Monthly Archives: July 2017

BBC News

Amazon Robotics Challenge 2017 won by Australian budget bot BBC News Cartman - a budget-priced robot from Australia - has triumphed in an annual contest to create a machine that can identify, pick up and stow warehouse goods. The bot was designed from scratch to take part in 2017's Amazon Robotics Challenge and used a ... Australian robotics team win Amazon compSky News Australia Australia Won The Amazon Robotics Challenge With 'Cartman', A Cheap Robot Held Together With Cable TiesGizmodo Australia CartMan picks and sticks its way to glory in Amazon Robotics ChallengeNew Atlas all 4 news articles »

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Amazon Robotics Challenge 2017 won by Australian budget bot - BBC News

TABOR, S.D. (AP) - If you travel about three miles northeast of Tabor, there is a hillside that is home to the Pechous Dairy. It might not look different from the average dairy operation on the outside, but inside its a different story.

Housed inside the walls of the Pechous Dairys newly built free-stall barn is a high-tech system of four robots working 24/7 to milk 230 cows an average of 2.8 times per day. The new barn and advanced machinery are investments in the familys legacy as dairy farmers for future generations.

Having grown up and lived on dairy farms only two miles apart, Bob and Nancy Pechous took over Bobs parents operation in 1980 before getting married in 1981. The couple started with 30 cows in a stanchion barn and had to physically haul their own buckets of milk to the cooler. In 1986, the couple expanded their operation and built a 12-station milking parlor with a pipeline for hauling milk. The upgrade allowed them to gradually begin increasing their herd size to around 125 cows.

The addition of the milking parlor was great because everything became centralized, Nancy Pechous told the Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan (http://bit.ly/2vuoCFf ). We could have six cows on each side. Once we finished milking on one side, we could switch to the other side and rotate in six new cows.

The Pechous Dairy operated out of its 12-station milking parlor for the next 30 years with help from two hired hands and family support before changing to their current operation.

Out of their three children, only the Pechous youngest son, Kyle, decided to join the dairy as a partner. Their oldest son, Justin, operates Pechous Repair in Tabor and their daughter, Jennifer, teaches in Brandon.

Kyle was adjoined at the hip with Bob since he could walk, Nancy said. We knew he was going to be our farmer. He was always helping out at the dairy as soon as he was old enough.

Kyle obtained a degree in diesel mechanics from Northeast Community College before returning home as a full-time partner in 2005. It was his idea to upgrade to the new robotic milking system in 2016.

We got to the point where the old barn was falling apart, Nancy said. We either needed to repair it or start new. Bob and I were actually thinking about getting out of the dairy business at the time, but Kyle came up with the idea to implement the new robotic system. We decided that we were all in this together and went full speed ahead.

Construction on the new barn and the installation of the robotic milking system began in January 2016 and finished late last September.

We are now nine months into the new system, Nancy said. For the first three months, we practically lived up in the barn after it was built. Thats how long it took before the cows adjusted to the new system.

Built with the potential for expansion in mind, the new barn is divided into two main sections capable of housing 120 cows on each side. Both sections are outfitted with access to a feeding trough, back scratchers and bedded stalls. The barn is also outfitted with fans that create a constant five-mile-per-hour breeze that keeps the cows comfortable and the bugs out. Adding to the overall automation of the Pechous Dairy, manure is also automatically scrapped from the floors by a robotic system and pressed into dry bedding to be put on top of the rubber mats that cover the stall floors.

We built this for future generations, Bob Pechous said. We want to keep this dairy going and pass it down to our grandchildren.

Installed in each section are two fully-automatic milking machines, each with the capability of milking 60 cows. All the cows at the dairy have been trained to come to one of the four milking machines through the use of special protein pellets that are delivered by the robots. When a cow walks into the stall next to a machine, it reads the chip inside of a collar placed around the cows neck. The cow is then weighed and fed according to how much milk it produces.

While the cow is feeding, the machine washes each teat and hooks up to them automatically, guided by lasers. The system records how much time each cow has been attached to the machine; it even measures down to the exact time that each teat is attached and how much milk each one produced. All the milk is then automatically transported from the machine to the cooler where it waits to be hauled out by truck every other day.

If something were to go wrong with the machine, like a computer glitch or a milking cup getting knocked out of position, the system automatically calls for assistance until someone responds. As an added safety net in case of power outages, the whole dairy is also backed up by a diesel generator to ensure that the system never goes offline and the cows are always milked.

The automated system also offers total monitoring of the herd from an office computer. It notifies the dairy of which cows are in need of artificial insemination and which cows need to be dried up. It also records the weight and body temperature of each animal, as well as notifies the dairy of abnormal milk, mastitis and other potential illnesses.

The new system allows us to get to the cows before they get sick, Nancy said. It helps us to head off a lot of things before they become a real problem.

Under the new milking robotic milking system, the Pechous Dairy has seen an increase of approximately 10 pounds of milk per cow. The daily average at the dairy is currently about 80 pounds of milk per cow. Overall, the dairy produces approximately 20,000 pounds of milk per day.

My goal per cow was 86 pounds per day, Bob said. We are not far from that right now. We actually have 33 cows producing over 100 pounds of milk per day, and our top producer is at about 145 pounds per day.

Currently, two-thirds of the Pechous Dairys herd is first-time heifers who dont produce as much milk until their second lactation.

Next lactation, we are going to probably get another 10 pounds of milk per cow from the majority of our herd, Nancy said. After our first-time heifers have their second calf, they will produce more milk.

Already the largest of three dairies in Yankton County, the Pechous family said it wants to continue to lead local dairy production well into the future with the technological investments they have made at their facility.

We want to help educate people on where their dairy products come from, Bob said. A lot of people might not know what goes into the process of getting their milk from the cow to the table.

___

Information from: Yankton Press and Dakotan, http://www.yankton.net/

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South Dakota dairy looks to future with robotics - Washington Times - Washington Times

Duluth East Daredevils Teach Robotics at the Boys and Girls Club

DULUTH, Minn. Custom built robots zipped through obstacle courses at the Boys and Girls Club of Duluth this summer.

I think its fun, says Rodrick Campbell, a robotics camper. I like to play with remote control cars and how to see how they work and I like to play with my drones.

It was all part of the second annual Lego Robotics Camp.

Ive always been interested in looking at the way things work and robotics really allowed me to expand on that, says Cameron Anderson, co-captain of the Duluth East Daredevils robotics team, and a teacher at the camp.

At the camp, the Duluth East High School Daredevils robotics team teaches elementary and middle school kids the basics of programming and robotics.

Its our way of reaching out to this group who normally wouldnt be able to have this experience, says Anderson.

If you want a good hockey player, you start them young, says Tim Velner, coach of the Daredevils. If you want a good engineer, you got to start them young, and thats what were trying to do.

The kids use those skills to design and build their own robots capable of making it through a challenging course.

Theyre given a problem to solve and then they have to engineer, both mechanically and with a program, a way to solve the problem, says Velner.

If the robot cant finish, its back to the drawing board for the campers.

Most problems arent solved overnight, says Velner. Theyre solved because we have the grit to stick with it.

The kids make upgrades until their robots are unstoppable.

I learned that you should never stop trying, says camper Ira Alves.

The kids have a lot of fun and, in the process, learn valuable skills needed in the modern world.

I love the idea of inspiring the next generation especially of engineers, says Anderson.

When Im growing up, I want to be a mechanical engineer, says Campbell.

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Robotics Camp Teaches Kids Engineering and Problem Solving - FOX 21 Online

NuTonomys driverless car took a spin around in South Boston.

It was this time last year that it first occurred to me that the U.S. presidential election was a choice between two World War II acronyms: SNAFU (Situation Normal All F***ed Up) and FUBAR (F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition).

In essence, American voters faced a choice between a candidate who personified the political status quo under an arrogant and detached liberal elite and a candidate who promised the disruption of that status quo. With Hillary Clinton there was the certainty that nothing much would change. With Donald Trump there was the chance of quite a lot of change, but the risk that it would be change for the worse.

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This week, the time has arrived to break the bad news to those who voted for Trump. You wanted change. You got it. For only the second time since 1955, Republicans control both the White House and Congress. But the result is a political system that I can now officially certify as FUBAR. This is not politics. This is fubatics.

Fubatics is to politics what comedy is to news. Ever since Americans began to get their politics from comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the danger has existed that the politicians would respond by providing them and their scriptwriters with material for gags. We have now reached that point.

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On Wednesday, newly appointed White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci told a New Yorker journalist that his colleague, chief of staff Reince Priebus, was a (expletive) paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.He took to Twitter to imply that Priebus was guilty of a felony in leaking details of his financial disclosures. Meanwhile, their boss was also tweeting that he had lost faith in his very weak attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

For the White House, the attacks on the attorney general have touched off a serious problem on Capitol Hill when it did not need any other headaches.

Unified government? These guys are unified the way the cast of Reservoir Dogs were unified.

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, the plan to render most Americans and indeed most humans unemployed goes smoothly forward.

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If you dont live in northern California, you tend to assume that it will be decades before self-driving vehicles are the dominant mode of transport. Last week, British Environment Secretary Michael Gove announced that the sale of new diesel and petrol cars would be banned in the UK by 2040, to encourage people to buy electric vehicles. This time frame surely underestimates Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, not to mention the established car manufacturers currently chasing him in the race to bring electric cars to the mass market. Goves worries about diesel fumes remind me of the Times editorial in 1894 warning that, by the middle of the 20th century, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of horse manure.

Despite overwhelming evidence of the accelerating pace of technological change and its diffusion, we humans remain chronically bad at making realistic projections about our economic future. According to the American trucking industry, the number of jobs for heavy-truck drivers and tractor-trailer drivers will be 21 percent higher in 2020 than in 2010. The Bureau of Labor expects that growth to continue until 2024. Yet self-driving vehicles are already on the road in several states in the United States. The Tesla Model S that takes me to the airport is already fitted with an autopilot mode.

According to the American Trucker Association, there are 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the United States. It is the most common job in the overwhelming majority of states. But the stark reality is that truckers are sitting where the drivers of horse-drawn carriages were sitting a century ago: on the brink of unemployment. Nor are they alone. Nearly half of jobs in United States are at risk of being automated over next decade or two, according to Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxfords Martin School. Looking at global employment as a whole, the McKinsey Global Institute recently concluded that half of todays work activities could be automated by 2055, but this could happen up to 20 years earlier.

Trump voters thought it was globalization that destroyed the good jobs in American manufacturing. In reality, it was globalization and technology and now technology is getting ready to destroy the not-so-good jobs too.

As an economic historian, I cling to the hope that current predictions of the impending redundancy of humanity like similar predictions at earlier stages of industrialization will turn out to be wrong. As a reader of Dostoevskys Notes from Underground, I also expect bloody-minded humanity to put up more of a fight against the automation of the world than Silicon Valley expects. (That is probably what Steve Bannon is thinking, too.)

Yet I watch my son play gleefully with a new toy robot called RoboSapien. The G.I. Joe we gave him for Christmas lies forgotten in a corner of his bedroom. Suddenly I felt a sense of kinship with that poor, discarded doll.

The goings-on in Washington that I follow so closely are the politics of a distracted age. But the more attention we give to @realDonaldTrump on Twitter, the less we pay to the economic revolution going on all around us. The future belongs to robotics, not fubatics.

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From fubatics to robotics - The Boston Globe