Robot helps police counsel a depressed man

A farmer, Gajendra Singh from Rajasthan recently committed suicide by hanging himself off a tree in Central Delhi during a political rally in front of cameras, political activists and police.

In the light of this story comes another with a happier ending. An armed man threatened to jump off a flyover in San Jose, USA and the police convinced him to relent using a strange technique. They used a Robot to send a phone to the man. And they did'nt stop there - the robot would give the man a pizza if he picked up the phone! Wow.

By the way the robot they used ( Remotec ANDROS F6A normally used for bomb disposal) was teleoperated - which means there was a man controlling it over a radio link. The robot had cameras and sensors to "see" the man and the human operators could judge his behaviour in real time.

Now the ANDROS F6A is really cool cause it can climb stairs (!) and lift an amazing 30 kgs using it's arm. iRobot's Packbot is the kid brother of this mean machine and here's a video of the stair climbing.

 

Stairway to robot heaven!

Coming back to the story, the man took the phone (and the pizza!) from the robot and officers persuaded him to surrender. It's unclear whether the Robot dance of victory  was performed.

 Full story

Meet Sawyer the new offering from Rethink Robotics

Baxter is too bulky (thanks mainly to it's two arms). Rethink has done some "rethinking" and launched Sawyer which looks looks like a one armed Baxter with some interesting new additions. 

My favorite is the Cognex camera in the wrist with built-in light source for precision vision applications. Rethink wants to pitch Sawyer to electronics assembly lines in China and Asia. Here's the full article :

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/sawyer-rethink-robotics-new-robot

First-timers Overview of Robotic Arm Makers:

Kuka and ABB have led the market for robotic arms but their offerings are mostly bulky and more expensive and mostly for automotive assembly operations. 

The two main companies providing lightweight and easily programmable robotic arms are "Rethink Robotics" and "Universal Robots". Robots like the Baxter and UR-5 can be used on smaller assembly lines to pick and box items as demonstrated by the following video of Baxter: