A friend asked me to create the type of juice I want – hopefully the juice making industry can make one for me. Here is my imagination on the juice I am craving right now.

Dear Kim,

I am visiting Nairobi and I met an old friend who invited me to a local party. We had studied together in the University of Kentucky many years ago. My office had sent me to help open a new branch in Nairobi and while we were in the opening ceremony, some government representatives came. She was one of them. After the program, she asked me to come over to her house at the outskirts of the town. It was a very great evening with great local food and drinks.

After the trip, something is brewing in my mind. There is certainly a better drink for this world. I met a lot of natural tasting organic drinks in Kenya but I do think there is one that does not exist which I am planning to see how to make and I am hoping that you will be one of my paid customers to sample it.

My drink is called Nuta. It will be made with organically grown pineapple mixed with lemon. The look will be like a typical Tropicana juice when served on glass but the taste will be like tasting raw pineapple mashed with lemon. It will have a spicy taste with some gingers which will be added. That will make it also a little pepperish. There will be no preservative or chemical in any form because the fermentation process will be organically done. I like the taste of the juice from Nairobi.

Nuta will be all natural and will be made and consumed within 12 hours of brew. Customers will be served live and no packaging is necessary. However, to ensure scale, we will make a power version which can be used with added water and left for 10 minutes to get through production phase at home. So, we will have it in powder and pure liquid forms.

The vitamin will be natural and minerals totally intact with none lost during production. It will be labeled 100% organic because everything will be sourced from pure organic farmlands from rural farmers with no chemicals used in the farming process. It will deliver wholesomeness goodness and will drive unprecedented value on nutritional content.

It will be mama’s juice for the whole family.

Nuta will be available at home, offices and restaurants and will be distributed nationwide. We will sell it in Chipotle and Whole Foods because these brands symbolize the modernity we desire from natural foods.

Our uniqueness is the quality of the ingredients, production process and nutritional value.

Nuta Snack will also come on the way and will be made with pure organic ingredients processed the way some natives are processing their food systems with firewood in rural Africa with no chemical process.  I am hoping that Nuta products will be the first 100% all-natural, no nutrient-loss brand in the world and will be promoted by UNICEF, FAO and WHO.

When we see next week, I will give you more details. But please plan to place an order as I need some money to move into production of Nuta.

Best

Christie

NB: This is just an imagination but this thought-process is something I just want to share.

The literal definition of collaboration is: The action of working with someone to produce or create something. Which is the exact purpose of collaborative robots (cobots).  The idea is for humans and robots to be inter-dependent and achieve what each of them does best, safely. There are a few things requiring human ingenuity that are best done manually, whereas the accuracy, precision and repetitive mass production at higher efficiency is best taken care of by robots. These cobots provide an added incentive to the workforce as consistent quality production is possible with human supervision.

Collaborative robots are lightweight, cost effective and incredibly easy to operate. The human-robot collaboration is different from traditional robots. That is what cobots are becoming very popular across factories.

Moreover production setups today often need to be flexible and agile in order to meet changing demand and stay competitive. The light weight cobot arms are easily moved and re-deployed to new processes, enabling you to automate virtually any manual task, including those with small batches or fast change-overs.

Most cobots  in operation worldwide works right next to humans-with no safety guards to shield them and making robot technology accessible to all levels of industry. And cobots are more than happy to do the jobs that human operators find repetitive and dull.

Types of Collaborative features for robots

According the international standards ISO 10218 part 1 and part 2, there are four types of collaborative features for robots.

• Safety Monitored Stop: This kind of collaborative feature is used when a robot is mostly working on its own, but occasionally a human might need to enter its workspace. For example, when a certain operation must be performed on a part while it is in the robot’s space.
• Hand Guiding: This type of collaborative application is used for hand guiding or path teaching. So if you want to teach paths quickly for pick and place applications for instance, you might use this type of application
• Speed and Separation Monitoring: Here the environment of the robot is monitored by lasers or a vision system that tracks the position of the workers. The robot will act within the functions of the safety zones that have been pre-designed for it. If the human is within a certain safety zone, the robot will respond with designated speeds (generally slow) and stop when the worker comes too close.
• Power and Force Limiting: This is the type of robot that everybody calls a collaborative robot. So yes, this is probably the most worker friendly robot since it can work alongside humans without any additional safety devices.

The Concerns on Jobs

Instead of replacing human and causing job loss, collaborative robots helps companies in expanding operations, thereby creating job opportunities. Cobots help companies to expand multi-fold, thus creating jobs and many more opportunities at supervision roles. In a human-machine study conducted by MIT researchers at a BMW factory, it was shown that teams made of humans and robots collaborating efficiently can be around 85 percent more productive than teams made of either humans or robots alone. That helps to sell more products thereby needing more humans.