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 cell robots successful a primary place at LogiMat 2023.

Robots, needles & infants

A brand new age of desktop in vitro fertilization (IVF) has arrived. The online-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 girl recounted to ABC: “Going by way of IVF is brutal, isolating, and desperately lonely. It is a breakneck rollercoaster journey that whiplashes from hope to despair, second by second. It is bodily, psychologically, and spiritually distressing.”

About 500,000 kids are born by way of 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 way more widespread than it’s immediately.”

“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 Heart, 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 methods engineering.”

Overture Labs has modified all of that by revolutionizing embryology.

Robotic and FANUC RoboDrill triple throughput

A dental curing mild 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 drawback in producing its Valo LED curing mild. Small batch manufacturing was too sluggish: 50 minutes and three advanced machining operations to provide one curing mild.

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 would have liked extra reliability and quicker cycle instances,” stated 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 instances had been lower from “about 45 minutes, right 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.

Growing 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 preserve robotic harvesters. Australia-based Ripe Robotics and its fleet of robotic harvesters supply 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 an alternative of promoting its robotic harvesters, Ripe Robotics additionally runs them throughout harvest, as an alternative of requiring growers to function, preserve, and home the automated autos on the orchard.

Such an ease-of-use situation for automated harvesting is refreshingly completely different for growers. Growers merely change from hiring human staff at harvest to using robots.

Jay says that such an association additionally provides Ripe Robotics a leg up on product enhancements and upgrades. Working the harvest presents Jay’s group 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 rather more info about what’s happening 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. Huge 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 experiences that its autonomous system is “vehicle- and powertrain-agnostic, which permits Kodiak to simply incorporate its autonomous system into rising truck platforms as they turn into obtainable, no matter gasoline kind.”

The Peterbilt may be recharged in three hours, claims Kodiak, and presents a peak energy score of 670 horsepower. With a spread of as much as 150 miles, the corporate moreover notes that “the truck is designed for short-haul and drayage deployments,” and can turn into a check car for Kodiak.

Echo One debuts and wins LogiMat “finest 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 cell robots. In contrast to present sensor applied sciences, stated 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 strong, real-time 3D echo location knowledge to information autonomous methods throughout quite a lot of functions.

The efficiency of this 3D ultrasonic sensor is powerful in harsh environments (that includes the IP67 safety score), as it’s grime 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 presents options “to shortcomings of present, usually optical range-finding applied sciences by way of best-in-class 3D object detection (reminiscent of detecting forklifts in 3D area).”