Dyson, better known today for its (robot) vacuum cleaners, recently switched to more general household robots, and on May 25 Philadelphia International Conference on Robotics and Automation ICRA also showed a video of their developments in this direction.
The video demonstrates the latest features in the hands of Dyson-designed robots. It’s basically about seeing the future in robotics and being willing to invest in this field 10 years in advance, but amidst the great secrecy and astonishingly tweaked detail there are still some tangible improvements, like kids’ toys instead of kids (okay, let’s see on: instead of parents who packing their place) a robotic arm or robot that scans the 3D shapes of the sofa and then sucks the crumbs out of the gaps.
Dyson said the company said it was “halfway through the largest hiring drive for engineers in its history”: 2,000 people have joined the company this year, half of whom are engineers, scientists or programmers. This year, 250 robotics engineers will be hired in today’s trendy fields, such as computer vision, machine learning, or mechatronicsAnother 700 robotics engineers are set to be hired over the next five years.
The company plans to spend 2.75 billion pounds (more than 1,260 billion pounds) on developing new technologies and necessary infrastructure, of which 600 million pounds will be this year. As part of this, one of the hangars at Hullavington Airport, formerly used as a base for the British Air Force, has been renovated with new engineers working here, partly at the Dyson Robotics lab at Imperial College London and partly at the company’s headquarters in Singapore.
