Robot of the Year 2007 - 1

There is a beautiful article on Pink Tentacle about who won the 2007 Robot of the Year Award so I don't want to go into the details, but GetRobo was at the award exhibition and symposium where the people that developed the winnng robots talked about their experiences. (GetRobo was invited there to talk about the recent trends in robotics in the U.S.)

Dr. Shinsuke Sakakibara, a managing officer at Fanuc Ltd., talked about how from around year 2000 the advancement in vision sensors and force sensors enabled them to start making intelligent robots for industries that till then had not benefited from robots.  The M-430iA - which won the Grand Prize - is one of them and handles food and pharmaceutical products.

The M-430iA in the video below is packing small pieces of Yokan - or soft bean cakes.

The next video I took at IREX is another Fanuc robot - the M-710iC. Due to its vision sensors, it can pick up odd-shaped parts that are randomly stacked up in a box and place them as necessary.

Dr. Sakakibara said that Fanuc currently has 2000 employees and 1200 robots working at its company. And the reliability of Fanuc's industrial robots is at the level where there is less than one failure in 100 months - that's more than 8 years!