Reece’s mother Elizabeth told the BBC: “Reece was nervous about his operation before, but we showed him pictures and he was quite excited to know a robot was operating on him.”

The surgery, which was carried out last week at Southampton Children’s Hospital, saw Reece become the first child in the UK to undergo an operation using the Versius Surgical Robotic System.

Consultant paediatric urologist Ewan Brownlee used the robot to repair a narrowing of a vessel after Reece was diagnosed with an obstruction which inhibited the flow of urine from his kidney.

Dr Brownlee said: “This has been three years in the making so it’s really exciting for the whole paediatric urology team. I’m hoping that this is the start of seeing an increase in minimally invasive surgery for children all around the UK.”

Reece’s surgery was part of an NHS trial which sees Cambridge-based CMR Surgical’s Versius used in several hospitals to increase precision through the use of small surgical instruments, robot-assisted manual control and a magnified screen.

But it marks a wider adoption of robots across the healthcare sector, which is facing significant strain, thanks to ageing populations and a backlog of patients needing treatment following the Covid-19 pandemic. Could robots solve the challenges faced by the NHS and other healthcare providers?

Rise of the machines 

In the UK an ageing population is putting pressure on healthcare services. According to the country’s Office for National Statistics, the number of people aged 65 plus will grow from 12.7 million in 2022 (19% of the population), to 22.1 million in 2072 (27% of the population).

The fact that people are living longer could be, in part, down to improved healthcare services – new treatments and technologies mean ailments that were previously terminal can now be treated. But it also increases pressure on an already overwhelmed NHS.

This is compounded by the fact that the NHS has over 100,000 vacant roles, and waiting lists are at an all-time high.

As TechInformed recently reported, some NHS Trusts are turning to data analytics to tackle growing waiting lists. However, other hospitals have identified an even more noticeable technology – robots.

In surgery, robotic assistants offer “precise control” explains Jörg Zimmer, VP at software provider BlackBerry QNX. This “ensures accurate implant positioning and improved joint function.”

Plus, robots have the ability to make smaller incisions than surgeons, resulting in reduced trauma and faster recovery times for patients, Zimmer says.

Da Vinci coding

The Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust introduced the ‘da Vinci Xi robot’ to the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch for this very reason.

The da Vinci Xi robot is positioned directly over a patient during surgery. It has four arms – three that can hold different surgical instruments and a fourth that holds 3D cameras. Each arm is operated by a computer that replicates the movements of an operating surgeon.

Brought in by business change consultancy Entec Si, the da Vinci Xi robot has been implemented to help with urological procedures and surgeries that can provide better outcomes for those affected with prostate cancer.

Entec Si ensured the introduction of the robot came with a “fit for purpose training plan,” explains Eman Al-Hillawi, CEO of the firm – including on-site training for surgeons, visits to other sites that already have the da Vinci Xi Robot, and procedural material to support learning.

“Having experienced surgeons on hand when the newly trained surgeons work through their first few procedures was also critical and extremely helpful,” says Al-Hillawi.

Alongside the technical installation of the robot, it required new technology infrastructure, including connectivity (such as upgrading the network), new applications and databases to be installed.

In addition, physical spaces, structural integrity of the rooms, load bearing and other construction challenges had to be addressed, the CEO explains.

Al-Hillawi says that the community around the hospital feel positive about the robot – during the lead-up to the implementation, local residents raised or donated a total of  £50,000 to ensure the project could go ahead.

“Before the introduction of the da Vinci Xi robot, many patients facing prostate cancer were forced to travel miles around the country to access treatment,” she adds.

This meant that, at the time, at least 80 to 100 patients each year were travelling away from their local area for the operation.

“With the increased capability brought about by the da Vinci Xi, patients now have faster, easier access to treatment in their local area.”

Since its implementation, Al-Hillawi says the hospital has recorded high levels of satisfaction with most patients being able to leave the day after surgery, a decrease from the four to five days needed before the robot was introduced.

“As this process is less invasive for the patient than laparoscopic procedures, the recovery times are also much quicker, with less blood loss and reduced complication rates,” she explains.

For surgeons, the robot means more training opportunities in this new field of surgery, as well as improved health benefits.

“These include the reduction in the likelihood that surgeons will develop musculoskeletal injuries, particularly in the back and hand which can lead to early retirement,” says Al-Hillawi.

Plus, “this means that the NHS Trust will be able to keep its skilled workforce for longer, and surgeons will be able to stay in their careers longer,” plus, the NHS Trust will be able to attract new talent.

Spray and go 

Robots are also being deployed to relieve overworked hospital staff by helping with tasks such as room disinfectant and medicine delivery.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Swift Robotics received a £100k grant from Innovate UK, with support from Grantify, to build a UV disinfection robot.

“This initial success set the foundation for our growth and innovation,” says Michal Kostyal, co-founder of Swift Robotics.

“By introducing our robots, healthcare staff can focus more on direct patient care, which is especially critical during flu season when many staff members are ill.”

The robots are designed and manufactured in-house, in the UK.

Roaming the hospital floors, the bots are fully autonomous and modular in design – fitted with sensors combined with the proprietary software stack, the robots are able to “execute efficient dynamic path planning, obstacle avoidance, and localisation in a whole host of environments with varying complexities,” explains Kostyal.

The two bots not only help with cleaning, but are also used to deliver medicine, and medical tools across the floor.

Recently, the firm secured £1million in funding to enhance its AI and computer vision algorithms.  In collaboration with the Open University and Cranfield University, the funding will go towards boosting hospital resilience through the deployment of autonomous robots, explains Kostyal.

“Our robots are already in use in the UK and internationally, and this new funding will enable us to further improve and expand their capabilities.”

Get with the programming

BlackBerry QNX’s Zimmer said that to make further technological advances within the NHS a reality, “there needs to be a comprehensive strategy and investment in place to support manufacturers of these technologies and transform the industry to provide better patient outcomes.”

He explains that the success of robot-assisted surgeries relies on sophisticated software solutions that enable exacting precision and seamless communication between surgeons and robotic platforms.

Additionally, software developers building surgical robot applications need to ensure high-performance and hard real-time deterministic behaviour, so the robots can respond instantly to commands with low latency – a feature that is particularly critical in delicate procedures.

Robot assited surgeries also need to be fail-safe and fault-tolerant, so that a failed component or process won’t take down other components, the system can be restarted, or taken to a design-safe state.

“When it comes to reliability in surgical robotics, manufacturers need a trusted and proven solution,” says Zimmer.

The robot must show real-time deterministic behaviour, and adherence to rigorous safety standards, combined with a comprehensive set of security features, he says.

“Choosing the right technology will allow us to revolutionise the field of robot-assisted surgeries, setting new standards for the future of healthcare.”

The post How are robots easing pressure on healthcare? appeared first on TechInformed.

Elon Musk has revealed plans to start using humanoid robots to build Tesla’s electric cars from next year.

The Tesla boss took to social media to announce that the EV car maker will be the first manufacturer to leverage its own Optimus humanoid robots in production lines.

The Optimus bot has been in the works since 2021, with a prototype unveiled the following year. Musk said that the vehicle maker hopes to expand production next year, and then to sell the robots to other firms from 2026 onward.

“Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year and, hopefully, high production for other companies in 2026,” Musk said in his post on X.

Ofcom slaps TikTok with £1.9m fine over child safety

UK regulator Ofcom has fined social media giant TikTok to the tune of £1.9 million for failing to respond to a request for information on its parent controls safety feature.

The watchdog, which was given additional powers in 2022 to punish firms that fail to remove child sexual abuse content, said TikTok had failed to provide complete information on the uptake of its “Family Pairing” control.

The new powers, handed as part of the Online Safety Bill, allow Ofcom to fine companies who fail to respond to statutory information requests in a complete and timely fashion.

Ofcom said it had requested information about the Family Pairing parental control last summer, to assess the effectiveness of TikTok’s protections for teenage users.

TikTok provided a response to the request in September 2023, but retracted the information a few months later, Ofcom revealed in a blog post, leading to the fine.

Read Ofcom’s blog here

Oversight Board criticises Meta over AI generated images

Meta has been criticised by its own oversight board of its rules on adult images generated using artificial intelligence.

The Meta Oversight Board claimed Facebook’s parent company needs to be clearer about banning sexually explicit images made of real people. It also demanded the company introduce rules to stop these images spreading across its platforms.

The board issued the ruling after reviewing two pornographic fakes of famous women which were created using AI. These were then posted on Facebook and Instagram.

Meta has confirmed it plans to review the board’s recommendation, although it has no obligation to follow its advice.

The Oversight Board was established by Meta to assess any controversial decisions it might make. While it is funded by Meta, the board has operational independence, while the social media giant can choose whether to accept its suggestions.

Read more

India scraps “Google Tax” on digital services

The Indian government has scrapped a controversial levy on digital services rendered to Indian businesses by foreign firms after pressure from the US.

India introduced the expanded “Google Tax” in 2020, widening the scope of its 2016 equalization levy – which charged offshore firms hosting advertisements targeted at Indian consumers – to include other e-commerce services.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has now introduced the Finance Bill 2024 that will scrap the equalization levy on a wide array of services, including cloud and e-commerce offerings, form August 1.

The move will be welcomed by the US who had claimed in 2021 that the expanded levy was discriminatory against US businesses due to the high number of digital services firms who were offering services in India.

The Biden administration hit back by imposing its own tariff of up to 25% for up to $2 billion of goods from nations that implement digital services taxes, though this was suspended almost immediately.

Read more

The post Tesla to turn to humanoid robots and Meta slapped down by Oversight board appeared first on TechInformed.

Last year, the team evaluated the robot’s features in zero-gravity scenarios on a European Space Agency parabolic flight.

Parabolic flights — typically carried out twice a year — are the only sub-orbital carriers that allow scientists to conduct in-person experiments under conditions of microgravity.

The ‘SpaceHopper’ project was launched two and a half years ago as a focus project for bachelor’s degree students. Five master’s degree students and one doctoral student are now continuing it as a regular research project.

ETH Zurich student Valerio Schelbert explained: “The prototype we’ve developed moves asteroids by hopping. It uses the low levels of gravity on asteroids to travel.

According to fellow project member Fabio Buhler, there are two reasons to explore asteroids in space.

“The first is to gain new insights into the universe and our history. The second is that many asteroids contain rare materials that could be valuable to humanity in the future.”

One challenge in developing exploration robots such as these is the very low gravity prevailing on small celestial bodies (such as comets and asteroids) as opposed to larger bodies such as Earth.

Buhler added: “Until we tested the SpaceHopper in zero-gravity, we had no idea whether the robot would actually work and were very excited when it did. It was a massive weight off our shoulders.”

According to the ETH Zurich team, the experiment demonstrated how the robot could use its legs to reposition itself and jump in specific directions. “Overall, it was very successful,” Buhler added.

Check out our exclusive “A coffee with…” series for quick reads with tech leaders and CEOs here.

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Forget the doom and gloom—here TI reports on three different AI firms using AI for good: AiDash for biodiversity and property development, AutoDesk for coral reef restoration, and Accion, which is using it to help marginalised communities and even ensure that the tech itself isn’t discriminatory.

Biodiversity with AiDash

According to figures from the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII), the UK is one of the most biodiversity-depleted countries in the world. However, a BII study found that the UK has just half of its biodiversity left, leaving it languishing in the bottom 10% of the world’s countries.

AiDash is a firm focused on making infrastructure industries climate-resilient through satellites and AI. For biodiversity, it uses satellite imagery to get a bird’s eye view of what’s happening on the ground.

Working with satellite data providers, once an area is requested for analysis, AiDash will simply source an image that might already have been used for analysis.

According to Shashin Mishra, VP of EMEA at AiDash, the firm’s model seeks to identify exactly how many habitats there are by labelling each one. It then detects any invasive plants that pose a risk to native species, offering insights into the health profile of fauna.

This not only helps those fighting to improve the country’s biodiversity but also helps industries such as the UK’s property sector, where they must legally meet Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) requirements before building on a site.

BNG requirements mean developers must ensure their sites result in more or a better quality natural habitat than what was there before.

“When a property developer starts a project, they’re going to have a baseline preliminary survey done on the site,” explains Mishra.

This is typically done by an ecologist, but Mishra argues that these kinds of surveys lack accuracy and detail.

“Typically, what these surveys do not tell us is how much biodiversity is there and what kind of condition it might be in,” he says. “That’s what we deliver. They can see that as a report, and they can open it up on the web and interact with the system and see exactly what’s there.”

Under the sea

If we’re looking for true biodiversity, there are few places more diverse than coral reefs. Based on species diversity, for example, the Great Barrier Reef – the world’s largest coral reef – is one of the most diverse habitats on the planet.

Coral reefs also play a key role in our food security, with over one billion people reliant on reefs to support their food supply chain in some form. A quarter of marine species live in reefs. Yet, according to the UN, between 70% to 90% of coral reefs could be lost within the next 26 years.

“Reefs are critical carbon sinks,” says Nic Carey, senior researcher at Autodesk Robotics, “and they contribute to maintaining ocean pH levels and sustaining marine health, even well outside their immediate environment.”

Autodesk Robotics researches the future of robotics in industries such as manufacturing, architecture, construction and nonprofits with an underlying ethos of creating a better world.

To save coral reefs, Carey says the world needs to restore and plant hundreds of hectares per year, minimum. Currently, the world’s combined efforts fall far short, with only about one hectare planted per year.

This “serious mismatch in necessary goals comes from the fact that “there simply isn’t enough human workforce to address the scale of coral seeding and planting,” she explains

Reef monitoring is already abundant, and AI plays a key role in helping scientists predict bleaching patterns and the depletion of biodiversity. But, according to Carey, coral restoration projects are still underserved by automation.

Most conservation-restoration programmes are still done completely manually through coral seeding and planting in nurseries. Although seeding and planting is not a difficult task, Carey says, it i slow and extremely labour-intensive.

In 2020, Autodesk Technology Centre in San Francisco partnered with Australian restoration firm Coral Maker in order to test AI-powered robotics to automate the process of seeding and propagation of corals

By using off-the-shelf robots and sensors alongside open-source or commercially available software, the partnership is able to automate coral planting and seeding.

“Robots offer a significant force multiplier, but they’re also ideally suited to automation because their tasks are repetitive,” says Carey

With a combination of robotic arms and image sensors, the robot cuts fragments of an existing live coral into smaller pieces, glues them into plugs and implants them into limestone ‘skeletons’ to eventually grow into a bigger colony.

The skeletons are in the process of being mass-manufactured using recycled stone composite. With this and the robots, AutoDesk says it has the potential to scale 10,000 skeletons per day, each with the capacity to hold six to eight ‘fragments’ and ultimately help bring biodiversity back to the oceans.

Financial inclusion

Washington-based international nonprofit Accion uses technology such as AI to support small business owners, smallholder farmers, and women who are most impacted by climate change, economic instability, and conflict with financial services.

For instance, Apollo Agriculture, a portfolio company of Accion Venture Lab, uses technologies to support small-scale farmers across Africa in increasing their profits and farming more sustainably.

Its AI and automated operations enable farmers to access optimised financing, farm products, digital advice, and risk management solutions. For example, its predictive repayment propensity models help Apollo access risk in the market where farmers tend to be excluded from formal financial systems and absent a formal credit history.

Accion also includes the think tank Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI). It has published a toolkit for venture capitalists to vet start-ups and ensure that they do not use data that can lead to discrimination against people who are already economically vulnerable.

“The topics we’ve been examining are really with the aim to help build trust and digital finance by bringing more transparency and accountability for data practises that providers are using,” explains Alexandra Rizzi, senior research director, consumer data opportunities and risks at CFI.

“That includes issues around privacy, around AI, around data governance, and that transparency and accountability could be brought by different actors, whether those are impact investors who are asking before they invest in a particular fintech: How are you building your models? Where are you getting your data from?”

During the Covid pandemic, Rizzi recalls when many businesses had to close and needed access to relief because their income had essentially come to a halt.

“A number of countries did cash transfer programmes, giving out payments, but in many of those emerging markets, there were not strong social registries of who should actually be targeted,” says Rizzi.

The West African country of Togo launched a programme called Novice, which used an AI model that crunched satellite data, as well as mobile money transactional behaviour, used as a proxy for someone’s economic status and looked at the poverty levels of certain geographies.

“In the absence of a robust social registry database to say, well, this individual needs this economic payout, they were able to target individuals and build an AI model that leveraged the data.”

“So there are all kinds of incredible use cases I think that AI is already achieving,” says Rizzi. “But we also want to make sure that it doesn’t lead to unintentional harm or further exclusion, and so our work has been to raise very clearly the opportunities that are out there, but also make sure that these fintechs are aware of some of the potential risks.”

For instance, the CFI knows that in certain geographies there are gaps between men and women and ownership of phones, and so they have very different data profiles.

“So, our AI models need to adequately acknowledge these kinds of gaps in data trails between men and women and also with other excluded marginalised groups.”

The post AI for good: transforming biodiversity, coral restoration, and financial inclusion appeared first on TechInformed.

The Norwegian firm – formerly known as Halodi Robotics until a rebrand in March last year – says it has trained 30 bots on several individual tasks, using imitation learning via video and teleoperation.

That base model was then fine-tuned toward specific work – such as warehouse tasks, general door manipulation, and then finally trained the bots on the specific jobs they had to do.

Like muscle memory, 1x claims its androids “get better at common tasks every time. “Then that knowledge makes new tasks like “grab that lightbulb” even more seamless,” the firm added in a blog post on its website.

The robot, known as Eve, has an LED smiley face, wheels rather than legs and claws rather than hands.

“Every behaviour you see in the above video is controlled by a single vision-based neural network that emits actions at 10Hz. The neural network consumes images and emits actions to control the driving, the arms, gripper, torso and head,” the blog post continued.

“The video contains no teleoperation no computer graphics, no cuts, no video speed ups, no scripted trajectory playback. IT’s all controlled by neural networks, all autonomous, all 1X [real time] speed.”

According to the firm, the systems were first deployed on the bot in 2023 for patrolling tasks.

TechInformed met 1X CEO Bernt Øivind Børnich and one of his Eves at ADT’s booth at CES last year for a demo of its patrol work (see main picture). Back then, Eve was controlled using VR and AI, with a robot operator in the control centre.

A susequent round of funding ($23.5m) led by Chat GPT creator Open AI has seen the firm make significant strides in the bot’s autonomy – as demonstrated by those tasks in the video – which appear to demonstrate that the  bots have learned purely from data.

The firm claims that the Eves can also open doors and take themselves to charging stations and plug themselves in.

The company is now on a mission to create robots with practical, real-world applications, Børnich added, and is working towards releasing commercial models in Norway and the US.

“Our androids will eventually work among people, one by one,” Børnich said. “And unlike other androids that have to slow down to be functional, 1X’s models work at 1x (real time) speed,” he claimed.

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The German carmaker’s subsidiary said it will pursue a milestone-based approach consisting of two phases.

Figure’s robots claim to enable the automation of difficult, unsafe, or tedious tasks throughout the manufacturing process. The bot maker reasons that this allows employees to focus on skills and processes that cannot be automated, as well as continuous improvement in production efficiency and safety.

In the first phase, Figure will identify initial use cases to apply its robots in automotive production. Once completed, its robots will begin staged deployment at BMW’s manufacturing facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

While the company didn’t disclose how many robots BMW will be using, the partnership will start with small numbers and expand if performance targets have been met, according to Brett Adcock, chief executive at Figure.

Beyond the deployment of humanoid robots in an automotive manufacturing environment, BMW and Figure will also explore advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, robot control, manufacturing virtualisation, and robot integration.

World’s first humanoid robot factory to open in US

“Single-purpose robotics have saturated the commercial market for decades, but the potential of general purpose robotics is completely untapped, said Adcock.

“The use of general purpose robot solutions has the potential to make productivity more efficient, to support the growing demands of our consumers, and to enable our team to focus on the transformation ahead of us,” added Dr Robert Engelhorn, president and CEO of BMW Manufacturing.

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EX1 is a hip joint assisted robot primarily designed for exercise to combat the loss of muscle mass in the lower limbs that many people experience as they grow older, but it can be used as a permanent aid too.

Worn on the hip joint, the device has two thigh frames and straps to connect to the subject’s leg. An on-board processor is linked to an inertial measurement unit and to actuators on the frame — allowing it to guide the wearer through exercises.

The device operates in two modes, according to Samsung: an ‘assistive mode’, which uses the actuators to enhance the wearer’s movement during exercise and ‘resistive mode’ — actively pushing against the wearer’s movement to provide a tougher exercise.

The hip bot was put to the test by its Korean creators in a four-week trial led by Professor Wan-hee Lee from Sahmyook University College of Health Science, Korea; a collaborative team of researchers, Noble County; and Samsung Electronics.

The team designed an evaluator-blinded, pre-and post-test comparative study comprising of 21 older adults, aged 65 and above. The group performed a supervised exercise program consisting of walking, and strength, and balance exercises, wearing EX1 for 50 minutes per session, three times a week for four weeks.

Tracking the results, the research team found noticeable enhancements, especially during mid-walking, which was attributed to the assistive mode of EX1. This mode notably improved stride length, affecting forward movement in straight walking, according to the research.

While the findings did not find evidence of improved muscle strength over a four-week period, it did find that gait function and balance ability in this population had improved.

“Our findings provide a solid foundation for developing various types of improved and advanced wearable robots,” said Lee.

“This will further expand the global wearable robot market, promoting further research and commercialisation,” he added.

The research team’s work was published in the BMC Geriatrics  journal.

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We asked industry experts to unveil their predictions, from revolutionary applications to breakthroughs disrupting traditional industries. Envisage the transformative impact of robotics on work, society, and ethical frameworks, pioneering an era of unprecedented capabilities and opportunities.

1: Addressing the labour shortage

“Labour shortages are a huge concern for warehouses right now, with recruitment giant Hays reporting that more than three-quarters of supply chain and logistics employers anticipate low applicants. This isn’t being helped by the perception that automation will make many jobs in the sector obsolete in the near future.

“Robotics will continue to revolutionise the sector and will be able to attract the next generation into warehouses. Gen Z and millennials have both grown up with technology, and as warehouses modernise, they will be eager to work with cutting-edge technologies like automation and AI.

“The key is incremental adoption that complements human workers. With the right change management, robotics can unlock cross-generational collaboration. Younger hires bring digital skills while experienced staff have institutional knowledge – together they can optimise new technology.”

Brandon Black, VP and GM at Ivanti Wavelink

2: Innovations in materials and soft robotics

“Soft robotics and new materials will have the biggest impact on how robotics manufacturing will develop in the next five years, as our 2023 Robotics Manufacturing Status Report reveals. Soft robotics, such as grippers that enable robots to perform more logistical tasks, is expected to see a compound annual growth rate of 35.1% between 2022 and 2027, with biomedicine, food and agriculture set to benefit.

“Using new materials and technology requires several iterations for testing and refinement, so digital manufacturing is a key element in speeding up the development cycle.

“New materials are also being introduced in shape-morphing systems, also known as 4D printing. By using responsive materials that react to external elements like heat, light, moisture, electric current, or pressure, 4D-printed objects can change shape or properties.”

“Examples of how these are being developed include aerospace — 4D printed drone wings, which can bend up to 20 degrees in response to stimuli, significantly improving efficiency; MedTech — implants that adapt to a patient’s body over time; smart textiles that adjust their breathability based on humidity; and components in a plumbing system that expand or contract in response to temperature fluctuations.”

Bjoern Klaas, VP and MD of Protolabs Europe

To read more stories on robotics click here

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While this bodes well for the office worker, older generations taking on physical, outdoor tasks such as maintaining offshore oil platforms and onshore facilities such as wind and solar farms are subject to an earlier than-needed retirement.

Marc Dassler, CEO of robotics firm Energy Robotics, wants to change this: “We’d like the baby boomer generation to stay in jobs as long as possible because they have a lot of knowledge, and they add a lot of value to our economy,” he says.

This depletion of knowlege which is not passed onto younger generations in the workplace is sometimes referred to as “Boomer Brain Drain”.

His fleet of robots enables this by taking on dangerous, dirty, and dull tasks in facilities with large infrastructure and, simultaneously, building digital twins and monitoring, in real-time, the facilities’ machines.

Tank farm drones

One use case Dassler highlights is Energy Robotics’ ‘Drone-in-a-box’ solution, which entails deploying a drone to stay resident at a location and collect continuous data.

“We’re deploying this now in tank farms,” Dassler says, including Shell Energy and Chemicals Park Rheinland site in Germany.

To inspect these tanks manually, a worker will typically climb up the 25-metre-high tank, usually containing oil, three times a week to ensure the seal on the tank roof is intact, check for the presence of rainwater within the tank, and inspect for any other faults.

“It takes a lot of time for an operator to do that for 20 tanks, it’s about eight hours per day,” he adds.

“If you need to do that three times a week, you’ve already spent more than 24 hours of your 40 hours of work time running up tanks.”

Now, to reduce time, labour, cost, and accidents, Energy Robotics resident drone will be able to flutter over the tanks and collect the same data using cameras and AI technology. And it will likely be the same person previously responsible for climbing up the tank who is viewing the data from the comfort of an office.

The data is presented through high-resolution images, as well as thermal images captured by the drone, with highlighted boxes for any faults. “Those people are now sat in the operations centre, sipping a coffee and looking at the results of that,” Dassler adds,

Once the drone completes its autonomous mission, it automatically returns to its docking station to charge.

“That is a huge impact, especially if you look at, say, the baby boomer generation,” he says. “This enables them to stay longer because we’re taking away the dull, dirty, and dangerous task from them,” he reasons.

Regardless of age, Dassler claims that this technology has had a proven positive impact on worker health, because it not only takes the load off the laborious task but reduces the amount of people working night shifts, a time when accidents are most likely to occur.

For Shell, this is crucial in its step towards its own “Goal Zero” — reducing workplace accidents to nil.

Offshore facilities

Of course, this solution aims to benefit all generations and allow for the unmanning of laborious and lengthy tasks such as manually monitoring and maintaining an offshore facility.

“There are about 4000 [offshore facilities] in Northern Europe which need to be maintained and supervised,” said Dassler.

Reviewing and maintaining a facility normally entails flying a helicopter in to drop off about three people, who will walk around and check the facility, and then get picked up by the helicopter the same day or a day later.

“This is very extensive in terms of material, helicopters, and human capital.”

To tackle this, Energy Robotics makes a case for remote inspection — via the deployment of autonomous robots, including drones, and the Boston Dynamics Spot ‘dogs’, powered by Energy Robotics software, to be the eyes and ears of the facility to look out for any faults in machinery.

The robots find their way around using a digital twin they map out themselves using laser beams, and input instructions from the facility, to check machinery several times a day using cameras, sensors, and AI.

For example, the robots will look at valves and gauges enroute, and operators will receive an alert with an image if the gas pressure is reading outside of a predefined threshold range.

“Our system is taking care and making sure that you always get consistent data.”

The data is also usually in the form of high-resolution digital images, which, with the help of AI, will display the other data points, whether it is temperature for example, or the sound of a pump if it is faulty.

Onshore future

“We are now also looking at onshore capabilities, so looking at refineries and oil and gas plants, as well as power utilities where you also have large infrastructure which needs to be maintained and supervised,” explains Dassler.

In a gas plant, robots equipped with sensitive gas detectors, for instance, will perform regular inspection rounds to ensure early detection of leaks, even in areas not accessible to fixed sensors.

Substations can be best described as the “socket” of the energy transition, transmitting electricity to various grid levels and collecting the renewable energy.

More wind and solar farms being built across Europe necessitates even more substations but there is a lack of skills within the sector.

“It’s the same problem here, due to demographic changes and the baby boomers leaving, power utility companies are under strong pressure.”

These facilities still need to be inspected and need to have eyes and ears especially because of the increased forecast of severe weather conditions and storms.

“You want to have some intelligence data coming from those substations,” he adds. “Not only to monitor the substations for the machines but also if somebody was to break in.”

With this, “there’s a lot of potential to build and automate these substations, and we’re working with the big power providers right now to have fully autonomous and unmanned substations.”

Energy Robotics has autonomous robots monitoring a power supplier Bayernwerk’s substation in Bavaria, which use AI to inspect any fence defects, analyse analogue displays such as oil levels, and detect any impending overheating using thermography.

“By digitalising their inspection processes with our automated inspection solution, Bayernwerk benefits from increased productivity, quality and safety,” says Dassler.

Rather than a human having to drive about two hours to run around and figure out what the cause of a fault is, Dassler’s vision is that for robots to be flying around and spot any issues quickly.

“If you have fewer people available, you really want to make sure that you make the most out of it,” he says. “And the feedback we’re getting from humans is overwhelming, because they’re really happy to have a robot tool doing the job which they don’t want to do.”

It’s just like having a dishwasher, he concludes, “because no one wants to do the washing up.”

The post Robots to combat ‘boomer brain drain’ in manual jobs appeared first on TechInformed.

Professor Hiroyuki Tomiyama from Ritsumeikan University, Japan, led a research team to create DPPFA−Net (Dynamic Point-Pixel Feature Alignment Network), which makes multi-modal 3D object detection more accurate and robust, the team claimed.

According to the study, published in the IEEE Internet of Things Journal, most 3D object detection methods use LiDAR sensors to scan and measure the distances of objects and surfaces around the source, however this data alone can lead to errors due to the high sensitivity of LiDAR to noise, especially in adverse weather conditions like rainfall.

The DPPFA−Net model comprises multiple instances of three novel modules: the Memory-based Point-Pixel Fusion (MPPF) module; the Deformable Point-Pixel Fusion (DPPF) module, and the Semantic Alignment Evaluator (SAE) module.

The MPPF module is tasked with performing interactions between intra-modal features (2D with 2D and 3D with 3D) and cross-modal features (2D with 3D).

The use of the 2D image as a memory bank is said to reduce the difficulty in network learning and makes the system more robust against noise in 3D point clouds. Moreover, it promotes the use of more comprehensive and discriminative features.

In contrast, the DPPF module performs interactions only at pixels in key positions, which are determined via a smart sampling strategy. This allows for feature fusion in high resolutions at a low computational complexity.

Finally, the SAE module helps ensure semantic alignment between both data representations during the fusion process, which mitigates the issue of feature ambiguity.

The team evaluated DPPFA−Net against the top performers for the widely used KITTI Vision Benchmark.

The network achieved precision improvements as high as 7% under different noise conditions. The team also created a new noisy dataset by introducing artificial multi-modal noise in the form of rainfall to the KITTI dataset.

The results show that the proposed network performed better than existing models not only in the face of severe occlusions but also under various levels of adverse weather conditions.

“Our extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset and challenging multi-modal noisy cases reveal that DPPFA-Net reaches a new state-of-the-art,” said Tomiyama.

“Our study could facilitate a better understanding and adaptation of robots to their working environments, allowing a more precise perception of small targets,” he added. “Such advancements will help improve the capabilities of robots in various applications.”

Last year, we reported on a research team at the University of Cambridge which had designed a low cost energy efficient robotic hand capable of grasping objects as delicate as an egg,  by using the movement in its wrist and the feeling in its skin.

The post Scientists develop 3D object detection system for robots and self-driving cars appeared first on TechInformed.