Drone business landscape has been configured in recent years. The hardware price wars have consolidated the hardware landscape with the winner essentially forcing many out and leaving the rest at best vying for the position of being an alternative supplier.

A critical risk hanging over the future of the drone industry is safety and regulation. Today, even the current slightly more relaxed regulations put constrains on weight/payload, altitude, line-of-sight pilot control and so on.

Many consider drones as flying sensors. Indeed, nearly all applications of drones reply on some type of sensors, be it a simple camera to a complex hyperspectral or LIDAR sensor. In addition, drones are becoming more navigational autonomous.

This is a technological megatrend. Dumb load-bearing metal structures move to plastic and composite and incorporate energy harvesting and storage material - massless energy. Indeed you could call some of it negative mass energy. Goodbye components-in-a-box.

AWE should be seen as part of a bigger picture. The next generation of zero emission electricity producing technologies has no huge steel and concrete infrastructure, so it can have much less cost and installation time and making it redeployable.

The drone market has boomed in recent years. This is essentially because easy-to-use, reliable and small-sized flying machines have become available at highly accessible prices- well in the range of consumer electronic products. This has created its own demand amongst customers and professional.

Magically, next generation electricity production continuous (base) electricity production can avoid the massive concrete and steel structures currently used for nuclear power stations with their 1000 year fuel rod problem.

The term machine vision describes a group of technologies that enable a machine to see via imaging for the purpose of process automation, and often refers to industrial vision systems. Applications of machine vision include automated product inspection and vision guided robotics. Here we consider four technology types: illuminating, sensing, processing and learning.

This article will highlight some of the key advancements surrounding automation for the composite industry.

IDTechEx recently visited Automatica 2018 in Munich. This is the largest biannual automation event in Europe. At this show IDTechEx focused on three trends: collaborative robotic arms, mobile robots, and various associated sensors. In this article, we provide a review of various company highlights.

Traditional robotic arms are caged, operating in robot-only zones. This is changing with the emergence of collaborative robotic arms.

In the past five years or so several major research groups have demonstrated that robots can learn to grasp novel varied objects with accuracy levels around 80-85%. Still performance levels, even in the labs, are sub-human but this is changing fast.

Last mile delivery remains an expensive affair in the parcel delivery business, often representing more than half of the total cost. Its importance is also growing thanks to a change in the composition of total deliveries with B2C deliveries rapidly taking on a bigger share. E-commerce companies are also pushing next-day and now same-day services, often at a major growing loss, hoping to take away that last stronghold of bricks-and-mortar shops: instant customer fulfilment. It is within this context that autonomising the movement in the last mile delivery step finds its imperative.

Trucking is a big business. In this article we will demonstrate how and why trucking driving is going autonomous.

This article covers a number of topics to highlight how robotic technology within agriculture is altering the landscape.

This premium articles consider mobile robotics on material handling industrial vehicles. It show how the rise of navigational autonomy will render, in time, the incumbent infrastructure-dependant automated vehicle technology obsolete, and how it will have a transformative impact on the fortunes of the greater material handling vehicle industry. Indeed, it will show how navigational autonomy will induce a colossal transfer of value from wage bills paid for human-provided driving services towards spent on autonomous industrial vehicles. This, in turn, will fuel the growth in this material handling vehicle industry (e.g., forklift), creating significant revenues over a business-as-usual scenario. This takes place despite our technology roadmap showing that hardware commoditisation will slowly devalue such driving services particularly in high-wage regions.

Trucking is a big business. In the US, trucking industry revenues are in excess of $726bn. No wonder then that autonomous trucking is a hot topic.