Mercedes-Benz, conducting the biggest test using drones to ship everyday items like ground coffee and cellphones, said the mini aircraft completed 100 drop-offs to strategically placed vans in Zurich with a perfect safety record and more deliveries are planned for next year.

Mercedes-Benz is ramping up its offering of electric delivery vans after Deutsche Post AG switched from customer to competitor with the successful rollout of a no-frills battery-powered vehicle.

The singularly defining moment in Artificial Intelligence (AI) — even bigger than when IBM's Deep Blue beat chess master Garry Kasparov — happened back in in 2011 when the unbeatable Jeopardy! Champion Ken Jennings was finally taken down by IBM's new supercomputer, Watson.

It almost takes a force of nature to move an idea from the lab to the factory.

A robotic material handling unit zips through a global toy manufacturer's six-story distribution center. As the unit retrieves an open-top plastic container filled with freshly molded toy planes from an automatic storage and retrieval system (ASRS), sparks from a frayed electrical cable on the robot fly everywhere, igniting both the toy planes and the plastic container in which they are stored.

A lean management structure and forward-looking corporate culture is essential in building a smart manufacturing industry, according to experts at Dassault Systèmes' Manufacturing in the Age of Experience conference - where the move to smart manufacturing was a central theme.

After a year of stagnation the luxury market has returned to growth and will likely set a new record of $1.4tr in 2017, said a study released on Oct. 25 by consulting firm Bain and Company.

The U.S. merchandise-trade deficit widened to a four-month high as imports rose for the first time since April, according to the Commerce Department. The report also showed inventories increased at wholesalers and fell at retailers.

Daimler AG is jumping the gun on Tesla Inc. by showing off a battery-powered heavy-duty truck weeks before the California electric-carmaker's own planned unveiling, in a sign of the growing rivalry between the companies.