Hi folks, welcome to This Is Robotics for February 2024, Episode #28. I’m Tom Green, your host and companion as we travel together through the big, wide world of modern robotics…and now, robotics is getting even better as it converges with artificial intelligence.

Ah, the age of smart robots is upon us.

Thanks again for making This Is Robotics the #1 robotics news podcast worldwide…for two years running.

We did some investigative journalism this month to find out why…and we were surprised at what we found. You will be as well. An article series on the topic we published in Asian Robotics Review titled Why So Little Robot Automation in America? got over 10,000 hits. Our email response from our readership attested to the fact that we were not the only ones surprised by our findings. It’s accompanied by a news report from CBS which also covered the strange state of robotics in the U.S.

Then we’ll dip off into What’s New in Robotics? What’s New in Robotics? is the blog we write in partnership with Robotiq.

From the blog, we present here at This Is Robotics three FIRST-EVERS in robotics. We love what people have been doing with robots and cobots lately. Simply amazing!

Two of them hail from Korea: Hyundai’s micro-factory in Singapore; and a huge breakthrough by Koreans in teaching robots to respond to the human voice. Then we nip over to Argonne Laboratories to see cobots in a first-ever making medical radioisotopes.

We close out the podcast with what is the biggest story in robotics for the foreseeable future: Can Robots Save East Asia?

China, Korea, & Japan are suffering from a new pandemic: Too Few Workers, Too Many Elderly, and Too Little Automation.

China, Korea, and Japan are plagued with the very same “too few, too many, and too little” affliction simultaneously.

The clock is ticking on China, Korea, and Japan. The five years 2025 to 2030 will be critical. Each country has a plan. What is each doing…and can each plan work?

We have been following this mega-story since 2023. Along with an in-depth article series on the subject in Asian Robotics Review, we brought the story into this month’s podcast as well. We’ll show you what we know.


As always, look in the show notes for all the links to the online articles.

Thanks for coming. We appreciate your attention and loyalty.

Hi folks, welcome to This Is Robotics, and our last episode for 2023. Next up a wild and woolly 2024. We are already planning our January show. It’s forecast to be a fabulous for robotics, logistics and automation in general.

Plus, it’s also the Year of the Dragon (2024)

The dragon, one of the luckiest and most powerful symbols offering prosperity, and good fortune throughout 2024. It is the perfect time for rejuvenated beginnings and setting the foundation for long-term success.

THE STATS ARE IN FOR 2023!

Our podcast host just gave us the best-ever Christmas present from our listeners:

Once again, we are #1 worldwide for a robotics news podcast.

Across 12 time zones and 63 countries, This Is Robotics podcast was downloaded by over 3,000 fans per week!

Yearly, over 150,000 touchpoints with our listeners.

Every hour of every day 18 pairs of ears somewhere in the world seek us out for the very best news in robotics. Thank you so very much!

This closing episode for 2022, we highlight robots converging with artificial intelligence…in laboratories. Already making good headway, we look closely at what’s going on.

We’ll look at one fascinating woman’s brilliant insight on how best to discover a cure for our most intractable diseases, especially those without cures in neuroscience like ALS, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's.

How research is broken and how she’ll fix it. Hmmm, interesting. Her name, Alice Zhang, founder and CEO of Verge Genomics, and she just got $134 million to realize her brilliant insight.

We catch up with her at a lecture at Stanford where she explains it all.

Then we take a stab at answering a question we get all the time from our listening audience: How exactly do robots and AI work together in a laboratory to come up with miraculous discoveries as of late?

We go to a lab in Liverpool UK where Andy Cooper explains it all.

Then, how are all these elements taking over the industry? And giving it a name like Pharma 4.0? We present a concise, little episode excerpt that explains it all.

Wow, that’s a lot of “explaining it all” but it’s all cool stuff.

We close out our show with one of our most favorite and memorable episode excerpts, one that we get a large call to repeat throughout the year.

But, it just so happens to be a perfect Christmas story, so we retell it every December: It’s a story about China’s supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, without whom China would have no middle class or be the giant in robotics it is today.

We call it China’s Christmas Miracle. A more heartwarming tale you can’t find anywhere.

SHOW NOTES ADDENDUM

Please see the show notes for more on the incurable disease that is ALS, including one very sad diary from a 31-year-old woman just diagnosed with ALS.

ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), formerly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a neurological disorder that affects motor neurons, the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement and breathing.

As motor neurons degenerate and die, they stop sending messages to the muscles, which causes the muscles to weaken, start to twitch (fasciculations), and waste away (atrophy).

ALS is progressive. Eventually, in people with ALS, the brain loses its ability to initiate and control voluntary movements such as walking, talking, chewing and other functions, as well as breathing.

Welcome everyone to This Is Robotics, episode #26 for November, 2023.

Oh, and BTW: Thanks for making us the #1 Global Robotics News Podcast for TWO YEARS IN A ROW. I’m Tom Green, your guide and companion into the wide, wonderful world of robotics. Welcome.

It’s that time of year when we take a look at Time Magazine’s picks for its Global Top Inventions for the year. This year, 2023, there are 200 selections in 21 different categories.

Robotics, as usual, has its very own category, category #18, but my oh my, robotics, now with its new partnership in convergence with AI, has it ever seeped its way into nearly every other category.

We’ll take a look at Time’s picks, plus we’ll pull one out and showcase it. It’s an amazing 5-year-old developer called Shift Robotics, from Pittsburgh. Shift has taken robotics, AI, and automation and brought them into the shoe business. Footwear!

What caught my eye was its founder, Xunjie Zhang, and his 3-minute description of the company’s design process, the "ask it, research it, plan it, create it, test it, and improve it" of finding a problem and coming up with a solution. Beautifully clear thinking and execution. Then we’ll see what Wired’s Brent Rose thinks about the company during his visit.

Following that is our annual Homage to Pittsburgh. A segment that we run every Thanksgiving. The heartwarming story of Pittsburgh’s fall and rise on the wings of robotics, after 29 steel companies filed for bankruptcy and left the city in tatters.

I usually do a preamble to our Homage to Pittsburgh segment, but this year we have a contributor providing us with one. Florian Pestoni, well-known in the robotics biz as co-founder and CEO of InOrbit, a cloud robotics platform, who is also a pizza fanatic and a great admirer of Pittsburgh. He just made a trip to Pittsburgh and jotted down his thoughts. We’ll share them with you.

Then we’ll take a look at our newest website: Robo AI News where we aggregate and curate the best in the convergence of robotics with AI; and we’ll look to you guys to Get On Our Wall at Robo AI News. We’ll show you how. It’s simple but powerful. Robo AI News is dedicated to the most interesting man in the world: Garry Mathiason: The Man Who Knew Way Before! More on Garry a bit later in the show.

Okay, let’s get on with the news.