRy project, an innovative solution for the automatic location of products and the inventorying of warehouse stocks with the help of flying robots.
Kinze Manufacturing, a large farm equipment maker in Iowa, is developing driverless tractors like the self-driving cars that Google, Mercedes-Benz, and Nissan are prototyping.
Microsoft has hired five units of the autonomous security robot K5, manufactured by Knightscope, to patrol its campus in Silicon Valley. The robots’ mission is to predict and prevent criminal activity.
Telepresence robots allow their users to remotely interact with and observe people and their surroundings without being physically present there themselves. Such robots have the potential to add mobility and adaptability to traditional modes of videoconferencing. Their use in the everyday activities of companies and in the realm of business travel is promising as an idea, but in practice it is, as yet, a technology which is at an early stage in its development, with advantages and disadvantages, as reflected by those who have tried it.
SkyCatch, a start-up based in San Francisco which specializes in the aerial capture and processing of data, has just announced its new Workmode service. Workmode is an online platform which helps companies to find and hire freelance drone pilots for their inspection projects or for data mapping
Keecker has successfully outstripped the funding target in its Kickstarter campaign for its home-based robot, with the aim of launching it on the market in September 2015.
Robotics vendors are looking for new business and delivery models with which to launch their products and better reach their target market: the lease of machines and the sale of associated services are showing themselves to be flexible and adaptable solutions to address some market needs. A step further, “Robotics as a Service” (RaaS) is emerging as a business model with great potential.
