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Interview with Adept CEO John Dulchinos - Quattro robot widens appeal

Adept Technology, the largest U.S.-based manufacturer of industrial robots, is on a quest to move its robots outside of the factory floors into packaging lines, food handling processes and beyond. The company’s key product, the Quattro robot, is currently the fastest packaging robot on the market and is being designed to fit into various applications around the world.

GetRobo sat down with Adept CEO John Dulchinos to learn about the newer and fascinating ways that his clients are utilizing Quattro. The following is an excerpt from the interview.

(This week is National Robotics Week and Adept is having an open house on April 16to celebrate. It will open up its laboratory and GetRobo highly recommends a visit to see the Quattro and other robots in action. You can even control a Quattro yourself with a Wii remote!=video after the break)

 

 

(Photo: Adept CEO John Dulchinos with a model of Quattro) 

Q. What is special about the Quattro?

A. Quattro is the only parallel robot in the world that features a unique four-arm rotational platform. All the parallel robots from other industrial robot companies have a three-arm design. The advantage of having four arms is that it offers faster cycles and can carry heavier payloads. Moreover, the four-arm design is mechanically more efficient so it uses 25% less energy than the three-arm design.

 Since we brought the Quattro to the market in 2007, we’ve targeted at applications that are very high speed and have a large work envelope. These applications include food handling, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods and even as far reaching as solar (cell manufacturing).

 And now, the Quattro has become one of the very few robots accepted by the USDA. As a matter of fact it’s the only high-speed parallel robot accepted by the USDA and it enables us to sell the robot to the meat and poultry market.

Q. How significant is it to be USDA accepted?

This market requires robots to be specially designed. The big difference is that in meat and poultry plants there is a high risk of bacteria growing. Every night, those plants have a wash-down process using chemicals and high-pressure hoses, so it is an impossible environment for a normal robot. The coating on the casting and the materials on the platform are different and they need ot be accepted by the USDA. The electronics have to be tightly sealed. These are tough requirements especially for a sophisticated piece of equipment like a robot. But Adept was able to meet that and we introduced the product last Oct. And we shipped our first set of robots this March quarter to customers in meat and poultry handling in the U.S. and France.

 It’s important to note that automating meat and poultry applications is very important because there is a lot of labor involved and the working conditions are not conducive to people. There are contamination risks when people are involved in packaging. So robots bring delicate product handling, the dexterity of touch labor with the efficiency and consistency of machines.

Q. How large is the market?

Journalist Robot - Friend or Foe?

 There's been so much bad news lately for journalists like myself with all those publications shrinking and disappearing, when I read about this robot, the first thing that came into my mind was "great, more competition." Am I eventually going to be competing with a robot to get news? 

 According to this article on Internet Watch (via Moriyama-san' Diary) a "Journalist Robot" was demonstrated in Tokyo at the Information Processing Society of Japan 50th Anniversary Event.

(Photo of Journalist Robot borrowed from Internet Watch )

 The robot is being developed at the ISI Lab at Tokyo University. (It's the same lab that did the Mowgli  and the humanoid that can get up on its own.)

 The Journalist Robot can detect what is new in the environment by comparing what it sees with data previously stored, move up to what it has detected and take photographs. Then it can search for people in that area and ask questions. The robot would have to know from previous input what exactly it has detected (examples of wine bottles and posters are given in the article), and then it will insert that word into question templates. ("Do you know who put up those wine bottles there?" -- I don't know, I'm just imaging here.) 

 And then if the robot thinks that the event is newsworthy, it will actually write up a piece.

 So there's not much detail and I really have to see this thing in person to know it's capabilities, but it looks like I don't have to worry about my job being taken over by it anytime soon. Yeah, it may be able to spell better than me with the on-board spell checker (or Kanji checker in Japanese), but it probably can't do --- well, let's see, what would I be able to do better than the robot........ Oh, I'd know which professor likes to drink more....... but isn't that just about how much knowledge you put into the robot?  OK, then I could ask more sophisticated questions in a nicer way........... but is that really necessary? Hmmmmm, this is difficult.

 What I'm sure is that I would have loved to have a future version of this robot 20 years ago as a cub reporter. There were evenings when I would have to wait in front of an executive's house for hours for him to come home so I can ask him about the pending merger or the upcoming bill. It was tough especially during the winter. If I had one of these waiting instead of me, it would have been a great help.  

 You can find the academic paper regarding the Journalist Robot here. The following pictures were borrowed from the Tokyo University joint research website.

     

Asbestos removal robot does job that humans avoid

　New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO)  announced that it's asbestos removal robot (photo) being developed with Taisei Corp. is well on its way to unmanned operations. The robot is designed to move up and down inside elevator shafts to conduct asbestos removal at designated sites.

 

  The robot is designed to remove asbestos, a material harmful to human body, in elevator shafts of buildings to be demolished. After the elevators are removed, the robot placed on a gondola moves up and down the elevator shafts to conduct asbestos removal operations.

 

  The robot uses as its body a six-axis articulated robot developed by Fanuc Ltd. A metal brush attached to the end of its arm brushes the wall surface to remove asbestos.  A human operator will control the up and down maneuvering of the robot, but the actual removal of the harmful material is done by the robot by pre-designating work areas.

 

 A mock asbestos removal experiment was scheduled on Feb. 25 in an actual elevator  shaft set up at the machinery center at Seiwa Renewal Works headquarters in Saitama Prefecture, Japan.

 Asbestos removal operation is extremely dangerous and complicated, particularly when operating inside an enclosure such as an elevator shaft. This has caused the operations to be extremely time-consuming when done by human hands. The new robot is expected to achieve both safety and efficiency in asbestos removal operations.

 

 The robot was developed as part of the 2007-2009 "Project for Urgent Development of Basic Technologies to Reduce the Use of Asbestos and Decompose Materials Containing Asbestos" with a budget of 100 million yen. 

 

 (Via Robonable. Press release here.)

Robot Receptionist I-FAIRY introduces herself at CES 2010

Kokoro's I-FAIRY made its debut in Las Vegas last week.

　Well, I guess it must be hard to make a manga-type character come to life using plastic and motors. And if it were a manga character, she looks like she has a hangover when her forehead turns blue.

Commercial Laundry Handling Robot

 PUREX Co., a company in Japan that makes automation machinery for the linen supply industry, has developed a laundry handling robotic system that they aim to commercialize by 2013. In the real world, most of the linen handling has already been automated but the company is trying to robotize the one process that still need human hands. That is, picking up the clean linen one by one and placing it on the machine that smooths them out. 

 One arm picks up a piece of towel from the pile and lays it on a conveyor belt to make it easier to detect and grab the corner of the towel. The towel is handed and slided over to another arm that holds the edges and places it correctly on the finishing machine.

 PUREX's parent company is TOKAI, a linen supply service provider, so they will have no problem looking for a customer. Right now the system can only handle one type of linen at a time, but the goal is to become able to handle different things - from towels to sheets to gowns - all at once.  

 Via Robonable