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Bob Macintosh worked at Kuka for 12 years. Now semi-retired and writing because he has things to say.
IndustrialTaiwan's BizLink just agreed to buy Blackstone's Interplex Datacom unit for $850 million, and if you're not paying attention to connector supply chains, you probably should be.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 3 hours ago · 4 min
AI ModelsGoogle just slashed the cost of its AI Plus plan, and everyone's calling it a win for consumers. They're not wrong, but they're missing the bigger story.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 8 hours ago · 4 min
IndustrialJeep is telling Wrangler and Gladiator owners to park outside because the vehicles might catch fire. Bob has some thoughts on how this kind of thing happens.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 12 hours ago · 3 min
Big investment, big claims. But for those of us who've spent decades watching automation hype cycles come and go, the question is whether quantum actually changes anything in industrial settings.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 14 hours ago · 3 min
A pair of recent robotics papers poke at something the industry has quietly glossed over for years: robots completing tasks isn't the same as robots doing them right.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · Yesterday · 4 min
Everyone's reporting the number. Not many are asking whether the timing actually makes sense.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · Yesterday · 4 min
Two new papers on robotic hand control are worth paying attention to, but not for the reasons most write-ups will tell you.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · Yesterday · 4 min
Two new research papers out of arXiv show acrobatic drone control has moved well past party tricks and into genuinely unsettling territory.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 2 days ago · 4 min
Two new papers show robots recovering from falls on rough terrain. I've been waiting 15 years for this.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 2 days ago · 4 min
A batch of new papers suggests the field is moving past toy problems, but I've seen this movie before.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 2 days ago · 3 min
Two new research projects tackle the sensor integration problem that's plagued force-aware manipulation for years, and I'll be honest, the approaches are clever.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 2 days ago · 4 min
Two recent papers tackle the computational bottleneck that's kept advanced localization systems stuck in the lab.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 3 days ago · 3 min
Everyone's covering the financial circus. I'm more interested in what happens when Optimus gets a war chest.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 3 days ago · 3 min
Two new papers show real progress on autonomous UAV coordination. I've got some thoughts on where this is heading.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 3 days ago · 4 min
Everyone's comparing the MacBook Neo to Acer's Swift Air 14, but I'm sitting here wondering why nobody's building affordable compute for the factory floor.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 3 days ago · 3 min
Researchers are getting creative with VR annotation and physics-aware scene graphs, but we've been here before.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 3 days ago · 4 min
An iPhone update might seem off my beat, but the underlying tech here is worth watching if you're in factory automation.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 4 days ago · 3 min
Tim Cook's last keynote promises a smarter Siri, but those of us in manufacturing have heard this tune before.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 4 days ago · 3 min
Look, I've watched Amazon squeeze suppliers for decades. This Alexa design thing? It's the same playbook, just prettier.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 4 days ago · 4 min
Everyone's covering BCI as a healthcare story, but the real disruption is coming for industrial control systems.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 4 days ago · 4 min
Three million chips is a big number, but let's talk about what's really happening here.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 4 days ago · 4 min
I've watched enough product launches to know when something big is brewing, and Apple's developer conference has my attention this year.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 5 days ago · 3 min
Bear with me here. There's a reason I'm paying attention to consumer wearables, and it has everything to do with what's coming to the factory floor.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 5 days ago · 4 min
Meta's support agent got social-engineered into handing over Instagram accounts, and I'll be honest, this is exactly what some of us warned about years ago.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 6 days ago · 3 min
