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Simbe Robotics, based in San Francisco, announced its first product, a 30-pound robot called Tally that can move up and down a store's aisles checking inventory. The robot determines what products need restocking and send reports to workers who can add more stock. Tally also is set up to work during normal store hours, alongside employees and customers. "Tally performs repetitive and laborious tasks of auditing shelves for out-of-stock items, low stock items, misplaced items, and pricing errors," the company said in a release. "Tally has the ability to audit shelves cheaper, more frequently, and significantly faster than existing processes;...

Alpha 2, The World's First Humanoid Robot for the Family. Intelligent, Interactive and Expandable!

The world's first robot 'actress': Talking android fitted with a human face is given star role in Japanese nuclear disaster film Android called 'Geminoid F' is the co-star in the Japanese film 'Sayonara' Designed to look and act like a human with rubber 'skin' and woman's face The robot is equipped with motorised actuators and controlled remotely By Julian Robinson for MailOnline Published: 22:29 GMT, 1 November 2015 | Updated: 00:25 GMT, 2 November 2015 Japanese film-makers have created a robot movie star - by casting an android 'actress' in a lead role. The robot co-stars alongside a human in...

From the army of machines that work in Amazon warehouses to automatons that milk cows, the job-taking robots of the future are among us. Now the lettuce in your salad of the future might be grown by robots too. Oh, by “future,” we mean 2017. That’s the hope of Spread, a company in Kyoto, Japan, that plans to begin constructing the world’s first large-scale lettuce factory next spring. Once it’s fully operational, the entire process of growing a head of lettuce—from seeding to harvest—will be automated and run by robots. The efficiency of machines will enable the factory to produce...

Researchers in Germany are currently creating a "nervous system" that would mimic a pain response in robots, allowing them to quickly react and avoid harmful situations. "Pain is a system that protects us,” researcher Johannes Kuehn told a conference of engineers last week. “When we evade from the source of pain, it helps us not get hurt.” The researchers programmed their robot to experience a "hierarchy" of pain through a variety of different stimuli, such as blunt force or heat. Depending on the threat, such as a harsh movement or intense heat, the robot is programmed to retract to the...

A predictable consequence of the move to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour will be the hastened transition from human to a more robotic work-force. A photo that went viral this week showed a robot "manning" the take-out window at McDonald's. You can expect to see more of this. Employers will, of course, be pilloried by the usual cast of economically-challenged Marxists in the political and chattering classes as heartless, sexist, homophobic racists, etc., who put profits before people. But the non-economically challenged among us realize that the increased use of robots is a completely rational response of...

At the RoboUniverse expo in New York City, robots of all shapes and sizes were being put to work. Companies showed off automated machines designed to perform tasks that many humans would consider less than desirable. “There are certain tasks in our society… that will stay on and not be attractive for humans to do. And we cannot get rid of them if we want to live our lives in the usual fashion,” said Preben Hjørnet, founder and CEO of robotics startup Blue Workforce. “Robots have no conscience, no self-awareness, so they’ll never be social,” Hjørnet added, “But they don’t...

Apple and Samsung supplier Foxconn has reportedly replaced 60,000 factory workers with robots. One factory has "reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots", a government official told the South China Morning Post. Xu Yulian, head of publicity for the Kunshan region, added: "More companies are likely to follow suit." China is investing heavily in a robot workforce. In a statement to the BBC, Foxconn Technology Group confirmed that it was automating "many of the manufacturing tasks associated with our operations" but denied that it meant long-term job losses. [snip] Since September 2014, 505 factories...

Gentlemen, we have the technology. We can build the perfect sex companions. But do we want them? David Mills has a great story about the time he brought a date home and she almost saw his sex robot. “Everything was going well, and we were heading toward the bedroom,” he says. “And that’s when I realized, ‘Oh crap, Taffy’s in there!’” Taffy is Mills’s sex robot. He gave her that name because it sounded young and playful. Mills and Taffy are celebrating their two-year anniversary. In June of 2014, Mills had her delivered from a company called Abyss Creations in...

Getting stitched up by Dr. Robot may one day be reality: Scientists have created a robotic system that did just that in living animals without a real doctor pulling the strings. Much like engineers are designing self-driving cars, Wednesday’s research is part of a move toward autonomous surgical robots, removing the surgeon’s hands from certain tasks that a machine might perform all by itself. No, doctors wouldn’t leave the bedside — they’re supposed to supervise, plus they’d handle the rest of the surgery. Nor is the device ready for operating rooms. But in small tests using pigs, the robotic arm...

It took the team three years to complete the robot, which can speak, show micro-expressions, move its lips and body, yet seems to hold its head in a submissive manner. The humanoid is programmed to recognize human/machine interaction, has autonomous position and navigation and offers services based on cloud technology. This humanoid has natural eye movement, speech that is in sync with its lip movement and refers to its male creators as 'lords'.

"The robots weren't able to carry soup," one of their former colleagues said.After piloting early AI server programs, three Guangzhou restaurants have engaged in mass robot firings, Shanghaiist reports. Two of the formerly robot-employing restaurants have closed down entirely, and the remaining one has fired all but one of their nonhuman staff members. "The boss has decided never to use them again," a human waiter said of his former colleagues. Said boss and his compatriots originally hired the droids to save money—after an up-front investment, robot workers are much less expensive than humans, because you don't actually have to pay...

A viral video released in February showed Boston Dynamics' new bipedal robot, Atlas, performing human-like tasks: opening doors, tromping about in the snow, lifting and stacking boxes. Tech geeks cheered and Silicon Valley investors salivated at the potential end to human manual labor. Shortly thereafter, White House economists released a forecast that calculated more precisely whom Atlas and other forms of automation are going to put out of work. Most occupations that pay less than $20 an hour are likely to be, in the words of the report, “automated into obsolescence.”

Consumer preferences, reduced technology costs and government policies that increase labor costs are driving a trend toward automation in the restaurant business. If you make something more convenient and less expensive, it tends to catch on. As recently as the 1960s, gas-station employees would rush to fill your car’s tank, wash the windows, check the oil and put air in the tires. Telephone operators made your long-distance calls and bank tellers cashed your checks. Those jobs now are either gone or greatly diminished. Today, we reduce jobs whenever we shop on Amazon instead of our local retail outlet, use an...

A recent study by the Oxford Martin School and Citi, with OECD data from the World Bank, found that an average of 57 percent of workers around the world are at risk of being replaced by automation. The study's authors do recognize, however, that not all of these jobs will be automated. They explain that "a job is considered to be 'exposed to automation' or 'automatable' if the tasks it entails allows the work to be performed by a computer, even if a job is not actually automated." The jobs in question are mainly low-skilled positions, including jobs in transportation...

Eatsa, the mostly automated healthy, fast food bowl shop based in San Francisco, has inspired the CEO of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s to rethink the traditional workforce—by replacing all humans with robots. ...CEO Andy Puzder told Business Insider. "We could have a restaurant that's focused on all-natural products and is much like an Eatsa, where you order on a kiosk, you pay with a credit or debit card, your order pops up, and you never see a person." ... The CEO acknowledges that it may be some time before Carl’s Jr is people-free as it would take a pretty sophisticated...

Robots have changed our lives in many ways, from advancing our healthcare and automating our factory lines, to taking on dangerous tasks and even taking our place in warfare. Now Domino's have developed possibly the greatest use for robots yet - safe and secure pizza delivery in what the company claims is a world first.

The robots are called microTugs and they’re the creations of scientists at Stanford University’s Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory who have been working for some time on tiny-yet-strong robots. In 2015, they unveiled one weighing less than half an ounce that can pull up to 52 pounds. Another one weighing 9 grams uses its super-strength plus gecko-like sticky feet to pull a 2-pound object up a wall. ... The microTugs use the adhesive foot-power of the gecko robots, whose feet have minute rubber spikes that grip firmly by bending when pressure is applied, thus increasing their surface area and stickiness....

Artificial intelligence is poised to automate lots of service jobs. The White House has estimated there's an 83% chance that someone making less than $20 a hour will eventually lose their job to a computer. That means gigs like customer-service rep could soon be extinct. But it's not just low-paying positions that will get replaced. AI also could cause high-earning (like top 5% of American salaries) jobs to disappear. Fast. That's the theme of New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper's new feature, "The Robots Are Coming for Wall Street." The piece is framed around Daniel Nadler, the founder of Kensho,...

Are Robots are Coming of Age? “New robot shows off human-like qualities” says the headline. The media think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. My dearest is excited too: finally, she will no longer have to remind me of my chores, that the (yet to be acquired super-duper) robot with its well-programmed memory and a mind of its own will perform without being asked—and even without any snarky comments on the side. And here comes the latest news: “Artificial intelligence, human brain to merge in the 2030s, says futurist Kurzweil.” I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work but...