In this episode, Abate flew to Denver, Colorado, to get a behind-the-scenes look at the future of recycling with Joe Castagneri, the head of AI at Amp Robotics. With Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) processing a staggering 25 tons of trash per hour, robotic sorting is the clear long-term solution.

Recycling is a for-profit industry. When the margins don’t make sense, the items will not be recycled. This is why Amp’s mission to use robotics and AI to bring down the cost of recycling and increase the number of items that can be sorted for recycling is so impactful.

Joe Castagneri
Joe Castagneri graduated with his Master of Science in Applied Mathematics, with an undergrad degree in Physics. While still in university, he first joined the team at Amp Robotics in 2016 where he worked on Machine Learning models to identify recyclables in video streams of Trash in Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs). Today, he is the Head of AI at Amp Robotics where he is changing the economics of recycling through automation.

Nico, Emil, and Moritz founded ReRun with the mission of making powerful visualization tools free and easily accessible for roboticists. Nico and Emil talk about how these powerful tools help debug the complex problem scopes faced by roboticists. Tune in for more.

Nikolaus West
Co-Founder and CEO
Niko is a second-time founder and software engineer with a computer vision background from Stanford. He’s fanatic about bringing great computer vision and robotics products to the physical world.

Emil Ernerfeldt
Co-Founder and CTO
Emil fell in love with coding over 20 years ago and hasn’t looked back since. He’s the creator of egui, an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI in Rust, that we’re using to build Rerun. He brings a strong perspective from the gaming industry, with a focus on great and blazing fast tools.

Links

• ReRun
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Conventional sheet metal manufacturing is highly inefficient for the low-volume production seen in the space industry. At Machina Labs, they developed a novel method of forming sheet metal using two robotic arms to bend the metal into different geometries. This method cuts down the time to produce large sheet metal parts from several months down to a few hours. Ed Mehr, Co-Founder and CEO of Machina Labs, explains this revolutionary manufacturing process.

Ed Mehr

Ed Mehr is the co-founder and CEO of Machina Labs. He has an engineering background in smart manufacturing and artificial intelligence. In his previous position at Relativity Space, he led a team in charge of developing the world’s largest metal 3D printer. Relativity Space uses 3D printing to make rocket parts rapidly, and with the flexibility for multiple iterations. Ed previously was the CTO at Cloudwear (Now Averon), and has also worked at SpaceX, Google, and Microsoft.

Links

• Machina Labs
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Many people associate prosthetic limbs with nude-colored imitations of human limbs. Something built to blend into a society where people have all of their limbs while serving functional use cases. On the other end of the spectrum are the highly optimized prosthetics used by Athletes, built for speed, low weight, and appearing nothing like a human limb.

As a child under 12 years old, neither of these categories of prosthetics particularly speaks to you. Open Bionics, founded by Joel Gibbard and Samantha Payne, was started to create a third category of prosthetics. One that targets the fun, imaginative side of children, while still providing the daily functional requirements.

Through partnerships with Disney and Lucasfilms, Open Bionics has built an array of imagination-capturing prosthetic limbs that are straight-up cool.

Joel Gibbard dives into why they founded Open Bionics, and why you should invest in their company as they are getting ready to let the general public invest in them for the first time.

Joel Gibbard

Joel Gibbard lives in Bristol, UK and graduated with a first-class honors degree in Robotics from the University of Plymouth, UK.

He co-founded Open Bionics alongside Samantha Payne with the goal of bringing advanced, accessible bionic arms to the market. Open Bionics offers the Hero Arm, which is available in the UK, USA, France, Australia, and New Zealand. Open Bionics is revolutionizing the prosthetics industry through its line of inspiration-capturing products.

Links

• Open Bionics
• Pre-register to invest
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Dr. Tyler Reid, co-founder and CTO of Xona Space Systems, discusses a new type of global navigation satellite system (GNSS). Xona Space Systems plans to provide centimeter-level positioning accuracy and will serve the emerging autonomous vehicle community, where precise navigation is key. Reid discusses the advantages and technical challenges of a low Earth orbit (LEO) solution.

Tyler Reid

Tyler Reid is co-founder and CTO of Xona Space Systems. Previously, Tyler worked as a Research Engineer at the Ford Motor Company in localization and mapping for self-driving cars. He has also worked as an engineer at Google and as a lecturer at Stanford University, where he co-taught the GPS course. Tyler received his PhD (2017) and MSc (2012) in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford and B.Eng. (’10) in Mechanical Engineering from McGill.

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The Recycling Industry in the United States is a for-profit industry. They profit from taking recyclable material, refining it, and reselling it to companies at a cheaper price than producing the material from scratch.

Supply and Demand in Recycling

If you look at the demand side of the recycling industry, an array of multi-billion dollar companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are incentivized to buy recycled goods and reduce their materials costs.

On the supply side, ~300 million tons of trash are generated annually in the United States. Estimates suggest that up to 75% of that is recyclable.

On paper, it seems clear that maximizing the amount of trash the US recycles is in everyone’s interest. One issue though, less than a third of the trash ends up recycled.

Areeb, co-founder of Glacier, breaks down the multi-layered reasoning behind why the Recycling industry cannot handle this volume of trash, and what Glacier is doing to address this.

Areeb Malik

Areeb Malik is the Co-Founder of Glacier, and he is on a personal mission to fight climate change and extract value from the $123B worth of recyclables that fill the landfills and oceans. Before founding Glacier, Areeb was a Software Engineer at Facebook, where he used Machine Learning and Computer Vision to build out new product features.

Links

• Glacier
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The team at Retrocausal built a computer vision platform that allows any manufacturer to rapidly set up an activity recognition pipeline to assist with manual assemblies. Using any standard camera pointed at an assembly station, the system can learn the assembly procedure and give real-time feedback.

Deci:

At Deci, they are tackling the problem of taking a Machine Learning model optimized for a single hardware platform and adapting it to work on a different hardware platform.

When developing an ML model running on the edge, a time-consuming development cycle is made to optimize the model to run at peak capacity. However, over time hardware platforms get updated and companies need to make the decision of whether or not to update their hardware and dedicate engineering resources to manually tweak a multitude of settings.

Deci allows companies to upload their models to the cloud, then automatically optimize them for running on a variety of different hardware platforms that they own in their facilities.

StegAI:

Dr. Eric Wengrowski co-founded StegAI after publishing a paper in CVPR 2019 on embedding “fingerprints” that are embedded in images and videos that are invisible to the human eye, but detectable by their software.

Their product modulates the pixels in an image in such a way that even after compressing, resizing, or printing out the images, their deep learning algorithms will still be able to detect the origin of the image.

This powerful tool is used by social media firms to protect against potential copyright infringement when users upload content to their platforms

A lot of times on our podcast we dive into startups and smaller companies in robotics. Today’s talk is unique in that Brady Watkins gives us insight into how a big company like Softbank Robotics looks into the Robotics market.

we think scale first, (the) difference from a startup is our goal isn’t to think what’s the first 10 to 20, but we need to think what’s the first 20,000 look like. – Brady Watkins

Brady Watkins

Brady Watkins is the President and General Manager at Softbank Robotics America. During his career at Softbank, he helped to scale and commercialize Whiz, the collaborative robot vacuum designed to work alongside cleaning teams. Watkins played a key role in scaling the production to 20,000 units deployed globally.

Prior to his time at SBRA, Watkins was the Director of Sales, Planning, and Integration at Ubisoft, where he held several positions over the course of 10 years.

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At ICRA 2022, the researchers weren’t the only ones working with cutting-edge technology. We spoke to the exhibitors to get real-life demos of their products.

Tangram Vision

Tangram Vision is a hardware-agnostic sensor fusion platform. It streamlines the development and deployment of critical sensor infrastructure like calibration, fusion, and monitoring for any number of cameras, depth sensors, LiDAR, radar, and IMU. Their co-founder, Adam Rodnitzky, walks us through their sensor fusion platform.

FLX Solutions

Matt Bilsky, Founder and CEO of FLX Solutions gives us a live demo of their robot, the FLX BOT. Matt Bilsky applied his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering to create a novel, highly compact robot that is designed to reach and inspect parts of a building that a human cannot reach. The FLX BOT is one inch in diameter and is made of modular links that can be attached one after the other to extend the reach and degrees of freedom of the robot.

Exyn Technologies

Exyn Technologies specializes in aerial robotics, drone swarms, multi-modal sensor fusion, 3D mapping, obstacle avoidance, and autonomous navigation & planning.

Exyn’s focus is on developing software for aerial robots so they can operate in GPS-denied environments, without human control, prior information, or pre-existing infrastructure (e.g. no motion capture system).

Pollen Robotics

Pollen Robotics developed the robot, Reachy, an open-source humanoid robot with a quirky appearance. Reachy’s primary userbase is researchers studying fields such as teleoperation. Using mixed autonomy, Reachy is able to be teleoperated by humans, while still having onboard intelligence to autonomously infer the actions you want it to do.

Preliminary annual installations 2022 compared to 2020 by region – source: International Federation of Robotics

“Robot installations around the world recovered strongly and make 2021 the most successful year ever for the robotics industry,” says Milton Guerry, President of the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). “Due to the ongoing trend towards automation and continued technological innovation, demand reached high levels across industries. In 2021, even the pre-pandemic record of 422,000 installations per year in 2018 was exceeded.”

Strong demand across industries

In 2021, the main growth driver was the electronics industry (132,000 installations, +21%), which surpassed the automotive industry (109,000 installations, +37%) as the largest customer of industrial robots already in 2020. Metal and machinery (57,000 installations, +38%) followed, ahead of plastics and chemical products (22,500 installations, +21%) and food and beverages (15,300 installations, +24%).

Europe recovered

In 2021, industrial robot installations in Europe recovered after two years of decline – exceeding the peak of 75,600 units in 2018. Demand from the most important adopter, the automotive industry, moved at a high level sideways (19,300 installations, +/-0%). Demand from metal and machinery rose strongly (15,500 installations, +50%), followed by plastics and chemical products (7,700 installations, +30%).

The Americas recovered

In the Americas, the number of industrial robot installations reached the second-best result ever, only surpassed by the record year 2018 (55,200 installations). The largest American market, the United States, shipped 33,800 units – this represents a market share of 68%.

Asia remains world’s largest market

Asia remains the world’s largest industrial robot market: 73% of all newly deployed robots in 2021 were installed in Asia. A total of 354,500 units were shipped in 2021, up 33% compared to 2020. The electronics industry adopted by far the most units (123,800 installations, +22%), followed by a strong demand from the automotive industry (72,600 installations, +57%) and the metal and machinery industry (36,400 installations, +29%).

Video: “Sustainable! How robots enable a green future”

At automatica 2022 trade fair in Munich, robotics industry leaders discussed, how robotics and automation enable to develop sustainable strategies and a green future. A videocast by IFR will feature the event with key statements of executives from ABB, MERCEDES BENZ, STÄUBLI, VDMA and the EUROPEAN COMMISSION. Please find a summary soon on our YouTube Channel.

Brandon Gilles, Founder and CEO of Luxonis, tells us his story about how Luxonis designed one of the most versatile perception platforms on the market.

Brandon took the lessons learned from his time at Ubiquiti, which transformed networking with network-on-a-chip architectures, and applied the mastery of embedded hardware and software to the OAK-D camera and the broader OAK line of products.

To refer to the OAK-D as a stereovision camera tells only part of the story. Aside from depth sensing, the OAK-D leverages the Intel Myriad X to perform perception computations directly on the camera in a highly power-efficient architecture.

Customers can also instantly leverage a wide array of open-source computer vision and AI packages that are pre-calibrated to the optics system.

Additionally, by leveraging a system-on-a-module design, the Luxonis team easily churns out a multitude of variations of the hardware platform to fit the wide variety of customer use cases. Tune in for more.

Brandon Gilles

Brandon Gilles is the Founder and CEO of Luxonis, maker of the OAK-D line of cameras. Brandon comes from a background in Electrical and RF Engineering. He spent his early career as a UniFi Lead at Ubiquiti, where his team helped bring Ubiquiti’s highly performant and power-efficient Unifi products to market.

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In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to Dan O’Mara, who is the founder and COO of Circuit Launch and Mechlabs. Circuit Launch is a space for hardware entrepreneurs to work in Oakland, California, and Mechlabs is a project-based course to learn robotics. This interview is mostly about Mechlabs, but talks about the origins of Circuit Launch, including how it is not a maker or coworking space and its business model. For Mechlabs, we talk about several of its aspects that make it different than a university education in robotics, including how there are mentors not instructors, how projects are scoped, and how people are invited to work on what is most interesting to them. We also talk about the future of Mechlabs and how it fits with current universities.

Episode Links

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• Dan’s LinkedIn

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Number of awards: 2
Amount: travel and accommodation (up to 2k) + free registration
Application deadline: 22 April 2022

We are offering up to 2 Science Communication Awards to motivated roboticists keen on helping us cover ICRA. Your coverage could include videos, interviews, podcasts, blogs, social media, or art. Please apply by sending the following information by April 22 to sabine.hauert@bristol.ac.uk with the subject [ICRA SciCommAward]:

• Name
• Who you are (one paragraph)
• Previous experience in science communication (one paragraph with links to material)
• What you’d like to cover at ICRA and where you will publish material produced (one paragraph)
• Agreement to cross-post your content to the ICRA website or other third-party channels (yes/no).
• Estimated travel budget

Awards will be announced on 25 April.

Diligent Robotics, founded by Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu, develops socially intelligent automation solutions for hospitals. Moxi, their flagship robot, delivers items like medications and wound dressings between departments to save the clinical staff’s time. Diligent has just closed their Series B funding round with $30 million. 

We sat down with Dr. Thomaz to talk about Moxi, how to manage people’s expectations about robots, and advice for young people and women in robotics. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Andrea Thomaz with Diligent’s flagship robot Moxi.

What kinds of problems are you trying to solve with Moxi?

We are building Moxi to help hospitals with the massive workforce shortage that they’re seeing now more than ever. We actually started the company with the same intention several years ago before there was a worldwide pandemic, and it really has just gotten to be an even bigger problem for hospitals. I feel really strongly that robots have a place to play in teamwork environments, and hospitals are a great example of that. There’s no one person’s job in a hospital that you would actually want to give over to automation or robots, but there are tiny little bits of a lot of people’s jobs that are absolutely able to be automated and that we can give over to delivery robots in particular like Moxi. [The main problem we’re trying to solve with Moxi is] point to point delivery, where we’re fetching and gathering things and taking them from one area of the hospital to another. 

Hospitals have a lot of stuff that’s moving around every day. Every person in the hospital is going to have certain medications that need to be delivered to them, certain lab samples that need to be taken and delivered to the central lab, certain supplies that need to come up to them, food and nutrition every day. You have a lot of stuff that’s coming and going between patient units and all these different support departments. 

Every one of these support departments has a process in place for getting the stuff moved around, but no matter what, there’s stuff that happens every single day that requires ad-hoc [deliveries] to happen between all of these departments and different nursing units. So sometimes that’s going to be a nurse that just needs to get something for their patient and they want that to happen as soon as possible. They’re trying to discharge their patient, they need a particular wound dressing kit, they’re going to run down and get it because they want to help their patient get out. Or if there’s something that needs to be hand carried because the regular rounding of medications has already happened, a lot of times you’ll have a pharmacy technician stop what they’re doing and go and run some infusion meds for a cancer patient, for example. It sort of falls between these departments. There’s different people that would be involved but a lot of times it does fall on the nursing units themselves. A nurse explained to us one time that nurses are the last line of defense in patient care.

Moxi performing a delivery for a clinical staff member.

What is changing with this most recent round of funding?

Over the last 6-12 months, the demand has really skyrocketed such that we’re barely keeping up with the demand for people wanting to implement robots in their hospitals. That’s the reason why we’re raising this round of funding, expanding the team, and expanding our ability to capitalize on that demand. A couple of years ago, if we were working with a hospital it was because they had some special funds set aside for innovation or they had a CTO or a CIO that had a background in robotics, but it certainly wasn’t the first thing that every hospital CIO was thinking about. Now that has completely changed. We’re getting cold outreach on our website from CIOs of hospitals saying “I need to develop a robotic strategy for our hospital and I want to learn about your solution.” Through the pandemic, I think everyone has seen that the workforce shortage in hospitals is only getting worse in the near term. Everybody wants to plan for the future and do everything they can to take small tasks off of the plates of their clinical teams. It’s been really exciting to be part of that market change and see that shift to where everybody is really really open to automation. Before we had to say “No no no, this is not the future, I promise it’s not scifi, I promise these really work.” Now [the climate has] really shifted to people understanding “This is actually something that can impact my teams.”

[Two of our investors are hospitals, and] that’s been one of our most exciting parts of this round. It’s always great to have a successful funding round, but to have strategic partners like Cedars-Sinai and Shannon Healthcare coming in and saying “Yeah, we actually want to build this alongside you” — it’s pretty exciting to have customers like that. 

What kinds of technical problems did you run into when you were either building Moxi or deploying it in a hospital environment? How did you solve those problems? 

One that was almost surprising in how often it came up, and really impacted our ability [to run Moxi in the hospital environment] because we have a software-based robotic solution that is connecting at a regular basis to cloud services, [was that] we had no clue how terrible hospital WiFi was going to be. We actually spent quite a while building in backup systems to be able to use WiFi, backup to LTE if we have to, but be smart about that so we’re not spending a whole bunch of money on LTE data. That was a problem that seemed very specific to hospitals in particular.

Another one was security and compliance. We just didn’t know what some of the different requirements were for hospitals until we actually got into the environments and started interacting with customers and understanding what they wanted to use Moxi for. When we were first doing research trials in 2018 or 2019, we had a version of the robot that was a little bit different than the one we have today. It had lots of open containers so you could just put whatever you wanted to on the robot and send it over to another location. We quickly learned that that limited what the robot was allowed to carry, because so much of what [the customers] wanted was to understand who pulled something out of the robot. So now we have an RF badge reader on the robot that is connected to locking storage containers that are only going to open if you’re the kind of person that is allowed to open the robot. That was an interesting technical challenge that we didn’t know about until after we got out there. 

Moxi’s locking storage containers.

How did you work with nurses and the other healthcare professionals you were working with to figure out what would be the most helpful robot for them? 

My background, and my co-founder Vivian Chu’s background, is in human-robot interaction so we knew that we didn’t know enough about nursing or the hospital environment. We spent the first 9 months of the company in 2018 building out our research prototype. It looked a lot like what Moxi looks like today. Under the hood it was completely different than what we have today in terms of the reliability and robustness of the hardware and software, but it was enough to get that platform out and have it deployed with nursing units. We embedded ourselves with four different nursing units across Texas over a year-long period. We would spend about 6-8 weeks with a nursing department, and we were just there — engineers, product people, and everybody in the company was cycling in and out a week or two at a time. 

We would ask those nurses: “What would you actually want a robot like this to do?” Part of this that was really important was they didn’t have good ideas about what they would want the robot to do until they saw the robot. It was a very participatory design, where they had to see and get a sense for the robot before they would have good ideas of what they would want the robot to do. Then we would take those ideas [to the company] and come back and say “Yes we can do that,” or “No we can’t do that.” We came out of that whole process with a really great idea. We like to say that’s where we found our product market fit — that’s where we really understood that what was going to be most valuable for the robot to do was connecting the nursing units to these other departments. We can help a nurse with supply management and getting things from place to place within their department, or we can help them with things that are coming from really far away. [The second one] was actually impacting their time way way more.

Because the capabilities of robotic systems are usually misinterpreted, it can be really hard to manage the relationship with stakeholders and customers and set appropriate expectations. How did you manage that relationship?

We do a lot of demonstrations, but still with almost every single implementation you get questions about some robot in Hollywood, [and you have to say] “No, that’s the movies” and explain exactly what Moxi does. 

From a design perspective, we also limit the English phrases that come out of Moxi’s mouth just because we don’t want to communicate a really high level of intelligence. There are lots of canned phrases and interactions on the iPad instead of via voice, and a lot of times the robot will just make meeps and beeps and flash lights and things like that. 

Before starting the company, I had a lab, and one of the big research topics that we had for a number of years was embodied dialogue — how robots could have a real conversation with people. I had a very good appreciation for how hard that problem is, and also for just how much people want it. People come up to a robot, and they want it to be able to talk to them. How you can [set expectations] with the design and behavior of the robot has been a focus of mine since before we started the company. We purposefully don’t make the robot look very human-like because we don’t want there to be android human-level expectations, but [the robot does have a face and eyes so it can] communicate “I’m looking at that thing” and “I’m about to manipulate that thing,” which we think is important. It’s really about striking that balance. 

What would you say is one lesson that you’ve learned from your work at Diligent so far and how are you looking to apply this lesson moving forward?

The difference between research and practice. On the one hand, the motivation and reason for starting a company is that you want to see the kinds of things that you’ve done in the research lab really make it out into the world and start to impact real people and their work. That’s been one of the most fascinating, impactful, and inspiring things about starting Diligent: Being able to go and see nurses when Moxi is doing work for them. They are so thankful! If you just hang back and watch Moxi come and do a delivery, almost always people are super excited to see the robot. They get their delivery and they’re like, “Oh, thank you Moxi!” That feels like we’re really making a difference in a way that you just don’t get with just research contributions that don’t make it all the way out into the world. 

That being said though, there is a long tail of things that you have to solve from an engineering perspective beyond [developing a feature]. My VP of engineering Starr Corbin has this great way of putting it: The research team will get a certain thing on the product to be feature complete, where we’ve demonstrated that this feature works and it’s a good solution, but then there’s this whole phase that has to happen after that to get the feature to be production ready. I would say my biggest lesson is probably everything that it takes, and the entire team of people it takes, to get something from being feature complete to production ready. I have a deep appreciation for that. How fast we can move things out into the world is really dictated by some of that. 

Andrea Thomaz (left) and Vivian Chu with Moxi.

What advice would you give young women in robotics? 

If I put my professor hat on, I always had advice that I liked to give women in robotics, in academia, and just kind of pursuing things in general. Imposter syndrome is real, and everybody feels it. All you can do to combat it is not underestimate yourself. Speak up and know that you deserve a seat at the table. It’s all about hard work, but also making sure that your voice is heard. Some of the mentorship that I gave to a lot of my women grad students when I was a professor was around speaking engagements, speaking styles, and communication. It can be really uncomfortable when you’re the only anything in the room to stand up and feel like you deserve to be the one speaking, and so the more that you practice doing that, the more comfortable it can feel, the more confident you’ll feel in yourself and your voice. I think finding that confident voice is a really important skill that you have to develop early on in your career. 

What’s one piece of advice you’ve received that you always turn to when things are tough? 

There are two mentors that I’ve had who are women in AI and robotics. [In my] first year as a faculty member [the first mentor] came and gave a research seminar talk. I for some reason got to take her out to lunch by myself, so we had this amazing one-on-one. We talked a little bit about her talk, probably half of the lunch we talked about technical things, and then she just kind of turned the conversation [around] and said “Andrea, don’t forget to have a family.” Like, don’t forget to focus on that part of your life — it’s the most important thing. She got on a soapbox and said “You have to have a work life balance it’s so important. Don’t forget to focus on building a family for yourself, whatever that looks like.” That really stuck with me, especially as [when you’re] early in your career you’re worried about nothing but success. It was really powerful to have somebody strong and influential like that telling you “No, no, this is important and you need to focus on this.” 

The other person that’s always been an inspiration and mentor for me that I’ll highlight [was the professor teaching a class I TA’d for at MIT]. I had found a bug in one of her homework problems, and she was like, “Oh, fascinating.” She was so excited that I had found a question that she didn’t know the answer to. She [just said], “Oh my gosh I don’t know, let’s go find out!” I remember her being this great professor at MIT, and she was excited to find something that she didn’t know and go and learn about it together as opposed to being embarrassed that she didn’t know something. I learned a lot from that interaction: That it’s fun to not know something because then you get to go and find the answer, and no matter who you are, you’re never expected to know everything.

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to Dayo McIntosh, who is the founder of Yateou; Yateou is an early-stage startup that makes wellness products and has a customer facing robot, ADE, that personalizes customer orders. Dayo speaks about what motivated her to start Yateou, how she uses the robot arm, ADE, and about her plans for Yateou’s future.

Episode Links

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• Dayo’s LinkedIn
• Yateou’s website
• More information on Yateou’s ADE robot

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ApexAI is driving advances in ROS2 to make it viable for use in autonomous vehicles. The changes they are implementing are bridging the gap between the automotive world and robotics.

Joe Speed, VP of Product at ApexAI, dives into the current multi-year development process of bringing a car to market, and how ApexAI will transform this process into the shorter development time we see with modern technology. This technology was showcased at the Indy Autonomous Challenge where million-dollar autonomous cars raced each other on a track.

Apex.OS is a certified software framework and SDK for autonomous systems that enable software developers to write safe and certified autonomous driving applications compatible with ROS 2.

Joe Speed

Joe Speed is VP of Product & Chief Evangelist at Apex.AI. Prior to joining Apex.AI, Joe was a member of Open Robotics ROS 2 TSC, Autoware Foundation TSC, Eclipse OpenADx SC, and ADLINK Technology’s Field CTO driving robotics and autonomy.

Joe has spent his career developing and advocating open-source at organizations including Linux Foundation and IBM where he launched IBM IoT and co-founded the IBM AutoLAB automotive incubator. Joe helped make MQTT, IoT protocol, open-source and convinced the automakers to adopt it.

Joe is working to do the same for Apex.AI’s safe ROS 2 distribution and ROS middleware. Joe has developed a dozen advanced technology vehicles but is most proud of helping develop an accessible autonomous bus for older adults and people with disabilities.

Links

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In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to Helen Greiner, CEO at Tertill, which makes a small solar powered weeding robot for vegetable gardens. The conversation begins with an overview of Helen’s previous robotics experience, including at as a student at MIT, Co-founder at iRobot, Founder and CEO at CyPhyWorks, and in advising government research in robotics, AI, and machine learning. From there, Helen explains the design of the Tertill robot, how it works, and her high hopes for this simple robot: to help reduce the environmental impact of the agriculture industry by helping people to grow their own food. In the last part of the conversation, Helen speaks broadly about her experience in robotics startups, the robotics industry, and the future of robotics.

Episode Links

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• Tertill’s on LinkedIn

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Machine Learning at the edge is gaining steam. BrainChip is accelerating this with their Akida architecture, which is mimicking the human brain by incorporating the 5 human senses on a machine learning-enabled chip.

Their chips will let roboticists and IoT developers run ML on device for low latency, low power, and low-cost machine learning-enabled products. This opens up a new product category where everyday devices can affordably become smart devices.

Rob Telson

Rob is an AI thought-leader and Vice President of Worldwide Sales at BrainChip, a global tech company that has developed artificial intelligence that learns like a brain, whilst prioritizing efficiency, ultra-low power consumption, and continuous learning. Rob has over 20 years of sales expertise in licensing intellectual property and selling EDA technology and attended Harvard Business School.

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Suma Reddy, CEO of Future Acres, talks about her company which is focused on creating smart farming tools to reduce labor demand and increase efficiency. Suma introduces her journey into agriculture technology and the issues in current farming practices that can benefit from robotic solutions. Future Acres’s robotic harvest companion, Carry, autonomously transports crops within the farms and collects valuable data. Suma also discusses the impact of their technology and their visions for the future of agricultural technology.

 Suma Reddy is Co-founder and CEO of Future Acres, an AgTech startup building advanced mobility and AI solutions for farms to increase production efficiency, farmworker safety and provide real-time data and analytics. She is a three-times AgTech + ClimateTech founder (vertical farming, organic waste-to-energy, renewable energy), is on the advisory board of Scale for ClimateTech, a Board Member of GrainPro, and teaches Entrepreneurship for Sustainability and Resilience at the NYC School of Visual Arts. Suma is passionate about sustainable solutions and the disruptive technology that will help advance a better environment and more resilient world forward.

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Oleg Shipitko, Chief Technical Director of Evocargo, an integrated logistics service company using autonomous vehicles speaks with Kate. Oleg talks about the need for automating operational logistics inside enclosed facilities centers and how their autonomous vehicles and other operational services can greatly improve the current way we transport goods within facilities such as ports, warehouses and factories. Oleg also discusses the sensing choices for the specific use cases of these autonomous vehicles.

Oleg Shipitko

Oleg Shipitko is the Chief Technical Director of Evocargo. He has a bachelors and masters degree in autonomous information and control systems (bachelors: 4.96/5.0, masters: 5.0/5.0), and a PhD in Space Science and Technology with focus in Mathematical modeling, numerical methods and program complexes.

Oleg has received numerous awards including: Best paper awarded at 32nd European Conference on Modeling and Simulation (ECMS-2018): Ground Vehicle Localization With Particle Filter Based On Simulated Road Marking Image and Best paper awarded at IV International Conference on Information Technology and Nanotechnology (ITNT-2018): Gaussian filtering for FPGA based image processing with High-Level Synthesis tools.

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Torrey Smith, Co-Founder of Endiatx, is changing the reputation endoscopies have for being uncomfortable. At Endiatx, they are developing a pill-sized robot that you swallow, which will then livestream your digestive system for a doctor to view. Our interviewer Abate dives in.

Torrey Smith
Torrey Smith is the Co-Founder & CEO of Endiatx, a medical robotics company that manufactures tiny robotic pills capable of active movement inside the human stomach with control over internet protocol. Prior to launching Endiatx, he developed medical devices in the areas of endometrial ablation, atherectomy, therapeutic hypothermia, sleep apnea, and vascular closure.

An aerospace engineer by training, he takes a keen interest in the deep tech sector and is a proud mentor of up-and-coming founders at the Founder Institute. He is also the principal founder of the international arts collective known as Sextant, and he has had his art featured in the Smithsonian.

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Firstly, what is Deep Tech as opposed to Tech or technology enabled? Sometimes Deep Tech is regarded as a science based startup, sometimes it is regarded as disruptive to the status quo, sometimes it is regarded just as slow and hard, capital intensive, with a long ROI horizon. Or as something that investors aren’t ready for yet. But the amount of money going into Deep Tech investing is increasing, and the pool of Deep Tech investors is increasing. One of the key points I made in a recent GIST Tech Connect Deep Tech panel is that most investors, including the most successful Tech investors are not able to invest seriously in Deep Tech startups because they lack the technical awareness and depth of commercialization experience specific to a Deep Tech startup. GIST or the Global Innovation in Science and Technology Network is the US State Department program to encourage and support global entrepreneurship.

In fact, if you do the research into the failure rates of some high profile Deep Tech startups, it seems that certain large funds have a much higher failure rate than others, so at best, their growth pathway is not compatible with Deep Tech startups. At worst, they are simply cherry picking some Deep Tech startups for their publicity value. Startups should always do their due diligence on investors and how they treat founders, particularly founders with similar startups.

Universities play a huge role in derisking, funding and commercializing Deep Tech startups but there is still a ‘Valley of Death’ in the transfer stages. And a Deep Tech startup can come out of any university but not all universities have real commercialization experience and a supportive startup ecosystem. Silicon Valley Robotics and Circuit Launch have provided a ‘halfway house’ for a lot of Deep Tech startups by providing affordable workspace with prototyping facilities and a startup ecosystem. But the first question I always ask entrepreneurs is if they have leveraged every advantage that their university connections can provide. Universities can provide greatly discounted lab space and testing facilities, also connections to scientific experts in most any field who can be leveraged as consultants and advisors.

The SBIR program, or the American Seed Fund, which is about a $4 billion non dilutive funding from the federal government in the form of R&D dollars, contracts and grants to small businesses and startups gives you the opportunity to derisk a lot of the technology very early on. You can really do a detailed scope and scan, and then couple that with the iCorps program and you get the opportunity to do deeper dives into customer discovery, to really understand if this is something that’s just a nice to have, or is it a real must have. Although the SBIR program is American based program, a lot of the countries around the world have been creating similar ones. A good example of that is EU Horizon 2020 grants.

Grants catalyze and do a certain amount to de-risk technology, extending the runway through non-dilutive funding and by creating a technology roadmap which validates the science as significant. Corporate venture funds or strategic investors also play an important role, alongside non-dilutive grant funding. Not only can they be a check, they can be a customer, they can be an advisor and a partner in the early prototype to manufacture stages. The best strategic investors play a huge role in helping Deep Tech startups succeed, because they need the technology you are creating.

Here’s a collection of tips for Deep Tech founders gathered from the GIST TechConnect Panel on Deep Tech with Nakia Melecio from Georgia Tech, Nhi Lê from WARF, Andra Keay from SVR and The Robotics Hub, G. Nagesh Rao from US Dept of State. Also tips from Six red flags that send investors running the other way by Sara Bloomberg, San Francisco Business Times. Quotes not attributed to other investors are my thoughts or recollections from the event.

Accelerator hopping

“When you start going from accelerator to accelerator looking for funding, then you’re doing it wrong. Accelerators only fund you to participate in their program. Their program and mentors are the real value.” Nhi Lê, WARF Accelerator

You also dilute your equity and become uninvestable.

Taking the first check, giving away too much equity in early rounds

Always negotiate terms. But don’t focus solely on the financials and at the risk of throwing away the less obvious value that a good investor can bring to you.

“Deep Tech startups may take longer to get to revenue than a traditional tech startup, so you need to think about grant funding as a source of revenue, and any contracts that help you develop part of your technology.” Nhi Lê, WARF Accelerator

Not budgeting for IP defense

“Companies often say that they’re investable because they have a patent, but they haven’t budgeted anything to defend it. Your IP is only as good as your ability to defend it. Universities play a great role in protecting and defending IP that they’ve licensed.” Nhi Lê, WARF Accelerator

Not having a plan for the whole journey

“When you go into your first funding meeting, you must be thinking about the long term journey, all the way to exit. It’s never going to be just one check, you’re growing a company.” G. Nagesh Rao, US Dept of Commerce

Not doing diligence on investors or accelerators

“Deep tech, especially at the leading edge, is usually expensive, so it’s critical to find the right path to commercialization at scale. Good investors speed up the process and lower your burn rate.” Michael Harries, The Robotics Hub

Have your potential investors brought similar startups to market? Having that experience can make the commercialization process much faster, and it’s critical to manage your resources effectively. Constant fundraising takes founders away from product development. Also, do your investors have patient capital? Or are they needing a rapid return on investment for their current fund? Don’t assume that a well known investor or accelerator guarantees you success, or even finding a good fit with their process.

Ignorance of basic financials

Overreaching on inventory, being unable to meet debts in a timely fashion, structuring the company poorly, all these things are cited by founders who’ve struggled.

Customer discovery never stops

“Focus on the customer and fall in love with the customer’s problem and you’ll never go wrong.” Nakia Melecio, Georgia Tech

Do it from the start, and never stop going to market. You can’t just outsource your business development to people with better sales skills, not until you know that pain points you’re solving for your customers and you can write the scripts for them.

Not doing the research, or using vanity metrics instead of strategy

“If a founder is estimating their market in the trillions of dollars they have either not done the research or they are just delusional.” Swati Chaturvedi, Co-Founder of PropelX

“Founders who are focused only on vanity metrics (growth rate and valuation) and not attuned to developing sound business models are a red flag.” Anurag Chandra, Fort Ross Ventures

Trying to skip steps

“Another red flag is trying to FOMO you into moving quickly. Not only is it bad for arriving at a sound investment decision, it’s an indication of how they do business with customers and partners (ie. not invested in building long term relationships). Anurag Chandra, Fort Ross Ventures

Misrepresentation or withholding data

“Investors can tell when you are avoiding details like actual product or customer development status and it may mean you are misrepresenting your business.” Caroline Winnett, Executive Director of Berkeley SkyDeck

Cofounder issues, not having a clear leader or not being open to feedback

“There needs to be agreement on who is acting as CEO, and everyone needs to be aligned on that. Another red flag is not being open to advice from experts.” Caroline Winnett, Executive Director of Berkeley SkyDeck

Being disorganized

“Founders should be responsive to requests for more information. It shows if they are organized and in the mindset to do a deal versus spin cycles.” Shruti Gandhi of Array Ventures

Kate speaks with Brad Bogolea, CEO and Co-founder of Simbe Robotics. Simbe Robotics developed a mobile robot named Tally, which is bringing advanced shelf insights to improve the retail shopping experience.

Tally provides a state-of-the-art sensing system on a robust, scalable platform that collects analytics in real-time.

Brad Bogolea

Brad Bogolea is the CEO and Co-Founder of Simbe Robotics, where he is responsible for the company’s vision and execution of its leading retail intelligence solution. In November 2015, Brad brought to market the Tally robot, the world’s first autonomous shelf auditing and analytics solution to help retailers ensure merchandise is always stocked, in the right place, and correctly priced. The National Retail Federation Foundation has named Brad to its list of “People Shaping Retail’s Future.

Prior to Simbe, Brad spent 10 years in the energy and wireless sensor industry. Most recently Brad worked at Silver Spring Networks, where he led global product management and business development efforts for their energy management and data analytics platform for energy utilities. Products under Brad’s leadership allowed the world’s largest utility companies and their energy consumers alike to gain efficiency and visibility of their energy usage through smart sensors and data.

Brad holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Pennsylvania State University where he also returned to serve as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

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Amit Goel, Director of Product Management for Autonomous Machines at NVIDIA, discusses the new collaboration between Open Robotics and NVIDIA. The collaboration will improve the way ROS and NVIDIA’s line of products such as Isaac SIM and the Jetson line of embedded boards operate together.

NVIDIA’s Isaac SIM lets developers build robust and scalable simulations. Dramatically reducing the costs of capturing real-world data and speeding up development time.

Their Jetson line of embedded boards is core to many robotics architectures, leveraging hardware-optimized chips for machine learning, computer vision, video processing, and more.

The improvements to ROS will allow robotics companies to better utilize the available computational power, while still developing on the robotics-centric platform familiar to many.

For the developers out there, check out the ISAAC ROS Github repository to implement this yourself.

Amit Goel

Amit Goel is Director of Product Management for Autonomous Machines at NVIDIA, where he leads the product development of NVIDIA Jetson, the most advanced platform for AI computing at the edge.

Amit has more than 15 years of experience in the technology industry working in both software and hardware design roles. Prior to joining NVIDIA in 2011, he worked as a senior software engineer at Synopsys, where he developed algorithms for statistical performance modeling of digital designs.

Amit holds a Bachelor of Engineering in electronics and communication from Delhi College of Engineering, a Master of Science in electrical engineering from Arizona State University, and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley.

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In this episode, our interviewer Lilly speaks to Alex Wallar, co-founder and CTO of The Routing Company. Wallar shares his background in multi-robot path-planning and optimization, and his research on scheduling and routing algorithms for high-capacity ride-sharing. They discuss how The Routing Company helps cities meet the needs of their people, the technical ins and outs of their dispatcher and assignment system, and the importance of public transit to cities and their economics.

Alex Wallar

Alex Wallar is Co-founder and CTO of the Routing Company, an on-demand vehicle routing and management platform that partners with cities to power the future of public transit. Previously he was pursuing a PhD in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, conducting research on mathematical optimization for high-capacity ride-sharing.

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In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Melonee Wise, former CEO of Fetch Robotics and current VP of Robotics Automation at Zebra Technologies. Melonee speaks about the origin of Fetch Robotics, her experience at Willow Garage, her experience being acquired by Zebra Technologies, challenges in the warehouse setting, on autonomous cars, and on the future of robotics.

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In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Ryan Gariepy, Chief Technology Officer of both Clearpath Robotics and OTTO Motors. Ryan speaks about the origin of Clearpath, how Clearpath focuses on making reliable robots, and the future of robotics.

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Anthony DiMare and Charles Chiau deep dive into how Bedrock Ocean is innovating in the world of Marine Surveys. At Bedrock Ocean, they are developing an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that is able to map the seafloor autonomously and at a high resolution. They are also developing a data platform to access, process, and visualize data captured from other companies at the seafloor.

Bedrock Ocean is solving two problems in the industry of Marine Surveying.
1. The vast majority of the seafloor is completely unmapped
2. The data that is captured from the seafloor is not standardized or centralized.

Seafloor data conducted by two different companies with the same or different hardware to capture the data can vary significantly in the calculated seafloor profile

Anthony DiMare
Anthony previously founded Nautilus Labs, a leading maritime technology company advancing the efficiency of ocean commerce through artificial intelligence. While at Nautilus, Anthony helped global companies solve challenges with distributed, siloed maritime data systems and built the early team that launched Nautilus Platform into large publicly listed shipping companies.

Charles Chiau
Charles, Bedrock’s CTO, was previously at SpaceX where he helped design the avionics systems for Crew Dragon. He also was a system integration engineer at Reliable Robotics working on their autonomous aviation system and was the CTO of DeepFlight where he worked on manned submersibles including ones for Tom Perkins, Richard Branson, and Steve Fossett.

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RE2 Sapien 6M Robot Arm

In this episode, Shihan Lu interviews Travis Schneider, Business Development Manager at RE2 Robotics, focusing on their work on mobile outdoor manipulation. Travis introduces several robotic products and services of RE2, including RE2 Sapien robotic arms and human-centered system integration, and how they can be used to help rather than replace workers. He also shares his thoughts about challenges in human-robot collaboration.

Travis Schneider
Travis Schneider, Business Development Manager at RE2 Robotics (RE2), works to foster commercial B2B partnerships with groups interested in leveraging RE2’s robotic technology for applications in a wide variety of markets, including aviation, construction, energy, and medical. With a background in Mechanical Engineering, Travis has an intimate knowledge of many of the fundamentals associated with robotic systems including electromechanical design, motion control, and associated software.

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Abate talks to Maxime Gariel, CTO of Xwing about the autonomous flight technology they are developing.

At Xwing, they are converting traditional aircraft into remotely operated aircraft. They do this by retrofitting planes with multiple sensors including cameras, radar, and lidar, and by developing sensor fusion algorithms to allow their planes to understand the world around them, using highly accurate perception algorithms.

Xwing’s autonomous flight technology allows a plane to taxi in the airport, takeoff, fly to a destination, avoid airborne and ground threats, and land, all without any human input. This technology not only enables autonomous flight but may also enhance the safety of manned aircraft by improving a plane’s ability to understand its surroundings.

Maxime Gariel

Maxime Gariel is the CTO of Xwing, a San Francisco based startup whose mission is to dramatically increase human mobility using fully autonomous aerial vehicles. Xwing is developing a Detect-And-Avoid system for unmanned and remotely piloted vehicles. Maxime is a pilot but he is passionate about making airplanes fly themselves.

Maxime joined Xwing from Rockwell Collins where he was a Principal GNC Engineer. He worked on autonomous aircraft projects including DARPA Gremlins and the AgustaWestland SW4 Solo autonomous helicopter. Before becoming Chief Engineer of the SW4 Solo’s flight control system, he was in charge of the system architecture, redundancy, and safety for the project.

Before Rockwell Collins, he worked on ADS-B based conflict detection as a postdoc at MIT and on autoland systems for airliners at Thales. Maxime earned his MS and PhD in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech and his BS from ISAE-Supaéro (France).

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Softbank Robotics Europe, the group behind two of the more recognizable robots, is laying off 40% of its workforce. On July 7, the developer of the famous Nao and Pepper robots will reduce its Paris-based workforce that had 330 employees as of March 2021.

The Robot Report confirmed this news, which was first reported by French media outlet Le Journal du Net. Softbank Robotics Europe lost \$38 million in its fiscal 2019-2020 year and more than \$119 million over the last three years, according to Le Journal du Net.

Despite their worldwide fame, the Nao and Pepper robots never achieved financial success. Most of the 27,000 Nao and Pepper robots were sold in Japan, which is more accepting of humanoid robots than Europe, the United States and other parts of the world. While selling that many robots is certainly an achievement, price and capabilities were often issues, especially for Pepper, which costs \$30,000 in the U.S.

A Softbank Robotics Europe employee, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Robot Report “the market for Nao and Pepper is smaller than we expected.” The source added that it is “not sustainable to have this many workers in Paris based on the economic issues we are facing.”

Softbank Robotics Europe was formed after parent company Softbank acquired Aldebaran Robotics for \$100 million about a decade ago.

Softbank Robotics Europe sent this public statement to The Robot Report:

“Since 2012 SoftBank Robotics Group, a subsidiary of SoftBank, has invested in Humanoid Robotics and intends to keep Pepper & NAO robots business moving forward.

“In the light of the pandemic and economic slowdown, SoftBank Robotics Europe is considering a significant workforce optimization plan. Our EMEA HQ located in Paris is home to about 330 employees, as of March 2021.

“In this difficult time, we want to thank all our employees for their efforts in creating the best humanoids on the planet, and will make the best efforts to ensure fair departure decisions with labor representatives and local consultation bodies in France. The current round of job cuts should be completed by the end of 2021.

“The restructuring project has as one of its objectives to continue to provide product sales, services support and maintenance for Pepper and NAO robots.

“We also want to thank our customers, partners and suppliers for their trust in our Pepper & NAO products.

“SoftBank Robotics Europe will continue to make significant investments in next-generation robots to serve our customers and partners.”

Downplaying Nao & Pepper going forward

While this next information isn’t surprising, it is confirmation from a Softbank insider. The source said both Softbank Robotics Europe and Softbank Robotics America won’t be focusing on Nao and Pepper as much going forward.

“There will be less investment in emotional humanoids, and more focus on commercial products such as Whiz,” the source said. The Whiz autonomous floor cleaning robot first went on sale in early 2019 as sales of Pepper lagged.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Trstz8Z6I0

This is part of a larger shift in strategy for Softbank’s robotics efforts. Softbank Robotics America, for example, recently announced that Nao and Pepper will be available in the U.S. exclusively through San Francisco-based RobotLAB, a company that has focused on educational robots for years. While other media outlets have referred to this as Softbank continuing to expand, it’s actually the reverse. The company is divesting from its direct channel.

Parent company Softbank will maintain the IP for both Nao and Pepper, but it’s looking to outsource much of the sales, service, and support work for these robots as they don’t generate significant revenue. The source told The Robot Report deals similar to the RobotLAB partnership are being explored for Nao and Pepper in other parts of the world.

“Pepper launched in 2014, but Whiz is our flagship robot now,” the source said. “Pepper will remain an icon in robotics, but more business efforts will be put into Whiz going forward.”

It’s been clear for a while that Nao and Pepper weren’t going to be a major part of Softbank’s robotics strategy going forward. In January 2021, for example, Softbank Group announced that Softbank Robotics will jointly develop robots with Japanese electronics maker Iris Ohyama. The joint venture, called Iris Robotics, highlighted two products that are evolutions of existing products. The first product is a new take on Softbank’s Whiz cleaning robot called the “Whiz i Iris Edition.” The second product is an updated version of Bear Robotics’ flagship robot, Servi.

As we pointed out at the time Iris Robotics was announced, neither Nao or Pepper appeared to be part of the deal. Now we know why.

Softbank has made other changes to its robotics strategy, most notably offloading 80% of its ownership stake in Boston Dynamics to Hyundai for \$880 million. It also paid \$2.8 billion for a 40% ownership stake in AutoStore, a leading developer of automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS). The logistics market is booming automation-wise, and now Softbank is tied up with a major player. AutoStore currently has a global blue-chip customer base with more than 600 installations and 20,000 robots across 35 countries.

Softbank also recently partnered with Bear Robotics on serving and bussing robots. Founded in 2017, Bear Robotics’ robots operate in restaurants, corporate campuses, ghost kitchens, senior care facilities, and casinos across North America, Asia, and Europe. Softbank is an investor in Bear Robotics.

This article was first published in The Robot Report.

Intel RealSense ID was designed with privacy as a top priority. Purpose-built for user protection, Intel RealSense ID processes all facial images locally and encrypts all user data. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

Intel RealSense is known in the robotics community for its plug-and-play stereo cameras. These cameras make gathering 3D depth data a seamless process, with easy integrations into ROS to simplify the software development for your robots. From the RealSense team, Joel Hagberg talks about how they built this product, which allows roboticists to perform computer vision and machine learning at the edge.

Joel Hagberg

Joel Hagberg leads the Intel® RealSense Marketing. Product Management and Customer Support teams. He joined Intel in 2018 after a few years as an Executive Advisor working with startups in the IoT, AI, Flash Array, and SaaS markets. Before his Executive Advisor role, Joel spent two years as Vice President of Product Line Management at Seagate Technology with responsibility for their $13B product portfolio. He joined Seagate from Toshiba, where Joel spent 4 years as Vice President of Marketing and Product Management for Toshiba’s HDD and SSD product lines. Joel joined Toshiba with Fujitsu’s Storage Business acquisition, where Joel spent 12 years as Vice President of Marketing, Product Management, and Business Development. Joel’s Business Development efforts at Fujitsu focused on building emerging market business units in Security, Biometric Sensors, H.264 HD Video Encoders, 10GbE chips, and Digital Signage. Joel earned his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Math from the University of Maryland. Joel also graduated from Fujitsu’s Global Knowledge Institute Executive MBA leadership program.

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Matt Bilsky, founder and CEO of FLX Solutions, discusses the snake-like robot he invented called the FLX BOT. The FLX BOT consists of modular links, each with a joint that can extend and rotate to get into tight spaces. Each link includes sensors including inertial measurement units and a camera. The robot is used to navigate and work in challenging environments, such as above ceilings and within walls. Matt discusses the key innovations of his product as well as his academic and entrepreneurial journey that led him to the FLX BOT.

Matt Bilksy

Matt Bilsky, PhD, PE is the inventor of the FLX BOT, a licensed Professional Engineer, a Mechanical Engineering professor at Lehigh University, and a former repair/maintenance contractor. In 2017, he was awarded with the Lehigh University Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year. Matt has a Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. from Lehigh University focused on smart product design, Technical Entrepreneurship, and mechatronics. He holds two additional Lehigh degrees: a BS in Mechanical Engineering with an Electrical Engineering minor and a Master of Engineering degree also in Mechanical Engineering. Since he was a child Matt has been an innovator. In his basement shop he designed and built numerous electronic gadgets. In 2003 he started his first company, Mattcomp Services LLC, offering computer repair, networking, home theater, and handyman services. He also created a web hosting company in 2005, Mattcomp Hosting, including all necessary back-end components on dedicated servers.

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This episode is about learning the options you have to get some money to start your startup and what is expected you achieve with that money.

In this podcast series of episodes we are going to explain how to create a robotics startup step by step.

We are going to learn how to select your co-founders, your team, how to look for investors, how to test your ideas, how to get customers, how to reach your market, how to build your product… Starting from zero, how to build a successful robotics startup.

I’m Ricardo Tellez, CEO and co-founder of The Construct startup, a robotics startup at which we deliver the best learning experience to become a ROS Developer, that is, to learn how to program robots with ROS.

Our company is already 5 years long, we are a team of 10 people working around the world. We have more than 100.000 students, and tens of Universities around the world use our online academy to provide the teaching environment to their students.

We have bootstrapped our startup, but we also (unsuccessfully) tried getting investors. We have done a few pivots and finally ended at the point that we are right now.

With all this experience, I’m going to teach you how to build your own startup. And we are going to go through the process by creating ourselves another startup, so you can see in the path how to create your own. So you are going to witness the creation of such robotics startup.

Subscribe to the podcast using any of the following methods

• ROS Developers Podcast on iTunes
• ROS Developers Podcast on Stitcher
• ROS Developers Podcast on Spotify

Or watch the video

The post 94. How to build a robotics startup: getting some money to start appeared first on The Construct.

This episode is about understanding why you can’t build your startup alone, and some criteria to properly select your co-founders.

In this podcast series of episodes we are going to explain how to create a robotics startup step by step.

We are going to learn how to select your co-founders, your team, how to look for investors, how to test your ideas, how to get customers, how to reach your market, how to build your product… Starting from zero, how to build a successful robotics startup.

I’m Ricardo Tellez, CEO and co-founder of The Construct startup, a robotics startup at which we deliver the best learning experience to become a ROS Developer, that is, to learn how to program robots with ROS.

Our company is already 5 years long, we are a team of 10 people working around the world. We have more than 100.000 students, and tens of Universities around the world use our online academy to provide the teaching environment to their students.

We have bootstrapped our startup, but we also (unsuccessfully) tried getting investors. We have done a few pivots and finally ended at the point that we are right now.

With all this experience, I’m going to teach you how to build your own startup. And we are going to go through the process by creating ourselves another startup, so you can see in the path how to create your own. So you are going to witness the creation of such robotics startup.

Subscribe to the podcast using any of the following methods

• ROS Developers Podcast on iTunes
• ROS Developers Podcast on Stitcher
• ROS Developers Podcast on Spotify

Or watch the video

The post 91. How to build a robotics startup: getting the team right appeared first on The Construct.

Abate interviews Tessa Lau on her startup Dusty Robotics which is innovating in the field of construction.

At Dusty Robotics, they developed a robot to automate the laying of floor plans on the floors in construction sites. Typically, this is done manually using a tape measure and reading printed out plans. This difficult task can often take a team of two a week to complete. Time-consuming tasks like this are incredibly expensive on a construction site where multiple different teams are waiting on this task to complete. Any errors in this process are even more time-consuming to fix. By using a robot to automatically convert 3d models of building plans into markings on the floors, the amount of time and errors are dramatically reduced.

Dr. Tessa Lau

Dr. Tessa Lau is an experienced entrepreneur with expertise in AI, machine learning, and robotics. She is currently Founder/CEO at Dusty Robotics, a construction robotics company building robot-powered tools for the modern construction workforce. Prior to Dusty, she was CTO/co-founder at Savioke, where she orchestrated the deployment of 75+ delivery robots into hotels and high-rises. Previously, Dr. Lau was a Research Scientist at Willow Garage, where she developed simple interfaces for personal robots. She also spent 11 years at IBM Research working in business process automation and knowledge capture. More generally, Dr. Lau is interested in technology that gives people super-powers, and building businesses that bring that technology into people’s lives. Dr. Lau was recognized as one of the Top 5 Innovative Women to Watch in Robotics by Inc. in 2018 and one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in 2015. Dr. Lau holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

Links

• Download mp3 (20.9 MB)
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• Support us on Patreon

A two-day discussion on the future of European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIH) took place last month, as over 2000 stakeholders and policy-makers gathered online for the first time to take stock of the upcoming hubs network.

European Digital Innovation Hubs are one-stop-shops where companies and public sector organisations can access and test digital innovations, gain the required digital skills, get advice on financing support and ultimately accomplish their digital transformation in the context of the twin green and digital transition which is at the core of European industrial policy.

The EDIHs will become a network spread across the entire EU, sharing best practices and specialist knowledge and ready to support companies and public administrations in any region and economic sector. EDIHs will also play a brokering role between public administrations and companies providing e-government technologies, and are an important tool in Europe’s industrial and SME policies as they are close to local companies and ‘speak their language’.

Member States have already been invited to designate potential hubs. These potential hubs met for the first time on Tuesday the 26th of January at the Digital Innovation Hubs annual conference, organised in collaboration with the Luxembourg Ministry of Economy. Keynote speakers included Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton and Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel. The 2000+ participants were provided with a unique opportunity to better prepare their submissions for the upcoming call and connect for further collaboration in building up the network of EDIHs.

Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton said:

Our vision is a resilient EU which is at the forefront of digital, where every citizen is digitally literate and where every single company can use the technology they need. Digital technology will help to provide the best public services in the world, and even small companies will be able to do business everywhere in Europe. This is the Europe we want, and the work of the European Digital Innovation Hubs will contribute to its construction.

The event was a discussion forum for potential EDIH candidates, policy makers and regional managers where the important role of the hubs was put in the context of Europe’s economic recovery and practical questions regarding how to set up a hub were answered. The conference is a crucial step in kick-starting the network, and is critical to building EU capacity to accelerate the digital innovation of businesses.

Half of the €1.5 billion investment in the EDIH network will come from the Digital Europe Programme and the rest through national and regional funds, financing the approximately 200 hubs from 2021 to 2027. They will act as a multiplier and widely diffuse the use of all the digital capacities built up under the different objectives of the Digital Europe Programme. Member States have worked in close collaboration with the European Commission to prepare the call.

Next steps

The potential hubs designated by Member States will be invited to submit their proposals for the call, which will select the hubs participating in the initial network of European Digital Innovation Hubs. Projects will be launched after summer 2021, and will immediately start working towards further digitalisation of all the sectors of the European economy, giving a strong contribution to the recovery after the COVID-19 crisis.

Image credit: Techcouver

In this episode, Lilly interviews Afshin Doust, CEO of Advanced Intelligent Systems. Doust explains the company’s modular, robots-as-a-service subscription business model. They discuss robotic solutions for the agricultural industry, disinfecting robots to combat COVID19, and other exciting new developments at AIS.

Afshin Doust

Afshin Doust is the Chief Executive Officer of Advanced Intelligent Systems (AIS). He is a seasoned entrepreneur with professional experience in finance, sales, business consulting, and strategic management with a keen interest in assembling teams to resolve business challenges.  Afshin took the role of CEO at AIS in 2016, with the goal to lead the team towards the vision of creating innovations in autonomous robotic solutions for a wide range of applications.

Links

• AIS Press: COVID-19 Robots
• Download mp3 (16.0 MB)
• Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify
• Support us on Patreon

In this podcast series of episodes we are going to explain how to create a robotics startup step by step.

We are going to learn how to select your co-founders, your team, how to look for investors, how to test your ideas, how to get customers, how to reach your market, how to build your product… Starting from zero, how to build a successful robotics startup.

I’m Ricardo Tellez, CEO and co-founder of The Construct startup, a robotics startup at which we deliver the best learning experience to become a ROS Developer, that is, to learn how to program robots with ROS.

Our company is already 5 years long, we are a team of 10 people working around the world. We have more than 100.000 students, and tens of Universities around the world use our online academy to provide the teaching environment to their students.

We have bootstrapped our startup, but we also (unsuccessfully) tried getting investors. We have done a few pivots and finally ended at the point that we are right now.

With all this experience, I’m going to teach you how to build your own startup. And we are going to go through the process by creating ourselves another startup, so you can see in the path how to create your own. So you are going to witness the creation of such robotics startup.

This episode is about deciding the product your startup will produce.

Related links

• Why robotics startups fail, document made by Fresh
• Jibo robot
• Cozmo robot
• Baxter robot

Subscribe to the podcast using any of the following methods

• ROS Developers Podcast on iTunes
• ROS Developers Podcast on Stitcher
• ROS Developers Podcast on Spotify

Or watch the video

The post 89. How to build a robotics startup: the product idea appeared first on The Construct.

In this episode, Abate follows up with Benjamin Pietro Filardo, founder of Pliant Energy Systems and NACROM, the North American Consortium for Responsible Ocean Mining. Pietro talks about the deep sea mining industry, an untapped market with a massive potential for growth. Pietro discusses the current proposed solutions for deep sea mining which are environmentally destructive, and he offers an alternative solution using swarm robots which could mine the depths of the ocean while creating minimal disturbance to this mysterious habitat.

Benjamin “Pietro” Filardo
After several years in the architectural profession, Pietro founded Pliant Energy Systems to explore renewable energy concepts he first pondered while earning his first degree in marine biology and oceanography. With funding from four federal agencies he has broadened the application of these concepts into marine propulsion and a highly novel robotics platform.

Links

• Download mp3 (20.4 MB)
• Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify
• Support us on Patreon

For the past few months the SPAC craze has spilled over to the robot and remote sensing industries. Just last week, SoftBank announced it is raising $525 million in a blind pool SPAC for investments in artificial intelligence. In the filing with the SEC, Softbank states, “For the past 40 years, SoftBank has invested ahead of major technology shifts. Now, we believe the AI revolution has arrived.” In 2017, SoftBank’s Chief Executive, Masayoshi Son (nicknamed Masa) predicted that by 2047, robots will outnumber humans on the planet with 10 billion small humanoids (like its own Pepper robot) rolling the streets. An outspoken believer in Singularity, Masa has not been shy about investing in the robotics sector with ownership stakes in Whiz, Pepper, Bear and Brain Corp. The company sold its interests in Boston Dynamics to Hyundai for a billion dollars earlier this month. When launching his own venture capital fund in 2018, Masa declared, “I am devoting 97% of my time and brain on AI.” This past month, Masa’s $100 billion Vision Fund had a huge portfolio win with the IPO of DoorDash, erasing earlier losses of failed investments in WeWork and OneWeb. In that spirit, it is not surprising that the SPAC filing exclaims: “COVID-19 has pulled this future forward by dramatically accelerating the adoption of digital services. During this time, we intersected with many compelling companies that wanted our support at IPO and beyond, but we lacked the vehicle to partner with them. This trend has only increased over the past year as more companies have decided to list publicly.”

SoftBank’s optimism is further validated by the success of SPACs in acquiring hardware sensor companies. Earlier this month, Ouster became the fifth LiDAR startup to go public through a SPAC this year. Already trading on the markets is Velodyne, Luminar, Innoviz, and Aeva. Each of these companies raised hundreds of millions of dollars at valuations exceeding a billion dollars. Some have fared well in the public markets, such as Luminar doubling its valuation in a few weeks. Others, like Velodyne, have had more difficulty. Velodyne’s shares fell by half since its listing in September (it is currently trading modestly above its initial price). As hardware is tough, staying private comes at the cost of founder dilution and overvaluation. SPACs offer startups and their investors quicker access to capital and greater liquidity, enabling investors to reinvest their returns in the autonomous sector and ultimately driving innovation in advance of greater adoption.

Recently, I caught up with Andrew Flett, General Partner of Mobility Impact Partners which raised $115 million for a new SPAC – Motion Acquisition Corp. (ticker symbol MOTNU). Flett’s investment vehicle is still on the hunt for an acquisition of “target businesses in connected vehicle industries globally, which include companies providing transportation software and cloud solutions for fleet management, freight and logistics, and mobile asset management applications.” When speaking with Flett, he described his inaugural experience in the space as follows, “This is the first SPAC I have been directly involved with but the mechanism has evolved and matured over the last couple of decades. They are popular now as a function of the same yield scarcity and immense liquidity that has been driving public equity speculation. There will be both highly speculative companies and companies with solid fundamentals in any wave of interest. This wave is no different.” He astutely points to previous SPAC upticks (since the 1980s) led by dubious underwriters that used the mechanism as a way to make a quick buck through “pump-and-dump” schemes. These market manipulators, many still serving jail time, quickly promoted stocks on the exchanges to only rapidly sell their own interests in the companies before other investors were legally able to trade the shares, ultimately devastating the startup’s and its shareholders’ values. This is compounded by the increased expenses and transparency of publicly traded listings, leaving startup founders ill prepared for their new role on the NASDAQ or NYSE.

Unlike the past, many of the newly formed SPACs have been managed by brand name investors such as Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), Bill Ackman (Pershing Square) and Peter Thiel (Bridgetown). The performance of the newly listed SPAC 2020 crop has been very impressive, outpacing the S&P, with Draft Kings and Nikola leading the charge with triple digit returns. In nudging Flett for his opinion of these managers, he cautions, “Smart guys. Is it just a branding exercise or will they be involved in the asset evaluation and ultimate de-SPACed company? In the end, the asset needs to stand on its own and regardless of how it gets there (IPO, Direct Listing, SPAC), once public it is a pure apples to apples performance comparison dependent on strategy, management, and execution. If the public company does not benefit from their wisdom, it does not matter what brand is attached at the front end.”

Flett advises founders not to be too easily seduced by public capital, rather “focus on your company. If your company cannot absorb the responsibilities and overhead of being a public company, it is not the right option for you.” Gauging his view of Softbank’s latest announcement, “Like most Private Equity or institutional investors, it is simply a cash grab and an alternative vehicle to demonstrate their investing acumen. I prefer seeing Softbank doing reasonably sized SPACs than raising another misguided Vision Fund,” Flett optimistically opines. However, at the end of the day, the SPAC pioneer reminds us that the market is cyclical and the window of opportunity will eventually close, “As some of the speculative bets burn investors and yield alternatives appear, the SPAC market will slow.”

Abate interviews Benjamin “Pietro” Filardo, CEO and founder of Pliant Energy Systems. At PES, they developed a novel form of actuation using two undulating fins on a robot. These fins present multiple benefits over traditional propeller systems including excellent energy efficiency, low water turbulence, and an ability to maneuver in water, land, and ice. Aside from its benefits on a robot, Pietro also talks about its advantages for harnessing energy from moving water.

Watch this episode on YouTube

Benjamin “Pietro” Filardo
After several years in the architectural profession, Pietro founded Pliant Energy Systems to explore renewable energy concepts he first pondered while earning his first degree in marine biology and oceanography. With funding from four federal agencies he has broadened the application of these concepts into marine propulsion and a highly novel robotics platform.

Links

• Download mp3 (16.1 MB)
• Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify
• Support us on Patreon

In this episode, Abate interviews Josh Lessing, co-founder and CEO of Root AI. At Root AI they are developing a system that tracks data on the farm and autonomously harvests crops using delicate grippers and computer vision. Lessing talks about the path they took to build a product with good market fit and how they brought a venture capital backed startup to market.

Josh Lessing

Josh is one of the world’s leading minds on developing robotics and AI systems for the food industry, previously serving as the Director of R&D at Soft Robotics Inc. His current venture, Root AI, is integrating advanced robotics, vision systems and machine perception to automate agriculture. Josh was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Materials Science & Robotics at Harvard University, having earned his Ph.D. studying Biophysics & Physical Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received an Sc.B. in Chemistry from Brown University.

Links

• Download mp3 (16.0 MB)
• Listen to this episode on Spotify
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In this episode, Lauren Klein interviews Muralidharan Arikara, CEO of Xarpie Labs. Xarpie Labs creates visualization and simulation experiences within the retail, healthcare, and defense industries. Arikara describes how Xarpie Labs grew as part of the Machani Group, which has decades of experience in automotive manufacturing, into an innovator in virtual and augmented reality. He elaborates on the role of Xarpie Lab’s virtual reality and augmented reality experiences in allowing real estate customers a vision of properties from a distance. Arikara also paints a picture of Xarpie Labs’ augmented reality tools, including a project for a museum to visualize old gramophones for visitors and an air conditioning troubleshooting tool for technicians.

Muralidharan Arikara

Muralidharan Arikara is an entrepreneur and the CEO of Xarpie Labs. Arikara is an engineer by training, and worked in the clean energy industry prior to his current role. In addition to his role as CEO at Xarpie Labs, he is also a member of the advisory board of several startups in the energy and consumer segments.

Links

• Download mp3 (16.8 MB)
• Xarpie Labs Virtual Employee Onboarding Program
• LinkedIn
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In this episode, Lilly interviews Dr. William Crowe, CEO of High Earth Orbit (HEO) Robotics. The mission of HEO Robotics is to provide high quality imagery of satellites, space-debris and resource-rich asteroids. Crowe discusses the technical challenges which make robotics and satellites similar like computer vision and controls, and those where traditional robotics approaches aren’t suitable like localization and mobility. He explains new trends in the satellite industry, and the need for high quality imagery.

William Crowe

William Crowe is CEO of High Earth Orbit Robotics, a company that performs health checks on satellites by assessing data on images they take from other satellites. He has a PhD in Astrodynamics, where his research focused on the use of swarms to characterize asteroids, especially those that fly closer than the Moon. William sees a future where we use the resources of space in space to better our Earth.

Links

• Download mp3 (13.9 MB)
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In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Dave Coleman, CEO of PickNik Robotics, about the open source robotics manipulation platform called MoveIt. Coleman talks about MoveIt’s story, from inception and the early days to development and maintenance, as well as how MoveIt relates to the Robot Operating System (ROS) and their move to support ROS-2. He also speaks about MoveIt’s implementation, including global versus local planners and what that means. Coleman concludes by talking about World MoveIt Day and how those interested can begin learning MoveIt and contributing.

Here is a 2017 montage of how MoveIt has been used:

Dave Coleman

Dave Coleman completed his PhD in Computer Science at CU Boulder focusing on motion planning and his B.S. at Geogia Tech in Mechanical Engineering. Coleman has 12 years experience working in the field of robotics automation and is a leader in the open source MoveIt and ROS communities. His insights into robot-agnostic platforms for different morphologies, theoretical approaches, and different end-user requirements give him a well-rounded understanding for powerful robotic software. He has worked and consulted for all types of robotics companies including Google Robotics, Open Robotics, and Willow Garage.

Links

• Download mp3 (17.8 MB)
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In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Janet Vertessi, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton, on her book Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars. The book is written about her experience living and working with NASA’s Mars Rover team, and includes her observations about the team’s leadership and their relationship with their robot millions of miles away on Mars. She also gives some advice from her findings for teams.

Janet Vertessi

Janet Vertesi specializes in the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology. She has spent the past 7 years studying several NASA spacecraft teams as an ethnographer. Her book, Seeing like a Rover: Images and Interaction on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (Chicago, 2014) draws on over two years of ethnographic immersion with the Mars Exploration Rover mission to show how scientists and engineers use digital images to conduct scientific research on another planet. She is currently working on followup study of the NASA-ESA Cassini mission to Saturn focusing on the role of sociotechnical organization in research, data-sharing, and decision-making on robotic spacecraft teams. Vertesi is also interested in the digital sociology: whether studying computational systems in social life, shifting sociological methods online, or applying sociological insights to build new technologies.  She holds a Master’s degree from Cambridge and a PhD from Cornell, has received several grants from the National Science Foundation, and was awarded the Hacker-Mullins prize for best graduate student paper from the American Sociological Association, Science, Knowledge and Technology section in 2007.

Links

• Download mp3 (15.5 MB)
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In this episode, Abate interviews David Mindell, co-founder of Humatics. David discusses a system they developed that can detect the location of a special tracking device down to a centimeter level accuracy. They are currently developing a device to detect location down to a millimeter level accuracy. This solves a the core problem of localization for robots. David discusses the technology behind these products and their applications.

David Mindell

David co-founded Humatics with a mission to revolutionize how people and machines locate, navigate and collaborate. He is a professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, as well as the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, and Chair of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future. He has participated in more than 25 oceanographic expeditions and is an inventor on 8 patents in autonomous helicopters, AI-assisted piloting, and RF navigation. He is the author of five books, including Our Robots, Ourselves:Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy (2015) and Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (2008). David has undergraduate degrees from Yale and a Ph.D. from MIT.

Links

• Download mp3 (15.9 MB)
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In this episode, Lilly interviews Juxi Leitner, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Queensland University of Technology and Co-Founder/CEO of LYRO Robotics. LYRO spun out of the 2017 win of the Amazon Robotics Challenge by Team ACRV. Here Juxi discusses deep learning, computer vision, intent in grasping and manipulation, and bridging the gap between abstract and low-level understandings of the world. He also discusses why robotics is really an integration field, the Amazon and other robotics challenges, and what’s important to consider when spinning an idea into a company.

Juxi Leitner

Juxi Leitner is co-founder of LYRO Robotics, a deep-tech startup based in Brisbane, Australia, creating robotic picking and packing solutions. LYRO is a spin-out of the Australian Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision (ACRV), where Juxi is the research lead for the manipulation research stream (previously Vision and Action project). His research focus is on integrating Robotics, Computer Vision and Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence (AI) for robust grasping and manipulation in real-world scenarios. In 2017 his team won the Amazon Robotics Challenge. Juxi is active in the local Brisbane deep-tech ecosystem and started Brisbane.AI and the Brisbane robotics interest group.

Links

• Download mp3 (17.3MB)
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Welcome to the 300th episode of the Robohub podcast! You might not know that the podcast has been going in one form or another for 14 years. Originally called “Talking Robots,” the podcast was started in 2006 by Dario Floreano and several of his PhD students at EPFL, in Switzerland, including Sabine Hauert, Peter Dürr, and Markus Waibel, who are all still involved in Robohub today.  Since then, the podcast team has become international, with most of its interviewers in the United States and Europe, and all of its members being volunteers.

To celebrate 300 episodes of our podcast, we thought we would catch up with some of our former, as well as current, volunteers from around the world to find out why and how they got involved in the podcast, how their involvement impacted on their lives and careers, and what they’re doing in their day jobs now.

First up, Sabine Hauert, one of Professor Floreano’s former students, now, Assistant Professor in the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at the University of Bristol in the UK. Sabine, whose work focuses on swarm robotics, is also acting President and Co-founder of Robohub.org. She spoke to our interviewer Lilly.

Next, our interviewer and current podcast President Audrow caught up with Peter Dürr, who now leads a team in Switzerland focused on Computer Vision research, whilst remaining active with the podcast by editing all of our episodes.

And last, but definitely not least, Andra Keay, Managing Director of non-profit industry group Silicon Valley Robotics, and long standing member of Robohub, spoke to our interviewer Lauren about her company, and women in robotics.

Links

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In this episode, Ron Vanderkley interviews Mark Pivac, Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of FBR (formerly Fastbrick Robotics) about the world’s first end-to-end autonomous bricklaying robot, ‘Hadrian X’. Three years after his first interview, we catch up with Pivac to see how FBR has expanded its operation and chat about their latest commercial prototype, ‘Hadrian X’, as well as the future of the robotic construction industry.

Mark Pivac is the primary inventor of FBR’s automated bricklaying technology. He is an aeronautical and mechanical engineer with over 25 years’ experience working on the development of high technology equipment ranging from lightweight aircraft to heavy off-road equipment. He has 20 years’ experience working with pro/engineer 3D CAD software as well as high-level mathematics, including matrix mathematics, robot transformations and vector mathematics for machine motion. Mark has also worked extensively with design, commissioning and fault finding on servo controlled motion systems achieving very high dynamic performance.

Links

• FBR Website
• Marc Pivac Profile Page
• Hadrian X in action (Video)
• Download mp3 (13.3 MB)
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In this episode, join our interviewer Andrew Vaziri at Promat 2019, the largest expo for manufacturing and supply chain professionals in North and South America. Andrew interviews a handful of companies which provide warehouse fulfillment robots that can autonomous pick and place items. Our guests explain how advances in AI have made autonomous picking possible. They also talk about the unique technologies they use to stand out in a crowded field of competing products.

The guests in the order they appear are:
Vince Martinelli, Head of Product and Marketing, RightHand Robotics
Jim Liefer, CEO, Kindred
Pete Blair, VP of Marketing, Berkshire Grey
Sean Davis, Technical Product Manager, Osaro
Erik Nieves, CEO, Plus One Robotics

See video of each robot picking items on our YouTube page:

Links

• Download mp3 (11.7 MB)
• Righthand Robotics Website
• Kindred Website
• Berkshire Grey’s Website
• Osaro’s Website
• PlusOne Robotics’ Website
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In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Bernt Børnich, CEO, CTO, and Co-founder of Halodi Robotics, about Eve (EVEr3), a general purpose full-size humanoid robot, capable of a wide variety of tasks.  Børnich discusses how Eve can be used in research, how Eve’s motors have been designed to be safe around humans (including why they use a low gear ratio), how they do direct force control and the benefits of this approach, and how they use machine learning to reduce cogging in their motors.  Børnich also discusses the longterm goal of Halodi Robotics and how they plan to support researchers using Eve.

Below are two videos of Eve. The first is a video of how Eve can be used as a platform to address several research questions.  The second shows Eve moving a box and dancing.

Bernt Børnich

Photographer: Tonje Kornelie

Bernt Børnich is the CEO and CTO of Halodi Robotics, and the inventor of their Revo1 motors. He holds a bachelor of robotics and nano-electronics from the University of Oslo.

Links

• Download mp3 (16.4 MB)
• Halodi’s homepage
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In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Ian Bernstein, Founder and Head of Product at Misty Robotics, about a robotics platform designed for developers called Misty II.  Bernstein discusses the motivation behind making a robotics platform for developers (relating it to personal computers), Misty II’s hardware extensibility and software “skills,” and the future direction of Misty Robotics.

A video introducing the Misty II platform:

Ian Bernstein

Ian Bernstein is Founder and Head of Product at Misty Robotics, a spin-off company from Sphero, Inc. focused on building personal robots for the home and office. In this role, Bernstein leads Misty Robotics’ product development and design. Prior to Misty Robotics, Bernstein served as Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Sphero, Inc. that has shipped more than 3 million robots to date. Bernstein joined TechStars in 2010 with Sphero co-founder Adam Wilson and created Sphero, the original app-enabled robotic ball. Bernstein has had a lifelong passion for robotics and creation and has been building robots since he was 12. Ian holds a BS in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Colorado State University.

Links

• Download mp3 (13.8 MB)
• Misty Robotics’ homepage
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In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Dor Skuler, CEO and co-founder of Intuition Robotics, about a socially assistive robot for older adults named ElliQ. Skuler discusses the motivation for ElliQ, how it infers context and changes its behavior accordingly, and how ElliQ adapts its behavior over time.

Below is a video that shows what interactions with ElliQ look like.

Dor Skuler

Dor Skuler has co-founded five ventures, the most recent being Intuition Robotics. Skuler holds an MBA and Master’s of Science in Marketing from Temple University, has co-authored ‘Cloud Computing: Business Trends and Technologies’ published by Wiley in 2016 and holds board level advisory and director roles for several telecoms, cyber security and tech-led social impact ventures.

Links

• Download mp3 (17.1 MB)
• ElliQ’s webpage
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In this interview, Audrow Nash interviews Ryan Gariepy, Lars Grimstad, and Péter Fankhauser.

Ryan Gariepy, Chief Technology Officer of ClearPath and Otto Motors in Canada, speaks about Boxer, a robust research platform that has been used extensively in an industrial context over many years. Gariepy discusses how Boxer can be used in investigating human-robot interaction questions because of its expressive lighting, including for autonomous cars.

Lars Grimstad, Chief Technology Office of Saga Robotics in Norway, discusses a lego-like agriculture platform. He speaks about the platform’s design, including its power systems and communication protocol. Grimstad also talks about a project using this platform to pick hanging strawberries.

Péter Fankhauser, Chief Business Development Officer and Co-founder of ANYbotics in Switzerland, speaks about ANYmal, a quadrupedal robot. Fankhauer discusses going from research to industry, using ANYmal for inspection, and the future of ANYbotics.

Links

• Download mp3 (11.9 MB)
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In this interview, Audrow Nash interviews Kristoffer Richardsson, Michael Zillich, and Paulo Alvito.

Kristoffer Richardsson, Developer at Bitcraze in Sweden, speaks about small open-source unmanned aerial vehicle and different ways of localizing them.

Michael Zillich, CTO of Blue Danube Robotics in Austria, discusses a robotics platform for picking up toys, called Kenny. Zillich talks about Kenny’s design, including sensors and its robotic arm. He discusses how children can show the robot where to put specific toys, about how this large European project was coordinated, and about possibly commercializing this platform.

Paulo Alvito, CEO and CTO and Co-founder of IDMind in Portugal, discusses remote inspection robot for sewers. Alvito discusses what it means to be remotely autonomous, the design of the robot, and how these robots communicate data.

Links

• Download mp3 (17.3 MB)
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In this interview, Audrow Nash interviews Gabriel Lopes, Robot and Control Scientist at Robot Care Systems, and Bernt Børnich, CEO and Co-founder of Halodi Robotics.

Gabriel Lopes speaks about an assistive walker with additional functionality.  Lopes discusses how the walker can be used, including driving up to the person, helping them stand up, exercise, and make video calls.  He also discusses building a software language for non-technical people that work with older adults. Lopes also speaks about the future of their company.

Bernt Børnich speaks about the humanoid platform at Halodi Robotics. Børnich’s long-term goal is to create an affordable home robot. He discusses the design and form factor of this robot. This includes the custom motor designed for high torque, and how the robot can “lean in” from a joint at its ankle. Børnich discusses the timeline, speculated cost, and working with investors on the long term goal of building an affordable humanoid robot.

Links

• Download mp3 (13.6 MB)
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In this interview, Audrow Nash interviews Amruta Moktali, VP of Product Management at Salesforce Analytics, about Salesforce Analytics’ analytic and artificial intelligence software. Moktali discusses the data-pipeline, how data is processed (e.g., noise), and how insights are identified.  She also talks about how dimensions in the data can be controlled for (such as race, gender, or zip-code) to avoid bias and how other dimensions can be selected as actionable so Salesforce can make recommendations—and how they use interpretable methods so that these recommendations can be explained.  Moktali also tells about her professional path, including going from computer engineering and computer science to product management and her experience with intrapreneurship (that is, starting an endeavor within a large organization).

Here is a video demo of Einstein Analytics, and you can watch Moktali’s live in the Einstein Analytics keynote at Dreamforce on Thursday, Sept. 27 at 5pm PT at salesforce.com/live and youtube.com/user/dreamforce.

Amruta Moktali
Amruta Moktali, VP of Product Management for Salesforce Analytics, has spent 10+ years immersed in the data and analytics side of popular products. Before Salesforce, she was head of product at Topsy Labs, the social search and analytics company, where her team pinpointed the catalyst tweets that initiated the Arab Spring in Egypt. Topsy was acquired by Apple and is now part of Apple Search technology. Prior to that she worked at Microsoft where she worked on several products including Bing, which she had a hand in shaping with the Powerset team. She earned her bachelor’s degree in computer engineering at Maharaja Sayajirao University in India, and her master’s in computer science at Arizona State University.

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In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Jonathan W. Hurst, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Oregon State University and CTO and co-founder of Agility Robotics, about legged locomotion, about a bipedal robot, called “Cassie.” Hurst discusses Cassie’s design, what types of research questions Cassie should allow, and applications of walking robots, including package delivery. 

Below is a video of Cassie walking in several environments.

Jonathan W. Hurst

Jonathan W. Hurst is Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Agility Robotics, as well as an Associate Professor of Robotics and College of Engineering Dean’s Professor at Oregon State University. He holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering and an M.S. and Ph.D. in robotics, all from Carnegie Mellon University. His university research focuses on understanding the fundamental science and engineering best practices for legged locomotion. Investigations range from numerical studies and analysis of animal data, to simulation studies of theoretical models, to designing, constructing, and experimenting with legged robots for walking and running. Agility Robotics is taking this research to commercial applications for robotic legged mobility, working towards a day when robots can go where people go, generate greater productivity across the economy, and improve quality of life for all.

Links

• Dynamic Robotics Laboratory
• Agility Robotics
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MiR was just returning from celebrating its 300% growth in 2017 at a company get-together in Barcelona with 70 MiR employees from all over the world when the announcement was made. It tripled its revenue from autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in 2017. MiR co-founder and CEO Thomas Visti said that growth in 2017 was primarily due to multinational companies that returned with orders for larger fleets of mobile robots after it tested and analyzed the results of its initial MiR robot orders.

Another factor in MiR’s 2017 growth was the launch of the MiR200 which can lift 440 pounds, pull 1,100 pounds, is ESD approved and cleanroom certified. “The MiR200 has been very well received and represents a large part of our sales. The product meets clear needs in the market and increases potential applications for autonomous mobile robots. Combined with our new and extremely user-friendly interface – which even employees without programming experience can use – it makes it even simpler for our customers to implement and use our robots,” Visti said.

Another reason for MiRs rapid growth has been its initial strategic decision to develop and market solely to a growing network of integrator/distributors originally developed by Visti when he was VP of Sales at Universal Robots. MiR presently has 132 distributors in 40 countries with regional offices in New York, San Diego, Singapore, Dortmund, Barcelona and Shanghai – and the lists are growing.

Teradyne, by this acquisition, is hoping to capitalize on the synergies between MiR and UR as shown in the chart above. Both offer end users fast ROI and low cost of entry and provide Teradyne with attractive gross margins and rapid growth.

“We are excited to have MiR join Teradyne’s widening portfolio of advanced, intelligent, automation products,” said Mark Jagiela, President and CEO of Teradyne. “MiR is the market leader in the nascent, but fast growing market for collaborative autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). Like Universal Robots’ collaborative robots, MiR collaborative AMRs lower the barrier for both large and small enterprises to incrementally automate their operations without the need for specialty staff or a re-layout of their existing workflow. This, combined with a fast return on investment, opens a vast new automation market. Following the path proven with Universal Robots, we expect to leverage Teradyne’s global capabilities to expand MiR’s reach.”

Earlier this year, Teradyne acquired Energid for $25 million in a talent and intellectual property acquisition. Energid, which is exhibiting and speaking at the Robotics Summit & Showcase, developed the robot control and tasking framework Actin which is used in industrial, commercial, collaborative, medical and space-based robotic systems and is a UR partner. Teradyne sees Actin as an enabling technology for advanced motion control and collision avoidance.

MiR founder and CSO Niels Jul Jacobsen, Visti, and investors Esben Østergaard, Torben Frigaard Rasmussen, and Søren Michael Juul Jørgensen should all be proud of their achievement thus far. Congratulations to all!

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Maja Matarić, a professor at the University of Southern California and the Chief Science Officer of Embodied, about socially assistive robotics. Socially assistive robotics aims to endow robots with the ability to help people through individual non-contact assistance in convalescence, rehabilitation, training, and education. For example, a robot could help a child on the autism spectrum to connect to more neurotypical children and could help to motivate a stroke victim to follow their exercise routine for rehabilitation (see the videos below). In this interview, Matarić discusses the care gap in health care, how her work leverages research in psychology to make robots engaging, and opportunities in socially assistive robotics for entrepreneurship.

A short video about how personalized robots might act as a “social bridge” between a child on the autism spectrum and a more neurotypical child.

A short video about how a robot could assist stroke victims in their recovery.

Maja Matarić

Maja Matarić is professor and Chan Soon-Shiong chair in Computer Science Department, Neuroscience Program, and the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California, founding director of the USC Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center (RASC), co-director of the USC Robotics Research Lab and Vice Dean for Research in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. She received her PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from MIT, MS in Computer Science from MIT, and BS in Computer Science from the University of Kansas. 

Links

• Interaction Lab
• Embodied
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In this episode, Abate interviews Peter Harris from HighRes Biosolutions about automation in the field of drug discovery. At HighRes Biosolutions they are developing modular robotic systems that work alongside scientists to automate laboratory tasks. Because the requirements of each biomedical research laboratory are so varied, the robotic systems are specifically tailored to meet the requirements of each lab.

Peter Harris
Peter Harris is the CEO of HighRes Biosolutions. Prior to HighRes, Peter was VP and Managing Director at Axel Johnson, Inc. He spent most his career as the President & CEO of Cadence, Inc., a high technology medical device manufacturing and engineering firm enabling medical companies to bring better devices to market faster. Peter has been a Visiting Executive Lecturer at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia for over 10 years.

Links

• HighRes Biosolutions Website
• “Collaborative robots are redefining lab automation” by Peter Harris
• Peter Harris LinkedIn
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Image from the South China Morning Post

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Karl Weaver (魏卡爾), formerly the Original Equipment Manufacturer Business Development Director for Oasis Smart SIM. Weaver discusses how wearable technology is growing as a form of payment system in China. He speaks about wireless technology, including Near-Field Communications (NFC) and Embedded SIM cards (eSIM), in wearable technology and in other applications, such as bike rental.

Karl Weaver (魏卡爾)

Since the recording of this interview, Karl has begun working for ARM promoting eSIM and iUICC to Greater China and Asia.

Karl Weaver (魏卡爾) previously worked as the Original Equipment Manufacturer Business Development Director (North America and Northeast Asia) for Oasis Smart SIM. Prior to Oasis, Karl worked for Rivetz Corp, a Massachusetts-based start-up to promote developer tools for design-in of TEE-enables applications on Smartphones for payment and security. Karl also spent 5 years working in China for Gemalto (and Trustonic) as liaison and evangelist of embedded Mobile Near-Field Communications Payments & TEE security technologies to the OEM Smartphone/Tablet PC ecosystem. Weaver has a B.S degree in Business Management from Salve Regina University and a Certification in Mandarin Chinese Language, Customs, and Culture from National Taiwan Normal University.

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In this episode Abate talks with Zhe Zhang from Perceptin where they are building embedded platforms for robots to do Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms in real time. Zhe explains the methods they incorporate such as sensor fusion and hardware synchronization to make a highly accurate SLAM platform for IOT, consumer, and automotive grade robots.

Zhe Zhang

Zhe is the co-founder and CEO of PerceptIn. Prior to founding PerceptIn, he worked at Magic Leap in Silicon Valley and prior to that he worked for five years at Microsoft. Zhang has a PhD in Robotics from the State University of New York and an undergraduate degree from Tsinghua University.

Further research recommended by Zhe:

1. Probabilistic Data Association for Semantic SLAM
2. A Comparative Analysis of Tightly-coupled Monocular, Binocular, and Stereo VINS
3. Computer Vision for Autonomous Vehicles: Problems, Datasets and State-of-the-Art

Links

• Perceptin Website
• Zhe’s personal website
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A Lucie micro drone takes off from a performer’s hand as part of a drone show. Photo: Verity Studios 2017

2017 was the year where indoor drone shows came into their own. Verity Studios’ Lucie drones alone completed more than 20,000 autonomous flights. A Synthetic Swarm of 99 Lucie micro drones started touring with Metallica (the tour is ongoing and was just announced the 5th highest grossing tour worldwide for 2017). Micro drones are now performing at Madison Square Garden as part of each New York Knicks home game — the first resident drone show in a full-scale arena setting. Since early 2017, a drone swarm has been performing weekly on a first cruise ship. And micro drones performed thousands of flights at Changi Airport Singapore as part of its 2017 Christmas show.

Technologically, indoor drone show systems are challenging. They are among the most sophisticated automation systems in existence, with dozens of autonomous robotic aircraft operating in a safety-critical environment. Indoor drone shows require sophisticated, distributed system control and communications architectures to split up and recombine sensing and computation between aircraft and their off-board infrastructure. Core challenges are not unlike those found in modern systems for manned aviation (e.g., combining auto-pilots, GPS, and air traffic control) and in creating tomorrow’s smart cities (e.g., combining semi-autonomous cars with intelligent traffic lights in a city).

These technological challenges are compounded by another: At least for permanent show installations, these systems need to be operated by non-experts. Two years ago, in one of the first major indoor drone shows, a swarm of micro drones flew over the audience at TED 2016. That system was operated by Verity Studios’ expert engineers. Creating a system that is easy enough to use, and reliable enough, to be operated by show staff is a huge technical challenge of its own. All of Verity’s 2017 shows mentioned above were fully client-operated, which speaks to the maturity that Verity’s drone show system has achieved.

Selection of Verity Studios’ indoor drone shows, from the drone swarm at TED 2016 to 20,000 autonomous indoor drone show flights in 2017 alone.

For my colleagues and me, it is these technological challenges, together with the visual impact of indoor drone shows, that makes these systems so much fun and hugely rewarding to work with.

Creative potential

Creatively, the capabilities of today’s indoor drone show systems barely scratch the surface of the technology’s potential. For centuries, show designers were restricted to static scenes. Curtains were required to hide scene changes from the audience, lest stage hands rushing to move set pieces destroy the magic created by a live show. The introduction of automation to seamlessly move backdrops and other stage elements, followed by the debut of automated lighting to smoothly pan and tilt traditional, stationary illumination were revolutionary.

Drones hold the potential for pushing automation further. The Lucies shown in the images above give a first inkling of the creative potential of flying lights that can be freely positioned in 3D space, appearing at will. Larger drones allow to extend that concept to nearly any object, including the creation of flying characters.

Safety

The most critical challenge for indoor drone show systems is safety. Indoor drone shows feature dozens of drones flying simultaneously and in tight formations, close to crowds of people, in a repeated fashion, in the high-pressure environment of a live show. For example, as part of the currently running New York Knicks drone show, 32 drones perform above 16 dancers, live in front of up to 20,000 people in New York’s Madison Square Garden arena, 44 times per season.

There are really only three ways to safely fly drones at live events.

The first way to achieve safety is the same that keeps commercial aviation safe: System redundancy. Using this approach, Verity Studios’ larger, Stage Flyer drones performed safely on Broadway, completing 398 shows and more than 7,000 autonomous flights, flying 8 times a week, in front of up to 2,000 people for a year, without safety nets. The Stage Flyer drones are designed around redundancy. At least two of each components are used (e.g., two batteries, two flight computers, and a duplicate of each sensor) or existing redundancies are exploited. For example, the Stage Flyer drones have only four propellers and motors, like any quadcopter. However, advanced algorithms that exploit the physics of flight allow these multi-rotor vehicles to fly with less than 4 propellers. The overall design allows these drones to continue to fly in spite of any individual component failure. For example, in one of the last Broadway shows, a Stage Flyer experienced a battery failure. The drone switched into its safety flight mode and landed, and the show continued with 7 instead of 8 drones. This approach to drone safety remains highly unusual — all drones available for purchase today have single points of failure.

Verity Studios drone show, 2017 Event Safety Summit, Rock Lititz. Photo: Event Safety Alliance 2017

The second approach to safety is physical separation. This is how safety is usually achieved for outdoor drone shows: Drones perform over a body of water or some roads are temporarily closed to create a large-enough area without people. For example, the Intel drone show at the Super Bowl was recorded far away from the NRG stadium. In fact, for the Super Bowl, safety went even a step further, also adding “temporal separation” to the physical separation (the drone show was actually pre-recorded days ahead of time, and viewers in the stadium and on TV were only shown a video recording). For indoor drone lightshows, physical separation can be achieved using safety nets.

The third approach to safely flying drones at live events is to make the drones so small that they have high inherent safety. Verity Studios’ Lucie micro drones weigh less than 1.8 ounces or 50 grams (including their flexible hull).

As the continuing string of safety incidents involving drones at live events attests, not everyone takes drone safety seriously. This is why my colleagues and I have worked with aviation experts and leading creatives to summarize best practices in an overview paper: Drone shows – Creative potential and best practices.

So, what’s in store for 2018? The appetite for indoor drone shows is huge, which is why Verity Studios is growing its team. And given the 2017 track record, there is a lot to look forward to — your favorite venue’s ceiling is the limit!

Image: ICRA 2017

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews several companies at the International Conference for Robotics and Automation (ICRA). ICRA is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s biggest conference and one of the leading international forums for robotics researchers to present their work.

Interviews:

Howard Michel, Chief Technology Officer of UBTECH Education, on a humanoid robot for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education for a range of ages. (Begins at 1m 20s.)

Li Bingbing, Software Engineer and Cofounder of Transforma in Singapore, on a robot for painting tall buildings. (Begins at 10m 25s.)

Xianbao Chen, Associate Researcher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, on a hexapod robot for large parts machining. (Begins at 17m 5s.)

Lester Teh Chee Onn, Environmental Engineer at Advisian, on a watercraft for environmental monitoring. (Begins at 27m.)

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Six acquisitions were reported during the month including Delphi Automotive’s buying nuTonomy for $450 million and Boeing’s acquisition of 550-employee Aurora Flight Sciences.

On the IPO front, Altair Engineering raised $156 million and Restoration Robotics raised $25 million when both went live on the NASDAQ stock exchange this month.

Fundings

• Mapbox, a Washington, DC and San Francisco provider of nav systems for car companies and others involved in autonomous vehicles, raised $164 million in a Series C round led by the SoftBank Vision Fund, with participation from existing investors including Foundry Group, DFJ Growth, DBL Partners, and Thrive Capital. “Location data is central and mission critical to the development of the world’s most exciting technologies,” said Rajeev Misra, who helps oversee SoftBank’s Vision Fund.
• Element AI, a Canadian startup providing learning platform solutions for self-driving and advanced manufacturing, raised $135 CAD million (around $105 million) in a Series A round (in June) led by Data Collective, a SV-based venture capital firm, and included participation by Fidelity Investments Canada, National Bank of Canada, Intel Capital, and Real Ventures.
• Ninebot, the Chinese consumer products company that bought out Segway and raised $80 million in 2015, raised another $100 million in a Series C round  from the SDIC Fund Management Co. and the China Mobile Fund.
• Horizon Robotics, another Chinese startup, raised $100 million in a Series A round led by Intel Capital with participation by Wu Capital, Morningside Venture Capital, Linear Venture, Hillhouse Capital and Harvest Investments. Horizon is developing self-driving vehicle autopilot and self-navigating consumer and neural network chips. Wendell Brooks, Intel SVP and President of Intel Capital which invested in Horizon said, “By 2020, every autonomous vehicle on the road will create 4 TB of data per day. A million self-driving cars will create the same amount of data every day as 3 billion people. As Intel transitions to a data company, Intel Capital is actively investing in startups across the technology spectrum that can help expand the data ecosystem and pathfind important new technologies.”
• Innoviz Technologies, an Israel-based developer of LiDAR sensing technology for autonomous vehicles, raised $73 million in Series B funding. Investors include Samsung Catalyst and SoftBank Ventures Korea.
• Zume Pizza, the Silicon Valley robotic pizza making startup, raised $48 million in a Series B funding. Investors in the round were not detailed. Zume is already delivering pizzas in Silicon Valley. It uses an assembly line of robots to flatten dough into circles, spread sauce and cheese, and slide the pies into and out of an 800 degree oven. Pizzas finish cooking in ovens inside delivery trucks.
• Momenta AI, a Beijing autonomous driving tech startup using machine vision (rather than LiDAR), raised $46 in a Series B round led by NIO Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Hillhouse Capital and Cathay Innovation Fund.
• Wonder Workshop, previously named Play-i, a Silicon Valley and Chinese educational robot startup, raised $41 million in a Series C round from a series of investors including Tencent, TAL Education Group, MindWorks Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Softbank Korea, VTRON Group, TCL Capital, Sinovation Ventures, Bright Success, WI Harper, and CRV. Wonder Workshop’s Dot and Dash robots are in use by thousands of student groups and schools around the world. “We founded Wonder Workshop to provide all children — girls and boys of all ages — with the skills needed to succeed in the future economy. This round of financing will allow us to continue on our mission to inspire the inventors of tomorrow,” said Vikas Gupta, CEO.
• FogHorn Systems, a Silicon Valley smart manufacturing software startup, raised $30 million in a Series B round led by Intel Capital and Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures with new investor Honeywell Ventures and all previous investors participating, including Series A investors March Capital Partners, GE, Dell Technologies Capital, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Yokogawa Electric Corporation, Darling Ventures and seed investor The Hive.
• Nanotronic Imaging, an Ohio testing solutions provider, raised $30 million in a Series D funding led by Investment Corp of Dubai and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
• Wandercraft, a French rehabilitation exoskeleton startup, raised $17.8 million in a Series B round from XAnge, Innovation Capital, Idinvest Partners, Cemag Invest and BPIFrance.
• Ever AI, a San Francisco startup developing facial recognition, announced that they had raised $16 million in a Series B funding led by Icon Ventures with participation from Felicis Ventures and Khosla Ventures. On the same day SoftBank announced their intention to use Ever AI’s facial recognition platform as a new feature for their Pepper robot.
• Built Robotics, a San Francisco startup developing a self-driving kit for construction equipment – a self-driving excavator – raised $15 million in a Series A round led by NEA (New Enterprise Associates) with participation by Founders Fund, Lemnos and angel investors including Eric Stromberg, Maria Thomas, Carl Bass, Edward Lando and Justin Kan.
• Veo Robotics, a Cambridge, MA-based vision systems startup, raised $12 million in a Series A funding. Lux Capital and GV led the round, and were joined by unnamed investors including Next47.
• Riverfield Surgical Robot Lab, a Japanese startup, raised $10 million in a Series B round led by Toray Engineering and included SBI Investment, Jafco and Beyond Next Ventures.
• Beijing Beehive Agriculture Technology Co. raised $9.4 million in an A funding round led by Tendence Capital and other unnamed sources.  The funding marks the company’s second financing round after it raised around $5 million from e-commerce giant JD.com Inc. and others in its pre-A funding.
• Titan Medical, a Canadian robotic single-port surgery device developer, raised $9.1 million: $2.6 million by floating 13.4 million common shares in a private placement to more than a dozen robotic surgeons in the US and Canada and an additional $6.5 million from the early exercise of purchase warrants for 42.6 million common shares.
• Robart, an Austria-based developer of AI and navigation intelligence for autonomous consumer robots, raised $7.2 million in a Series B funding. CM-CIC Innovation led the round, and was joined by Innovacom, Robert Bosch Venture Capital and SEB Alliance.
• Nileworks,  a Japanese drone crop spraying startup, raised $7.1 million from a group of Japanese investors including public-private partnership the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, agricultural chemical maker Kumiai Chemical Industry Co., Sumitomo Corporation and its subsidiary  Sumitomo Chemical Co., the Japanese National Federation of Agricultural Co-operative Associations, and The Norinchukin Bank. When the product goes on sale in 2019 the company will target rice farmers in Japan.
• Impossible Objects, an Illinois provider of 3D printing tech, raised $6.4 million in a Series A funding led by OCA Ventures and joined by IDEA Fund Partners, Mason Avenue Investments, Huizenga Capital Management and Inflection Equity Partners.
• AeroFarms, the indoor vertical farming startup which raised $34 million reported earlier this year, rounded out their $40 million Series D funding with $6 million from Ikea Group and chef David Chang of the Momofuku Group. AeroFarms just built its 9th indoor farm in Newark, NJ.
• Blickfeld, a Munich-based LiDAR maker for autonomous driving, raised $4.25 million in seed funding. Investors include Unternehmertum Venture Capital Partners, High-Tech Gruenderfonds, Fluxunit – OSRAM Ventures and Tengelmann Ventures.
• Realtime Robotics, a Boston motion planning and control startup, raised $2 million in seed funding from SPARX Group, Scrum Ventures, and Toyota AI Ventures.
• Vitae Industries, a Rhode Island pharma dispensing robot maker, raised $1.8 million in seed funding from Lerer Hippeau Ventures and Slater Technology Fund. Other investors in the round included Techstars, BoxGroup, Compound and Founder Collective.
• Acutronic Robotics, a Swiss startup that last year acquired Spanish component maker Erle Robotics, raised an undisclosed amount from Sony in a Series A funding round. Sony will also adopt Acutronic’s Hardware Robot Operating System (H-ROS), for use in its own robotics division. Sony’s strategic use of the H-ROS platform in its own operations, and DARPA’s prior investment, suggest there’s a lot of interest in H-ROS for unifying legacy robotic systems from old-line robot providers.
• Bharati Robotic Systems, a Pune, India-based industrial robotic cleaning startup, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from its existing investors – Society For Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE, IITB Incubator), and other angel investors.
• IUVO, an Italian exoskeleton and wearable prosthetics spin-off from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, has received a joint investment from robot manufacturer Comau and Össur, a global provider of non-invasive orthopedics. No financial amounts were provided however Comau and Össur will now hold a majority share of IUVO. “This joint venture represents a key step toward the creation of wearable robotic exoskeletons that can enhance human mobility and quality of life,” emphasized Mauro Fenzi, CEO of Comau. “By uniting the know-how and enabling technologies of the various partners, we are in a unique position to extend the use of robotics beyond manufacturing and toward a truly progressive global reality. I believe the differentiating factor of a project like IUVO is the combination of Comau’s automation skills and Össur’s extensive experience in bionics and bracing to enable the production of products, such as the exoskeletons, and to be able to demonstrate the benefits of robotics”.
• Ultimaker, a manufacturer of professional desktop 3D printers and employer of over 300, raised an undisclosed amount from NPM Capital, a Benelux investment company.

Acquisitions

• Delphi Automotive, a UK Tier 1 automotive supplier, acquired nuTonomy, a Boston self-driving ride sharing startup, for $450 million. nuTonomy, a spin-off from MIT and Singapore and with funding from Ford, has grown to 100 employees including 70 engineers and scientists. The acquisition will double Delphi’s autonomous driving applications team.
• HTI Cybernetics, a Michigan industrial robotics integrator and contract manufacturer, has been acquired by Chongqing Nanshang Investment Group for around $50 million. HTI provides robotic welding systems to the auto industry and also has a contract welding services facility in Mexico.
• Ridecell, a San Francisco mobility platform provider of car sharing, ride sharing and autonomous vehicles software, has acquired Auro Robotics, a Silicon Valley self-driving vehicle startup with shuttles operating on the Santa Clara University campus, for an undisclosed amount but which TheInformation estimates to be around $20 million.
• Applied Automation, a UK components manufacturer of automation and control equipment, is changing and upgrading their status to include becoming an integrator of industrial and collaborative robots and, through the acquisition of PTG Precision Engineers, has gained talented engineering manpower to augment their sales/integration efforts. PTG is located across the street from Applied. No financial details about the acquisition were provided by either party.
• General Motors acquired Pasadena-based Strobe, a vision systems startup developing an optical micro-oscillator for LiDAR timing, navigation and sensing applications, for an undisclosed amount. Strobe will join the Cruise Automation self-driving group.
• Boeing is acquiring Aurora Flight Sciences, a 550 employee Virginia-based UAS provider, for an undisclosed amount. “Since its inception, Aurora has been focused on the development of innovative aircraft that leverage autonomy to make aircraft smarter,” said John Langford, Aurora Flight Sciences founder and chief executive officer. “As an integral part of Boeing, our pioneered technologies of long-endurance aircraft, robotic co-pilots, and autonomous electric VTOLs will be transitioned into world-class products for the global infrastructure.”

IPOs

• Restoration Robotics, a San Jose, Calif.-based company focused on robotics that assist doctors in hair transplant procedures, raised $25 million in an upsized offering of 3.6 million shares priced at $7. In 2016, the company posted revenue of $15.6 million and a loss of $21.8 million. HAIR is now listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
• Altair Engineering, a Troy, Mich.-based engineering software maker, raised $156 million in an IPO of 12 million shares at $13. The stock (ALTR) is now trading on Nasdaq. Altair develops simulation and design software for industrial applications, automobiles, consumer goods and all types of robotics.
• Nilfisk Holdings, a Danish manufacturer of industrial cleaning machines including a new line of autonomous cleaners, was spun off from NKT A/S, a Danish conglomerate, and went public on the NASDAQ Copenhagen exchange as NLFSK. Financial details were not disclosed.

Two reputable research resources are reporting that the robotics industry is growing more rapidly than expected. BCG (Boston Consulting Group) is conservatively projecting that the market will reach $87 billion by 2025; Tractica, incorporating the robotic and AI elements of the emerging self-driving industry, is forecasting the market will reach $237 billion by 2022.

Both research firms acknowledge that yesterday’s robots — which were blind, big, dangerous and difficult to program and maintain — are being replaced and supplemented with newer, more capable ones. Today’s new – and future robots will – have voice and language recognition, access to super-fast communications, data and libraries of algorithms, learning capability, mobility, portability and dexterity. These new precision robots can sort and fill prescriptions, pick and pack warehouse orders, sort, inspect, process and handle fruits and vegetables, plus a myriad of other industrial and non-industrial tasks, most faster than humans, yet all the while working safely along side them.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Gaining Robotic Advantage, June 2017, 13 pages, free

BCG suggests that business executives be aware of ways robots are changing the global business landscape and think and act now. They see robotics-fueled changes coming in retail, logistics, transportation healthcare, food processing, mining and agriculture.

BCG cites the following drivers:

• Private investment in the robotic space has continued to amaze with exponential year-over-year funding curves and sensational billion dollar acquisitions.
• Prices continue to fall on robots, sensors, CPUs and communications while capabilities continue to increase.
• Robot programming is being transformed by easier interfaces, GUIs and ROS.
• The prospect of a self-driving vehicles industry disrupting transportation is propelling a talent grab and strategic acquisitions by competing international players with deep pockets.
• 40% of robotic startups have been in the consumer sector and will soon augment humans in high-touch fields such as health and elder care.

 BCG also cites the following example as an example of paying close attention to gain advantage:

“Amazon gained a first-mover advantage in 2012 when it bought Kiva Systems, which makes robots for warehouses. Once a Kiva customer, Amazon acquired the robot maker to improve the productivity and margins of its network of warehouses and fulfillment centers. The move helped Amazon maintain its low costs and expand its rapid delivery capabilities. It took five years for a Kiva alternative to hit the market. By then, Amazon had a jump on its rivals and had developed an experienced robotics team, giving the company a sustainable edge.”

Tractica

Robotics Market Forecast – June 2017, 26 pages, $4,200
Drones for Commercial Applications – June 2017, 196 pages, $4,200
AI for Automotive Applications – May 2017, 63 pages, $4,200
Consumer Robotics – May 2017, 130 pages, $4,200

The key story is that industrial robotics, the traditional pillar of the robotics market, dominated by Japanese and European robotics manufacturers, has given way to non-industrial robot categories like personal assistant robots, UAVs, and autonomous vehicles, with the epicenter shifting toward Silicon Valley, which is now becoming a hotbed for artificial intelligence (AI), a set of technologies that are, in turn, driving a lot of the most significant advancements in robotics. Consequently, Tractica forecasts that the global robotics market will grow rapidly between 2016 and 2022, with revenue from unit sales of industrial and non-industrial robots rising from $31 billion in 2016 to $237.3 billion by 2022.  The market intelligence firm anticipates that most of this growth will be driven by non-industrial robots.

Tractica is headquartered in Boulder and analyzes global market trends and applications for robotics and related automation technologies within consumer, enterprise, and industrial marketplaces and related industries.

General Research Reports

• Global autonomous mobile robots market, June 2017, 95 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  TechNavio forecasts that the global autonomous mobile robots market will grow at a CAGR of more than 14% through 2021.
• Global underwater exploration robots, June 2017, 70 pages, TechNavio, $3,500
  TechNavio forecasts that the global underwater exploration robots market will grow at a CAGR of 13.92 % during the period 2017-2021.
• Household vacuum cleaners market, March 2017, 134 pages, Global Market Insights, $4,500
  Global Market Insights forecasts that household vacuum cleaners market size will surpass $17.5 billion by 2024 and global shipments are estimated to exceed 130 million units by 2024, albeit at a low 3.0% CAGR. Robotic vacuums show a slightly higher growth CAGR.
• Global unmanned surface vehicle market, June 2017, Value Market Research, $3,950
  Value Market Research analyzed drivers (security and mapping) versus restraints such as AUVs and ROVs and made their forecasts for the period 2017-2023.
• Innovations in Robotics, Sensor Platforms, Block Chain, and Artificial Intelligence for Homeland Security, May 2017, Frost & Sullivan, $6,950
  This Frost & Sullivan report covers recent developments such as co-bots for surveillance applications, airborne sensor platforms for border security, blockchain tech, AI as first responder, and tech for detecting nuclear threats.
• Top technologies in advanced manufacturing and automation, April 2017, Frost & Sullivan, $4,950
  This Frost & Sullivan report focuses on exoskeletons, metal and nano 3D printing, co-bots and agile robots – all of which are in the top 10 technologies covered.
• Mobile robotics market, December 2016, 110 pages, Zion Market Research, $4,199
  Global mobile robotics market will reach $18.8 billion by end of 2021, growing at a CAGR of slightly above 13.0% between 2017 and 2021.
• Unmanned surface vehicle (USV) market, May 2017, MarketsandMarkets, $5,650
  MarketsandMarkets forecasts the unmanned surface vehicle (USV) market to grow from $470.1 Million in 2017 to $938.5 Million by 2022, at a CAGR of 14.83%.
• Military/Civil UAS markets, May 2017, 608 pages, Teal Group
  The Teal Group’s 2016 world military market study estimates that UAV production will soar from current worldwide UAV production of $2.8 billion annually in 2016 to $9.4 billion in 2025, a 15.4% CAGR and that civil UAS production will soar from $2.6 billion worldwide in 2016 to $10.9 billion in 2025, a 15.4% CAGR.

Agricultural Research Reports

• Global agricultural robots market, May 2017, 70 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts the global agricultural robots market will grow steadily at a CAGR of close to 18% through 2021.
• Agriculture robots market, June 2017, TMR Research, $3,716
  Robots are poised to replace agricultural hands. They can pluck fruits, sow and reap crops, and milk cows. They carry out the tasks much faster and with a great degree of accuracy. This coupled with mandates on higher minimum pay being levied in most countries, have spelt good news for the global market for agriculture robots.
• Agricultural Robots, December 2016, 225 pages, Tractica, $4,200
  Forecasts that shipments of agricultural robots will increase from 32,000 units in 2016 to 594,000 units annually in 2024 and that the market is expected to reach $74.1 billion in annual revenue by 2024. Report, done in conjunction with The Robot Report, profiles over 165 companies involved in developing robotics for the industry.

Bottom Line

The disparity between the projections of these research reports is wide but the CAGRs are mostly all double digit. It is easy to conclude as BCG did – that the robotics industry is growing faster than expected

China has rapidly become a global leader in robotics and automation. 2016 annual sales of industrial robots reached the highest level ever for any single country: 87,000 units (up 27% from 2015) and China’s stock of industrial robots is now, at 340,000 units, also the highest total in the world. while Chinese robot manufacturers increased their market share to 31% (up 120% from 2015).

The International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which provided these figures, is forecasting that “from 2018 to 2020, a sales increase between 15 and 20 percent on average per year is possible for industrial robots.” And these projections don’t include service robots for professional and B2B use, and personal use such as toys, drones, mobile gofers, guides, home assistants, and consumer products like robotic vacuums and floor and window cleaners.

Outlook for 2017

According to a report released by China Robot Industry Alliance (CRIA) at the big World Robot Conference in August in Beijing and reported by China Daily, China’s industrial robot market is expected to reach $4.22 billion in 2017 representing more than 110,000 new industrial robots.

At the same press conference, CRIA also reported that China’s service robot market will reach $1.32 billion this year, up 28% percent from 2015.

Outlook to 2020

The main drivers for the growth of the use of industrial robots in China are the electrical and electronics industry followed by general handling, welding and the auto industry. This broad and expanding demand is expected to continue as major contract manufacturers start and/or continue to automate their production. A further driving factor is China’s growing consumer market for all kinds of consumer goods.

According to the ten-year national plan “Made in China 2025,” the Chinese government wants to transform China from a low-cost labor-intensive manufacturing giant into a technology-based world manufacturing power. The plan includes strengthening Chinese robot suppliers and further increasing their market shares in China and abroad.

Shanzhai

Shenzhen is the Silicon Valley of technology and hardware for China. Things get made FAST. All kinds of ‘things.’ The can-make attitude in Shenzhen is being duplicated around China thus it is important to know what goes on, why it happens in Shenzhen, why it happens so fast, and what they think about patents, intellectual property and Western companies.

Another factor (driver) in China’s relentless push toward automation and robotics is this factoid: In 2016, China’s mobile payments hit $5.5 trillion, roughly 50 times the size of America’s $112 billion market, according to consulting firm iResearch. Chinese are adopting cashless and e-commerce methods at a rate significantly faster than the rest of the world.

WIRED Video produced an hour-long documentary describing the process, the people, and ‘Shanzhai,’ the evolving philosophy of copycat manufacturing, and attempts to put a positive spin on patent avoidance and what many Westerners call stealing, plus the speed of production for adequate profits (as opposed to massive profits). It is a worthwhile and very informative investment of an hour of your time.

In this episode, MeiXing Dong interviews Matthias Vanoni, co-founder and CEO of Biowatch. Vanoni speaks about Biowatch, a wrist-veins biometric reader that functions as a security solution for mobile payments and smart devices. They discuss the technical challenges of building a miniaturized wrist-vein reader and how this device changes the usual user authentication process.

Matthias Vanoni

Prior to being the CEO and co-founder of Biowatch SA, Matthias Vanoni (31) was a PhD student at EPFL and IDIAP Research Institute, specialised in biometric authentication and a former captain in French Gendarmerie. His Life is now dedicated to entrepreneurship, his wife and their little boy.

Links

• Download mp3 (14.7 MB)
• Biowatch Website
• Biowatch Video
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

July 2017 was a big month for robotics-related company funding. Four raised $588 million and 19 others raised $370.6 million for a monthly total of $958.6 million. Acquisitions also continued to be significant with ST Engineering acquiring Aethon for $36 million, iRobot buying its European distributor for $141 million, and SoftBank purchasing 5% of iRobot shares for around $120 million.

Fundings

1. Plenty, a San Francisco vertical farm startup, raised $200 million in a Series B round led by SoftBank and included Bezos Expeditions, Data Collective, DCM Ventures, Finistere Ventures, Innovation Endeavors and Louis Bacon. Plenty plans to use the funds to expand to Japan and add strawberries and cucumbers to the leafy greens they already produce. Plenty makes an internet-connected system which delivers specific types of light, air composition, humidity and nutrition, depending on which crop is being grown, and is designing and adding robotics and automation as it can, particularly with their recent acquisition of Bright Agrotech (see below). Plenty says it can yield up to 350 times more produce in a given area than conventional farms — with 1 percent of the water.
   

   Sanjeev Krishnan of S2G Ventures said: “This investment shows the potential of the sector. Indoor agriculture is a real toolkit for the produce industry. There is no winner takes all potential here. I could even see some traditional, outdoor growers do indoor ag as a way to manage some of the fundamental issues of the produce industry: agronomy, logistics costs, shrinkage, freshness, seasonality and manage inventory cycles better. There are many different models that could work and we are excited about the platforms being built in the market.”

2. Nauto, a Silicon Valley self-driving device and AI startup, raised $159 million in a Series B funding round led by SoftBank and Greylock Partners and also included previous investors BMW iVentures, General Motors Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures, Allianz Group, Playground Global and Draper Nexus.
   

   SoftBank Group Corp. Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son said, “While building an increasingly intelligent telematics business, Nauto is also generating a highly valuable dataset for autonomous driving, at massive scale. This data will help accelerate the development and adoption of safe, effective self-driving technology.”

3. Desktop Metal, the MIT spin-off and Massachusetts-based 3D metal printing technology startup, raised another $115 million in a Series D round which included New Enterprise Associates, GV (Google Ventures), GE Ventures, Future Fund and Techtronic Industries which owns Hoover U.S. and Dirt Devil.
   

   According to CEO Ric Fulop, “You don’t need tooling. You can make short runs of production with basically no tooling costs. You can change your design and iterate very fast. You can make shapes you couldn’t make any other way, so now you can lightweight a part and work with alloys that are very, very hard, with very extreme properties. One of the benefits for this technology for robotics is that you’re able to do lots of turns. Unless you’re iRobot with the Roomba, you’re making a lot of one-off changes to your product.”

4. Brain Corp, a San Diego AI company developing self-driving technology, got $114 million in a Series C funding round led by the SoftBank Vision Fund. Qualcomm Ventures was the only other investor. The funds will be used to develop technology that enables robots to navigate in complex physical spaces. Last October, Brain Corp. rolled out its first commercial product —a self-driving commercial floor scrubber for use in grocery stores and big box retailers.
5. Beijing Geekplus Technology (Geek+), a Chinese startup developing a goods-to-man warehousing system of robots and software very similar to Kiva System’s products, raised $60 million in a B round led by Warburg Pincus and joined by existing shareholders and Volcanics Venture. The company claims to have delivered the largest numbers of logistics robots among its peers in China, delivering nearly 1,000 units of robots in warehouses for over 20 customers that include Tmall, VIPShop and Suning.
   

   Yong Zheng, Founder and CEO of Geek+, said, “This round of financing will help us upgrade our business in three aspects. Firstly, we will accelerate the upgrading of our logistics robotics products and expand product offerings to cover more applications.” “Secondly, we will accelerate our geographical expansion and industry coverage to provide our one-stop intelligent logistics system and operation solutions to more customers. Thirdly, we will start exploring overseas markets through multiple channels.”

6. Vicarious, a Union City, California-based artificial intelligence company using computational neuroscience to build better machine learning models that help robots quickly address a wide variety of tasks, raised $50 million funding led by Khosla Ventures.
7. Momenta.ai, a Beijing autonomous driving startup that is developing digital maps, driving decision solutions and machine vision technology to detect traffic signs, pedestrians and track other cars, raised $46 million in a Series B funding round led by NIO Capital. Sequoia Capital China and Hillhouse Capital along with Daimler AG, Shunwei Capital, Sinovation Ventures and Unity Ventures also participated.
8. Autotalk, an Israeli chip maker of vehicle to vehicle communications, raised $40 million from Toyota, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking and other investors. The funding will allow Autotalks to prepare and expand its operations for the upcoming start of mass productions as well as continue to develop communication solutions for both connected and autonomous cars.
9. Flashhold (also named Shanghai Express Warehouse Intelligent Technology and Quicktron) raised $29 million in a Series B round led by Alibaba Group's Cainiao Network and SB China Venture Capital (SBCVC). Flashhold is a Shanghai-based logistic robotics company with robotic products, shelving and software very similar to Amazon's Kiva Systems.
10. Slamtec,  a Chinese company developing a solid state LiDAR laser sensor for robots in auto localization and navigation, raised $22 million from Chinese Academy of Sciences Holdings, ChinaEquity Group Inc. and Shenzhen Guozhong Venture Capital Management Co.
11. 6 River Systems, the Boston, MA startup providing alternative fulfillment solutions for e-commerce distribution centers, raised $15 million in a round led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from  Eclipse Ventures and other existing investors.
12. Prospera, an Israeli ag startup, raised $15 million in a Series B round for its end-to-end internet of things platform for indoor and outdoor farms. The round was led Qualcomm Ventures  and fellow telecom heavyweight Cisco. Propsera uses computer vision, machine learning, and data science to detect and identify diseases, nutrient deficiencies, and other types of crop stress on farms with the hope of improving crop yields and saving farmer costs.
    

    “Receiving funding from these major tech companies is a clear signal that tech industry heavy-hitters understand that agriculture is ripe for digitalization. It means that such companies, which are already involved in digitizing other traditional industries, see a significant opportunity in agtech,” said Prospera CEO Daniel Koppel.

13. Embark, a Belmont, California-based self-driving trucking startup, raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Data Collective and was joined by YC Continuity, Maven Ventures and SV Angel. Embark has teamed up with Peterbilt and plans to hire for their engineering team and add more trucks to expand their test fleet across the U.S.
14. Xometry, a Maryland startup with an Uber-like system for parts manufacture, raised $15 million in funding led by BMW Groups’ VC arm and GE.
15. Intuition Robotics, an Israeli startup developing social companion technologies for seniors, raised $14 million in a Series A round led by Toyota Research Institute plus OurCrowd and iRobot as well as existing seed investors Maniv Mobility, Terra Venture Partners, Bloomberg Beta and private investors.
    

    Dr. Gill Pratt, CEO of Toyota Research Institute said: “We are impressed with Intuition Robotics’ thought leadership of a multi-disciplinary approach towards a compelling product offering for older adults including: Human-Robot-Interaction, cloud robotics, machine learning, and design. Specifically, we believe Intuition Robotics’ technology, in the field of cognitive computing, has strong potential to positively impact the world’s aging population with a proactive, truly autonomous agent that’s deployed in their social robot, ElliQ.”

16. SkySafe, a San Diego, California-based radio-wave anti-drone device manufacturer, raised $11.5 million in Series A funding, according to TechCrunch. Andreessen Horowitz led the round. SkySafe recently secured DoD contracts to provide counter-drone tech for Navy Seals.
17. Kuaile Zhihui, a Beijing educational robot startup, has raised around $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Qiming Venture Partners and included GGV Capital and China Capital.
18. Atlas Dynamics, a Latvian UAS startup, raised $8 million from unnamed institutional and individual investors. Funds will be used to advance the development of its Visual Line of Sight (VLOS) and Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone-based data solutions, and to build its presence in key markets, including North America.
19. Reach Robotics, a gaming robots developer, raised $7.5 million in Series A funding led by Korea Investment Partners and IGlobe. Reach has produced and sold an initial run of 500 of its four-legged, crab-like, MekaMon bots. MekaMon fits into an emerging category of smartphone-enabled augmented reality toys like Anki.
20. UVeye, a New York-based startup that develops automatic vehicle inspection systems, has raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by Ahaka Capital. Israeli angel investors group SeedIL Investment Club also participated. Funds will be used to launch its products and expand to international markets, including China.
21. Miso Robotics, the Pasadena-based developer of a burger-flipping robot, raised $3.1 million in a funding round led by Acacia Research. Interestingly, Acacia is an agency that licenses patents and also enforces patented technologies.
22. Metamoto, the Redwood City autonomous driving simulation startup, raised $2 million in seed funding led by Motus Ventures and UL, a strategic investor.
23. Fastbrick, an Australian brick-laying startup, raised $2 million from Caterpillar with an option to invest a further $8 million subject to shareholder approval. Both companies signed an agreement to collaborate on the development, manufacture, selling and servicing of Fastbrick’s technology mounted on Caterpillar equipment.

Acquisitions

1. Robopolis SAS, the France-based distributor of iRobot products in Europe, is being acquired by iRobot for $141 million. Last year iRobot, in a similar move to bring their distribution network inhouse, acquired Demand Corp, their distributor for Japan.
2. Bright Agrotech, a Wyoming provider of vertical farming products, technology and systems, was acquired by Plenty, a vertical farm startup in San Francisco. No financial terms were disclosed. Bright has partnered with small farmers to start and grow indoor farms, providing high-tech growing systems and controls, workflow design, education and software.
3. Singapore Technologies Engineering Ltd (ST Engineering) has acquired robotics firm Aethon Inc through Vision Technologies Land Systems, Inc. (VTLS), and its wholly-owned subsidiary, VT Robotics, Inc for $36 million. This acquisition will be carried out by way of a merger with VT Robotics, a special purpose vehicle newly incorporated for the proposed transaction. The merger will see Aethon as the surviving entity that will operate as a subsidiary of VTLS, and will be part of the Group’s Land Systems sector.
4. On the Move Systems, a Canadian penny stock trucking systems provider, is merging with California-based RAD (Robotic Assistance Devices), an integrator of mobile robots for security applications. The merger involves RAD receiving 3.5 million shares of OMVS (around $250k).

IPOs and stock transactions

• iRobot, the 27-year-old Massachusetts-based maker of the Roomba, has seen its stock soar from news of a purchase of an undisclosed amount of iRobot stock by SoftBank (or the SoftBank Vision Fund). The purchase is reported to be over $100 million and less than $120 million (5% of the market value).

Failures

• Pearl Automation

Join us at the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017) for a full day workshop that will bring together international stakeholders in robotics to examine best practices for accelerating robotics innovation through strategic policy frameworks.

Best practices in designing effective roadmaps for robotics innovation

IROS Workshop | 8:30-17:00 September 28, 2017 | Vancouver Convention Centre | Vancouver BC

This is a unique opportunity to learn from people who have played a significant role in designing and implementing major strategic robotics initiatives around the globe.

Objectives
In the past decade, a number of governing bodies and industry consortia have developed strategic roadmaps to guide investment and development of robotic technology. With the roadmaps from the US, South Korea, Japan and EU etc. well underway, the time is right to take stock of these strategic robotics initiatives to see what is working, what is not, and what best practices in roadmap development might be broadly applied to other regions.

The objective of this two-part workshop is to examine the process of how these policy frameworks came to be created in the first place, how they have been tailored to local capabilities and strengths, and what performance indicators are being used to measure their success — so that participants may draw from international collective experience as they design and evaluate strategic robotics initiatives for their own regions.

Program Part ONE — Morning Session: “Developing innovation policy for robotics, and establishing key performance indicators that are relevant to your region”
The morning session will feature international speakers who have played a significant role in launching and shaping major strategic robotics initiatives across the globe. The focus of this session will be on the history and process of designing the roadmap (rather than on merely presenting the roadmap itself) and key performance indicators of roadmap success. Via presentations and panel discussion, the outcome of this session will be an exploratory overview of best practices and key performance metrics, so that participants can apply knowledge gained from the workshop as they design strategic robotics policy frameworks for their own regional or national contexts.

Program Part TWO — Afternoon Session: “Towards a national robotics strategy for Canada”
The afternoon session will bring together leading Canadian robotics experts from academia, industry, federal/provincial policy, and the national research council to discuss and strategize the future of robotics in Canada, with an emphasis on addressing the social, economic, legal/ethical and regulatory issues, and the robotics strengths and capabilities specific to this country. The main goals of this session will be to 1) establish a clear picture of the internal Canadian robotics landscape and how it compares to other nations worldwide, 2) discuss lessons learned in the International session within the Canadian context, and 3) discuss and identify gaps and opportunities for a Canadian initiative. Ultimately the Canadian session will serve as a venue for collecting data and viewpoints to support the development of a Canadian Robotics Roadmap.

Who should attend
This workshop is open to all members of academia, government, and industry with an interest in funding, policy and research strategy.

Part One of the workshop (morning session) will be broadly applicable to anyone with an interest in robotics policy, partnerships and funding.

Part Two (afternoon session) will be of particular interest to Canadian conference-goers as well as those who are interested in Canadian research and industry partnerships.

Call for participation
We are actively seeking participants for this workshop. If you are …

… involved in developing or evaluating a major strategic robotics initiative in your region and would like to participate in our international discussion, OR …

… are a member of the Canadian robotics ecosystem or are a Canadian roboticist living abroad who would like to be involved in a national robotics strategy for Canada …

… then please send an email with your expression of interest to: info@canadianroboticsnetwork.com. We look forward to hearing from you!!

Workshop Organizers

• Elizabeth Croft, Director, Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CARIS) Lab, UBC
• Clément Gosselin, Professor, Laboratoire de Robotique, Université Laval
• Paul Johnston, Research Policy Consultant, former President of Precarn Incorporated
• Dana Kulić, Associate Professor, Adaptive Systems Laboratory, University of Waterloo
• AJung Moon, Co-Founder & Director, Open Roboethics Institute
• Angela Schoellig, Assistant Professor, Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), University of Toronto
• Hallie Siegel, Strategic Foresight & Innovation @ OCAD U, former Managing Editor @Robohub

Workshop Registration

Registration for IROS workshops is separate from the IROS conference fee. Please see the IROS Website for details: http://www.iros2017.org/registration-travel/registration# 

Early workshop registration deadline: July 22nd.

More Info
http://canadianroboticsnetwork.com/iros-workshop/
http://www.iros2017.org/program/workshops-and-tutorials

Contact
info@canadianroboticsnetwork.com

A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox.

Robots, drones and AI in action

Let’s kick off our June review by looking at some great new robotics research and development in action: Inspired by arthropod insects and spiders, Harvard Professor George Whitesides and Alex Nemiroski—a former postdoctoral fellow in Whitesides’ Harvard lab—have created a type of semi-soft robot capable of standing and walking. The team also created a robotic water strider capable of pushing itself along the liquid surface. The robots are described in a recently published paper in the journal Soft Robotics.

And in news from the garden shed, Franklin Robotics has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Tertill, their solar-powered, garden-weeding robot. Tertill lives in your garden, collecting sunlight to power its weed patrol, and cutting down short plants with a string trimmer/weed whacker with almost no intervention required. Available for about $300USD, the fully autonomous Tertill is the first weeding robot available to home gardeners! Check out the video below.

You may have heard that humankind lost another important battle with artificial intelligence last month when AlphaGo beat the world’s leading Go player Ke Jie by three games to zero. AlphaGo is an AI program developed by DeepMind, part of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Last year it beat another leading player, Lee Se-dol, by four games to one, but since then AlphaGo has substantially improved. Ke Jie described AlphaGo’s skill as “like a God of Go”. But AlphaGo will now retire from playing Go, leaving behind a legacy of games played against itself. These games have been described by one Go expert as like “games from far in the future”, which humans will study for years to improve their own play.

Elsewhere, Chinese education authorities have gone high-tech to catch cheaters as millions of high-school students take their “gaokao”, the annual university entrance exam seen as key to landing a lucrative white-collar job. So high are the stakes and so competitive is the exam that some students resort to cheating. But not if these facial recognition drones can help it.

Meanwhile, back in the pub, students from the University of Leeds have created a robot which they claim is capable of pulling the perfect pint. The team, from the School of Mechanical Engineering, worked with local engineering company Quality Bearings, and Saltaire Brewery to come up with the concept. The robot was put through its paceswith a taste test, a consistency test and a wastage test. Check out the clip below.

At ICRA 2017, researchers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) introduced a small robotic explorer that uses a single solid-fuel rocket to launch itself into the air. What’s new is that their robot includes some braking rockets that help it make pinpoint landings, as well as a clever gyroscopic system to make sure that it flies straight as well as providing a way for the robot to get around after landing.

In other flying news, a team of MIT engineers has come up with a much less expensive UAV design that can hover for longer durations to provide wide-ranging communications support. The researchers designed, built, and tested a UAV resembling a thin glider with a 24-foot wingspan. The vehicle can carry 4.5 to 9 kg of communications equipment while flying at an altitude of 15,000 feet. Weighing in at just under 68 kg, the vehicle is powered by a 5-horsepower gasoline engine and can keep itself aloft for more than five days — longer than any gasoline-powered autonomous aircraft has remained in flight, the researchers say. Check out the Jungle Hawk Owl’s maiden flight below.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are aiming to develop flying robots that can both drive through a city-like setting with parking spots, no fly zones and landing pads. In a new paper, the team presented a system of eight quadcopter drones that can do all of that and more.

And last but not least: Authors of the ICRA 2017 Best Automation Paper “UAV-Based Crop and Weed Classification for Smart Farming” wrote about their findings for Robohub. Check it out.

Policy and financing

Europe needs a “human in command approach,” says the European Economic and Social Comitte (EESC). The EU must pursue a policy that ensures the development, deployment and use of artificial intelligence in Europe in favor, and not conducive to the detriment, of society and social welfare, the Committee said in an initiative opinion on the social impact of AI which 11 fields are identified for action.

Across the pond, some of the nation’s leading wireless giants and drone makers offered “effusive praise” of President Donald Trump in June as they lobbied his administration to eliminate the federal regulations that stand in the way of their businesses. As part of the White House’s five-day focus on technology, Trump gathered executives from those industries—including AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, PrecisionHawk CEO Michael Chasen and a number of venture capitalists—for a morning of brainstorming sessions devoted to spurring new investments in emerging fields.

And in a long-awaited business transaction, The New York Times Dealbook announced that SoftBank was buying Boston Dynamics from Alphabet (Google). Also included in the deal is the Japanese startup Schaft. Acquisition details were not disclosed. Both Boston Dynamics and Schaft were acquired by Google when Andy Rubin was developing Google’s robot group through a series of acquisitions. Both companies have continued to develop innovative mobile robots. And both have been on Google’s “for sale” list.

The Drone Racing League (DRL) has announced the closing of a $20 million Series B round of financing, bringing the total amount raised to $32 million. The new round of financing was led by Sky, Liberty Media LMCA +% (owner of Formula 1) and Lux Capital, with involvement by a couple of new investors in Allianz and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Investment from Allianz was expected after it was announced that Allianz signed on to become title sponsor of DRL’s elite racing circuit in February.

Pilots are gearing up to compete in the DRL. Image: Drone Racing League.

Health and medicine

Researchers from MIT’s CSAIL have developed a new system that uses a 3-D camera, a belt with separately controllable vibrational motors distributed around it, and an electronically reconfigurable Braille interface to give visually impaired users more information about their environments.

New algorithms power a prototype system for helping visually impaired users avoid obstacles and identify objects. Courtesy of the researchers.

Elsewhere, a researcher at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) is developing a bio-inspired ‘smart’ knee joint for prosthetic lower limbs. Dr Appolinaire Etoundi, based at Bristol Robotics Laboratory, is leading the research and will analyse the functions, features and mechanisms of the human knee in order to translate this information into a new bio-inspired procedure for designing prosthetics.

And the medical innovations didn’t stop there in June. How about Robot snakes slithering into the delicate field of heart surgery? Or a robotic doctor that can be controlled hundreds of kilometres away by a human counterpart? Getting a check-up from a robot may sound like something from a sci-fi film, but scientists are closing in on this real-life scenario and have already tested a prototype.

An aging population means the age-dependency ratio—the proportion of the elderly compared with the number of workers—will almost double from 28.8 % in 2015 to 51 % in 2080, straining healthcare systems and national budgets. The creators of one humanoid robot (below) under development for the elderly say it can understand people’s actions and learn new behaviors in response, even though it is devoid of arms. Robots can be programmed to understand an elderly person’s preferences and habits to detect changes in behavior: for example if a yoga devotee misses a class, it will ask why, while if an elderly person falls it will automatically alert caregivers or emergency services.

Humanoid robots under development can be programmed to detect changes in an elderly person’s preferences and habits. Image credit: GrowMeUp

Self-driving news

June was a huge month of wheeling and dealing in the self-driving cars industry. NuTonomy, a small Boston startup that makes software for self-driving cars, has launched a research-and-development partnership with San Francisco’s Lyft Inc., the second-largest ride-hailing company in the United States. It’s the latest alliance between Lyft and a maker of autonomous vehicle technology, and could boost nuTonomy’s efforts to become a major force in self-driving vehicles. Lyft chief executive Logan Green said the partnership “could lead to thousands of Lyft cars on the nuTonomy platform.”

Source: Uber

Meanwhile, competitors Uber, the global ride-sharing transportation company, named two replacements to recover from the recent firing of Anthony Levandowski who headed their Advanced Technologies Group, their OTTO trucking unit, and their self-driving team. Levandowski was fired May 30th. Eric Meyhofer and Anthony Levandowski will pick up the slack.

In other high-level firing news, Tesla Inc. has parted ways with another senior leader on its self-driving technology team, adding more turmoil to a program that is under pressure to meet the grand ambitions of Chief Executive Elon Musk. The Silicon Valley electric-car maker said Chris Lattner—head of development of Tesla’s Autopilot program—left his post as after he and Musk failed to see eye to eye on some important issues during Lattner’s six months in post.

Meanwhile, Waymo is done driving around the cute, steering-wheel-free autonomous cars that were introduced by Google back in 2014. In a blog post, Waymo leaders write that time has come to “retire our fleet of Fireflies” —their name for the tiny cars—and focus instead of integrating self-driving technology into other vehicles, like the Chrysler Pacifica minivans Waymo put on the road earlier this year.

Source: Waymo

In the UK, Venturer driverless car project published results of their first trials. Venturer is the first Connected and Autonomous Vehicle project to start in the UK. The results of Venturer’s preliminary trials show that the handover process is a safety critical issue in the development of Autonomous Vehicles. The first Venturer  trials set out to investigate ‘takeover’ (time taken to reengage with vehicle controls) and ‘handover’ (time taken to regain a baseline/normal level of driving behavior and performance) when switching frequently between automated and manual driving modes within urban and extra-urban settings. This trial is believed to be the first to directly compare handover to human driver-control from autonomous mode in both simulator and autonomous road vehicle platforms.

Honda was the latest automaker to commit to an ambitious self-driving car goal in June. It wants cars with SAE Level 4 autonomy on the road by 2025, CEO Takahiro Hachigo announced at a media event in Japan. This news will likely stoke a fire underneath other Japanese self-driving car developers, so stay tuned for lots of new developments.

Auto supplier Robert Bosch GmbH will build a 1 billion-euro ($1.1 billion) semiconductor plant, the biggest single investment in its history, as the maker of brakes and engines prepares for a surge in demand for components used in self-driving vehicles.

Tutorials

Robohub showcased some great tutorials last month. Here’s one: The Robot Academy is a new learning resource from Professor Peter Corke and the Queensland University of Technology, the team behind the award-winning Introduction to Robotics and Robotic Vision courses. There are over 200 lessons available, all for free. The courses were designed for university undergraduate students but many lessons are suitable for anybody! So get stuck in.

Florian Enner offered this useful tutorial on programming: “Using MATLAB for hardware-in-the-loop prototyping #1 : Message passing systems”. Check it out here.

And Ricardo Téllez offered an article on “Teaching ROS quickly to students“—a novel method of teaching to class of students in a rapid time frame.

Enjoy!

Upcoming events for July– August 2017

CIROS: July 5, 2017 — July 8, 2017, Shanghai, China

ASCEND Conference and Expo: July 19, 2017 — July 21, 2017, Portland, OR

RoboCup: July 25, 2017 — July 31, 2017, Nagoya, Japan

Farm Progress Show: August 29, 2017 — August 31, 2017, Decatur, IL

World of Drones Congress (WoDC): August 31, 2017 — September 2, 2017, Brisbane, Australia