News 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 successful a primary place at LogiMat 2023.
Robots, needles & infants
A brand new age of desktop in vitro fertilization (IVF) has arrived. The net-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.
In the U.S., the common price of 1 IVF (in vitro fertilization cycle) can vary from $15,000 to $25,000, in response to Dr. Jennifer Ashton, ABC News chief medical correspondent and a board-certified OBGYN doctor. Plus, there’s the emotional toll, as one lady recounted to ABC: “Going through IVF is brutal, isolating, and desperately lonely. It’s a breakneck rollercoaster ride that whiplashes from hope to despair, moment by moment. It’s physically, psychologically, and spiritually distressing.”
About 500,000 youngsters are born by IVF globally every year.
A Barcelona, Spain-based startup, Overture Life, has constructed a robotic system it claims “is an initial step toward automating in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and potentially making the procedure less expensive and far more common than it is today.”
“Think of a box where sperm and eggs go in, and an embryo comes out five days later,” says Santiago Munné, the prizewinning geneticist who’s chief innovation officer on the Spanish firm.
At New York City’s New Hope Fertility Center, 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 dwell 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 outstanding science and really mediocre systems engineering.”
Overture Labs has modified all of that by revolutionizing embryology.
Robot and FANUC RoboDrailing 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 drawback in producing its Valo LED curing gentle. Small batch manufacturing was too sluggish: 50 minutes and three complicated machining operations to supply one curing gentle.
The manufacturing course of concerned “hand-loading raw materials and finished parts; a cumbersome and sluggish process for a company that only had three employees on the shop floor per shift.”
“We needed more reliability and faster cycle times,” stated Ryan Umpleby, Ultradent’s Sr. CAD/CAM programmer.
Problem decision: two customized automation cells, every consisting of a FANUC RoboDrailing, a FANUC robotic arm, and room for uncooked inventory storage. The cells now run 16 hours a day of unattended and lights-out machining.
Production cycle occasions had been minimize from “about 45 minutes, down to a 21-minute average. With only three employees on the shop floor per shift, automating the process of loading/unloading.” With 24/7 operations underway, Ultradent elevated its throughput virtually threefold whereas additionally lowering machining prices related to third-party processing.
Increasing to 24/7 operations, Ultradent elevated its throughput virtually threefold whereas additionally lowering 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 companies.
“We build and operate our own fruit-picking robots, using our own designs,” says Hunter Jay, CEO of Ripe Robotics. “We can optimize 
for the things growers care about—speed, price, quality of the pick—without optimizing for things that off-the-shelf robots usually need, like millimeter-level precision.”
Instead 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 autos on the orchard.
Such an ease-of-use state of affairs for automated harvesting is refreshingly completely different for growers. Growers merely swap 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 workforce a firsthand take a look at the harvester and the harvesting course of each concurrently.
“Our robots will change things for growers as we scale up, reducing the amount of labor they need to find and manage each year,” observes Jay, “and giving them much more information about what’s going on with their fruit throughout the season.”
Autonomous 18-wheel EVs
Class 8 vehicles are a freeway’s monster vacationers, normally tractor-trailer 18-wheelers with gross automobile weights over 33,000 kilos. Big 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 sort of an endeavor.
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 Model 579EV electrical.
The Peterbilt Class 8 truck is supplied with Kodiak’s fifth-generation sensors. The firm experiences that its autonomous system is “vehicle- and powertrain-agnostic, which enables Kodiak to easily incorporate its autonomous system into emerging truck platforms as they become available, regardless of fuel type.”
The Peterbilt might be recharged in three hours, claims Kodiak, and presents 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 grow to be a check automobile for Kodiak.
Echo One debuts and wins LogiMat “best prize”
Before 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 Picking, Conveying, Lifting, and Storing Technology.”
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 methods.
Toposens claims that it’s a first-ever sensor for AGVs and cellular robots. Unlike current sensor applied sciences, stated an organization spokesperson, that may be negatively impacted by lighting circumstances or moisture (equivalent to fog), “the Echo One makes use of echolocation to generate strong, real-time 3D echo location information to information autonomous programs throughout quite a lot of purposes.
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 a protracted robotic uptime, whereas the Echo One presents options “to shortcomings of existing, typically optical range-finding technologies through best-in-class 3D object detection (such as detecting forklifts in 3D space).”