Might the bailout of the week strategy in vogue in Washington be simply irrational behavior on an institutional level? I hinted at this in Peeling Away the Economic Onion. I ran across this Shankar Vedantam column in the Washington Post, Taking More Risks Because You Feel...
Search engines use so called robots or spiders which go through a web pages source code and store the crawled page in a database. This robot will usually follow the links on a page (assuming it can read and interpret them, but more on that later) and then crawl the...
Space has always been at a premium in most dairy processing plants. With necessary machinery taking up a huge part of a facility's overall footprint, processors need to make the most of the space they do have for warehousing ? all the while attempting to cut down the time products...
A testing lab performing tensile tests on plastic specimens had a testing backlog problem. Even with a staff of 17 technicians, testing time had to be reserved three weeks in advance. A TestMaster Automation System with robotics specimen handling, batch identification, specimen dimensions measurement, automatic gripping and Series IX software...
Barrett Technology, Inc., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a leading manufacturer of advanced robotics for applications that require superior versatility and dexterity, such as agile manufacturing, robot-guided surgery, and remote bomb disarming. Initially, Barrett engineers created robotic designs manually, using line drawings and 2D CAD systems. But the designs could...
The paper reveals that it is known that being the supplier of choice entails providing comprehensive packaging solutions to the customers. Robotics was a natural extension of the continuous product improvement effort. Easily integrated and supported by our existing line of case and tray erectors, formers and sealers, robotic loading...
One main objective of the European project REALSIM - Real-time Simulation for Design of Multiphysics Systems - is to enhance tools for efficient real-time simulation, where the multi-domain modeling language Modelica is used as a basis. The systems under consideration contain components with varying model structure, such as Coulomb friction,...
There was a time, not so long ago, that the last place I'd go to find news was a corporate press release. Not any more. The line between a press release and breaking news has blurred in this era of SEO, SEM and Web 2.0. In order...
Having trouble dividing the workload with your fellow team members? Do squabbles over workflow drive your manager crazy? You might want to think twice about twice about airing your disputes to management, because as Honda tells us, robots are becoming quite adept at working as a team. ...
I went to see Palm and Treo creator Jeff Hawkins speak at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute today (trivia note: RPI claims to have awarded the first engineering degree in America). Hawkins is both smart and humble and would be worth listening to just to hear him talk...
Fortune Magazine released its list of the 100 fastest growing companies today. Which glamorous company topped the list? Forget shiny tech products or innovative start-ups. The number one fastest growing company was online diet company NutriSystem. Fortune offers the company's expanding men's business and its ads featuring former NFL superstar,...
The Robotics Specialist job description template includes the following job summary: To coordinate and lead a group of five to eight automation engineers and programmers to support projects and field services activities. To organize team and develop a professional approach to standardization of structured programming and documentation. Additional information available...
This paper discusses applying telepresence robot to interpersonal communication. First the "user" and "people" connected by a telepresence robot in the interpersonal communication are defined. This paper then describes telepresence research literature from the framework of projection-immersion (from the user's perspective) and observer-dialogist (from the people's perspective). The design elements...
Rixan Associates and Millersville University partnered in 2004 to improve the development and design of the automation lab and control systems curriculum at Millersville University. Through this partnership Millersville University has gained a state-of-the-art industrial robotics facility that is essential to their Control Systems Industrial Technology programs. Rixan Associates has...
For most businesses, the words "Small" and "Global" don't go together. A company the size of Adept Technology, with fewer than 200 employees, can't be expected to have a seamless supply chain that effectively manages product flow the world over. Or can it? Adept, a maker of industrial robots, has...
The Battle Management Language BML initiative started by the US Army Modeling and Simulation Office AMSO published a standard in 1999. It organised doctrinal terms into "5W's"; "Who, What, When, Where and Why", to faciliate interoperability between command and control systems and simulations. BML is an unambiguous language used to...
This white paper document describes in detail a process for synthesis of peptides and phosphopeptides on microtiter plate wells that overcomes previous limitations and demonstrates utility in determination of the epitope of an autophosphorylation site phospho-motif antibody and utility in substrate utilization assays of the protein tyrosine kinase, p60c-src.It also...
This white paper deals with the robust motion estimation from image measurements which would be an enabling technology for Mars rover, micro air vehicle, and search and rescue robot navigation; modeling complex environments from video; and other applications. This paper work develops both batch and recursive algorithms for estimating camera...
This study examines the utility of an automated liquid handling robot integrated with a microwell plate reader to enable the rapid acquisition of bioprocess kinetic data. The relationship between the key parameters for liquid handling accuracy and precision and the sample detection period has been characterized for typical low and...
This white paper document proposes a resolution-optimal planner that considers uncertainty while optimizing any monotonic objective function such as mobility cost, risk, energy expended, etc. The resulting path is a one that minimizes the expected cost value of the objective function, while ensuring that the uncertainty in the position of...