Work Revolutionized by ROBOTS

In 2015, Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, asserted that we were on the brink of a “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” one powered by a fusion of technologies, such as advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things.

“[This revolution] will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another,” wrote Schwab in an essay published in Foreign Affairs. “In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.”

The recent surge of developments in AI and robotics — and their deployment into the workforce — seems right in line with his predictions, although almost ten years on.

“We see a future where 

general-purpose robots are 

as ubiquitous as cars, 

helping people to do work 

that needs doing.”

GEORDIE ROSE

While robots have been in factories for decades, they’ve traditionally been purpose-built to automate just one task — a robotic arm might be added to the assembly line at an auto factory to weld two parts together over and over again, for example Humanoids are robots that mimic the size, shape, and capabilities of people. That would make them a perfect physical fit for any workspace.         READ MORE...

Faster Than A Human Construction Crew

California-based startup Built Robotics has unveiled a huge autonomous construction robot that speeds up the creation of utility-scale solar farms — accelerating the transition to a clean energy future and making workers safer, too.

The challenge: Electricity generation is responsible for more than 30% of the US’s carbon emissions, so transitioning the grid away from fossil fuels and toward renewables, such as solar, is essential to combating climate change. Not only that, we’ll need to generate a lot more electricity as we increasingly electrify cars, machines, and industry.

To meet the demands of the future, automation is gonna be key in the construction world.

JUSTIN RUSSELL

Constructing a utility-scale solar farm is a major undertaking, though: once a company goes through the potentially years-long process of finding a site and securing permits, it can still take another couple of years to build the solar farm.


Moreover, as solar panels have gotten dramatically cheaper, an increasingly large share of the cost of solar power is coming from things other than the panels themselves, like construction and labor. If we’re going to keep pushing the price of solar down, we’ll have to get more productive at those things, too.

The construction robot: Built Robotics has now unveiled RPD 35, an autonomous construction robot that accelerates an important part of building a utility-scale solar farm: installing solar piles.

These heavy steel beams are about 15 feet long, and during solar farm construction, they’re driven about eight feet into the ground — the part of the pile that remains exposed then serves as the foundation for a solar array.  READ MORE...