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You can’t discuss fulfillment robots without mentioning Amazon. Over the past decade, the retail juggernaut has become the 800-pound gorilla in the category, courtesy of several key acquisitions and seemingly endless resources. And while warehouse robotics and automation have been accelerated amid the pandemic and resulting employment crunch, Amazon Robotics has been driving these categories for years now.

This week at its annual Re: Mars conference in Las Vegas, the company celebrated a decade of its robotics division, which was effectively born with its acquisition of Kiva Systems. Over the course of its life, Amazon Robotics has deployed more than 520,000 robotic drive units, across its fulfillment and sort centers. From the outside, it’s been a tremendous success in the company’s push toward same-and next-day package delivery, and its driven the competition to look for their own third-party robotics solutions, bolstering startups like Locus, Fetch and Berkshire Grey.

The West Japan Rail Company, also known as JR West, has unveiled its giant worker robot that can be tasked to carry out jobs that are considered risky for humans, New Atlas reported.

【News Release】 生産性・安全性向上に向けて、株式会社人機一体および日本信号株式会社と共同で、人型重機ロボットと鉄道工事用車両を融合させた多機能鉄道重機を開発しています。

詳しくはこちらをご覧ください。 https://www.westjr.co.jp/press/article/items/220415_01_robot.pdf pic.twitter.com/FBVjIe1xCC — JR西日本ニュース【公式】 (@news_jrwest) April 15, 2022

Just as car created job for drivers, computer created job for data entry operator.robots will also create new types of high paying jobs.


For decades, the arrival of robots in the workplace has been a source of public anxiety over fears that they will replace workers and create unemployment.

Now that more sophisticated and humanoid robots are actually emerging, the picture is changing, with some seeing robots as promising teammates rather than unwelcome competitors.

‘Cobot’ colleagues

Take Italian industrial-automation company Comau. It has developed a robot that can collaborate with – and enhance the safety of – workers in strict cleanroom settings in the pharmaceutical, cosmetics, electronics, food and beverage industries. The innovation is known as a “collaborative robot”, or “cobot”.

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New Zealand-based agritech company Robotics Plus has launched an autonomous multi-use, modular vehicle for agriculture that could revolutionize the industry by alleviating ongoing labor shortages and simplifying agricultural tasks, according to a press release by the firm published on Thursday.

Optimizing tasks

The robot can be supervised in a fleet of vehicles by a single human operator, using a combination of vision systems and other technologies to sense its environment. This empowers it to optimize tasks and allow intelligent and targeted application of inputs such as sprays. It is suitable for a variety of jobs including spraying, weed control, mulching, mowing and crop analysis.

Occupation-related stress and work characteristics are possible determinants of social inequalities in epigenetic aging but have been little investigated. Here, we investigate the association of several work characteristics with epigenetic age acceleration (AA) biomarkers.

The study population included employed and unemployed men and women (n = 631) from the UK Understanding Society study. We evaluated the association of employment and work characteristics related to job type, job stability; job schedule; autonomy and influence at work; occupational physical activity; and feelings regarding the job with four epigenetic age acceleration biomarkers (Hannum, Horvath, PhenoAge, GrimAge) and pace of aging (DunedinPoAm, DunedinPACE).

We fitted linear regression models, unadjusted and adjusted for established risk factors, and found the following associations for unemployment (years of acceleration): HorvathAA (1.51, 95% CI 0.08, 2.95), GrimAgeAA (1.53, 95% CI 0.16, 2.90) and 3.21 years for PhenoAA (95% CI 0.89, 5.33). Job insecurity increased PhenoAA (1.83, 95% CI 0.003, 3.67), while working at night was associated with an increase of 2.12 years in GrimAgeAA (95% CI 0.69, 3.55). We found effects of unemployment to be stronger in men and effects of night shift work to be stronger in women.