Information briefs for the week check out in vitro fertilization of a human ovum utilizing a robotic, needle, and a SONY PlayStation 5 controller, small batch machining tripling its output with a robotic work cell, Ripe Robotics’ new providing of HaaS (Harvest as a Service), Kodiak Robotics automating Class 8 EV vehicles, and echolocation for AGVs and cellular robots profitable a primary place at LogiMat 2023.
Robots, needles & infants
A brand new age of desktop in vitro fertilization (IVF) has arrived. The web-net for {couples} desirous to but unable to have a child: a robotic, needle, and a SONY PlayStation 5 controller simply crashed a billion-dollar trade with a reasonable, dependable, and efficient substitute.
Within the U.S., the common price of 1 IVF (in vitro fertilization cycle) can vary from $15,000 to $25,000, in keeping with Dr. Jennifer Ashton, ABC Information chief medical correspondent and a board-certified OBGYN doctor. Plus, there’s the emotional toll, as one lady recounted to ABC: “Going via IVF is brutal, isolating, and desperately lonely. It is a breakneck rollercoaster experience that whiplashes from hope to despair, second by second. It is bodily, psychologically, and spiritually distressing.”
About 500,000 youngsters are born via IVF globally annually.
A Barcelona, Spain-based startup, Overture Life, has constructed a robotic system it claims “is an preliminary step towards automating in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and probably making the process cheaper and much more widespread than it’s at present.”
“Consider a field the place sperm and eggs go in, and an embryo comes out 5 days later,” says Santiago Munné, the prizewinning geneticist who’s chief innovation officer on the Spanish firm.
At New York Metropolis’s New Hope Fertility Middle, a mechanical engineer from Overture, with none medical coaching, used a robotic, a needle holding a single sperm, and a PlayStation 5 controller to information the needle, penetrated a stay feminine egg or ovum and injected the sperm.
To David Sable, a former fertility physician who now runs an funding fund, says IVF has been “40 years of excellent science and actually mediocre techniques engineering.”
Overture Labs has modified all of that by revolutionizing embryology.
Robotic and FANUC RoboDrill triple throughput
A dental curing gentle makes use of a customized light-emitting diode (LED) for light-curing dental supplies, even penetrating into porcelain for 
curing underlying resin cement.
Utah-based Ultradent had a manufacturing downside in producing its Valo LED curing gentle. Small batch manufacturing was too sluggish: 50 minutes and three complicated machining operations to provide one curing gentle.
The manufacturing course of concerned “hand-loading uncooked supplies and completed components; a cumbersome and sluggish course of for a corporation that solely had three workers on the store ground per shift.”
“We wanted extra reliability and quicker cycle occasions,” mentioned Ryan Umpleby, Ultradent’s Sr. CAD/CAM programmer.
Downside decision: two customized automation cells, every consisting of a FANUC RoboDrill, a FANUC robotic arm, and room for uncooked inventory storage. The cells now run 16 hours a day of unattended and lights-out machining.
Manufacturing cycle occasions have been minimize from “about 45 minutes, all the way down to a 21-minute common. With solely three workers on the store ground per shift, automating the method of loading/unloading.” With 24/7 operations underway, Ultradent elevated its throughput nearly threefold whereas additionally decreasing machining prices related to third-party processing.
Rising to 24/7 operations, Ultradent elevated its throughput nearly threefold whereas additionally decreasing machining prices related to third-party processing.
Ripe Robotics HaaS (Harvest as a Service)
Most any orchard would like to free itself from hiring staff at harvest time or having to personal and keep robotic harvesters. Australia-based Ripe Robotics and its fleet of robotic harvesters provide each as providers.
“We construct and function our personal fruit-picking robots, utilizing our personal designs,” says Hunter Jay, CEO of Ripe Robotics. “We will optimize 
for the issues growers care about—velocity, worth, high quality of the decide—with out optimizing for issues that off-the-shelf robots normally want, like millimeter-level precision.”
As a substitute of promoting its robotic harvesters, Ripe Robotics additionally runs them throughout harvest, as a substitute of requiring growers to function, keep, and home the automated automobiles on the orchard.
Such an ease-of-use state of affairs for automated harvesting is refreshingly totally different for growers. Growers merely swap from hiring human staff at harvest to using robots.
Jay says that such an association additionally offers Ripe Robotics a leg up on product enhancements and upgrades. Working the harvest provides Jay’s crew a firsthand take a look at the harvester and the harvesting course of each concurrently.
“Our robots will change issues for growers as we scale up, decreasing the quantity of labor they should discover and handle annually,” observes Jay, “and giving them far more data about what’s occurring with their fruit all through the season.”
Autonomous 18-wheel EVs
Class 8 vehicles are a freeway’s monster vacationers, normally tractor-trailer 18-wheelers with gross car weights over 33,000 kilos. Large and clumsy, and fairly harmful if one ever will get uncontrolled. To do a makeover of a Class 8 truck into an autonomous truck is kind of an enterprise.
Mountain View, CA-based Kodiak Robotics has simply accomplished such a self-driving truck makeover and launched the first-ever autonomous electrical class 8 truck: a Peterbilt Mannequin 579EV electrical.
The Peterbilt Class 8 truck is supplied with Kodiak’s fifth-generation sensors. The corporate studies that its autonomous system is “vehicle- and powertrain-agnostic, which permits Kodiak to simply incorporate its autonomous system into rising truck platforms as they change into accessible, no matter gas kind.”
The Peterbilt may be recharged in three hours, claims Kodiak, and provides a peak energy score of 670 horsepower. With a variety of as much as 150 miles, the corporate moreover notes that “the truck is designed for short-haul and drayage deployments,” and can change into a take a look at car for Kodiak.
Echo One debuts and wins LogiMat “greatest prize”
Earlier than LogiMAT 2023, Europe’s largest commerce present for intralogistics, closed its doorways on April 27, it introduced its three best-of-show prizes. Echo One, debuting together with 100 different new merchandise, pulled off first place within the class “Order Selecting, Conveying, Lifting, and Storing Know-how.”
Echo One, from Germany’s Toposens GmbH, is the corporate’s 3D ultrasonic expertise for collision avoidance, which is designed to imitate a bat’s echolocation strategies.
Toposens claims that it’s a first-ever sensor for AGVs and cellular robots. In contrast to present sensor applied sciences, mentioned an organization spokesperson, that may be negatively impacted by lighting situations or moisture (reminiscent of fog), “the Echo One makes use of echolocation to generate sturdy, real-time 3D echo location information to information autonomous techniques throughout a wide range of functions.
The efficiency of this 3D ultrasonic sensor is strong in harsh environments (that includes the IP67 safety score), as it’s dust tolerant and never affected by mud, smoke, and mist.”
Its low energy consumption of two.2 W helps an extended robotic uptime, whereas the Echo One provides options “to shortcomings of present, sometimes optical range-finding applied sciences via best-in-class 3D object detection (reminiscent of detecting forklifts in 3D house).”
