Demonstrating static electricity by using a charged balloon to levitate your hair is a classic science experiment. But, imagine if you could harness the same static cling to handle a material as fragile as an egg, as flimsy as soft fabric - or to assemble the uppers of Nike trainers at 20 times the pace of a human worker. Hatched in the heart of Silicon Valley, in Sunnyvale, California, robotics start-up Grabit is harnessing static electricity, machine learning and automation from Toshiba Machine partner, TM Robotics, to do just that. Material handling is one of the most labour-intensive and expensive aspects of manufacturing, and when dealing with an array of different materials, the process is impossible to automate. Assembling a pair of Nikes requires as many as 40 pieces of material to be stacked and heated to create the upper, the flexible part that sits on top of your foot. For a human worker, arranging the pieces of material can take up to 20 minutes. However, Grabit's technology allows a machine to do this in as little as 50 seconds.
展开▼
