Register now free-of-charge to explore this white paper This Whitepaper offers engineers and researchers a technical examination of the key design barriers in humanoid robotics and the component-level strategies emerging to address them, from sensing and motion control to power systems and thermal management. What you will learn about:   The core engineering challenges — complex motion control, safe human-robot interaction, and hardware cost constraints — that currently limit practical humanoid robot deployment. Sensing system architectures: how IMUs, gyroscopes, accelerometers, tactile sensors, and AMR magnetic sensors support real-time posture estimation, perception fusion, and environmental awareness. Motion and actuation design considerations including actuator-level power delivery, motor noise mitigation, PCB bend-stress resistance, and dexterous hand integration. Power and thermal system trade-offs: battery chemistry selection (LFP vs. NCA), BMS design, DC/DC converter topologies, and thermistor-based protection for operational reliability. Click 'LOOK INSIDE' to Download Now.

Register now free-of-charge to explore this white paper The future of robotics is being shaped by powerful technologies like AI, edge computing, and high-speed connectivity, driving smarter, more responsive machines across industries. Robots are no longer confined to static environments—they are evolving to interact dynamically with humans and their surroundings. This eBook explores the impact of robotics in diverse fields, from home automation and medical technology to automotive, data centers, and industrial applications. It highlights challenges like power efficiency, miniaturization, and ruggedization, while showcasing Molex’s innovative solutions tailored for each domain. Additionally, the eBook covers: Ruggedized connectors for harsh industrial settings Advanced power management for home robots Miniaturized systems for precision medical robotics 5G/6G-enabled autonomous vehicles High-speed data solutions for cloud infrastructure Download Whitepaper

Welcome to your essential guide to functional safety, tailored specifically for product developers. In a world where technology is increasingly integrated into every aspect of our lives—from industrial robots to autonomous vehicles—the potential for harm from product malfunctions makes functional safety not just important, but critical. This webinar cuts through the complexity to provide a clear understanding of what functional safety truly entails and why it's critical for product success. We'll start by defining functional safety not by its often-confusing official terms, but as a structured methodology for managing risk through defined engineering processes, essential product design requirements, and probabilistic analysis. The “north star” goals? To ensure your product not only works reliably but, if it does fail, it does so in a safe and predictable manner. We'll dive into two fundamental concepts: the Safety Lifecycle, a detailed engineering process focused on design quality to minimize systematic failures, and Probabilistic, Performance-Based Design using reliability metrics to minimize random hardware failures. You'll learn about IEC 61508, the foundational standard for functional safety, and how numerous industry-specific standards derive from it. The webinar will walk you through the Engineering Design phases: analyzing hazards and required risk reduction, realizing optimal designs, and ensuring safe operation. We'll demystify the Performance Concept and the critical Safety Integrity Level (SIL), explaining its definition, criteria (systematic capability, architectural constraints, PFD), and how it relates to industry-specific priorities. Discover key Design Verification techniques like DFMEA/DDMA and FMEDA, emphasizing how these tools help identify and address problems early in development. We'll detail the FMEDA technique showing how design decisions directly impact predictions like safe and dangerous failure rates, diagnostic coverage, and useful life. Finally, we'll cover Functional Safety Certification, explaining its purpose, process, and what adjustments to your development process can set you up for success.

Register now free-of-charge to explore this white paper How Embodied Intelligence Enhances the Safety, Resilience, and Autonomy of UAV Systems As drones evolve into critical agents across defense, disaster response, and infrastructure inspection, they must become more adaptive, secure, and resilient. Traditional AI methods fall short in real-world unpredictability. This whitepaper from the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) explores how Embodied AI - AI that integrates perception, action, memory, and learning in dynamic environments, can revolutionize drone operations. Drawing from innovations in GenAI, Physical AI, and zero-trust frameworks, TII outlines a future where drones can perceive threats, adapt to change, and collaborate safely in real time. The result: smarter, safer, and more secure autonomous aerial systems. What Attendees will Learn: Why Embodied AI Outperforms Traditional AI The 4 Pillars of Drone Intelligence Swarm Resilience in Dynamic Environments Security Breakthroughs for Critical Missions Click on the cover to download the white paper PDF now.

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The promising thing about laundry-folding robots is that they target a job that everybody does frequently, and nobody really likes. But to be successful in robotics, especially in consumer robotics, you have to be both affordable and reliable, and robots are, still, generally awful at those things. Laundroid, a robotic system that could ingest wads of laundry and somehow spit out neatly folded clothes, put on a few demos at CES over the past few years, but the Japanese company behind it just announced bankruptcy--probably because the robot didn't work all the time, and would likely have been absurdly expensive. Laundroid may not have been a success, but does that mean that other laundry-folding robots, most notably Foldimate, are doomed as well? The original Laundroid concept was to combine washing clothes, drying clothes, ironing clothes, and folding clothes into one single (magical?)

Barely an hour ago, Recode broke the news that Anki, the consumer robotics company behind both Vector, Cozmo, and Overdrive, will be terminating several hundred employees and shutting down on Wednesday after it failed to secure a new round of financing at the end of last week. This is a significant blow to the consumer robotics industry: Anki, which came out of stealth during Apple's WWDC in 2013, had nearly US $100 million in revenue in 2017, and they seemed to have found a sweet spot with relatively sophisticated robotic toys that were still at least somewhat affordable. Despite having sold more than 1.5 million robots (hundreds of thousands of which were Cozmos) as of late last year, it wasn't enough "to support a hardware and software business and bridge to our long-term product roadmap," Anki said in a statement sent to press today. While the details of what happened at Anki are still developing, the company told Recode that "a significant financial deal at a late stage fell through with a strategic investor and we were not able to reach an agreement." This is despite additional reports that a variety of companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Comcast, were all potentially interested in acquiring Anki.