by Gary Mintchell | Dec 8, 2025 | Robots
I just listened to two tech guys on a podcast talking about Google as a full stack AI company with its Gemini plus its own TPU chips—no reliance on Nvidia’s GPUs. Contrast with OpenAI, which only owns the software. It depends upon Nvidia for the chips and others to build the massive data centers.
Then, I receive a press release relative to industrial robotics where they tout—Bringing a new meaning to the term full-stack company, Flexiv’s own AMR platform makes the company’s entire hardware and software stack fully in-house.
Flexiv designs and builds general-purpose robotics. The company has designed an autonomous mobile vehicle product that mashes up with its robotics. Therefore, “full-stack”. Interesting. And probably useful.
Flexiv, a global leader in general-purpose robotics, is proud to announce the launch of the Flexiv Mobile Robot (FMR) 300, the company’s first self-developed autonomous mobile robot platform. Engineered to expand the operating space of Flexiv’s adaptive robots and eliminate the limitations of stationary workspaces, the FMR 300 represents a major milestone in mobile manipulation and next generation factory automation.
A few of the necessary features:
Featuring a compact footprint of 31 by 24 inches and a height of 34 inches, along with a payload capacity of 600 pounds, the FMR 300 allows customers to deploy advanced adaptive robotic solutions in space constrained environments.
Powered by a 72 Ah lithium-iron battery, the FMR 300 can operate for up to eight hours under typical workloads. If the platform detects that its battery needs recharging, it can autonomously navigate to its charging dock, enabling true “lights-out” operational capability.
When used in conjunction with a Rizon-series adaptive robot, positional errors caused by platform movement or workpiece misalignment can be compensated for as a Rizon robot can use its force sensitivity to “feel out” the exact location of the workpiece. This eliminates the need for computer vision and controlled lighting, enabling reliable operation in dynamic, unstructured environments where conventional AMR–cobot solutions typically fail.
The FMR 300 features high precision laser SLAM navigation, two-wheel differential motion control, and built in collision detection to ensure safe human robot interaction. If necessary, the platform can also incorporate computer vision for enhanced collision avoidance in crowded or highly dynamic workplaces.
One-stop Shop:
From programming software to robot arms, grippers, and now AMRs, Flexiv’s entire portfolio is developed in house. This not only makes creating complex automation solutions easier but also reduces commissioning time and troubleshooting.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 26, 2025 | Automation, News, Robots, Technology
The only news emanating from Automation Fair last week was the announcement of a plan to build a 1 million sq ft manufacturing and warehousing facility in southeast Wisconsin. Executives also reinforced earlier news regarding its regrouping of the cybersecurity SecureOT Solution Suite and the new ControlLogix 5590.
Executives appeared before the assembled media and analyst folks attending to highlight areas of emphasis that Rockwell Automation wished to promote. These talks were enlightening about the current state of Rockwell Automation’s thinking on what is important in this market and where Rockwell fits at this time.
Bob Buttermore, senior vice president, chief supply chain officer, has often appeared as the point person for using Rockwell products and services to improve internal and external supply chains within the company. Part of the new plant announcement included investing $2B in Rockwell operations to test and prove the next generation of industrial technology.
Our existing facilities in Singapore, Twinsburg and Milwaukee serve as live innovation labs, showing how new tools and processes perform in real-world manufacturing. These plants give customers a front-row seat to breakthrough solutions and demonstrate how Rockwell is shaping the future of smart, efficient and resilient manufacturing.
The old Silicon Valley phrase was “eating your own dog food.” The today Rockwell Automation version is Rok on Rok. Buttermore told us the team in Singapore took initiative to work with the local government and internal Rockwell resources to bring reality to “factory of the future” improvements. Learnings from that initiative are being applied within the Twinsburg, Ohio facility. They will be used to build the new Wisconsin facility when the time comes.
Special kudos to Buttermore for going beyond the pablum “we use AI” phrase to pinpointing which aspects of AI are used where. So refreshing to get something closer to specifics.
Speaking of AI, Rockwell has an executive in charge. Jordan Reynolds, Vice President, Artificial Intelligence & Autonomy, spoke about companies going beyond embedding AI in technology by incorporating it in workflows, and further using it to empower the people using the technology.
His talking point—As AI becomes more deeply embedded in operations, manufacturers must ensure their teams are not only equipped with the right skills but also confident in using AI to make faster, smarter decisions. In fact, 47% of manufacturers responded that AI comfortability is a “very important skill” in their workforce according to the 2025 State of Smart Manufacturing Report, which marks a 10% increase from 2024.
Sustainability remains an important mission. A panel brought together leaders from Circulor, Bolder Industries, and Utility Global to discuss how their innovations are accelerating the transition to a low-carbon future. The conversation highlighted the role of circular manufacturing, supply chain transparency, and clean hydrogen in building reliable and sustainable energy infrastructure. Panelists discussed overcoming regulatory, operational, and technological challenges through strategic partnerships and advanced automation.
My long history with Rockwell Automation includes nothing about robotics. Given a couple of recent acquisitions, the company has a new vice president of robotics, Ryan Gariepy. He was CTO of OTTO, the recently acquired AMR company. He’s excited about bringing together the array of robotics technology. This includes software Unified Robot Control and software-defined automation. Mobile with Clearpath development platform and the OTTO Autonomous Mobile Robotics. An integration ecosystems with Emulate 3D and OTTO Fleet Manager.
Running the anchor leg of the relay was Dan DeYoung, Vice President & General Manager, Design & Control. We saw him later showing off the ControlLogix 5590. This session focused on the future of software-defined automation. Rockwell sees the future of industrial automation as one where control systems can rapidly adapt and grow as new disciplines emerge. “With software defined automation, we are rethinking how robotics, vision, AI and ML come together with the core strengths of our multidiscipline control. Our focus is on creating an environment where these technologies can be integrated with speed and simplicity, shaping a future where automation is more flexible, scalable and ready for what’s next.”
It was at this point that a question from the audience asked about adoption of IEC 61131 programming and especially about the PLCOpen nirvana of write once/run anywhere. That is, write control code in your IDE of choice in a 61131 language and then target control platforms from any vendor. There was no comment. (Something I expected.) As Ed Sheeran put it, I was Thinking Out Loud on this longer thought piece about that topic.
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by Gary Mintchell | Nov 11, 2025 | Automation, Robots, Standards
I’m betting that you know where you are in terms of physical location. They once asked on TV ads, “Do you know where your kids are?” Now the questions are, “Do you know where your machines are?” and “Do your machines know where they are?”
OPC Foundation continues its quest to link to everything possible. Its list of “companion specs” is long. This new concerns a partnership regarding spatial understanding—by networked industrial systems of machines, robots, and mobile systems understanding one another by physical location. Sounds useful for things moving around the factory.
This partnership includes AIM-D, omlox, and the OPC Foundation creating a new OPC UA specification.
Industrial automation is facing a paradigm shift: machines, robots, and mobile systems are learning to “understand” space. With the new OPC UA Companion Specification for Identification and Locating, AIM-D e.V., PROFIBUS & PROFINET International (PI) with the open locating standard omlox, and the OPC Foundation are establishing the foundation for a common language of “spatial intelligence.”
Physical AI – that is, AI that actively perceives physical space and acts contextually – requires a unified understanding of positions, movements, and identities in space. This is precisely where the new Companion Specification comes in: it harmonizes the spatial data model for absolute positions within the OPC Foundation and allows for a unified global positioning of assets in the physical and digital world.
This enables a seamless integration of spatial data into industrial IT and OT systems – a prerequisite for autonomous mobile robots, intelligent assistance systems, and self-organizing production environments.
The new specification is now freely available on the OPC Foundation’s website and is considered a milestone for the next evolutionary stage of industrial intelligence.
The collaboration between AIM-D, omlox / PI, and the OPC Foundation brings together the disciplines of identification, locating, and communication in a common spatial context. This creates a decisive foundation to equip robots, vehicles, and machines with a shared spatial understanding – the key to Physical AI, resilient supply chains, and autonomous industrial ecosystems.
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by Gary Mintchell | Nov 5, 2025 | Robots
Rockwell Automation’s evolution during the past five or more years has been instructive of the direction of American industry. Rockwell has been acquiring some interesting companies, one of which was Clearpath Robotics. This release bows to the current climate of building in America plus the growth of Autonomous Mobile Robots in manufacturing as well as in warehouse.
Rockwell Automation announced the first autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) have officially rolled off the production line at its global headquarters in Milwaukee.
The new 25,000 square feet OTTO production space at the Milwaukee campus is now assembling the OTTO 600 and OTTO 1200 AMRs, robots designed to move heavy materials safely and efficiently across busy factory floors and in tight spaces. By reducing reliance on manual forklifts, the AMRs help manufacturers increase safety, improve transition times, minimize damage to goods, and create more resilient and sustainable operations.
What makes these robots unique:
- Laser scanners scan the room more than 30 times per second, building a virtual map in their memory of the room around them.
- Through shared communication, each robot is aware of the other robots in the room and their locations, even around corners.
- Every OTTO AMR completes over 15 miles of driving before being considered ready to ship to the customer.
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by Gary Mintchell | Oct 22, 2025 | Robots, Technology
Crazy Stupid Tech, Interview of Rodney Brooks with Om Malik.
iRobot Founder: Don’t Believe The (AI & Robotics) Hype!
This is a must read interview for all of us interested in the current technology trajectories. Veteran technology journalist Om Malik interviewed iRobot Founder Rodney Brooks about robots, AI, and technology trajectories.
We are in the middle of another massive technological wave, thanks to generative artificial intelligence and its offshoot, robotics. A tanker load of money is being poured into these two areas, and it has come with increasingly breathless promotional activity. It warrants a reality check. For that, I turned to Rodney Brooks, who has spent decades in both arenas. The Australian-born Brooks was a Professor of Robotics at MIT and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has founded three companies: iRobot (maker of the Roomba), Rethink Robotics, and now Robust.AI, which now builds warehouse automation robots. He is an academic who entered the startup arena and hasn’t left it since.
Rodney: At MIT, I taught big classes with lots of students, so maybe that helped. I came here in an Uber this morning and asked the guy what street we were on. He had no clue. He said, “I just follow it.” (‘It’ being the GPS—Ed.) And that’s the issue—there’s human intervention, but people can’t figure out how to help when things go wrong.
Rodney: My companies have always been about letting the person still have control. The previous one, Rethink Robotics, involved people showing the robot what to do. The Roomba had a handle; if it got stuck, you could pick it up and move it. If a human grabs the Carta cart, they’re now in charge. If you grab its magic handlebar, you are like Superman—you move your hand a little, and it amplifies what you’re doing. We make the floor worker take control and put it in the right place without much physical effort.
There’s a tendency to go for the flashy demo, but the flashy demo doesn’t deal with the real environment. It’s going to have to operate in the messy reality. That’s why it takes so long for these technologies.
Rodney: I think we need multiple education approaches and not put everything in the same bucket. I see this in Australia—”What’s your bachelor’s degree?” “I’m doing a bachelor’s degree in tourism management.” That’s not an intellectual pursuit, that’s job training, and we should make that distinction. The German system has had this for a long time—job training being a very big part of their education, but it’s not the same as their elite universities.
[ Brooks is right in pointing out that we are busy propping up an education system that creates work for an industrial and industrial-version of digital economies. Germans (and many other parts of the world) have this idea of diplomas in specialized trade skills, which is exactly how we are going to be thinking about in the future, because the idea of work, augmented by digitized automation, both robotic and software, will need to evolve. As such, we need to really rethink the entire map of employment and fine-tune “collegial output” in terms of jobs needed to be done in tandem with the emergence of rapid computerized automation. The United States is still trying to use the same template of education that it has for decades. –OM ]
When Elon Musk decided he wanted to put stuff into orbit, he didn’t say, “I’ll write a Python script, and that will get stuff into orbit.” He had to figure out how to burn fuel efficiently, worry about mass, liquid flows, high temperatures, because you can write as big a program as you want, it’s not going to get stuff into orbit. Computation is not the stuff you need to physically move things.
I started manufacturing in China in the late ’90s. Just last week, my company put out a press release that Foxconn is going to build our robots at scale. They’re based in Taiwan, but it’s undeniable—if you want to do something at scale, that’s how you have to do it.
But let’s look ahead to this century. Fifty years from now, all the innovation is going to be happening in Nigeria. They’re going to be such a big part of the world population, and they’re going to have so many problems they have to deal with, and they will deal with them. Nigeria is going to be the center of the technological universe by the end of this century. (Just as China and its large population, and its need to solve its problems made it into an economic powerhouse, Brooks believes the sheer size of Nigeria is going to make it an economic and technological epicenter.–Ed)
Rodney: I was at a Brown University commencement giving a talk. And we were bemoaning the loss of US manufacturing. I asked the parents of the about to be Brown graduates—do who wants your kids to work in a factory? Oh no, not us! The poor people need the jobs, not my child. Who aspires that their kid is going to work at the sewage company? This bemoaning of manufacturing being lost is a little duplicitous—it’s not for us, it’s for the poor people.
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by Gary Mintchell | Oct 20, 2025 | Commentary, News, Robots
News reports back in the early 1980s continuously propagated the idea that Japan was far ahead of the US installing robots in manufacturing. Digging below the headlines, we could discover some pertinent technology facts.
We had two principle ways to pick parts, say off a conveyor, and place them into an assembly or on a pallet. One was a simple X-Y axis “pick-and-place”. The other was a 3-axis (or more) SCARA robot or a 5-axis robot (á la Fanuc or Asea). Japan considered all of the above as robots, whereas only the latter were considered robots in the US.
I really like News Items by John Ellis. He recently posted this news items sourcing The New York Times (hardly a bastion of authentic manufacturing information).
China is making and installing factory robots at a far greater pace than any other country, with the United States a distant third, further strengthening China’s already dominant global role in manufacturing. There were more than two million robots working in Chinese factories last year, according to a report released Thursday by the International Federation of Robotics, a nonprofit trade group for makers of industrial robots. Factories in China installed nearly 300,000 new robots last year, more than the rest of the world combined, the report found. American factories installed 34,000. While Chinese factories have been using more robots, they have also gotten better at making them. (Source: nytimes.com)
Perhaps China needs to install more robots because it is still catching up to US manufacturing? Not sure, but worth asking. Sometimes gross numbers from an industry group can be misleading. It’s like using percentages in places where percentage gain or loss is essentially meaningless.
I think another angle is to consider that the robot market in the US became mature. Even the collaborative robot market is saturating. Adding AI technologies and new form factors looks promising for expanding the market. I’d like to see much more depth—both from the IFR and the NYT.
More troubling was another item from the NYT on News Items.
New national test results for 12th graders, released this month, showed significant declines in students’ math and reading abilities since 2019, results that are now being felt in college and the labor market. On the national test, students’ reading scores were the worst in three decades, and math scores were the lowest since 2005. The scores are at least partially explained by the pandemic and school closures.
The numbers have not been good for quite some time. They offer an explanation that perhaps partially explains the drop. My neighbor, for example, taught 8th-grade math during the pandemic. She was frustrated trying to teach math over Zoom. But this is not a new phenomenon.
Anther contributor to the comparison numbers lies in the population. We test everyone in the US. Other countries do not test the entire population of students or may not have every child enrolled in that type of school.
So, the NYT falls into a trope:
But they also reflect broader societal changes, including an increase in time spent in front of screens for both young people and adults.
But they also point to something I’ve seen through the eyes of my wife—a long-time elementary school teacher.
The decline was primarily driven by lower-scoring students, who have been losing ground for a decade.
She was frustrated at both ends of the spectrum. Some parents didn’t care or were not supportive of their child. On the other hand, other parents pressed for special treatment, exemption from work, automatic better grades, and the like (helicopter or snow-plow parents).
They are correct in trying to come up with consequences:
The results have vast consequences for a generation of students, the U.S. economy and the country, which already ranks 28th in the world for math, behind Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and nearly every other major industrialized democracy. The world’s highest-performing countries not only produce students who outscore the brightest American students at the top. They also manage to lift far more students up to a base level of skill — something some experts believe is only going to become more important in a world of artificial intelligence.
What can you do to help? Offer to tutor? Find ways to encourage kids? Sponsor a First Robotics team?
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