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This year’s Amazon Robotics competition was designed to find a machine that could identify, pick up and store item. The winners consisted of university students as part of the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision. The team built their machine without a robot arm, instead opting to do the picking from above using a sliding mechanism and walked away with an $80,000 cash prize."The parts for the robot were cheap by the standards of typical industrial robots and it could be built for unde …

In Boston today, TechCrunch is hosting its “The Minds Behind the Machines” robotics meeting to foster comprehensive discussion and networking with the entire robotics community from researchers to technologists to students. The conference offers robot demonstrations as well as a variety of topics like Human-Robot Interaction, Hardware Setup Challenges, and Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. The conference was broken out from TechCrunch’s larger Disrupt events due to it being …

The first book I ever read about package design was The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans and Tubes, by Thomas Hine, a Philadelphia-based author, as it turns out. In his fascinating book, Hine describes the progression of packaging from utilitarian to manipulative. He cites products that are instantly recognizable by their labels even when the image is contorted and words are no longer visible. (Can you identify the product in the scramble …

Johnson & Johnson’s Greek facility required its employees to do very repetitive, boring work. To relieve employees of these tasks, the company installed Universal Robots collaborative robot technology to increase morale and allow employees to pursue more interesting work at the company.The robot would have to perform multiple complicated tasks including picking up different types of bottles, transferring them to a packaging machine and sorting them by product type. Johnson & Johnson i …