Industrial robots and their end effectors have demonstrated a remarkable dexterity, matching and often exceeding that of human hands. Combined with vision systems, many industrial robots can combine high-level dexterity with object recognition for pick and place applications, but most industrial systems, the things that robots manipulate are consistent in size and shape.

The food processing industry has a very different problem: individual portions of things like fish fillets are similar, but no two are alike. The technology however is rapidly improving, and modern systems can now handle complex food processing tasks that until recently have resisted automation.

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Artificial intelligence is not only widely anticipated but is expected to dramatically change the manufacturing landscape worldwide, forever. The promise is huge, but to deliver on that promise, manufacturers need to develop coherent strategies for implementation, and more importantly, understand where the use cases exist for AI implementation. New research from AI software provider IFS suggests that American firms are sceptical of artificial intelligence in its current form.

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Want to watch this podcast as a video? This Week in Engineering is available on engineering.com TV along with all of our other shows such as End of the Line, Designing the Future, Manufacturing the Future, and the Engineering Roundtable.

For the 100 years or so of air transport, the form factor of airplanes has been essentially consistent: a fuselage, usually cylindrical, with attached wings and tail. While relatively simple to build, with a good strength to weight ratio, aerodynamically, this form factor is not the most efficient.

Eliminating the fuselage and building the aircraft as a flying wing has long been recognized as a path to greater efficiency and performance, and since the late 1940s, multiple flying wing designs have been proposed. Very few have made it into hardware, but a form of hybrid concept, called the blended wing body, appears to be a practical way to reduce drag, and consequently fuel burn, and commercial aircraft.

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Want to watch this podcast as a video? This Week in Engineering is available on engineering.com TV along with all of our other shows such as End of the Line, Designing the Future, Manufacturing the Future, and the Engineering Roundtable.