Sany welders train robots for Ningxiang workshop ↗
A factory visit shows workers overseeing two welding machines as roles shift around automation.
Industrial robots
Cainiao ZeeBot robots climb nine-meter racks for Singles’ Day ↗
A fleet of 135 ZeeBot robots handled bin retrieval during Singles’ Day. People still pick and pack individual products, showing the practical boundary of warehouse automation.
Colorado State builds elephant-trunk robots that bend, grab, and link up with claws at both ends ↗
Most robots are still made of rigid links and joints, so their shape is hard to change. On November 11, Colorado State University described flexible, trunk-like robots from associate professor Jianguo Zhao's group: stiff rods held by a web of tensioned cables rather than locked rigidly in place, so they can bend, collapse, and change shape. Each tube-like body has a gripping claw at both ends, used either to hold objects or to attach to another robot. The work appears in Nature Machine Intelligence. The machines still need a human pilot, though the team has shown that two robots can find each other and connect on their own.