As far back as 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird successfully transmitted the first recognisable image using a device he called the Televisor. However, the technology was held back until after 1947 when John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley of Bell Laboratories co-invented the transistor. With the UK’s first robotics week taking place in […]
If you have recently been to a large sporting event or music concert, chances are you might have caught sight of something high in the air, whizzing around on gossamer tendrils. The system enables television cameras to move both vertically and horizontally, tracking action quickly, fluently and accurately. To allow it to do this, the […]
The robotics revolution is upon us. It has long been the topic of sci-fi thrillers, but now it has arrived, it looks very different to the way we envisioned it. Mechanical men don’t march among us, in fact robots are mainly used in industry and they have only just been permitted to operate outside a […]
As a famous fictional policeman once said, “the reason that the rich were so rich… was because they managed to spend less money.” What he meant was that although the rich may buy more expensive things, they buy products that will last longer and are therefore a better investment. Although the policeman in question was […]
High precision gearing specialist, Harmonic Drive UK, has launched IridiumLine, a new series of lightweight gears with an extremely large hollow shaft with a diameter up to 60 percent of the total gear diameter. The new design has been achieved without restricting torque capacity, making the IridiumLine ideal for applications such as industrial, robotics, military, […]
More people than ever before are using aviation to travel. In fact, there were over 78 million passengers at UK airports in the third quarter of 2015 alone, according to travel statistics from the Civil Aviation Authority. As such, it is increasingly important that aircraft are designed and built to provide a reliably safe journey. […]
Most people probably open tens of packaged goods a day without even realising it. Opening jars, cereal packets and sandwich boxes are all part of our daily routine, but we don’t tend to notice the packaging until something goes wrong. When milk cartons burst, drinks spill in your bag or crisps go stale when they’re […]
Over the next decade, the UK will spend £178 billion on military equipment. This equipment may range from torches to high calibre weapons, but it all requires high quality manufacturing and the ability to adapt to a variety of conditions. Much of this equipment requires high precision gears, as Graham Mackrell, managing director of Harmonic […]
Sometimes, you only need one small innovation to make something revolutionary. Sliced bread, for example, simply took a stroke of inspiration for Otto Rohwedder to combine automatic bread wrapping equipment with cutting functionality. Here, Graham Mackrell, managing director of precision gearing expert Harmonic Drive UK, explains WavePlus technology, an innovative development in strain wave gearing. […]
The British Standards Institute (BSI) recently released a new set of standards for the ethical design of robots and robotic devices. The standards highlight the growing need for guidelines on robotic safety, contact with human beings, robotic deception, addiction and possible sexism or racism exhibited by self-learning artificial intelligence (AI) systems. When science fiction writer […]