Source: Uber

Uber, the global ride-sharing transportation company, has 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

Meyhofer, who before coming to Uber was the co-founder of Carnegie Robotics and a CMU robotics professor, was also part of the group that came to Uber from CMU (see below). He has now been named to head Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) self-driving group and will report directly to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

The ATG group is charged with developing the self-driving technologies of mapping, perception, safety, data collection and learning, and self-driving for cars and trucks.

Sensors that determine distances are integral to the process. Elon Musk said recently that LiDAR isn’t needed because cameras, sensors, software and high-speed GPUs can do the same tricks at a fraction of the cost. Levandowski favored LiDARs, particularly newly developed solid state LiDAR technologies.

Anthony Levandowski

Levandowski, the previous head of the ATG, joined Google to work with Sebastian Thrun on Google Street View, started a mobile mapping company that experimented with LiDAR technology and another to build a self-driving LiDAR-using car (a Prius). Google acquired both companies including their IP. In 2016 Levandowski left Google to found Otto, a company making self-driving kits to retrofit semi-trailer trucks. Just as the kit was launched, Uber acquired Otto and Levandowski became the head of Uber’s driverless car operation in addition to continuing his work at Otto.

The Levandowski case, which caused Uber to fire him, revolves around the intellectual property and particularly the LiDAR-related technologies that Google’s and Uber’s self-driving plans revolve around. Getting the cost of perception down to a reasonable level has been part of the bigger challenge of self-driving technology and LiDAR technology is integral to that plan.

Google’s Waymo self-driving unit is implying in their suit that in return for bringing Google’s IP to Uber, Uber gave Levandowski $250 million in stock grants. Uber has called Waymo’s claims baseless and an attempt to slow down a competitor.

Waymo also claims that Uber has a history of “stealing” technology and includes the time in 2015 when Uber hired away 50+ of the Carnegie Mellon University robotics team – a move that cost Uber a reported $5 billion and created havoc at CMU and the National Robotics Engineering Centre (NREC) which lost 1/3 of their staff to Uber. The move was preceded by establishing a strategic partnership with CMU to work together on self-driving technologies. Four months later, Uber hired the 50.

The Daily Mail headlines said:

Carnegie Mellon left decimated after Uber poaches 40 top-rated robotic researchers to help them develop self-driving cars

• Carnegie Mellon ‘in crisis’ after mass defection of scientists to Uber
• Uber hope their fleet of taxis will not require drivers in the future
• Used $5 billion from investors to poach at least 40 from the National Robotics Engineering Center
• Uber took six principal investigators and 34 engineers

Brian Zajac

Zajac has been on Uber’s self-driving team since 2015 after stints with Shell and the U.S. Army. Now he becomes the new chief of hardware development and reports to Meyhofer.

David Morris, writing for Fortune, wrote:

“Zajac will now bear a great deal of responsibility for cracking the driverless car problem, which Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has described as “existential” to the company. Uber loses huge amounts of money, and many observers think eliminating the cost of drivers is its only realistic path to profitability.”

Bottom line:

Uber has research teams in Silicon Valley, Toronto and Pittsburgh all working to perfect Level 5 autonomous driving capabilities before any of their competitors are able to duplicate the process. Google, Baidu, Yandex, Didi Chuxing, a few of the Tier 1 component makers, and many others including all the major car companies are racing forward with the same intentions. Levandowski’s firing caused a big gap in Uber’s self-driving project management and fear amongst their investors. Uber hopes that these two changes, Meyhofer as overall head and Zajac as hardware chief, will quell the fears that Uber is losing their momentum.

May 2017 had two robotics-related companies get $9.5 billion in funding and 22 others raised $249 million. Acquisitions also continued to be substantial with Toyota Motor’s $260 million acquisition of Bastian Solutions plus three others (where the amounts weren’t disclosed).

Fundings

1. Didi Chuxing, the Uber of China, raised $5.5 billion in a round led by SoftBank with new investors Silver Lake Kraftwerk joining previous investors SoftBank, China Merchants Bank and Bank of Communications. According to TechCrunch, this latest round brings the total raised by DiDi to about $13 billion. Uber, by comparison, has raised $8.81 billion.
2. Nvidia Corp, a Santa Clara, CA-based speciality GPU maker, raised $4 billion (representing a 4.9% stake in the company) according to Bloomberg. Nvidia’s newest chips are focused on providing power for deep learning for self-driving vehicles.
3. ClearMotion, a Woburn, MA automotive technology startup that’s building shock absorbers with robotic, software-driven adaptive actuators for car stability, has raised $100 million in a Series C round led by a group of JP Morgan clients and NEA, Qualcomm Ventures and more.
4. Echodyne, a Bellevue, WA developer of radar vision technology used in drones and self-driving cars, has raised $29 million in a Series B round led by New Enterprise Associates and joined by Bill Gates, Madrona Venture Group, and others.
5. DeepMap, a Silicon Valley mapping startup, raised $25 million in a round led by Accel and included GSR Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
   

   “Autonomous vehicles are tempting us with a radically new future. However, this level of autonomy requires a highly sophisticated mapping and localization infrastructure that can handle massive amounts of data. I’m very excited to work with the DeepMap team, who have the requisite expertise in mapping, vision, and large scale operations, as they build the core technology that will fuel the next generation of transportation,” said Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

6. Hesai Photonics Technology, a transplanted Silicon Valley-to-Shanghai sensor startup, raised $16 million in a Series A round led by Pagoda Investment with participation from Grains Valley Venture Capital, Jiangmen Venture Capital and LightHouse Capital Management. Hesai is developing a hybrid LiDAR device for self-driving cars. Hesai has already partnered with a number of autonomous driving technology and car companies including Baidu’s Chinese electric vehicle start-up NIO and self-driving tech firm UiSee.
7. Abundant Robotics, a Menlo Park, CA-based automated fruit-picking tech developer, raised $10 million in venture funding. GV (Google Ventures) led the round, and was joined by BayWa AG and Tellus Partners. Existing partners Yamaha Motor Company, KPCB Edge, and Comet Labs also participated.
8. TriLumina Corp., an Albuquerque, NM-based developer of solid-state automotive LiDAR illumination for ADAS and autonomous driving, closed a $9 million equity and debt financing. Backers included new investors Kickstart Seed Fund and existing stakeholders Stage 1 Ventures, Cottonwood Technology Fund, DENSO Ventures and Sun Mountain Capital.
9. Bowery Farming, a NYC indoor vertical farm startup, raised $7.5 million (in February) in a seed round led by First Round Capital and including Box Group, Homebrew, Flybridge, Red Swan, RRE, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and Tom Colicchio – a restauranteur and judge on reality cooking show, Top Chef.
10. Taranis, an Israel-based precision agriculture intelligence platform raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. Finistere Ventures led the round, and was joined by Vertex Ventures. Existing investors Eshbol Investments, Mindset Ventures, OurCrowd, and Eyal Gura participated.
11. Ceres Imaging, the Oakland, CA aerial imagery and analytics company, raised a $5 million Series A round of funding led by Romulus Capital.
12. Stanley Robotics, a Paris-based automated valet parking service developer, raised $4 million in funding. Investors included Elaia Partners, Idinvest Partners and Ville de Demain. Stanley’s new parking robot is a mobile car-carrying lift that moves and tightly parks cars in outdoor locations.
13. AIRY3D Inc, a Canadian start-up in 3D computer vision, raised $3.5 million in a seed round co-led by CRCM Ventures and R7 Partners. Other investors include WI Harper Group, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners and several angel investors that are affiliates of TandemLaunch, the Montreal-based incubator that spun out AIRY3D.
14. SkyX Systems, a Canada-based unmanned aircraft system developer, raised around $3 million in funding from Kuang-Chi Group.
15. Catalia Health, a San Francisco-based patient care management company applying robotics to improve personal health, raised $2.5 million in funding. Khosla Ventures led the round.
16. vHive, an Israeli startup developing software to operate autonomous drone fleets, raised $2 million (in April) in an A round led by StageOne VC and several additional private investors.
17. Vivacity Labs, a London AI tech and sensor startup, raised $2 million from Tracsis, Downing Ventures and the London Co-Investment Fund and was also granted an additional $1.3 million from Innovate UK to create sensors with built-in machine learning to identify individual road users and manage traffic accordingly.
18. Bluewrist, a Canadian integrator of vision systems, raised around $1.5 million (in February) from Istuary Toronto Capital.
19. American Robotics, a Boston-based commercial farming drone system and analytics developer, raised $1.1 million in seed funding. Investors included Brain Robotics Capital.
20. Kubo, a Danish educational robot startup, raised around $1 million from the Danish Growth Fund. Kubo is an educational robot that helps kids learn coding, math, language and music in a screenless, tangible environment.
21. Zeals, a Japanese startup which produces interaction software for robots such as Palmi and Sota, has closed a $720k investment from Japanese adtech firm FreakOut Holdings.
22. Kitty Hawk, a San Francisco drone platform startup, raised $600k in seed money in March from The Flying Object VC.
23. Kraken Sonar, a Newfoundland marine tech startup, raised around $500k from RDC, a provincial Crown corporation responsible for improving Newfoundland and Labrador’s research and development. The funding will be used to develop the ThunderFish program which will combine smart sonar, laser and optical sensors, advanced pressure tolerant battery and thruster technologies and cutting edge artificial intelligence algorithms integrated onboard a cost effective AUV capable of 20,000 foot depths.
24. Motörleaf, a Canadian ag sensor, communications and software startup, raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round (in March).

Acquisitions

1. Toyota Motor Corp paid $260 million to acquire Bastian Solutions, a U.S.-based materials handling systems integrator. Toyota is the world’s No. 1 forklift truck manufacturer in terms of global market share. With this acqisition Toyota is making a “full-scale entry” into the North American logistics technology sector and will also use Bastian’s systems to make its own global supply chain more efficient.
2. Ctrl.Me Robotics, a Hollywood, CA drone startup, was acquired by Snap, Inc. for “an amount less than $1 million.” Ctrl Me developed a system for capturing movie-quality aerial video but was recently winding down its operations. Snap acquired its assets and technology as well as talent. Snap was already using one of Ctrl.me’s products: Spectacles, which captures video for Snap’s mobile app.
3. Applied Research Associates, Inc. (ARA), an employee-owned scientific research and engineering company, acquired Neya Systems LLC on April 28, 2017. Neya Systems LLC is known for their development of unmanned systems for defense, homeland security, and commercial users. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
4. Trimble has acquired Müller-Elektronik and all its subsidiary companies, for an undisclosed amount. Müller is a German manufacturer and integrator of farm implement controls, steering kits and precision farming solutions. The transaction is expected to close in the Q3 2017. Financial terms were not disclosed. Müller was key in the development of the ISOBUS communication protocol found in most tractors and towed implements, which allows one terminal to control several implements and machines, regardless of manufacturer.

IPOs

1. Gamma 2 Robotics, a security robot maker, launched a $6 million private offering to accredited investors.
2. Aquabotix, a Fall River, MA-headquartered company, raised $5.5 million from their IPO of UUV (ASX:UUV) on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). Aquabotix manufactures commercial and industrial underwater drone/camera systems and has shipped over 350 units worldwide.

Failures

1. FarmLink LLC
2. EZ Robotics (CN)

Levandowski (right) at MCE 2016. Source: Wikipedia Commons

Andy Rubin, who developed the Android operating system at Google then went on to lead Google through multiple acquisitions into robotics, has launched a new consumer products company. Anthony Levandowski, who, after many years with Google and their autonomous driving project, launched Otto which Uber acquired, was sued by Google, and just got fired by Uber.

People involved in robotics – from the multi-disciplined scientists turned entrepreneurs to all the specialists and other engineers involved in any aspect of the industry of making things robotic – are a relatively small community. Most people know (or know of) most of the others, and get-togethers like ICRA, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, being held this week in Singapore, are an opportunity to meet new up-and-coming talent as they present their papers and product ideas and mingle with older, more established players. Two of those players made headline news this week: Rubin, launching Essential, and Levandowski, getting fired.

Andy Rubin

Rubin came to Google in 2005 when they acquired Android and left in 2014 to found an incubator for hardware startups, Playground Global. While at Google Rubin became an SVP of Mobile and Digital content including the open-source smartphone operating system Android and then started Google’s robotics group through a series of acquisitions. Android can be found in more than 2 billion phones, TVs, cars and watches.

2008 Google Developer Day in Japan – Press Conference: Andy Rubin

In 2007, Rubin was developing his own version of a smartphone at Google, also named Android, when Apple launched their iPhone, a much more capable and stylish device. Google’s product was scrapped but their software was marketed to HTC and their phone became Google’s first Android-based phone. The software was similar enough to Apple’s that Steve Jobs was furious and, as reported in Fred Vogelstein’s ‘Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution,’ called Rubin a “big, arrogant f–k” and “everything [he’s doing] is a f–king rip-off of what we’re doing.”

Jobs had trusted Google’s cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt who was on Apple’s board. All three had been telling Jobs about Android, but they kept telling him it would be different from the iPhone. He believed them until he actually saw the phone and its software and how similar it was to the iPhone’s, whereupon he insisted Google make a lot of changes and removed Schmidt from Apple’s board. Rubin was miffed and had a sign on his office white board that said “STEVE JOBS STOLE MY LUNCH MONEY.”

Quietly, stealthily, Rubin went about creating “a new kind of company using 21st-century methods to build products for the way people want to live in the 21st century.” That company is Essential and Essential just launched and is taking orders for its new $699 phone and a still-stealthy home assistant to compete with Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home devices.

Wired calls the new Essential Phone “the anti-iPhone.” The first Phones will ship in June.

Anthony Levandowski

In 2004, Levandowski and a team from UC Berkeley built and entered an autonomous motorcycle into the DARPA Grand Challenge. In 2007 he joined Google to work with Sebastian Thrun on Google Street View. Outside of Google he started a mobile mapping company that experimented with LiDAR technology and another to build a self-driving LiDAR-using a Prius. Google acquired both companies including their IP.

In 2016 Levandowski left Google to found Otto, a company making self-driving kits to retrofit semi-trailer trucks. Just as the kit was launched, Uber acquired Otto and Levandowski became the head of Uber’s driverless car operation in addition to continuing his work at Otto.

Quoting Wikipedia,

According to a February 2017 lawsuit filed by Waymo, the autonomous vehicle research subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, Levandowski allegedly “downloaded 9.7 GB of Waymo’s highly confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation” before resigning to found Otto.

In March 2017, United States District Judge William Haskell Alsup, referred the case to federal prosecutors after Levandowski exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. In May 2017, Judge Alsup ordered Levandowski to refrain from working on Otto’s LiDAR and required Uber to disclose its discussions on the technology. Levandowski was later fired by Uber for failing to cooperate in an internal investigation.

The Wolf: The Hunt Continues Starring Christian Slater Presented by HP Studios | HP Source: HP Studios/YouTube

Here’s a video you will want to watch. “The Wolf: The Hunt Continues” is really an ad showing how a hacker can enter a network through an unprotected printer (or robot). Christian Slater stars as the evil hacker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqibWHfn_Yc

“There are hundreds of millions of business printers in the world and less than 2% are secure,” said Vikrant Batra, Global Head of Marketing for Printing & Imaging, HP. “Everyone knows that a PC can be hacked, but not a printer.” [Hence the need to inform about how easily a printer can be hacked and the consequences of that.]

Although not related to the recent WannaCry hack which held hundreds of thousands of companies ransom and downloaded millions of personal records before destroying billions more, HP,  this 7-minute terrifying advertisement for securing inconsequential devices dramatizes what can happen if we don’t stay a step ahead of the threats that are out there waiting to happen. As companies attempt to stream and analyze data from their Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and software and from varied pieces of equipment and sensors throughout their facilities, opportunities such as the one described in the HP video will certainly happen.

One that comes to mind is FANUC’s plan to network all its CNCs, robots and peripheral devices and sensors used in automation systems with the goal of optimizing up-time, maintenance schedules and manufacturing profitability. FANUC is collaborating with Cisco, Rockwell and Preferred Networks to craft a secure system which they’ve named FIELD. Let’s hope it works.

Fortune Magazine recently reported about consumer products that spy on their users by companies attempting to learn new business models based on data:

What do a doll, a popular set of headphones, and a sex toy have in common? All three items allegedly spied on consumers, creating legal trouble for their manufacturers.

In the case of We-Vibe, which sells remote-control vibrators, the company agreed to pay $3.75 million in March to settle a class-action suit alleging that it used its app to secretly collect information about how customers used its products. The audio company Bose, meanwhile, is being sued for surreptitiously compiling data—including users’ music-listening histories—from headphones.

For consumers, such incidents can be unnerving. Almost any Internet-connected device—not just phones and computers—can collect data. It’s one thing to know that Google is tracking your queries, but quite another to know that mundane personal possessions may be surveilling you too.

So what’s driving the spate of spying? The development of ever-smaller microchips and wireless radios certainly makes it easy for companies. As the margins on consumer electronics grow ever thinner, you can’t blame companies for investigating new business models based on data, not just on devices.

Aargh!

SoftBank, the giant telecom company, is venturing out into the world of robotics and transportation services. DealStreet Asia said that SoftBank is trying to transform itself into the ‘Berkshire Hathaway of the tech industry’ with the recent launch of a $100 billion technology fund.

UPDATED 5/24/17: SoftBank’s acquisition of 4.9% of the outstanding shares of Nvidia Corp.

First SoftBank bought Aldebaran, the maker of the Nao and Romeo robots, and redirected them to produce the Pepper robot which has been sold in the thousands to businesses as a guide, information source and order taker, then bigger partnerships with Foxconn and Alibaba to manufacture and market Pepper and other consumer products, and most recently to establishing the $100 billion technology fund.

Recognizing that the telecom services market has matured, SoftBank is putting their money where they can to participate in the new worlds of robotics and transportation as a service. $5 billion in Didi Chuxing, China’s largest ride-sharing company, is a perfect example.

Didi Chuxing

Didi, which already serves more than 400 million users across China, provides services including taxi hailing, private car-hailing, Hitch (social ride-sharing), DiDi Chauffeur, DiDi Bus, DiDi Test Drive, DiDi Car Rental and DiDi Enterprise Solutions to users in China via a smartphone application.

Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba are big investors — even Apple invested $1 billion.

The transformation of the auto industry into one focused on providing transportation services is a moving target with much news, talent movement, investment and widely-varying forecasts. But all signs show that it is booming and growing.

For more information on this subject, read the views of Chris Urmson, previous CTO of Google’s self-driving car group, in my article entitled: Transportation as a Service: a look ahead.

SoftBank Group Corp. acquired a $4 billion stake in Nvidia Corp. making it the fourth-largest shareholder of the graphics chipmaker.

Nvidia

Nvidia, a gaming chipmaker, has been receiving a lot of media attention for their GPU deep learning AI which they call ‘the next era of computing’ — with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world around their sensors.

Nvidia recently introduced the NVIDIA Isaac robot simulator, which utilizes sophisticated video-game and graphics technologies to train intelligent machines in simulated real-world conditions before they get deployed. The company also introduced a set of robot reference-design platforms that make it faster to build such machines using the NVIDIA Jetson platform.

“Robots based on artificial intelligence hold enormous promise for improving our lives, but building and training them has posed significant challenges. NVIDIA is now revolutionizing the robotics industry by applying our deep expertise in simulating the real world so that robots can be trained more precisely, more safely and more rapidly.”

After reading the press releases for this batch of 24 research reports, although they vary widely in their forecasts, they almost all agree that most segments of the robotics industry are expected to grow at a double-digit pace at least through 2022.

Service, mobile & aerial robots

Global and China Camera Drones Market
March 2017, 110 pages, S&P Consulting, $2,700
Provides a description of the value chain and its distributor analysis for this troubled DJI-dominated segment of the drones industry.

Drone Identification System Market
April 2017, Markets and Markets, $5,650
The drone identification market is estimated to grow from $801.8 Million in 2016 to $16 billion by 2022, at a CAGR 64.64% during the forecast period.

Automated Guided Vehicle Market
April 2017, Markets and Markets, $5,650
The automated guided vehicle market is expected to reach $2.68 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 9.34% between 2017 and 2022. The growth of this market is propelled by advancements in automation, emphasis on workplace safety, and the growing need to cut down operational cost and increase productivity.

Global smart robots market
January 2017, 84 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
Forecasts the global smart robots market to grow at a CAGR of 20.65% during the period 2016-2020.

Electric UAV Drones
February 2017, 160 pages, IDTechEx, $4,995
Unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) will be a business of over $6 by 2027. IDTechEx forecasts the next advances in hardware and software revolve around autonomy and energy independence while swarming theory will transform security and other applications.

Innovations in UAVs
February 2017, Frost & Sullivan, $6,950
Recent innovations in UAVs include digital IDs, their use by utility companies, their use underwater, payloads of thermal and other sensors.

Service robots & drones
October 2016, 302 pages, IHS Markit, $14,000
The global service robotics market will increase from $3.7 billion in 2015 to around $15 billion in 2020 at a CAGR of greater than 20%.

Service Robotics Market by air, land and sea
January 2017, Markets and Markets, $5,650
The service robotics market is estimated to reach $23.90 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 15.18% between 2016 and 2022.

Service robotics market in China
November 2016, 20 pages, China Research & Intelligence, $2,000
Chinese government issued a series of supporting policies for the development of the service robot industry. In May 2015, the State Council issued specific plan of Made in China 2025, in which service robots play a significant role.

World cleaning robot market
January 2017, Allied Analytics, $4,740
the cleaning robot market is expected to reach $2.50 billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 15.3%.

Global cleaning robot market
April 2017, Persistence Market Research, $4,900
The emergence of futuristic robotics is supporting the innovation of low cost, smaller size and technologically advanced cleaning robots. However, the low battery life and durability issues are some of the factors hindering the growth of cleaning robotics market.

Healthcare robotics

Global CyberKnife Market
January 2017, 116 pages, ReportsnReports, $2,800
A market analysis of the commercially available Accuray cyberknife and very few others.

Healthcare assistive robot market
January 2017, 200 pages, Global Market Insights, $4,500
Market size was over $200 million in 2015, with 18.9% CAGR estimated from 2016 to 2024.

Ancillary & components

Position sensor market
April 2017, Markets and Markets, $5,650
The position sensor market is expected to reach $5.98 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 6.27% between 2017 and 2022.

Sensors for Robotics: technologies, markets and forecasts to 2027
December 2017, IDTechEx, $4,995
The market for robotic sensing will reach over $16.1 billion by 2027.

Defense & space robots

Global defense robotics market
January 2017, Persistence Market Research, $4,900
Border patrol needs are creating an increasing demand for UAVs and UGVs in countries such as Israel, South Korea, China and United States.

Aerospace Robotics
January 2017, Markets and Markets, $5,650
The aerospace robotics market is projected to grow from $1.81 billion in 2016 to $4.54 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 16.55% during the forecast period.

Aerospace and Defense Tech with UAVs
February 2017, Frost & Sullivan, $6,950
Describes unmanned supply aircraft to supply troops under fire, VTOL UAVs, and drone-capturing UAVs. Report includes a section on sensors: “The need for low power, smaller, lighter sensors with enhanced performance attributes and minimal false alarms is driving innovations in the sensors space.”

Agricultural robots

Agricultural robots and drones technologies market
March 2017, 163 pages, Research and Markets, $5,760
A complex ten-year segmented market forecasts for 14 categories including static milking robotics, mobile dairy farm robots, autosteer tractors, autonomous tractors, unmanned spraying drones, autonomous data mapping drones, robotic implements for de-weeding, autonomous de-weeding mobile robots, robotic fresh fruit harvesting, robotic strawberry harvesting, manned and unmanned robotic lettuce/vegetable thinning/harvesting which is forecast to reach $10 billion as early as 2022.

Agricultural robots and drones
March 2017, IDTechEx, $4,995
Forecasts robotics in dairy farms will reach $8 billion by 2023; more than 660,000 tractors will come equipped with autosteer by 2027; drone-provided analytics will reach over $480 million by 2027; slower progress in harvesting and agrochemicals.

Industrial, warehousing & collaborative robots

Collaborative Robot Market
January 2017, 147 pages, Transparency Market Research, $5,795
The report states that the global collaborative robot market is expected to be worth $95 billion by the end of 2024 as compared to $10.3 billion in 2015 and expand at a CAGR of 30.0%.

Warehousing and logistics robots
February 2017, 104 pages, Tractica, $4,200
Sales of warehousing and logistics robots reached $1.9 billion in 2016 and Tractica expects that the market will continue to grow rapidly reaching a market value of $22.4 billion by the end of 2021.

Global industrial robot market 
December 2016, 104 pages, Marketsize Forecasters, $2,800
The report discusses the competitive landscape of the industrial robot market, particularly with mergers, acquisitions, new product launches and expansions.

Global industrial robotics services
January 2017, 66 pages, Infiniti Research, $3,500
Forecasts the global industrial robotics services market to grow at a CAGR of 10.16% during the period 2017-2021.

Robotics Industry Reports from the International Federation of Robotics

The fact-based backbone for many of these research reports is the International Federation of Robotics‘ (IFR) annual World Robotics Industrial Robots and World Robotics Service Robots reports. These two books represent the official tabulation and analysis from all the robot associations around the world.

The two 2016 reports cover 2015 activity and can be purchased for around $2,200.

The 2017 reports covering 2016 activity will be published and available for purchase around September 30, 2017.

April 2017 had 16 robotics-related fundings totaling over $337 million – a fourth solid month for 2017 – $995 million year-to-date. Acquisitions also continued to be substantial with ABB’s $2 billion acquisition of Bernecker & Rainer, plus Baidu, iRobot and Cognex each making strategic acquistions. And there was some IPO activity (but no new stocks).

Fundings

1. Mobvoi, a Chinese voice recognition startup, signed a strategic partnership to build a 50/50 joint venture targeting the automotive market with Volkswagen. The deal involved VW investing $180 million in a Mobvoi series D funding. Modvoi has developed an advanced Chinese speech recognition system, Chinese/English translation, semantic analysis and integrated vertical and proactive search, all adapted for and connected with a smart rear-view mirror that provides navigation, messaging and information through voice input. Prof. Dr. Heizmann, President and CEO of Volkswagen Group China said:
   “This partnership is a particular example of Volkswagen’s determination to work with groundbreaking Chinese tech companies like Mobvoi to create new forms of people-oriented mobility technology. We are impressed by Mobvoi’s innovative approach of AI technologies, and we are pleased to form this joint venture to explore the next generation of smart mobility.”
2. Peloton Technology, a Silicon Valley-based developer of technology for trucks to avoid collisions, cut fuel use and travel in closer proximity, raised a $60 million round of funding led by Omnitracs, and additional investments from existing investors Intel Capital, DENSO International America, BP Ventures, Lockheed Martin, Nokia Growth Partners, UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund, Volvo Group, Sand Hill Angels, Band of Angels and Birchmere Ventures along with new investors B37 Ventures, Mitsui USA, Okaya, Schlumberger, US Venture and Breakthrough Fuel.
3. Luminar Technology, a Silicon Valley vision systems startup, is developing a new LiDAR-like high-resolution sensor that will help autonomous vehicles read signs, see traffic lights and avoid obstacles. Peter Thiel’s 1517 Fund, which invests in startups led by young founders, participated in the $36 million seed round. GVA capital and Canvas Ventures also participated.
4. Shield AI, a San Diego developer of artificially intelligent systems, raised $10.5 million in a Series A funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round.
5. Synchron, a San Francisco-based company developing a medical device that records neuron signals as a way to control advanced prosthetics, raised $10 million in Series A funding. Neurotechnology Investors led the round and was joined by the U.S. Department of Defense.
6. Renovo Auto, a Campbell, CA startup creating platforms for autonomous, connected, and electric vehicles, raised $10 million in a funding round led by True Ventures (Verizon’s venture arm).
7. Aurora Innovation, a Silicon Valley startup headed by Chris Urmson, former CTO of Google’s self-driving car project, has raised $6.1 from Allen & Company, Chris Urmson, Drew Bagnell and Sterling Anderson (who previously oversaw Tesla’s Autopilot software and who was involved in a lawsuit by Tesla which was settled/dropped by Tesla just the other day).
8. VIST Group, a 25-year-old Russian IT company, raised $6 million from I2BF Global Ventures and VTB Capital Asset Management to develop robotizing and autonomous equipment for the mining industry. Said Vladimir Sakovich of the Skolkovo Foundation:
   “VIST is an example of those Russian companies, not numerous yet, that are showing good financial performance with a huge potential for international markets and also constantly developing innovative high-tech solutions.”
9. The Yield Technology Solutions, an Austrailian ag analytics and sensors startup, raised $4.9 million from lead investor Bosch, as well as from KPMG and AgFunder in a Series A funding round. The startup will use the funds to expand beyond aquaculture (oyster farming), its first target market in Australia, and into the US where it will focus on customers on the West Coast growing intensive, irrigated crops.
10. DeepScale, a Silicon Valley autonomous vehicle vision systems startup, raised $3 million in a seed round.  Investors included Bessemer Venture Partners, Greylock, Auto Tech Ventures, Andy Bechtolsheim (who was the first investor in Google) and Jerry Yang.
11. Arbe Robotics, an Israeli drone radar collision avoidance platform, raised $2.5 million from unknown sources. Arbe is also developing radar for autonomous vehicles that facilitates real-time mapping at distances up to 300 meters.
12. WiBotic, a Seattle startup developing a wireless power and battery solution for mobile air, land and sea robots, raised $2.5 million in a seed round led by Tsing Capital, and including investments from Comet Labs and Digi Labs as well as follow-on investments from W Fund, WRF Capital and Wisemont Capital.
13. COSY (Cognitive Operational Systems), a spin-off from the GRASP Labs at U Penn, raised $2.3 million (in February) in a Series A round from Safeguard Scienfitics, a growth-stage VC. COSY has developed a vision, perception and AI system for mobile robots to collect and evaluate inventory data.
14. BestMile, a Swiss startup developing a cloud platform for the operation and optimization of autonomous vehicle fleets, raised $2 million from Airbus Venture, Partech Venture, and Serena Capital.
15. Compound Eye, a San Francisco 3D vision for autonomous machines startup, raised $1 million from unknown sources.
16. Ecoation Innovative Solutions, a Vancouver, CA ag sensor and analytics startup, raised $750k in a seed round with funds to be used to launch commercial sales to greenhouse growers in North America.

Acquisitions

When asked about the few IPOs but many acquisitions in the digital, tech and robotics industries, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said in an interview in Fortune Magazine:

When Steve and I started Apple we were so naïve and young. We didn’t know anything about business. We didn’t know that it’s often the case that you start a company and then you get bought out as an exit strategy. We thought that you start at home, you make a product, and become profitable so you have your company forever. As long as it makes a profit, it never goes away. That’s how I thought companies worked. Boy, it’s a different story now in Silicon Valley.

I think there are an awful lot of people who have a quick exit plan like selling the business to another big company to get enough money to buy a house in San Francisco. Then they move on to the next one. There are many companies that are started by business people and not engineers. Engineers say, “What would be a cool product? What would make the world greater and better?” That’s where I come from.

1. ABB has acquired Austrian industrial automation company Bernecker & Rainer, a move that fits in with its strategy of expanding its products to better challenge German rival Siemens on the factory floor. The Swiss company said the acquisition would increase its sales in industrial automation to around $15 billion by adding B&R’s annual sales of more than $600 million. ABB gave no purchase price but a person familiar with the matter said it was nearly $2 billion.
2. iRobot has acquired the Japanese iRobot-related distribution business of Sales on Demand Corp, a Tokyo integrator/reseller for around $15 million. The acquisition is expected to contribute incremental revenue of approximately $20-$25 million in 2017 and to expand gross margin.
3. Cognex, the large vision systems provider, acquired Boulder, CO 3D sensor camera maker Chiaro Technologies for $3.5 million plus $1.25 million based upon reaching certain milestone revenue levels.
4. Cognex also acquired ViDi Systems SA, a Swiss maker of deep learning machine vision software for an undisclosed amount.
5. MHI Holdings, a Norfolk, Va. provider of marine repair services backed by Stellex Capital Management, acquired Seaward Marine Services, a provider of robotic underwater hull cleaning and ship husbandry services, and Accurate Marine Environmental, a provider of marine and industrial tank and bilge cleaning services, environmental remediation, and disposal services. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.
6. Schmalz, a global Germany-based manufacturer of vacuum technology for the robotics industry, acquired GPS GmbH (GPS Production Systems), a spin-off from the Fraunhofer Institute IPA, for an undisclosed amount. GPS develops products, tools and methods – including a plug-and-play interface for connection – to interface actuators and sensors to MES and ERP systems.
7. Baidu acquired Silicon Valley vision systems startup Xperception  for an undisclosed amount. xPerception co-founders Dr. Bao Yingze and Dr. Chen Mingyu, were early key engineers at AR start-up Magic Leap. Following the acquisition, the core xPerception team will join Baidu Research and continue developing xPerception’s core technology, visual inertial simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Baidu hopes to harness the potential of xPerception’s visual perception camera in its bid to develop autonomous cars. The camera’s features include sophisticated tracking technology, three-dimensional obstacle detection, and object recognition. Michael Ramsey, transportation and mobility analyst for Gartner Research, explained that the acquisition could “help push Baidu closer to the leaders” but that it has a long way to go.
   

   “Right now, the largest tech players are scrambling to catch Uber, which has a big head start on virtually everyone. That means that if you don’t have the capability in-house, you have to acquire it. XPerception has expertise in processing and identifying images, an important part of the sensing for autonomous vehicles. The purchase may help push Baidu closer to the leaders, but it is just one piece… it has a long way to go.”

IPOs

Lots of activity, but no new stocks just yet.

• San Jose, CA-based Mota Group, a maker of fingertip-sized drone toys and a line of more professional drones for commercial users, filed for an IPO of up to $23 million last year, pulled that and has recently lowered that figure to just $6 million and refiled. No indication of when the actual launch will occur.
• Myomo, a Cambridge, MA upper limbs exoskeleton startup, filed for a Reg A+ IPO of $15 million in February and Banq, the issuer and service provider, says the final papers will be submitted mid-May.
• Knightscope, a Silicon Valley security systems and robotics startup, also filed for a $20 million Reg A+ IPO in February and, according to SeedInvest, the issuer and service provider, is close to completing the transaction. Knightscope was evasive but sent over this picture of their company on NASDAQ’s massive NYC signboard. A 1/4 page ad for Knightscope’s offering also appeared in the WSJ and USA Today.

Failures

• Nav on Time (FR)
• Wany Robotics (FR)

FANUC_R2000iB at work. Source: Wikipedia Commons

CBS News, and reporter David Pogue, displayed some new technologies threatening jobs, while the International Federation of Robotics suggested that deploying robots actually increases jobs. Are either true? Or both? 

In this Sunday Morning CBS News piece, David Pogue cites the numbers of drivers that will be displaced as self-driving cars and trucks hit the roads (180k taxi drivers, 600k Uber drivers and 3.5 million truck drivers). He then explores other areas where bots and robots will soon disrupt employment: 230k workers in fintech along with 47% of many other occupations could be lost to automation in the next 20 years. He concludes with an MIT economics professor who suggests that, historically, new occupations have risen and overall employment has also risen even as major disruptions have happened over the last 100 years.

IFR’s Press Conference

Last week’s Chicago Automate and ProMat trade shows began with a press conference by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) which included a CEO Roundtable discussing automation, the future of US manufacturing, and the jobs issue. Executives from Amazon, GM, ARM, ABB and AMT participated.

The IFR reported 2016 data which indicated that 31,500 industrial robots were installed in the US in 2016 (up 15% from 2015). 43% of those robots went to the auto industry, reaching an all-time high for that industry which has been growing at a CAGR of 9% since 2010.

Worldwide, around 290,000 industrial robots were installed, 14% more than 2015. 90,000 of those robots were installed in China, 31% more than 2015. The IFR also predicted that global annual growth is expected to average 12% for the remainder of the decade.

Employment and jobs

Employment in the U.S. auto industry during the 2010 to 2016 period rose from 679,000 to 940,000 at a steady 6% CAGR, thus 261,000 new jobs were created in the automotive sector in the U.S. from 2010 through 2016 — the same period that robot deployment grew by 9%.

“The main driving force of this growth is the ongoing trend to automate production in order to strengthen the competitiveness of American industry globally, to keep manufacturing at home, and in some cases  bring back manufacturing that had previously been outsourced to other countries,” said Joe Gemma, President of the IFR.

Recent articles in The Guardian, Financial Times and the NY Times debate whether increased manufacturing efficiencies using automation and robotics cause fewer jobs or change job growth from DDD (dull, dirty, dangerous) jobs to higher-skilled ones, or neither. The NY Times article presented evidence from two economists who quantified the negative effects of the deployment of robots in a new paper which concluded that for every robot deployed, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell for the remaining workers by as much as three-fourths of a percent. NOTE: All three articles are worth reading.

The panelists and the IFR agreed on the IFR analysis of economic data and forecasts that show automation and the use of robots create new jobs by increasing productivity. They also agreed, that education and training systems must be adapted to enable current and future workers to reap the benefits of robotics.

Reporters asked about the Bill Gates robot tax idea and the IFR responded with a reasoned fact-backed argument which included this paragraph:

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, more than 90 percent of jobs will not be fully automatable in the future. Instead, robots and humans will work together. The positive impact that the increased productivity of robots has on employment can already be seen in the most advanced industrial nations. The US automotive industry, for instance, installed more than 60,000 industrial robots between 2010 and 2015. During this same period, the number of employees in the US automotive sector increased by 230,000. [See chart above.] The same trends can be seen in the most advanced economies in Europe and Asia. Moreover, recent research by the OECD on the future of productivity shows: companies that employ technological innovation effectively are up to 10 times more productive than those that do not.

The IFR foresees the future job scene to be robots and humans working together and, agrees with the McKinsey report that less than 10% of jobs will be fully automatable.

Thus the debate continues.

Ahem…

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March 2017 had 29 robotics-related startups get funding totaling over $222 million – another solid month for 2017 and $658 million year-to-date. Acquisitions also continued to be substantial with Intel’s eye-popping $15 billion acquisition of Israeli Mobileye. Plus, there were three IPOs.

Fundings

1. Corindus Vascular Robotics, already an over-the-counter stock, raised $45 million in a private placement of 68 million shares at $0.6616/share. Corindus is FDA approved to use robotic devices in coronary intervention procedures such as placing stents in arteries.
2. Farmer’s Business Network, a Silicon Valley platform that collects, analyses, and shares data from farmers, raised $40 million in Series C funding. GV and DBL Partners led the round, with additional participation from Bow Capital, Acre Venture Partners, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
3. Medrobotics, a Massachusetts surgical robot startup, raised $20 million in a Series H round of funding from 12 unnamed investors. Medrobotics developed the Flex robot-assisted surgical platform which won CE Mark approval in 2016 and a partial approval from the FDA for throat procedures.
4. Wayray, a Swiss startup developing a software and a holographic AR add-on device for navigation in self-driving cars, raised $18 million in a Series B round led by Alibaba subsidiary Banma Technologies.
5. EasyMile, a French startup specializing in mobility solutions for autonomous vehicles, raised $15 million in a Series A funding from Alstom, the international mobil transportation company.
6. Endomaster, a Singapore-based medical robotics spin-off from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the National University of Singapore (NUS), has closed a $14.6 million Series B funding round. No investors were disclosed. Existing investors are NTUitive Pte and Japan’s Hoya Corporation. Endomaster is a robotic-assisted surgical system that combines minimally invasive endoscopic surgery with intuitive robotic-assisted surgery.
7. 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 $14.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Singapore’s Vertex Ventures, Volcanic Stone Capital and Banyan Capital. 300 of Geek+’s robots are already at work in e-commerce, retail and manufacturing in China and Alibaba’s TMall in particular.
8. Drone Delivery, a Canadian startup developing a commercially viable drone delivery system for Canada, raised around $8.1 million from the issuance of a private placement of special warrants.
9. RightHand Robotics, a Cambridge, MA-based robotic picking solutions provider, raised $8 million in a Series A funding from Playground Global, Matrix Partners, Seven Seas Partners, Dream Incubator and angel investors. RightHand is launching its new RightPick gripper which combines a vacuum stick with fingers to quickly pick and grasp individual items.
   

   “RightHand Robotics has created a transformative technology combining machine learning and smart hardware to address a tremendous opportunity in the logistics industry,” says investor Andy Rubin, Founder and CEO at Playground Global. “For the first time, affordable industrial robots can grasp things they have never seen before.”

10. Chowbotics, a San Jose, CA startup recently renamed from Casabots, raised $5 million in Series A funding from Techstars Ventures, Foundry Group, Galvanize Ventures and the Geekdom Fund. Chowbotics is developing robots that can prepare and plate ready-to-eat meals.
11. Sarcos, a Utah-based provider of military exoskeletons, added Schlumberger to their list of Series A funders previously reported in 2016 and added $5 million to their take in a second closing of the round.
12. XACT Robotics, an Israeli startup developing a robotic surgical assistant for brain needle navigation, raised $5 million in a Series B round led by investment company MEDX Ventures Group.
13. SB Drive, a Tokyo-based autonomous vehicle startup subsidiary of SoftBank and Advanced Smart Mobility, raised $4.6 million in a Series A funding to develop autonomous vehicle technology for public transport. Yahoo! Japan led the round, and was joined by SoftBank.
14. Arable Labs, a Princeton, N.J. ag industry startup for in-field crop monitoring and analytics, raised $4.25 million in Series A funding. Middleland Capital and S2G Ventures led the round, with participation from Chase Field, Spark Labs and Cantos VC.
15. Starsky Robotics, a San Francisco self-driving trucking startup, raised $3.75m from Y-Combinator, Sam Altman, Trucks VC, Data Collective and a few others in a seed round. On February 3, 2017 one of Starsky’s trucks hauled a 5,000-lb load 140 miles, and drove itself for 120 of those miles. Their system was also used to driverlessly move trailers around a truck yard.
16. Flytrex, an Israeli startup making drone components, raised $3 million in a Series A funding led by Armada Investments and private angel investors Daniel Gutenberg and Joey Low.
17. ShadeCraft, a Pasadena, Calif. robotics startup of an autonomous robotic shade that tracks the sun and is solar powered, raised $2 million in seed funding from undisclosed sources.
18. CrowdAI, a startup providing image analytics for drones and self-driving car systems as a service, raised $2 million in seed funding from Susa Ventures, Box Group, SV Angel, Metamorphic and Yahoo founder Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud.
19. No Isolation, a Norwegian startup providing robotic avatars to disabled children via schools and municipalities, raised $1.4 million from telecom giant Telia and PR firm Trigger. No Isolation plans to sell and ship 500 AV1 robots into Norwegian schools this year.
20. Beehex, an Ohio 3D pizza printing startup, raised $1 million in a seed funding led by Grote Company founder, Jim Grote. Grote is a worldwide manufacturer of food-processing equipment.
21. Novarc Technologies, a Vancouver, BC industrial robot startup, raised $750k in a seed round led by Seaspan ULC with participation from BDC Capital. Novarc builds robotic systems that do pipe welding for shipbuilding.
22. CBot Construction Robotics,  a Swedish startup, raised $656k in venture funding from unknown sources. Cbot robots have been developed to lay flat major surfaces, such as floors in supermarkets, malls and airports. With the help of sensors and artificial intelligence Cbot’s floor robot can replace the human labor for this activity.
23. AirZaar, a St. Louis, MO startup providing preflight planning and postflight analytics for drone operators and industry clients, raised $350k in a seed round from Quake Capital Partners.
24. Inka Robotics, an Israeli startup developing an autonomous tattooing robot, raised $100k from an unnamed angel investor.
25. Emoshape, a UK startup, raised $45k from Quake Capital Partners, a NYC accelerator. Emoshape has evolved through a failed emotion-recognizing device to an emotion processing chip undergoing testing by two Fortune 500 companies.
26. Flyte, a Belfast, Ireland drone flight planning software startup, raised $24k in seed funding from STARTPlanetNI, COLMAN EQUITY, PROPEL, and Invest Northern Ireland.
27. Blue Workforce, a Danish startup making a Delta-like robot, raised an undisclosed double-digit million dollar amount from a Chinese investor group who will become a minority partner in Blue Workforce and controlling partner in a new Blue Workforce Asia Pacific venture to be located in Hong Kong.
28. Medineering Surgical Robots, a German startup, raised an undisclosed amount from a Series A round led by Brainlab and three funders from the seed round.
29. SkySquirrel Technologies, a Canadian drone/analytics ag startup, raised an undisclosed non-equity funding from The Pearse Lyons Accelerator.

Acquisitions

1. Intel announced plans to acquire Israel-based Mobileye, a developer of vision technology used in autonomous driving applications, for $15.3 billion. Mobileye share prices jumped from $47 to $61 (the tender offering price is $63.54) on the news, a 30% premium. The purchase marks the largest acquisition of an Israeli hi-tech company ever.
2. CobotsGuide, a website, was acquired by Productive Robotics, a Southern California startup builder of co-bots, for an undisclosed amount. The chief writer of the guide is now the marketing director for the co-bot company which is launching their new OB-7 mobile warehouse robot at the Promat/Automate show in Chicago.
3. Trio Motion Technology, aTewkesbury, UK motion control components manufacturer, was acquired by Nanjing, China-based Estun Automation for $19 million. Estun’s industrial robots and AC servo systems plus Trio’s motion control systems will enable the combined company to provide complex motion control solutions.

IPOs

1. UUV Aquabotix Ltd, an Austrailian corporation, has filed an IPO (in Australia) to sell 25 million shares at $0.15 cents/share in the hopes of raising $19 million. UUV Aquabotix will then market, manage and operate AquaBotix Technology’s Massachusetts-based business. According to the prospectus, Aquabotix Technology had 2016 sales of $840k, an increase of 80% over 2015.
2. Ecovacs Robotics Co Ltd, a Chinese IDG Capital-backed robot vacuum maker, has filed with China Securities Regulatory Commission to list on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the China Money Network (CMN) reported. Based in Jiangsu province, Ecovacs claims to be China’s top robot home appliances maker with a 65% market share, and currently has over 5,000 employees. Companies in China must wait in queue for multiple years after they file an IPO prospectus as there are currently over 800 companies in the pipeline waiting to be permitted to complete their listings.
3. X-Fab Silicon Foundries, a German sensor and chipmaker, is seeking to raise about $530 million in an IPO on Paris Euronext, according to Bloomberg. BNP Paribas SA and HSBC Bank PLC are the lead underwriters on the offering. X-Fab makes pressure sensors, optical encoders, flow meters and other sensors used in industrial robotics.

Failures

1. Titan Aerospace, a Google acquisition
2. BioRob Bionic Robotics GmbH

February fundings for 16 robotics-related startups totaled over $313 million – another solid month for the new year. Acquisitions also continued to be substantial with Ford’s acquisition of Argo and Midea Group’s purchase of Servotronix. Plus there were two IPOs.

Fundings

1. CloudMinds, a Chinese startup developing cloud-intelligence-based services for robotics and other application areas, raised $100 million in a Series A funding round. Although no funder information was provided, seed financing was provided by SoftBank, Foxconn, Walden International and Keytone Ventures.
2. Desktop Metal, a 3D metal printing startup based in Burlington, Mass., is gearing up to take its first product into production and raised $45 million from GV, BMW I Ventures and Lowe’s Ventures. The company has now raised a total of $97 million. Other investors include NEA, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lux Capital, GE Ventures, Saudi Aramco, and Stratasys.
3. Xenex Disinfection Services, a San Antonio maker of mobile robots for the healthcare industry, raised $38 million in funding. Essex Woodlands led the round, and was joined by Piper Jaffray Merchant Banking, Malin Corporation, and Tectonic Ventures.
4. Makeblock, a Chinese platform for making DIY robotics kits, raised around $29 million in Series B funding according to Bloomberg. Funders include Sequoia Capital and Hax. Makeblock products are used by more than 600,000 people, with more than 60 percent of its revenue generated from overseas.
5. AirMap, a Los Angeles startup developing a traffic management platform for drones, raised $26 million from Microsoft Ventures, Airbus, Qualcomm, Rakuten, Sony and Yuneec. AirMap provides real-time traffic management software for 80% of the world’s drones, from all sorts of manufacturers, allowing drones and their controllers to share data needed to fly safely at low altitudes.
6. Dedrone, a Germany-based provider of DroneTracker, a software hardware scanner which, in combination with an RF sensor, is able to detect drones and remote controls by their radio frequency (RF) signatures, secured $15 million in a Series B funding led by John Chambers, Executive Chairman of Cisco and Felicis Ventures. Dedrone can set up around cities where major events are scheduled, so the company often works with federal and city governments to monitor airspace. Its technology was used to detect drones, for example, over Davos, and two presidential debates.
7. ZongMu Technology, a Shanghai self-driving car control systems startup, got $14.5 million in a Series B funding led by Legend Capital with additional funding from another Xiamen-based VC.
8. TerrAvion, a San Leandro, Calif.-based provider of aerial imagery services for farmers, raised $10 million in Series A funding. Merus Capital led the round, and was joined by Promus Ventures, Initialized Capital, and 10x Group. TerrAvion offers farmers images from 12 flights over their land per growing season for as little as $4 an acre. These images provide a low-cost alternative to drone imagery and a higher resolution than satellite imagery.
9. TetraVue, a San Diego, CA-based LiDAR and 3D camera technology company, raised $10 million in Series A funding. Robert Bosch Venture Capital and Nautilus Venture Partners led the round, with participation from Samsung Catalyst Fund and Foxconn. The funding will enable TetraVue to bring its Ultra High Definition, Solid State Flash LIDAR to the autonomous car industry, and to be one of the first in the new Vision for Things (VfT) marketplace.
10. Synapticon, a Germany-based provider of control systems for mobile, service and industrial robots, raised around $9 million in scale-up funding led by 7 Industries Holdings (NL) and also HTGF High-Tech and MBG.
    “Demand has exploded over the past two years. We benefit from the trend towards automation and robotics, especially in Asia. We succeeded in gaining important key customers around the world,” says Nikolai Ensslen, founder and CEO of Synapticon. “Many manufacturers of robots and similar machines have developed products based on our control and drive systems. These are now gradually going into series production, which means that we now have to increase our resources sustainably.”
11. Intuition Robotics, an Israeli developer of social-companion robots, raised $6 million from iRobot and OurCrowd. With the funding, the Jerusalem-based company plans to open an office in the Bay Area and begin testing ElliQ with senior citizens in San Francisco. ElliQ is made up of an interactive robot attached to a tablet and was built to help older adults age in place, while keeping them engaged, active, and connected to the outside world.
12. Exyn Technologies, a spin-out from the U of Penn, raised around $3.4 million in seed financing from IP Group, a VC specializing in tech transfer opportunities from major universities. Exyn develops fully autonomous aerial robot systems with multi-modal sensing capabilities and was founded by Dr. Vijay Kumar, the former Director of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at the U of Penn.
13. Evollve Ozobot, a Southern California educational robot kit toy startup, raised $3 million in Series A venture funding to ramp up production of the Ozobot, and to develop new features and content to reach even more kids in the U.S., France and South Korea. Tribeca Venture Partners led and was joined by unnamed venture firms and angel investors, including ZICO coconut water founder Mark Rampolla. Another helper is a licensing tie-in with Disney’s Marvel Avengers. The company sells toppers kids can affix to their robots, changing the way the Ozobot sounds and moves when attached.
    Rampolla said about his investment in Ozobot: “[They’ve] got Ozobot built and into more than 3,000 schools with limited resources from some friends and family funding. They’ve had a really amazing response from teachers around the country already. And this funding just helps expand on that early success.”
14. PerceptIn, a Silicon Valley A.I. startup, raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a Series A round led by Matrix Partners China. Walden International and TEEC Angel Fund also participated in the round. According to an announcement by Matrix Partners, the funding is worth $2 to $3 million.
15. BluHaptics, a Seattle telerobotics startup, got $1.36 million in Series A funding led by Seattle Angel Fund with additional funds from Seattle’s Alliance of Angels. BluHaptics software enables operators to interact with and control remote robots in dangerous and unpredictable environments.
16. Airware, a Newport Beach, Calif.-based platform for developing and operating drones, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Caterpillar Ventures and eight others.

Acquisitions

1. Argo AI, a Pittsburgh startup, has sold a majority share of their company to Ford Motor Co. which has agreed to invest $1 billion over 5 years. Bryan Salesky, previously with Google’s self-driving team, and Peter Rander, previously with Uber’s, will head up the new company. Argo AI plans to develop a software platform backbone for Ford’s fully autonomous vehicle and are planning on making that platform a working reality by 2021. They are working with the City of Pittsburgh to establish a work facility, finding office space, and hiring up to 200 engineers and CS professionals. Until this transaction, Ford’s investments in future transportation technology have been relatively modest, eg, $75 million last year to buy a minority stake in Velodyne, a manufacturer of laser-based LiDAR sensing systems and $6.6 million in Civil Maps, also last year, a Berkeley, CA startup working on AI-powered mapping for self-driving cars.
   

   “The next decade will be defined by the automation of the automobile, and autonomous vehicles will have as significant an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line did 100 years ago,” Ford President and CEO Mark Fields said in a statement. “As Ford expands to be an auto and a mobility company, we believe that investing in Argo AI will create significant value for our shareholders by strengthening Ford’s leadership in bringing self-driving vehicles to market in the near term and by creating technology that could be licensed to others in the future.”

2. ABB, one of the Big Four of robot makers, acquired NUB3D, a Spanish startup making digital 3D inspection and QC components using white-light scanning sensor technologies. Financial details were not disclosed. ABB and NUB3D already partnered to introduce two fully robotized inspection solutions for off- and in-line inspection.
3. Verizon bought Skyward, a Portland, OR startup which has developed fleet management software for drones, for an undisclosed amount. Verizon Ventures was an investor in the company’s seed round. The company will operate under Verizon’s IoT portfolio.
   

   “Last quarter we announced our strategy to drive innovation and widespread adoption for in-flight wireless connectivity through our Airborne LTE Operations initiative, a new service to simplify certification and connectivity of wireless drones. This acquisition is a natural progression of our core focus on operating in innovative, high-growth markets, leveraging our network, scale, fleet management, device management, data analytics and security enablement capabilities and services to simplify the drone industry and help support the adoption of IoT,” said Mike Lanman, Verizon SVP Enterprise Products and IoT.

4. Servotronix, an Israeli motion control and automation systems company, was acquired by Midea Group of China (the same company that bought KUKA last year) for $170 million. Servotronix, founded in 1987, develops and manufactures comprehensive and high performance motion control solutions, ranging from advanced encoders, servo drives, and multi-axis motion controllers, for a wide variety of industries including industrial robots, electronics assembly, semiconductor, machine tools and medical equipment.
   

   “This alliance will provide Servotronix with significant leverage for our global operations and put Servotronix in a leadership position in the field of robotics, control and automation, with China being a major market in this field,” said Dr. Ilan Cohen, president, CEO and founder of Servotronix.

IPOs

Two crowdfunded IPOs under Reg A+ of the SEC – the new rules under the JOBS Act allowing private companies to raise up to $50 million via crowdfunding technology:

1. Myomo, a Cambridge, MA upper limbs exoskeleton startup, has filed for a Reg A+ IPO of $15 million. Banq is the issuer and service provider.
2. Knightscope, a Silicon Valley security systems and robotics startup, also filed for a $20 million Reg A+ IPO and, according to SeedInvest, the issuer and service provider, is 2/3 of the way there with pledges.

Although the original articles (2016 was best year ever for funding robotics startup companies) and (Over $19 billion paid to acquire 50 robotic companies) have been updated to reflect the omissions of 2016 fundings and acquisitions, listed below is a recap of those updated transactions.

Fundings:

• $100 million for China-based RooBo – A China-based service robot maker for home and personal use, raised $100 million from iFlyTek, a Chinese software firm with which it formed a strategic partnership that will see ROOBO integrate iFlyTek’s intelligent speech and language recognition technology into ROOBO’s robots. ROOBO also manufactures an intelligent drone, a VR headset and smart bone conduction headphones. ROOBO’s team has 300 employees and 7 offices worldwide.
• $50 million for Israeli Roboteam – An Israeli manufacturer of unmanned ground vehicles for the military secured a $50 million Series B funding from Calcalist and The Marker, both Singaporean investment funds.
• $9.5 million for Matternet – A startup providing load-carrying unmanned aerial systems for on-demand aerial logistics, raised $9.48 million in a seed round by Daimler and the Wei Fund.
• $2 million for area17 – A SRI spin-off located in Silicon Valley, raised $2 million in seed funding from Morado Venture Partners and Red Dog Capital. Area17 is developing a collision avoidance autonomous navigation system for mobile and aerial robots.
• $1.8 million for xCraft – An Idaho-based UAV startup with a VTOL capable of vertical takeoff and landing, raised $1.8 million seed round from angel investors including Mark Cuban, Kevin O’Leary, Daymond John and Lori Greiner.
• $1.5 million for ReActive Robotics GmbH – A German rehab robotics startup, closed a Series A round of “seven digits” (in Euros) from which we approximated $1.5 million. Investors included MTIP MedTech Innovation Partners, Bayern Kapital, High-Tech Gruenderfonds and The TQ Group.
• $800k for Ascent Robotics – A Tokyo startup developing multi-task AI agents for robotic systems, raised $800k in seed funding.
  ​
• Also Cafe X Technologies, Fellow Robots and Simbe Robotics received undisclosed amounts.

Acquisitions:

• Regarding the acquisition of Liquid Robotics by Boeing, at the time it didn’t have any financial details, but a flurry of leaks and rumors suggest that Boeing paid $300 million for LR. Both companies won’t comment.
• Redbird, a French drone-powered analytics provider for construction and mining companies, sold to American Airware for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition allows Airware to concentrate on the insurance vertical where it helps State Farm and other customers with inspecting roofs, residential claims management, and commercial underwriting.
• Erle Robotics, a Spanish startup making components for robots and drones, was acquired by Swiss Acutronic Group, a maker of multiple axes motion simulators, for an undisclosed amount.

Photo: Ford Motor’s next-generation Fusion Hybrid autonomous development vehicle. (Courtesy of Ford Motor)

Argo AI, a Pittsburgh startup, has sold a majority share of their company to Ford Motor Co. which has agreed to invest $1 billion over a five-year schedule but will immediately become the majority shareholder. Both companies declined to disclose further details.

Argo AI plans to fully support Ford but eventually license its software and sensor suite to other companies.

“Our view [is that], in the future, there will be a number of players that will have systems,” Ford CEO Mark Fields told Recode in an interview. “There won’t be just one winner. But at the same time we can offer that to other companies where it doesn’t compromise our competitive advantages. We think that’s a great opportunity to get even more scale and create some value for the companies.”

Bryan Salesky, previously with Google’s self-driving team and Peter Rander, previously with Uber’s, will head up the new company. Argo AI plans to develop a software platform backbone for Ford’s fully autonomous vehicle and plan on making that platform a working reality by 2021. They are working with the City of Pittsburgh to find and establish a work facility and planning to find office space in the Pittsburgh area and hiring up to 200 engineers and CS professionals.

“We want to take a straight-line path to market as much as we possibly can,” Salesky said.

Until this transaction, Ford’s investments in future transportation technology have been relatively modest, eg, $75 million to buy a minority stake in Velodyne, a manufacturer of laser-based LiDAR sensing systems, and $6.6 million in Civil Maps, a Berkeley, CA startup working on AI-powered mapping for self-driving cars.

“The next decade will be defined by the automation of the automobile, and autonomous vehicles will have as significant an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line did 100 years ago,” Ford President and CEO Mark Fields said in a statement. “As Ford expands to be an auto and a mobility company, we believe that investing in Argo AI will create significant value for our shareholders by strengthening Ford’s leadership in bringing self-driving vehicles to market in the near term and by creating technology that could be licensed to others in the future.”

iRobot Braava jet 240. Source: irobot.com

The International Federation of Robotics forecast that the global market for vacuum cleaning robots, lawn-mowing robots and other household cleaning robots will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33% through 2019. Other research reports say the market will reach $2.5 billion by 2020 at a CAGR of 15%.

iRobot

America’s biggest provider, iRobot, in their earnings disclosure delivered this week, reported very strong sales in the United States; 2016 sales were up more than 35% over a record 2015. Total units shipped in fiscal 2015 were 2,436,000 compared to 2,174,000 units in fiscal 2014. International shipments in 2015 represented 10.77% of revenue but increased only 1.5% over 2014. No unit data was released for fiscal 2016.

iRobot’s stock steadily doubled over the 12 months although it took a $7 dive on the date of the earnings report.

The increase in domestic home robots revenue was primarily attributable to increased sales as a result of significant investments in advertising media and national promotions as well as the launch of Roomba 980. International home robots revenue growth slowed compared to fiscal 2014 as a result of negative macroeconomic conditions, specifically in Japan and Russia, offset by a significant growth increase in China.

iRobot is eyeing Asia for growth and recently launched a $290 Braava jet mopping robot customized for China. iRobot has also acquired the iRobot related distribution business of privately-held Sales On Demand Corporation (SODC) based in Tokyo, Japan. The acquisition, which is expected to close in April 2017, will enable iRobot to get closer to Japanese consumers and retail partners, and thus allow the company to better address Japanese market needs.

The Chinese market

Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and, in China, Singles Day are big shopping holidays. Singles Day is held on November 11th (11/11). [November 11 was chosen for the annual holiday because no other date has as many 1’s, or “singles”.] On that date in 2016 Ecovacs popular robot vacuum Deebot outsold TVs to emerge as the top-selling home electronic appliance on Tmall, a business-to-customer platform of Alibaba, the online sales network. Ecovacs reported that their online sales exceeded $47 million which equates to approximately 188,000 units.

David Qian, who is in charge of Ecovacs’ international business, said: “After decades of development, the household robot industry is, in fact, still in its infancy. Future domestic robots will become multifunctional. Just cleaning floors will be not enough.”

“China’s swelling middle class has a rising demand for domestic cleaning, home security and surveillance robots,” said Luo Jun, CEO of the Asian Manufacturing Association. “Robots can make doing housework interesting and cool,” said Liu De, co-founder and vice-president of Xiaomi.

As a consequence, both domestic and foreign enterprises are scrambling to participate in the market. Chinese home appliance firms such as Haier Group and TCL Corp are eyeing the market with similar products, making the market increasingly crowded. Chinese smartphone vendor Xiaomi Corp launched a smart vacuum cleaner last September. Priced at $246, the machine is equipped with 12 sensors and a central processing unit. Instead of bouncing around the room and haphazardly picking up debris, Xiaomi said it can automatically measure the size of the room and map the best routes to do cleaning.

iRobot is planning to quadruple its presence in the Chinese market after setting up its Chinese headquarters in Shanghai last September.

“The global household robots market is growing about 25 percent annually, but in China, the growth rate is close to 70 or 100 percent,” said Colin Angle, chairman and CEO of iRobot.

Other vendors and trends

Prominent companies besides Ecovacs and iRobot operating in the market are Dyson Ltd., Infinuvo, Koninklijke Philips N.V., LG Electronics Inc., Neato Robotics Inc., Intellibot Robotics, Yujin Robot, and Samsung Electronics to name just a few.

At CES in Las Vegas in January, one could see that the current consumer products fad seems to have shifted gears from big TVs to robots. CES may well become the goto tradeshow for consumer oriented robotic start-ups. Smart devices for the home offering compatibility with Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home and Apple’s HomeKit were all crowd pleasers but one could see Amazon everywhere. By opening up their Alexa Voice Service, its now being integrated into cars (Ford, VW), smartphones (Huawei), robot vacuums (LG), remotes (DirectTV) and LG refrigerators. Voice activation that works – as Amazon’s Alexa and Siri are proving – is becoming real and offers a new selling point for techies and other early adopters of robotic vacuums and other home products.

Lady Gaga performing at Super bowl LI Source: NFL/YouTube

Three hundred drones flashed their colored lights and created a flying American flag as Lady Gaga sang a blend of “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land” to 160 million viewers of the Super Bowl. Oh, and two football teams played into overtime, and the final score was 34 to 28.

Intel, Disney and ARS Electronica were all involved in the development of the drones, software and content. But because of restrictions by the FAA, the drones didn’t actually perform during the Super Bowl half-time show. They were actually filmed earlier, sync’d into Lady Gaga’s song as background, and appeared on all the monitors as though they were really there overhead.

All the tech media seemed to be in a huff because of the FAA restriction, but the spectacular effect of 300 drones creating America’s red, white and blue flag (and, in a 10-second ad after the game, the Pepsi and Intel logos as well), was reason enough to review the details of how it all worked and who did it.

The “Shooting Star” drones by Intel are a foot across and weigh just eight ounces to soften impacts. Each is equipped with a special LED that can produce four billion color combinations. The performance was coordinated by a central computer that can do unlimited UAV animations in three dimension. Intel recently set a world record by flying 500 of them together (video below) and said “we hope this experience inspires other creatives, artists and innovators to really think about how they can incorporate drone technology in new ways.” The sophisticated algorithms even check the battery levels and assign lesser roles to weaker drones — if one should drop out, a reserve unit automatically takes its place within a few seconds.

The Intel folks produced this video which describe the process:

January fundings for robotics-related startups totaled over $123 million – a reasonable start for the new year. For acquisitions, three of the six companies acquired reported that $390.5 million traded hands. All in all, another strong month for robotics.

Fundings

Moon Express, a Cape Canaveral, FL.-based commercial company building robotic space crafts to explore the moon, raised $20 million in a Series B funding. Investors include Founders Fund, Collaborative Fund, and Autodesk. MoonEx was given government permission to travel to and land on the Moon in 2017. The change in U.S. policy begins a new era of commercial lunar exploration and discovery.

Rethink Robotics, the Boston-based maker of the Baxter and Sawyer robots founded by iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks, raised an additional $18 million in an unfinished $33 million Series E round led by private equity firm Adveq. Previous investors who also participated in the round included Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, CRV, Highland Capital Partners, Goldman Sachs and GE Ventures. This brings cumulative funding to $131.5 million. The new funding will be used for Rethink’s global expansion initiatives, as well as new product development. Scott Eckert, President and CEO of Rethink said:

As we did previously with our Series D round, we expect two closings for different investors. $18M was the initial closing and we will announce additional financing when the transactions are complete.

Sawyer is outselling Baxter ten to one, and we tripled our revenue in 2016. In China, the appetite for Sawyer has been quite high. We’ve sold a large quantity of Sawyer robots. In addition, we are looking to 2017 to be a big year for our deployments in Europe, as we expect to have additional distribution agreements in place in that region soon as well.

Starship Technologies, the Estonian mobile robot startup now testing delivery of hot and cold food products in London, got $17.2 million in a seed round led by Daimler with Grishin Robotics, HOF Capital, Matrix Partners, Morpheus Ventures, Playfair Capital, Shasta Ventures and ZX Ventures also participating.

Flirtey, a Reno, NV-based medicine and food delivery drone startup testing in NZ, raised $16 million in a Series A funding. Investors include Menlo Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Lowercase Capital, Y Combinator, World Innovation Lab, Goodwater Capital, Amity Ventures, and Partech Ventures.

Two Bit Circus, a Los Angeles-based “experiential entertainment company building products at the crossroads of entertainment and technology,” has raised $15 million in Series B funding. JAZZ Venture Partners led the round with participation from Foundry Group, Techstars Ventures, Intel Capital, Dentsu Ventures and Georgian Pine.

Measure, a drones-as-a-service company, which serves the farming and crop insurance markets among others, closed a $15 million Series B led by New Jersey-based IT and consulting firm Cognizant Technology Solutions with participation from private equity firm Hudson Bay Capital Management.

Neurala, the AI company that developed the Neurala Brain, got a $14M Series A investment that will be used to accelerate deep learning platform deployment to its customers. The round was led by Pelion Ventures with participation from Sherpa Capital, Motorola Ventures, 360 Capital Partners, Draper Associates Investments, and Idinvest Partners through its Electranova Capital II Fund and in partnership with Ecomobility Ventures. Neurala is headed by Massimiliano Versace, 2nd cousin to Donatella and the late Gianni Versace. Neurala’s software can be used in devices like drones, robots, automobiles, and toys. It’s tailored to work with the sensors and processors in those devices.

Exotec Solutions, a French material handling robotics startup, raised $3.5 million (in December) from 360 Capital Partners, Breega Capital and several original investors. Exotec recently unveiled their Kiva-like mobile robot, portable shelving and fleet control system and is planning deployment to its first paying client in Q1 2017.

Otto Robotics, a startup developing automated systems to support food prep and delivery, raised $1.5 million in funding led by seed-stage venture capital firm Draper Associations and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s venture firm, Vulcan Capital. The company says it is developing low-cost modular robotic solutions for the restaurant industry – semi-autonomous systems that are designed to assemble, cook and deliver food “with no human intervention.”

Iris Automation, a Canadian startup bringing sense and avoid technology to drones for industrial tasks, raised $1.5 million in a Series A funding led by Bee Partners and included Paul Buchheit, Kevin Moore, Liquid2 Ventures, GGV Capital and Social Capital.

Rubedo Sistemos, a Lithuanian mobile robotics for medical systems software startup, raised $500,000 (in December) in a seed round from Practica Venture Capital, a Lithuanian VC.

Acquisitions

NOTE: Our December story about the acquisition of Liquid Robotics by Boeing didn’t have any financial details but a flurry of leaks and rumors suggest that Boeing paid $300 million for LR. Both companies won’t comment.

Autonomos, a 2012 spinoff from Free University of Berlin, was acquired by Amsterdam-based TomTom for an undisclosed amount. Autonomos has provided consultancy services for automated vehicle assistance systems and has built up expertise and technologies in the process, including a full demonstration-level autonomous driving software stack, 3D sensor technology, and digital image processing.

“This is an important development for TomTom as it will help us to continue to strengthen our capabilities for the future of driving and expand our knowledge and expertise,” says Harold Goddijn, CEO and co-founder of TomTom. “With this deal we are further positioning ourselves as one of the leaders in autonomous driving.”

 

Zodiac Pool Solutions has sold to global asset management firm, Rhône, for an undisclosed amount. Zodiac’s products include a Wi-Fi connected and app-controlled Polaris Sport robotic pool cleaner and its iAquaLink pool automation app.

“We had an exciting, record year of growth in 2016 and look forward to building on it. We see a lot of opportunity in the coming years, and we will maintain our focus on customer-driven innovation across our product portfolio,” said Bruce Brooks, CEO of Zodiac.

 

Copellia Robotics, a Swiss startup that developed V-REP. a robot simulator, was acquired by Danish startup Blue Workforce, a developer of a Delta-style fast-grasping robot system. No financial details were disclosed. The first joint product from the newly merged company is BlueReality, a customized V-REP system configurator which enables drag-and-drop training.

“We have been able to frame this so anyone with the capability to play an online computer game would be able to setup, run and optimize their own ideas on how to solve a Robotics System and this is just the beginning. We will shortly announce a large pool of tutorials and real world industrial production and packaging line scenarios.”

IPOs

• None, nor were any filed for the near future.

Failures

Lily, a Silicon Valley startup with a stylish camera drone, announced that although it had $34 million in pre-sales, it couldn’t get additional funds to meet production demands and was closing down. What remains of the company is focused on handling refunds and dealing with a suit filed by the San Francisco district attorney’s office over claims that the drone maker engaged in false advertising and unfair business practices.

Source: CBS Evening News

By investing $6 million in robots, Bicycle Corporation of America (BCA) was able to take back 10% of their manufacturing from China and place it into a new factory in Manning, South Carolina employing 140 new workers.

BCA has been an American business since 1905 but has manufactured most of its bicycles offshore in China. Recently, as wages have risen in China, robotic technology has improved, and as the costs of owning and operating robots have decreased, the economics are beginning to make sense when there are processes that can be effectively performed by robots.

In BCA’s case, their investment in robots that insert spoke wires onto bike wheels have obviated the need for 100 additional workers who would otherwise be needed. As a result, it makes economic sense for BCA to manufacture in the U.S. BCA bought an abandoned factory Manning, SC and created 140 jobs — a lifeline in this distressed industrial town. But the only way to make it work was investing in robots.

“We’re creating jobs with the automation and being able to be price-competitive with China now and it will get even better in the future,” said Arnold Kamler, BCA owner.

Thus, for BCA and the City and people of Manning, SC, robots are creating jobs –140 of them.

Headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA, the new institute is made up of governments, industry, academia, and non-profit organizations from across the country. Combined they have contributed $173 million that will be fused with $80 million in federal funding.

The new ARM institute, part of the Manufacturing USA network, is dedicated to help revitalize American manufacturing.

“The ARM Institute’s mission is to create and then deploy robotic technology by integrating the diverse collection of industry practices and institutional knowledge across many disciplines – sensor technologies, end-effector development, software and artificial intelligence, materials science, human and machine behavior modeling, and quality assurance – to realize the promises of a robust manufacturing innovation ecosystem.

 

Technologies ripe for significant evolution within the ARM Institute include, but are not limited to, collaborative robotics, robot control (learning, adaptation, and repurposing), dexterous manipulation, autonomous navigation and mobility, perception and sensing, and testing, verification, and validation.”

The ARM Institute joins the Manufacturing USA institute network, a program with industry, academia, and government participants who co-invest in the development of cutting-edge manufacturing technologies and capabilities. It is patterned after the Fraunhofer Institute which has 67 institutes and research units located throughout Germany providing focused research on future scientific progress and economic development.

Each of the 14 new Manufacturing USA institutes focus on a technology area critical to future competitiveness and include advanced tissue biofabrication, advanced functional fabrics, photonics, digital manufacturing and design, advanced composites, flexible hybrid electronics, biopharmaceuticals, advanced semiconductor components, molecular level technologies, smart manufacturing and an accelerator. The federal government has committed over $1 billion, matched by over $2 billion in non-federal investment, across the Manufacturing USA network.

ARM will be led by a newly established national nonprofit called American Robotics (not to be confused with a Boston agricultural startup with the same name), which was founded by Carnegie Mellon University and includes a national network of 231 stakeholders from industry, academia, local governments and nonprofits.

Source: swarmfarm

After reading all the press releases for this batch of 21 research reports, one can see that although they vary widely in their forecasts they almost all agree that the robotics market is expected to grow at a double-digit pace through 2022.

Healthcare:

Global medical robotics market, December 2016, 156 pages, ReportsandReports, $2,200
Rising adoption of medical robots among the population along with the growing focus on positive outcomes of procedures has led to the growth of medical robot market. Market is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 21.43% during 2016 – 2021.

Exoskeleton technology for future factories, September 2016, Frost & Sullivan, $4,950
Provides insight into the major industries where exoskeleton could be integrated within assembly line processes and further establishes the potential costs, benefits, net present value and ROIs associated with implementing the technologies that augment human capabilities.

China Medical Robotics Industry, November 2016, ReportLinker, $1,900
Chinese surgical robots have made progress with the support of national policies and subsidies. In July 2016, China’s FDA (CFDA) received Beijing TINAVI’s registration application for its third-generation “Tianji” orthopedic surgery robot, which is expected to be formally commercialized at the end of 2016 or in early 2017. In addition, Tianjin University has put its minimally invasive surgical robot system “Smart S” into clinical application and prototyped three models of “Smart S2” which are expected to be mass-produced early in 2017.

Healthcare Robotics, November 2016, 136 pages, Tractica, $4,200
Forecasts that healthcare robot shipments will increase from approximately 3,400 units annually in 2016 to more than 10,500 units per year by 2021.

Agriculture:

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.

Global agricultural robots market, September 2016, 273 pages, Grace Market Data, $3,200
The global agri-bots market is expected to reach $11.1 billion in 2020 and explode to $30.8 billion in 2025 as more and more farmbots will be used to increase productivity.

Global agricultural drones market, September 2016, 211 pages, Grace Market Data, $2,980
Grace Market Data predicts the global agricultural drones market to grow phenomenally at 37.1% per annum by unit shipment, and 28.9% yearly by annual sales revenue generated from agricultural UAV hardware, drone software and servicing section over the next decade.

Latest agritech,IoT in Ag, September 2016, 143 pages, Mind Commerce, $1,995
The report evaluates the overall marketplace and provides forecasts for sensors (and other devices), services, solutions, and data analytics globally, regionally, and by country for the period 2016 to 2021.

Global commercial UAS ag services market, September 2016, Frost & Sullivan, $1,500
Frost & Sullivan calls this a market poised for substantial growth after 3-5 more years of research and testing.

Unmanned air, land and sea systems:

Global commercial UAS inspection and monitoring services market, September 2016, Frost & Sullivan, $1,500
Frost & Sullivan calls this market poised for immediate growth due to accelerating technological advancements and favorable regulations.

Autonomous vehicles (land, water & air), October 2016, IDTechEx, $4,950
A significant part of the $0.7 trillion electric vehicle market will be fully autonomous vehicles.

Global and China fixed-route autonomous vehicles, September 2016, 25 pages, Research in China, $1,200
Scenic-spot vehicles and fixed-point/fixed-route autonomous vehicles are the autonomous vehicles that are mostly likely to be put into commercial application during the next few years.

Autonomous underwater vehicles, September 2016, 152 pages, Markets and Markets, $5,650
The AUV market is expected to grow from USD 211.8 million in 2016 to USD 497.9 million by 2022, at a CAGR of 15.31% to 2022.

Global UAV battery market, September 2016, 64 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
Forecast the global unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) battery market to grow at a CAGR of 10.16% during the period 2016-2020.

Global UAV landing gear market, September 2016, 63 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
Technavio predicts the global unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) landing gear market to grow at a CAGR of around 13% through 2020.

US DoD UAS payloads, September 2016, 50 pages, Frost & Sullivan, $1,500
DoD has been transitioning from acquiring new UAS to upgrading current platforms, sensors payloads, and overall capabilities. This report focuses on the technologies involved in this transition.

Global commercial mapping and surveying UAS services market, November 2016, Frost & Sullivan, $1,500
The global commercial unmanned aerial system (UAS) services market that includes aerial mapping and surveying should experience significant growth over the next decade. Potential growth will be limited more by regulations and the inability to convey and/or demonstrate the benefits of drone use than by the technological capabilities of enterprise drones.

Other miscellaneous robotics-related reports:

Global oil & gas robotics market, September 2016, 100 pages, Nineteen Columns Market Research, $5,500
A variety of service robots are forecast to gain significantly from the use of robotics in many use-cases, particularly the rising demand in the oil and gas sector in the next ten years.

Global logistics robots market, September 2016, 187 pages, Grace Market Data, $2,800
Global logistics robots market is expected to grow to around $11.18 billion in 2022, including sales of robotics hardware, software and service spending.

Internet of robotic things market, September 2016, 189 pages, Markets and Markets, $5,650
The Internet of Robotic Things market is expected to be $21.44 billion by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 29.7% between 2016 and 2022. The growth of this market is principally driven by adoption of IoRT in the e-commerce industry.

Packaging automation solution market, December 2016, Markets and Markets, $5,260
The packaging automation solution market was valued at USD 28.39 Billion in 2015 and is expected to reach USD 52.42 Billion by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 8.68% during the forecast period.

Toy and entertainment drones, camera drones for professional and business use, moon-shot drones and military drones are all becoming more and more distinct as much of the drone industry gets commoditized. Prices are dropping even as impressive new features are added. It’s a difficult time in the drone business.

UPDATED 1/13/2017: SF District Attorney files false advertising suit against Lily Robotics. Details added below.

Commercial drones

The commercial drones market consists of consumer products like toys, games and camera drones for photography and action selfies, and the professional market (called the pro-sumer market) which serves the construction, surveying, mapping, utilities, telecom, ag, public safety and insurance industries where the drone is matched with speciality software to provide package solutions unique to those industry groups. Many feel that a saturation point has been reached in the consumer marketplace and that after reaching that point it then becomes a race to the bottom in terms of price and profitability, hence the shift to the pro-sumer market by almost all drone makers.

Parrot SA – layoffs

Parrot SA is a French wireless products manufacturer based in Paris, France. Parrot invented and manufactured the AR.Drone and initiated a drone division which now represents 1/3 of their business. Parrot just released its Q4 2016 report which showed a 15% drop in revenue. The company had revenues of €85 million but targeted €100 million. Revenue from drones was €60 million, with €11 million coming from commercial, and €49 million from consumer drones. As a result, Parrot announced plans to reduce its drone workforce by 35%, laying off around 290 people.

Parrot plans to focus on a reduced number of consumer products, redeploy product offerings, realign resources and adjust its support teams. Conversely, Parrot will continue to invest in its commercial drone business which has been doing well and is steadily growing.

3D Robotics – layoffs

3D Robotics and their Solo quadcopter were media hits until their product stumbled and their ambitious inventories didn’t move. Like Parrot, 3DR laid off hundreds last year, had to shut down facilities, and has since been scrambling to keep afloat by refocusing on commercial operations in the pro-sumer marketplace.

Lily Robotics – refunds and failure

Lily, a Silicon Valley startup with a stylish camera drone and presentation, announced that although it had $34 million in pre-sales, it couldn’t get additional funds to meet production demands and was closing down. What remains of the company is focused on handling refunds.

“After so much hard work, we are sad to see this adventure come to an end,” founders Balaresque and Bradlow wrote on the Lily website. “We are very sorry and disappointed that we will not be able to deliver your flying camera, and are incredibly grateful for your support as a pre-order customer.”

In a late development which portends difficulty for other over-exuberant marketing types, the San Francisco district attorney’s office filed suit against Lily Robotics over claims that the drone maker engaged in false advertising and unfair business practices. Lily said it would begin shipping drones to customers who had placed orders by February 2016 but failed to live up to that promise. The office alleged that Lily lured customers with a promotional video that was actually filmed by a “much more expensive, professional camera drone that required two people to operate.”

“It does not matter if a company is established or if it is a startup,” District Attorney George Gascón said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “Everyone in the market must follow the rules. By protecting consumers, we protect confidence in our system of commerce.”

Google – moonshot shutdown

Alphabet (Google) has closed down the Titan Project to fly high-altitude drones that would beam wireless Internet access back down to the earth. More than 50 project members were let go – some have moved to other Google X projects. Titan Aerospace was acquired by Google in 2014 and was reformed into the Titan Project which competed with another Google X project, Project Loon, which also has problems. Loon is temporarily mired in an IP infringement suit with Space Data.

GoPro Karma – layoffs and refunds

Although GoPro had a big presence at CES, their Karma drone wasn’t there and the sales people said that they hope it will be re-released in a few months. Karma was high-profile, long-anticipated, and late. The Karma was supposed to be the company’s hope to pull up diminishing revenues. Karma had mid-flight power failures and GoPro recalled all the devices shipped and offered refunds. GoPro cut its staff by about 200 people in November. Karma’s relaunch, if it happens, will need to compensate for product and price improvements offered by DJI that outperform and underprice the Karma in all but camera lenses.

SZ DJI Technology – 2/3 of the market

DJI is the elephant in the room. Their products have outperformed, outpriced and been faster to market than all their competitors. Their marketing has emphasized integration with pro-sumer software, GoPro cameras and mounts, and other accessories. They keep on inventing and they are headquartered in Shenzhen where all their suppliers reside, hence their ability to be quick to market.

“What we realized is that it’s inherently much more difficult for a Silicon Valley-based, software-focused company to compete against a vertically integrated powerhouse manufacturing company in China,” said Colin Guinn, 3D Robotics’ former chief revenue officer.

Founded in 2006 as a company that built flight controllers for remote control toy helicopters, DJI unveiled the Phantom in 2012, an off-the-shelf drone that became the standard for consumer drones.

DJI seems to have a rhythm to their products: launch, then 6-10 months later lower prices, then launch a newer upgraded product at a price point halfway between the previous product and the discounted price, then repeat the process.

Even DJI has recently begun to feel the heat from fellow Chinese drone makers Xiaomi and Yuneec both of which undercut DJI with similar products at lower prices. Hence DJI’s stressing their collaboration with and integration of software and accessory vendors focusing on the pro-sumer marketplace.

Defense drones

In the defense sector the Predator, Reaper, and Global Hawk drones that have done their work in two wars have become popularized by movies that exposed their expense, their vulnerabilities, and their Las Vegas-based human pilots and sensor operators controlling them remotely. Now DARPA and the DoD are introducing new robot war machines. Their latest is drone swarms, where several small flying robots work together to do jobs previously done by the larger craft. An anti-air missile can shoot down an $18 million Reaper, but firing that same anti-air missile at a swarm of drones wouldn’t work.

With every Predator, there’s a joystick and flight controls for a human pilot who maneuvers it. That format changes entirely with a group of autonomous swarming drones.

“They are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature,” according to Strategic Capabilities Office Director William Roper. Unlike the Predator, where the machine responds to the pilot’s joystick, this swarm receives objectives from a human controller, and then directs itself to that location. Presumably, the swarm could still fly to a preset list of objectives even if it loses contact with a human controller, giving it the freedom to operate in the face of jamming as well as anti-air weapons.

Drones to protect and defend are a necessary part of government’s province and a steady source of research, invention, and income for the military industrial complex. In the next four years, at least in the U.S., the defense/security segment of the drone industry is expecting significant growth.

Sawyer. Image: Rethink Robotics

Rethink Robotics, the Boston-based maker of the Baxter and Sawyer robots founded by iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks, raised an additional $18 million in an unfinished $33 million Series E round led by private equity firm Adveq. 

Previous investors who also participated in the round included Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, CRV, Highland Capital Partners, Goldman Sachs and GE Ventures.

This brings cumulative funding to $131.5 million. The new funding will be used for Rethink’s global expansion initiatives, as well as new product development.

Scott Eckert, President and CEO of Rethink said:

“As we did previously with our Series D round, we expect two closings for different investors. $18M was the initial closing and we will announce additional financing when the transactions are complete.

Sawyer is outselling Baxter ten to one, and we tripled our revenue in 2016. In China, the appetite for Sawyer has been quite high. We’ve sold a large quantity of Sawyer robots. In addition, we are looking to 2017 to be a big year for our deployments in Europe, as we expect to have additional distribution agreements in place in that region soon, as well.”

Teledyne Technologies, which specializes in deepwater gas and oil exploration and production, oceanographic research, air and water quality environmental monitoring, electronics design and development, factory automation and medical imaging, in an all cash $780 million transaction, will acquire British imaging sensor maker E2V Technologies.

Teledyne’s offer represents a 48% premium on last weeks E2V’s closing price.  [Both Teledyne and E2V are members of the ROBO Global Robotics & Automation UCITS Index, an index of 82 stocks from around the world that reflect the robotics and automation industry (and of which I am a co-founder).]

E2V’s imaging devices, machine vision cameras for sensitive, high-speed inspection processes, industrial processing systems, and other sensors, enable a range of industrial robotic and automation systems to work more efficiently and for space science and astronomy applications. E2V also provides high reliability semiconductors and board-level solutions for use in aerospace, space and radio frequency communications applications. For the year ended March 31, 2016, E2V had sales of approximately $300 million.

“We have followed e2v for more than a decade. Over time, as both Teledyne and e2v evolved, our businesses have become increasingly aligned. In fact, every business within e2v is highly complementary to Teledyne. As important, there is minimal product overlap,” said Robert Mehrabian, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Teledyne. “For example, we are both leaders in space and astronomy imaging, but Teledyne largely provides infrared detectors and e2v provides visible light sensors.

“In machine vision applications, e2v’s advanced capabilities in proprietary CMOS sensor design add to Teledyne’s strengths in cameras and vision systems. While Teledyne designs advanced mixed signal circuits for government and commercial applications, e2v’s broader product portfolio enhances our offerings and channels to market.”

Big year for acquisitions

Both Teledyne and E2V are members of the ROBO Global Robotics & Automation UCITS Index, an index of 82 stocks from around the world that reflect the robotics and automation industry (and of which I am a co-founder). ARCAM, Swisslog, Kuka, Mako, Zygo and Atmel were other publicly-traded stocks which also got acquired in 2016 and recent years.

Of the 48 acquisitions thus far in 2016, only 30 disclosed the amounts involved. However those 30 transactions totaled an astounding $17,500,000,000!

1. Aerial MOB by 5D Robotics
2. Aesynt by Omnicell
3. Affymetrix by ThermoFisher
4. Arcam AB by GE
5. Ascending Tech by Intel
6. Bluefin by GD Mission Systems
7. Cabinplant A/S by CTB
8. Cruise Automation by GM
9. Dematic by Kion Group
10. Drone Services USA by Howco
11. E2V by Teledyne
12. Eagle Scout by Deveron UAS
13. Ecoclean Group (Dürr) by Shenyang Blue Silver
14. Ergopedia by Pasco Scientific
15. Gatewing (Trimble) by Delair-Tech
16. Gimatic by Agic Capital
17. Grohmann Engr by Tesla
18. Hansen by Auris
19. Hocomo by DIH Intl
20. Intelligrated by Honeywell
21. Interactive Motion Technologies by Bionik Labs
22. iRobot Defense by Endeavor
23. Jaybridge Robotics by Toyota
24. Jorgensen Engineering by Zano
25. KraussMaffei by ChemChina
26. KUKA by Midea
27. Liquid Robotics by Boeing
28. Maverick Technologies by Rockwell Automation
29. Mikrotron by Ambienta
30. Moodstocks by Google
31. Movidius by Intel
32. NDC Automation by Dematic
33. Otto Motors by Uber
34. PAS by Swisslog
35. Paslin by Wanfeng
36. Point Grey Research by FLIR Systems
37. Prox Dynamics by FLIR Systems
38. Retrotech by Egemin
39. RoboRobo by Shengtong Printing
40. SLM Solutions Group by GE
41. SVIA by ABB
42. Thrust UAV by PCS Edventures
43. Time Domain by 5D Robotics
44. Tumblejump by Apple
45. Turi by Apple
46. Voith by Triton
47. Westfalia Group by Horizon Global
48. Zimmer Biomet by Medtech

One CEO of a selling company, Enrico Krog Iversen, who sold Danish Universal Robots to American Teradyne in 2015, when asked if it was a trend that robotics-related companies were exiting to larger companies or funds instead of going public, said:

“Exiting to a larger company will often make sense not only for financial reasons, but also for people reasons – opening up for new/more career opportunities. You will become part of something bigger and can instantly get access to additional resources. Naturally there are also some political considerations if you choose this path.

Exiting to a fund is also a good financial solution and you will probably get access to a very strong board who can help you develop the company faster.

An IPO may bring more money on paper, but it is a very restricted way to exit and it is also very bureaucratic to run a listed company. In our case, I preferred to have a good sum of money in the bank instead of a lot of money on paper. Also I did not personally fancy all the bureaucracy and politics that goes with being CEO of a listed company.”

The Robot Report’s annual recap of fundings, acquisitions and IPOs wil appear just after the new year. Stay tuned.

A recent article in The Washington Post by Morgan Stanley strategist and author of “The Rise and Fall of Nations” Ruchir Sharma, provides a nuanced overview of the issues of jobs, robots, productivity and income disparity. 

In the article, Sharma suggests that because the labor pool isn’t growing fast enough to support our needs, it may not be long before economists worry about a global shortage of robots to fill those needs.

“In many industrial countries, from Germany to Japan to South Korea, growth in the working-age population has already peaked, acting as a drag on the economy. Widely overlooked, however, is the fact that the population-growth slowdown is unfolding even faster in the emerging world.”

China, the most prominent of those emerging countries, is already feeling the effects of four disruptive population trends:

1. China’s working-age population growth just turned negative and China is expected to lose 1 million workers each year for the foreseeable future.
2. Of those coming of working age, because of education and other social reasons, they don’t want to work in factories.
3. China’s elderly share of the population is rising twice as fast as in the U.S. and four times faster than in France. Unlike France and the U.S.
4. Given the widespread political backlash against immigration, compensatory immigrant increases to offset ageing workforces are unlikely.

Sharma cited an instance where Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize-winning psychologist/economist who wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” a 2011 best seller, had occassion to comment on the subject:

“Asked by an alarmed dinner companion about the threat robots posed to jobs in China, Nobel economist Daniel Kahneman responded: “You just don’t get it. In China, the robots are going to come just in time.” No wonder Beijing now offers heavy subsidies to companies involved in industrial automation.”

Strategic long-view planning such as that exhibited by the Chinese series of 5-year plans focused on bringing robotics to China, creating an in-country robotics industry, and expanding the use of robots to provide social assistance in addition to industrial production, is being replicated in Japan, Korea and throughout the EU.

It remains to be seen how this will play out in the U.S.

If you enjoyed this article about robots and jobs, you may also want to read:

• US auto industry installed 135,000 robots and added 230,000 jobs
• What coachmen from the 1920s can tell us about robots and jobs
• Stop talking about bringing jobs back from China
• ‘Robots or jobs’ is key focus of #ERF2015
• Obama connects robots to jobs in State of the Union address

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Source: Liquid Robotics

In a move consistent with many other recent acquisitions of stars within the robotics industry, Liquid Robotics announced that they sold their company to Boeing’s Autonomous Systems for Defense, Space & Security division.

Liquid Robotics‘ Wave Gliders have traveled over 1.2 million nautical miles for a variety of partners and clients and an even greater number of commercial, defense and scientific applications.

• Partnering with Boeing and the British Royal Navy, Liquid Robotics provided a version of their wave gliders hooked up with Boeing’s acoustic sensors for anti-submarine warfare missions and also to gather data that contributed to sensor prediction models and provide real-time data on weather and ocean conditions critical to safe operations for the Navy.
• In a three-year-old strategic joint venture with Schlumberger, Liquid Robotics has been providing environmental measurement services and speciality products to Schlumberger’s global offshore oil and gas presence.
• Working in conjunction with the Pew Charitable Trust “Project Eyes on the Seas,” Liquid Robotics Wave Gliders patrol the 840,000 square kilometers of remote marine habitat around the Pitcairn Islands. Experts in a Virtual Watch Room remotely direct the Wave Glider using both satellite surveillance and their knowledge of the habitat.

Financial terms weren’t provided for the deal, but it is the second acquisition of an unmanned undersea vehicle maker this year by a major defense firm. General Dynamics Mission Systems acquired robot maker Bluefin Robotics during February, also for an undisclosed amount. In recent years many stars in the robotics industry have been acquired by bigger and less known companies in the industry: KUKA by Midea, Universal Robots by Teradyne, Kiva Systems by Amazon and Hansen Robotics by Auris Surgical to name just a few.

Liquid Robotics, which started in 2007 as the commercialization of the tools used to track the songs made by whales, has grown to employ around 100 people in the Bay Area of California and in Hawaii. They raised over $81 million in six rounds of venture fundings to become the nimble, well rounded, low-cost, self-sustaining ocean observation provider they now are. They will become a subsidiary of Boeing’s Autonomous Systems for Defense, Space & Security division.

Source: Liquid Robotics

“With Liquid Robotics’ innovative technology and Boeing’s leading intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance solutions, we are helping our customers address maritime challenges in ways that make existing platforms smarter, missions safer and operations more efficient,” said Leanne Caret, president and CEO of Boeing Defense, Space & Security.”

The Beijing World Robot Conference (WRC), sponsored by Beijing City, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the China Association of Science and Technology, was held October 21-25. It was big, long, ran over a weekend and gave a run-down of the breath of China’s fast-emerging robotics industry.

More than 145 vendors filled the exhibition hall which was separated into international and domestic industrial robots, and service and special purpose robots. In the main forum, 45 sessions comprising individual and panel presentations took place in the main auditorium with seating for 1,000 over three of the five days of the event. Rodney Brooks described how collaborative robots are helping bring flexibility to electronics manufacturing; KUKA’s Bernd Liepert described how manufacturing benefits through the use of robotics; and IBM’s Grady Booch and many others discussed the future of AI in relation to robots, manufacturing, self-driving cars and cloud processing and connectedness; to name just a few of the Western speakers.

The audience consisted of business executives, government personalities, academics of all types and from all across China, Korea, Japan and the EU, robot manufacturers and their sales staffs, and, particularly on the weekend, whole families – from children to their great grandparents.

A variety of contests and challenges focused on young people peppered the event: an unmanned driving challenge, an underwater robot competition, a RoboCup Challenge of robots playing soccer, and a youth challenge to work with other kids to get a robot to shoot hoops. There was even Star Challenge, a reality show about robotic startups and their key people, that will soon be broadcast on Chinese satellite and network TV.

Most of the WRC reviews that appeared in Chinese and international media emphasized the abundance of human-like robots such as JiaJia, a super realistic robot capable of micro facial expressions and basic conversation, from the University of Science and Technology of China. She was the media hit as can be seen in this video which shows JiaJia, an old man in traditional Chinese clothing drawing Chinese characters with a brush, and a few other mobile robots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODW3khVrTZI

Other media showed a man flying a bionic butterfly drone, a badminton-playing robot that took on the crowd, and SmartTuna, a swimming industrial robot that finds leaks inside underwater pipelines which swam through clear plastic pipes for all to see.

Business executives from companies that were users or candidates to use robots in their businesses were exposed to a wide range of applications and uses throughout the conference and by demonstrations on the exhibition floor. The conference program was forward-looking and addressed subjects such as Russian and Israeli co-operative partnerships, healthcare and surgical developments, collaborative robots, self-driving vehicles, drones, and research challenges that must be met for the industry to progress and succeed.

About 40% of the robots on display at the show were industrial, while the rest were service and specialized robots.

According to the China Robot Industry Association, 68,000 industrial robots were sold in China in 2015, up 20% compared to the same period of 2014. China accounted for about a quarter of robot sales globally in 2015, making the country the biggest market for industrial robots for three consecutive years. 32,996 industrial robots were manufactured in China last year, up 21.7% year on year.

China has set goals to be able to make in-country 150,000 industrial robots in 2020, 260,000 in 2025 and 400,000 by 2030 and Shenzhen-based Siasun Robot & Automation, China’s largest domestic robot manufacturer, had the largest exhibition space to show their full range of robotic products.

In April, the Ministry of Industry, the Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Finance and other ministries jointly issued a development plan for the next 5 years which included these goals and stressed the need for service robots as well as industrial ones, hence the emphasis at the show and in the conference program of the growing importance of non-industrial robots as consumer and entertainment products, social assistants and helpers and for all manner of use in business.

The Chinese government is determined to stimulate robot development in China. According to statistics released by the Qianzhan Industry Research Institute, China’s domestic robot industry in 2015 was just $243 million, albeit a year-over-year increase of 55%.

At the conference, Vice Premier Liu Yandong urged enhanced research and development of the industry. She said related policies should be improved, human resources should be developed, and global communication should be enhanced.

According to Ms. Yandong, the development of robotics technology plays an important role in supporting intelligent manufacturing, enhancing production efficiency and improving the people’s well-being, which ushers in a new era of economic and social development. She also said:

“The Chinese Government attaches great importance to robotics technology innovation and industrial development, and expects to speed up the development of intelligent industries represented by robotics and strengthen cultivation of innovation talents, improve synergized education mechanism and incentive evaluation mechanism integrating industries, universities, research institutes and users, and help innovation talents give full scope to their expertise; advance international exchange and cooperation, jointly develop international standards for robotics, intensify application for patents and protection of intellectual property rights, and strive to establish a robotics development pattern of inclusive development, resource sharing and complementary advantage.”

Source: Intel

Intel is establishing an autonomous driving division; hacker George Hotz is open-sourcing his self-driving software in a bid to become a network company; LiDAR and distancing devices are changing. What does it all mean?

Intel

Semiconductor giant Intel, in a strategic move to become THE supplier of chips to the fast-emerging self-driving industry, is re-organizing and creating a new division. Fortune magazine said:

“The decision is a bet not just on a future of connected devices; it’s also a wager that vehicles will be the centerpiece or at least a core component in the world of IoT. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich has predicted that by 2020, the Internet of Things will include 50 billion devices and each user of those gadgets will generate 1.5 gigabytes of data every day. But, he has said, the average autonomous car will create about 40 gigabytes of data each minute. That’s a lot of data to process and who better to handle the load? Intel.”

Intel in recent months has made key acquisitions and strategic partnerships in pursuit of their autonomous driving division’s plans:

• A partnership with German automaker BMW and Israeli Mobileye to produce self-driving cars for city streets. The companies plan to develop the technology as an open platform that can be used by other automakers or ride-sharing companies.
• Delphi and Mobileye announced they will use Intel’s “system on chip” for autonomous vehicle systems.
• Intel acquired three companies with related products and plans for self-driving cars:
  1. Yogitech is a semiconductor design firm that specializes in adding safety functions to chips used in self-driving cars and other autonomous devices.
  2. Arynga, which was acquired by Intel’s Wind River Unit, develops software that enables vehicles to received over-the-air updates—a capability used frequently by automaker Tesla to enhance performance and fix security bugs in its cars.
  3. Itseez, a company that specializes in machine vision technology that lets computers see and understand their surroundings – a necessity for autonomous vehicles which need to be able to perceive the world around it.

Comma.ai and George Hotz

In a move toward becoming a network provider, and in response to a recent NHTSA letter which caused Hotz to cancel his self-driving aftermarket kit, Hotz announced his plans to open his software code and hardware designs to the world. On November 30th all of the code and plans were posted on Github.

Hotz is encouraging people to build their own self-driving kits. His software enables adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping assist for certain Honda and Acura models.

Fortune magazine quoted Hotz as saying:

“The future is not hardware. If you look at a lot of companies’ business models now it has a lot more to do with ownership of networks than hardware sales. We want to make this as easy as possible for as many people as possible,” Hotz told Fortune, noting that the company even redesigned parts of the Comma Neo to make it easier for hobbyists to build.

nuTonomy

NuTonomy, an MIT spin-off and autonomous vehicle systems startup that’s been testing its technology in Singapore, announced it will begin testing its self-driving Renault Zoe electric vehicles in an industrial park in South Boston in the next few weeks. Although the area is a public area, NuTonomy will, because of the nature of the industrial park, still be somewhat removed from normal vehicle and pedestrian traffic.

Credit: nutonomy

Oryx Vision

Oryx Vision, an Israeli startup which recently got $17 million in a Series A funding round, shows off its new coherent optical radar which uses a laser to illuminate the road ahead, but radar to treat reflected signals as a wave rather than a particle. In an article in IEEE Spectrum, it was revealed that:

“The laser in question is a long-wave infrared laser, also called a terahertz laser because of the frequency at which it operates. Because human eyes cannot focus light at this frequency, Oryx can use higher power levels than can lidar designers. Long-wave infrared light is also poorly absorbed by water and represents only a tiny fraction of the solar radiation that reaches Earth. This means the system should not be blinded by fog or direct sunlight, as lidar systems and cameras can be.”

One of the potential cost savings of Oryx’s technology comes from the fact that its laser does not need to be steered with mechanical mirrors or a phased array in order to capture a scene. Simple optics spread the laser beam to illuminate a wide swathe in front of the vehicle. (Oryx would not say what the system’s field of view will be, but if it is not 360 degrees like rooftop lidars, a car will need multiple Oryx units facing in different directions.)

The clever bit—and what has prevented anyone from building a terahertz lidar before now—is what happens when the light bounces back to the sensor. A second set of optics direct the incoming light onto a large number of microscopic rectifying nanoantennas. These are what Oryx’s co-founder, David Ben-Bassat, has spent the past six years developing.

“Today, radars can see to 150- or 200 meters, but they don’t have enough resolution. Lidar provides great resolution but is limited in range to about 60 meters, and to as little as 30 meters in direct sunlight,” says Wellingstein. He expects Oryx’s coherent optical radar to accurately locate debris in the road at 60 meters, pedestrians at 100 meters, and motorcycles at 150 meters—significantly better than the performance of today’s sensor systems.

Regarding other industry improvements and inventions, the IEEE Spectrum article also said:

“But don’t write off lidar just yet. Following a $150 million investment by Ford and Chinese search giant Baidu this summer, Velodyne expects an “exponential increase in lidar sensor deployments.” The cost of the technology is still dropping, with Velodyne estimating that one of its newer small-form lidars will cost just $500 when made at scale [at present, the price on the website is $7,999 for the new PUCK shown on the right].

Solid-state lidars are also on the horizon, with manufacturers including Quanergy, Innoluce, and another Israeli start-up, Innoviz, hinting at sub-$100 devices. Osram recently said that it could have a solid-state automotive lidar on the market as soon as 2018, with an eventual target price of under $50. Its credit card–size lidar may be able to detect pedestrians at distances up to 70 meters.

That’s not quite as good as Oryx promises but is probably fine for all but the very fastest highway driving. The window for disrupting lidar’s grip on autonomous vehicles is closing fast.”

What’s it all mean:

Fast-emerging may be a catch-all phrase but it seems appropriate to the various parts of the self-driving vehicle marketplace. There are multiple stakeholders about to be disrupted, as I wrote about in April:

“The stakeholders are numerous and the effects can be devastating. Think secretaries, airline reservationists, and all the others disrupted during the emergence of the digital era. The transition to self-driving vehicles and car-sharing systems is likely to cause similar worldwide disruptions.

Consider the insurance industry. If accident rates go down by 90%, as many are predicting, premiums will need to go down too because the reserves for payouts, which are built into the rates, will go down as well. Also, there will likely be fewer insured drivers and car owners thereby lowering the pool of insured people.

Consider hotels and motels and their real estate values and employees – particularly those along the major highways. Why stop at a motel when you can snooze comfortably in a long-haul high-speed driverless car? This will likely affect short-haul airlines and airline employees as well.

Think about professional drivers – truckers, taxies, limos, buses, shuttles. It is expected that many will be replaced by on-demand point-to-point self-driving devices.”

The list of stakeholders also goes on in the auto manufacturing industry and all the Tier 1, 2, 3 and 4 component providers and wannabees. As self-driving vehicles show their needs – for example, the need for low-cost distancing vision systems – new products will be developed and new vendors could replace old ones, hence the posturing by Velodyne, LeddarTech, Quanergy, Bosch, Valeo and all the other LiDAR providers.

As the technologies emerge, it becomes clear that vehicles will be the core component in a larger connected world, streaming massive amounts of data to be analyzed in ways we haven’t even fathomed yet, hence Intel’s new division and the new chips from Nvidia, Qualcomm and others. It’s a fast-emerging marketplace on multiple fronts.

Times and our definition of cars are changing day by day – and fast emerging – a true moving target!

Seventeen robotics-related companies got funded for a combined total of over $225 million. Four more got acquired. Three went public to raise funds. And one failed.

Fundings:

• Seven Dreamers Labs raised around $60 million in a Series B round that included Panasonic, SBI Investment and Daiwa House. This Japanese startup has a new laundry folding robot (Laundroid) that was a hit at CES and CEATEC Japan.
• Zoox, a secretive Silicon Valley startup working to build its own self-driving cars, has quietly raised $50 million (in October) in a Series A round led by Composite Capital Management, a Hong Kong-based hedge fund.

“At Zoox what we’re creating is not a self-driving car any more than the automobile is a horseless carriage. We’re not building a robo-taxi service; we’re actually creating an advanced mobility service,” said founder Tim Kentley-Klay in October. Earlier, in May, it was disclosed that Zoox would be deploying a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles by 2020 for ride-sharing services like those Uber offers.”

• Shenzhen FLYPRO Aerospace Tech, a Chinese startup, got around $23 million in a B round (in March) from Shenzhen Capital Group. FLYPRO produces two types of quadcopters: a racing drone and a camera drone.
• Farmers Edge, a Canadian precision ag data consolidator/integrator startup, has raised another $18.3 million – the 3rd raise in 2016. This time the round was led by Sustainable Dev Tech Canada (SDTC) with $6.1 and the remaining $12.2 coming from unidentified sources and existing partners. These new funds are earmarked to help the company reduce fertilizer, water and pesticide in their next generation of h/w, s/w and agronomic decision support systems.
• SimToo, a Shenzhen-based UAS startup, raised around $13.6 million in a Series B round led by Renmin Group, Duoniu Media, Lanhai Ark and Hanjing Family Office, all Chinese VCs. SimToo makes a foldable follow-me hands free camera quadcopter called a Dragonfly. Priced at $443, Dragonfly has sold over 20,000 units via online and offline channels and the company expects to realize a profit this year.
• Jibo, the much delayed social robot developed by MIT’s Cynthia Braezeal, raised $13.1 million and are continuing the search for an additional $15 million. Jibo has raised $65.4 million thus far. Ther most recent announcement delayed shipments until November for people willing to be Beta testers and didn’t say when fully functioning Jibos will ship to those early buyers that don’t want to Beta test (I am one of these).
• Movendo Technology, an Italian startup based in Genoa, raised around $11 million to develop a specialized robotic rehabilitation platform. Sergio Dompé was the primary investor. The new company will develop, manufacture and market medical devices at a site in Genoa, near IIT, The Institute of Italian Technology, where the first product (Hunova) will be developed, assembled and then introduced to European and US markets.
• GreenValley International, renamed from True Reality Geospatial, a provider of satellite and drone data and analytics, raised $10 million in a Series A round in April led by Northern Light Ventures and including SF Investments.
• Rapyuta Robotics, a Swiss and Japanese A.I. startup and spin-off from Zurich’s ETH, got $10 million in a Series A round in September. Rapyuta is developing and building multi-robotic systems for the security market.
• LifeRobotics, a Tokyo-based startup developing a narrow one-armed co-bot, raised $9 million in a Series B funding from Global Brain, Mitsui Fudosan, Koden Holdings, Mizuho Capital and Golden Asia Fund. Funds will be used to scale up for mass production of the co-robot and improving services for customers. LifeRobotics raised $4.4 million earlier this year.
• Airobotics, an Israeli UAS startup (not to be confused with AI-Robotics, a Beijing startup), received an additional $6 million in a combined Series A and B round concluded in June. Backers included BlueRun Ventures, CRV, UpWest Lab as well as private individuals such as Noam Bardin, the CEO of Waze, and Richard Wooldridge, Google ATAP’s COO. Airobotics provides an on-site and on-demand automated drone platform that allows companies to run missions to monitor, inspect, survey and secure large industrial facilities and other strategic sites via aerial data collection, processing and analysis. The company currently has a team of 70 people.
• ecoRobotix, a Swiss ag startup with a sensor-laden solar-powered mobile robot, raised $2.97 million led by 4FO Ventures and Investiere.ch, a platform for online investment, and Business Angels Switzerland.

“In creating this innovative working tool, adapted to the needs of farmers for whom soil conservation is a priority, we aim to demonstrate that high-tech has a place in the agriculture of tomorrow, alongside traditional inherited wisdom. This is not intended to devalue human labour, but makes it less taxing and less hazardous to health, while being sustainable in both ecological and economic terms,” said Steve Tanner, co-founder of ecoRobotix.”

• Varden Labs, a SF self-driving car startup and Y Combinator Winter participant, raised $2.2 million in a seed round in March led by Maven Ventures and included additional money from Funders Club.
• Sunflower Labs, a Silicon Valley startup raised $2.1 million in a seed funding round led by General Catalyst and other unknown funders. Sunflower is designing home security sensors, apps and products including a smart drone. Its sensor-laden smart lights are solar-powered, and can detect motion, sounds and vibrations while illuminating the perimeter of a property or its walkways. The lights communicate with a camera-equipped quadcopter. Whenever there’s uncommon activity identified by the smart lights, the quadcopter flies to where the action is, to capture video and transmit it to the cloud where clients get notifications via a mobile app when there’s activity detected on their property. The app learns, over time, what kind of commotion is routine and which is abnormal.
• Tend.ai, an Oregon startup providing cloud software robots tending multiple 3D printers, raised $2 million in seed funding from True Ventures, a SV early stage VC.
• AI-Robotics, a Beijing medical robotics and exoskeleton startup (not to be confused with Israeli startup Airobotics), got $1.8 million in a seed round.
• Nauto, a SV self-driving car vision systems startup, received an undisclosed amount in additional Series A funding from BMW, Toyota and the insurance company Allianz. Nauto’s technology combines real-times sensors, forward-looking cameras and cabin-view cameras to understand the driving context in real-time. Nauto is selling their system and its predictive capabilities to vehicle fleet managers and insurance companies.

Acquisitions:

• Tesla is acquiring Germany’s Grohmann Engineering, an integrator of factory systems technology including robotics. Tesla will turn Grohmann into a new subdivision dedicated to helping Tesla increase the automation and effectiveness of its manufacturing process. Although no disclosure was made regarding how or how much was paid, Grohmann’s 2015 revenue was $125 million and they employ around 800 people in facilities in Germany, the US and China.

“This will really be our first acquisition of significance in our whole history,” explained Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk on a call discussing the news, noting that Grohmann was their “first choice” in terms of bringing on expertise to help it “build the machines that build the machine.”

• Prox Dynamics, an Oslo, Norway, developer, manufacturer, and distributor of aerial sensors and UAS that are small and light, for covert surveillance systems, was acquired by FLIR Systems for $134 million.

“This acquisition adds a unique unmanned aerial systems capability to our portfolio. The Prox Dynamics team has created a highly-differentiated solution, incorporating our Lepton sensor, for advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance that fits well with our vision for growth for our Surveillance segment,” said Andy Teich, President and CEO of FLIR.”

• RoboRobo, a Korean educational robotics kit and course provider startup, was acquired by Shenzhen-based Shengtong Printing for $62 million in cash and stock. RoboRobo raised a small angel investment from Zhen Fund in 2014 and received $10 million from New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc. last year. The company was set up in 2012 in Beijing as the general agent in China for South-Korean based educational robot courses and tool developer Roborobo. Now, it operates 16 schools in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing, and other cities.
• Jorgensen Engineering, an Odense, Denmark integrator, has sold to Zano, a Swedish holding company (and not to be confused with UK Torquing Group’s Zano, which recently failed) for $35 million. Jorgensen had annual sales of $40 million. Jorgensen will be folded into Zano’s Industrial Solutions unit which supplies customer-specific automation solutions for the food and medical technology industries, in addition to packaging machines for beverage and other food packaging.

IPOs and equity crowdfundings:

• Moley Robotics, the UK two-armed cooking robot that’s received so much publicity, has achieved 92% of it’s £1 million (around $1.25 million) equity crowdfunding round. Sadly U.S. citizens can’t participate. Investors get 2.6% of equity for their £1M.
• Myomo, a Cambridge, MA medical robotics startup, is using the new Reg-A crowdfunding method to $50 MILLION for their new MYO stock to be listed on the NYSE MKT. Myomo has designed and developed a myoelectric upper limb orthosis that supports weak or deformed arms. Their device helps users regain the ability to perform ADLs (activities of daily living) using EMG signals to drive small motors that allow users to extend/flex elbows and open/close thumb and fingers. The IPO is expected to finalize in January 2017 and the proceeds will be used to fund Myomo’s sales and marketing expansion, product development, repayment of debt and for working capital and other general corporate purposes.
• ZMP, a Tokyo-based service robotics provider that has partnered with DeNa to develop a fleet of robot taxis (and started a company by that name) in time for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, has filed for a IPO of approximately $82 million and be traded on the TYO Mothers Market exchange under the symbol 7316. funds would be used for research and development to strengthen its self-driving technology as well as fund affiliate Robot Taxi. ZMP will begin trading December 19.

Failures:

• Zano from Torquing Group – a Kickstarter star and failure. Fascinating in-depth study of what happened and why here.

Source: IFR.org

In the last six years, (2010–2015), according to the IFR (International Federation of Robotics), US industry has installed around 135,000 new industrial robots. The principal driver is automation in the car industry. During this same period, (2010–2015), the number of employees in the automotive sector increased by 230,000.

This news affirms the conclusions of a study conducted by the market research firm, Metra Martech, “Positive Impact of Industrial Robots on Employment,” that there will be growth in robot use over the next five years resulting in the creation of one million high-quality jobs around the world.  “Robots, in addition to the auto industry, will help to create jobs in some of the most critical industries of this century: consumer electronics, food, solar & wind power, and advanced battery manufacturing to name just a few.”

“The rapid rise of robot use in the United States is impressive for several reasons,” said Jeff Burnstein, President of Robotic Industries Association.

1. The industry’s largest user, the automotive industry, has accelerated its purchases of robots and at the same time created more jobs in the manufacturing process.
2. There has been strong growth in the use of robots in general industry, as robots further penetrate industries such as life sciences, warehousing, and semiconductor and electronics manufacturing.
3. The use of robots is rising in small and medium sized companies who see robotics as a key factor in improving productivity and product quality in order to stay globally competitive. We expect these trends to continue well into the future.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, car manufacturers and component suppliers will continue to be heavy users of robots. In addition, more and more new companies specialized in electric or autonomous vehicles that are starting up in the United States and are in need of modern and efficient production facilities. The electronics industry continues to be the fastest-growing emerging industry for industrial robots in the United States (2014-2015 = +41%). Increasing numbers of orders can also be expected from the metals and machinery industry, the rubber and plastics industry, the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry, and the food and beverage industry.

In President-elect Trump’s interview with the NY Times yesterday, when discussing jobs, closed factories and factories that may leave the country, he was asked: “Are you worried that those companies will keep their factories here, but the jobs will be replaced by robots?

Trump responded as follows: (transcript from NY Times)

“They will, and we’ll make the robots too. It’s a big thing, we’ll make the robots too. Right now we don’t make the robots. We don’t make anything. But we’re going to, I mean, look, robotics is becoming very big and we’re going to do that. We’re going to have more factories. We can’t lose 70,000 factories. Just can’t do it. We’re going to start making things.

“I was honored yesterday, I got a call from Bill Gates, great call, we had a great conversation, I got a call from Tim Cook at Apple, and I said, ‘Tim, you know one of the things that will be a real achievement for me is when I get Apple to build a big plant in the United States, or many big plants in the United States, where instead of going to China, and going to Vietnam, and going to the places that you go to, you’re making your product right here.’ He said, ‘I understand that.’ I said: ‘I think we’ll create the incentives for you, and I think you’re going to do it. We’re going for a very large tax cut for corporations, which you’ll be happy about.’ But we’re going for big tax cuts, we have to get rid of regulations, regulations are making it impossible. Whether you’re liberal or conservative, I mean I could sit down and show you regulations that anybody would agree are ridiculous. It’s gotten to be a free-for-all. And companies can’t, they can’t even start up, they can’t expand, they’re choking.”

“I tell you, one thing I would say, so, I’m giving a big tax cut and I’m giving big regulation cuts, and I’ve seen all of the small business owners over the United States, and all of the big business owners, I’ve met so many people. They are more excited about the regulation cut than about the tax cut. And I would’ve never said that’s possible, because the tax cut’s going to be substantial. You know we have companies leaving our country because the taxes are too high. But they’re leaving also because of the regulations. And I would say, of the two, and I would not have thought this, regulation cuts, substantial regulation cuts, are more important than, and more enthusiastically supported, than even the big tax cuts.”

It’s true that 2/3 of the robotics industry and 100% of industrial robots are manufactured outside of the U.S. by non-U.S. companies. The industrial robot industry was started in America but the companies making those original robots were sold and moved off shore, never to return except in the form of sales and service offices and research and support centers. [Adept Technologies, the last American industrial robot manufacturer, was sold last year to Japanese industrial components and robot manufacturer OMRON.] 

In China, Japan, Korea and throughout the EU, governments are providing significant credits and incentives to make (or in the EU and Japan, to keep) robot-making in-country. These are strategic investments of billions and billions of dollars. It’s having a good effect worldwide. For example, China’s in-country robot production rate is growing exponentially. Yet thus far in America, through the American Manufacturing Initiative and other measures, less than $100 million has been earmarked for robotics and less than $50 million towards manufacturing them in the U.S.

Let’s hope that Trump does what he says he’s going to do regarding robots and robotics in America.

For the last few years, there have been very few stock IPOs (Initial Public Offerings). Promising companies have been acquired instead, eg: Kiva Systems and Universal Robots. But two robotics-related companies have recently filed: one for the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the other for the New York Stock Exchange.

Credit: Myomo

Myomo, a Cambridge, MA medical device robotics startup, is using the new Reg-A crowdfunding method to seek funding for their new MYO stock to be listed on the NYSE MKT Exchange. The Reg-A rules, known as “Regulation A+,” were adopted by the SEC as part of the JOBS Act that became effective June 2015. Regulation A+ is designed to allow early stage growth companies to raise up to $50 million in a crowdfunded-like public offering through a process that provides streamlined and lower-cost access to the capital markets for the issuer and provides investors the opportunity to participate in an IPO for these potentially high growth companies.

Myomo has designed and developed a myoelectric upper limb orthosis that supports weak or deformed arms. Their device helps users regain the ability to perform ADLs (activities of daily living) using EMG signals to drive small motors that allow users to extend/flex elbows and open/close thumb and fingers.

The IPO is expected to finalize January 2017 and the proceeds will be used to fund Myomo’s sales and marketing expansion, product development, repayment of debt and for working capital and other general corporate purposes.

Credit: Robot Taxi

ZMP, a Tokyo-based service robotics provider of mobility products, has partnered with DeNa, a provider of a broad range of mobile and online services including games, e-commerce and entertainment content distribution, to develop a fleet of autonomous Level 5 robot taxis (and started a company by that name, Robot Taxi) in time for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. ZMP also partnered with Sony to develop the new AeroSense UAV startup.

ZMP has filed for an IPO of approximately $82 million and plans to be traded on the TYO Mothers Market exchange under the symbol 7316. It said that funds would be used for research and development to strengthen its self-driving technology as well as fund affiliate Robot Taxi. ZMP will begin trading Dec. 19 on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers Market for startups.

Credit: Aeryon labs inc.

Key executives leaving (or were requested to leave) Goggle’s drone delivery Project Wing; GoPro recalls all of its newly launched Karma drones and doesn’t offer a replacement; DJI slashes prices. What’s going on?

Funding for drone makers has bottomed out although new applications using drones are still getting funded, e.g., home and business security drones. Consumer purchases are weak with DJI and Parrot’s line of products capturing most of the market, and DJI’s aggressive lowering of prices forcing startups and other makers to focus on specialized tasks. There’s turmoil in the drone industry.

GoPro’s Karma

GoPro Inc recalled about 2,500 drones – all of their shipments thus far – for a refund – after just a couple of weeks on the market. Units had sudden power outages. GoPro didn’t say when or if it would offer a replacement product. GoPro’s much-delayed Karma project is also threatened by competing and lower-priced camera drones from DJI and many others.

DJI lowers prices

Part of DJI’s strategy exhibited over the past few years is to offer newer and better products faster than the competition and reduce prices of previous versions in conjunction with the new launches. Their price slashing has enabled them to dominate the market. DJI discounted its popular Phantom 3 drone to about $300 today from $1,000 at the beginning of the year.

3D Robotics offers new product

3D Robotics – an early drone startup that raised more than $125 million, has seen its consumer business all but crash and had massive layoffs shortly after releasing its Solo consumer drone – a competing product to DJI’s Phantom 3 – at a price ($1,500) higher than the Phantom 3. Co-founder and CEO Chris Anderson said:

“It’s no fun watching prices fall by 70 percent in 9 months”  [referring to DJI’s price-cutting].

In a retrenching effort, 3DR unveiled a new commercial camera-equipped drone (the Solo) with imaging software designed for construction companies. 3DR’s plan is to outfit the Solo with new technology to capture 3D images that show the shape, size and volume of items at a construction site.

“It might be too little too late for 3DR,” said industry analyst Patrick Egan. “They aren’t the only company that is going to have problems.”

Google’s Project Wing

From a recent Wall Street Journal article:

“Alphabet, Google’s parent, has been developing delivery drones in its research arm since 2012 with the hopes of transforming logistics. But the drone project—dubbed Project Wing—has had a bumpy ride, with its original head departing in 2014.

Alphabet last month pushed out the project’s chief, Dave Vos, and its top commercial executive, Sean Mullaney, in large part because of conflict between the group’s engineers and its commercial team, according to the people familiar with the matter. It also issued notices to several other Project Wing workers, giving them 90 days to find other positions within Alphabet, one former employee said.

An Alphabet spokeswoman said the company is committed to Wing and the concept of delivery drones. Astro Teller, the new temporary head of Project Wing, has spoken recently about the potential for delivery drones to not only upend logistics, but also, reinvent the concept of ownership by giving people access to some goods in minutes versus having to keep such items on hand for the rare moments they are needed.

“We believe that opening the skies to faster, more efficient transportation of goods is a moonshot worth pursuing.”

Lofty goals indeed for Google and Teller. But turning the corner from research, testing, and product engineering to a functioning product that conforms to FAA and other governmental regulations and is secure from pranksters, children and thieves is another matter altogether and there’s a ticking clock of competitors hoping to get to market first.

Many, many companies, including Amazon, DHL, Walmart and UPS are aggressively developing drones and landing/delivery systems for same-day and/or speedy delivery.

senseFly, DelAir and other B2B providers thrive

While many drone-makers overestimated demand from hobbyists and other consumers, they now see big opportunities selling to businesses. There is strong interest in software and services that can make aerial imaging useful for industries including insurance, construction, agriculture, and entertainment. senseFly, a Parrot company and DelAir, the new owner of Gatewing (a drone and service provider to Trimble’s global agricultural division, join startups and others (see chart below) that are focusing on software to make sense of images, whether it’s the angle of a pipe laid at a new construction site or damage to a roof from a hurricane or collision-avoidance. The drone itself is just a tool in the overall objective.

Parrot, whose stock has plummeted from $25 to $8 so far this year, predicted that 2016 would be a “bloody year” for drone makers. Parrot CEO Henri Seydoux, in an interview in Forbes in November, 2015, predicted 2016 would be a year of reckoning for the consumer drone space and that 2016 would be a ‘bloody’ 12 months for any company designing and selling unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for hobbyists. It’s just the nature of the consumer electronics business, he said, noting that increased competition will see a commoditization of the flying robots and perhaps even the collapse of some of the weaker companies.

“There are now a dozen companies doing these types of drones. It will put a lot of pressure on the market.”

Bottom line

Delivery drones will happen someday soon; drones in agriculture and construction are already happening; drones for governmental and defense/security purposes will continue to happen. What we are seeing today is a consolidation process: commercial makers are separating into consumer or business providers; although the Drone Industry Insights chart shown below is already outdated, the big makers, Parrot, DJI and Ehang are hanging in there with substantial sales. Not shown on the chart are all the defense contractors that produce drones for the military; these vendors have pretty much given up on finding niche commercial markets and are, instead, focusing on improving their products and systems.

Source: Drone Industry Insights

Certainly 2016 is living up to Seydoux’s predictions. Even the recent spinoff by Trimble of its Gatewing division is indicative of the consolidation and refocusing of efforts toward providing meaningful services using drones rather than selling drones. They’ll leave that – selling drones to hobbyists and consumers – to the few companies that are able to emerge from the dropping prices of the commoditization of this type of camera drone.

The broad market will continue to grow in all three segments (consumer, commercial and military) as will the variety of end-to-end business models. Quoting Drone Industry Insights:

“There are plenty of niches waiting to be discovered and occupied. Hardware will become more capable allowing new applications. Advanced drone operation regulations will allow new use cases with a high grade of automation. The drone ecosystem is strongly technology driven and market growth will additionally be catalyzed by developments outside the drone market environment (e.g. mobile phone industry, etc.).”

Source: Nesta.org, Precision Agriculture

Farmers, ranchers and growers the world over are transitioning to precision agricultural methods, i.e., subdividing their acreage into many unique sub-plots — in some cases right down to the individual plant, tree, or animal — thereby enabling increased productivity, trace-ability and lower overall costs. Low-cost aerial vehicles, sensors and cameras are integral to the process and are being used to map, observe, sense and spray.

Digital farms are already a reality

Robotic automation is already widely practiced and can be seen today in milking systems and increasingly in precision techniques that use sensors and drone-mounted cameras to steer tractors and to monitor soil for temperature, moisture, disease, varmints, crop quantity, weather damage, and nutrient content. This data is then analyzed in order to improve decision-making on planting, weeding, pruning and chemical application. Digitally-controlled farm implements are already in use in developed countries and most Western farmers and ranchers are high-tech to some extent and more variable-rate dispensing devices are on the horizon. Self-steering kits can be found in most new tractors and follow RTK/GPS and digital guidance with levels of accuracy down to the centimeter level.

There are partially and fully automatic and robotic devices for most aspects of agricultural functions from grafting to planting, from harvesting to sorting, from packaging to boxing, but because the metrics of their implementation have thus far been too costly, and the safety and liability aspects difficult, so they are not widely deployed. These challenges are being met with a new group of vendors, lower costs, and new robotic products, often marketed in the form of Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS). Adding to these challenges are ever-increasing costs and lack of available water, labor and tillable land.

I observed an example of those additional challenges on a recent research trip to Odense, Denmark.

EGATEC A/S specializes in automated end-of-line packaging and palletizing solutions. They are an integrator. Rosborg Denmark is a nursery that grows and sells miniature flowerpots and spices. Rosborg is one of EGATEC’s clients and the two are working together to automate Rosborg’s end-of-line packaging process – a step that presently handles 12 million plants per year and which is done entirely by hand by 40-60 people.

Rosborg is already mechanized. They’ve automated their potting and seeding operations. Plants then are placed on mobile trays slowly moving towards the harvesting stations where fully-grown plants are picked, wrapped and packaged for boxing and palletizing. These latter steps are done by hand and are the steps being automated by EGATEC.

Many of Rosborg’s employees are immigrants eager for the work even though, by Danish standards, it is low paying. In Denmark non-citizens are subject to the same mixture of union and other agreements as citizens and thus their hourly wage approximates $20 an hour — quite high and easy for a robot packaging cell to beat.

Transformative effect on agricultural automation

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) (drones) are stimulating this transformative effect on agricultural automation. UAVs are beginning to be used in areas as diverse as soil and field analysis, planting, crop spraying and monitoring, irrigation and plant and crop health assessment. They are producing valuable data enabling farmers to make better decisions.

However, amid the current shift toward precision agricultural practices, farmers are also running into hurdles with technology integration. Farmers often have to mix precision ag hardware and software with third-party vendors; the results can lead to lost time from a variety of reasons. To combat these barriers, many farm equipment conglomerates are upgrading their products and offering consolidation software. For example, Trimble Ag Software promises to seamlessly integrate with its hardware solutions as well as with other third-party manufacturers using Trimble’s API. By using one technology platform, data can flow wirelessly across the entire farm. This provides timely crop input recommendations and eliminates data re-entry, saving time and reducing potential errors.

Trimble’s Ag Software, like many others, is attempting to be an all-in-one tool offering customers a complete desktop, web-based and mobile-enabled agricultural software solution for farmers and their stakeholders: farm managers, supervisors, crop advisors, service providers, ag retailers and food processors.

Agricultural Robotics: 149 Profiles

Working together with Tractica, a Colorado research firm, my team and I compiled a list of over 200 global businesses and agencies involved in developing robotic solutions for the ag industry. From that list, I was able to interview and profile over 149 companies and 16 research labs as follows:

• Academic and research labs     (16)
• Backroom and post processing     (5)
• Dairy and milking     (10)
• Drones, analytics and data service providers     (26)
• Farm equipment manufacturers     (13)
• Harvesting, weeding and thinning robots     (21)
• Hobby farming     (2)
• Indoor and vertical farming     (23)
• Integrator, distributor and reseller     (20)
• Self-driving vehicles     (15)
• UAS/UAV vendors     (14)

Source: tractica.com

This research report will be published in the next few weeks and will contain the whole list, the profiles, and the conclusions drawn from the research, interviews and analyses. The report will be $4,200 for a Basic License (1-5 users) or $6,300 for an Enterprise License. Note: the link to the report is to the previous report and will be updated with new information just as soon as the report is published.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy these articles about agricultural robotics:

• Swarms of precision agriculture robots could help put food on the table
• Agricultural robot market anticipated to reach $16.3 billion by 2020
• Top 10 technologies in precision agriculture
• Robohub Digest 09/16: AI100, RoboLaw, sailing and farming robots
• In agriculture, robots replace job vacancies

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Illustration: Zoox

Zoox, the secretive Silicon Valley startup working to build its own self-driving cars, has quietly raised $50 million (in October) in a Series A round led by Composite Capital Management, a Hong Kong-based hedge fund. This brings Zoox’s total equity funding to $290 million.

“At Zoox what we’re creating… is not a self-driving car any more than the automobile is a horseless carriage. We’re not building a robo-taxi service; we’re actually creating an advanced mobility service,” said founder Tim Kentley-Klay in October.

“Zoox is developing fully autonomous vehicles and the supporting ecosystem required to bring the technology to market at scale,” according to a Zoox post on LinkedIn. “Sitting at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and design, Zoox aims to provide the next generation of mobility-as-a-service in urban environments.

Kentley-Klay, an Australian designer, is working on the stealthy startup with Jesse Levinson, who worked at Stanford University with Sebastian Thrun, co-creator of Google’s driverless car project. Earlier in May 2016, it was disclosed that Zoox would be deploying a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles by 2020 for ride-sharing services like those Uber offers. Zoox’s description says: “Zoox is developing a breakthrough, fully automated, electric vehicle fleet and the supporting ecosystem required to bring the service to market at scale: autonomous mobility as a service.

Zoox is one of a dozen California companies that have received permits to test drive autonomous vehicles in California. Zoox got their permit in March 2016. Ford, Honda, BMW, Cruise Automation, Nissan, Bosch, Tesla Motors, Delphi Automotive, Google, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen were the others.

Safe Car News, a website, said, “Uber has been working on its own autonomous-vehicle project, following in the footsteps of Google and Apple Inc. The automotive industry is finding itself competing against fast-moving tech companies [such as Zoox] that are new to the world of cars and threatening to upend a century-old industry.

October fundings for robotics-related startups totaled $291.75 million bringing the year-to-date funding figure very close to $1.5 billion. For acquisitions, three of the six companies acquired reported that $390.5 million traded hands. All in all, another strong month for robotics.

UPDATE #1 11/2/2016: Supporting the “another strong month for robotics” statement is an announcement from the RIA (Robotic Industries Association) that robot orders and shipments in North America set new records in the first nine months of 2016. A total of 23,985 robots valued at $1.3 billion were ordered from North American companies in the first nine months of 2016, an increase of 7% in units and 3% in dollars over the same period in 2015, which held the previous record.

UPDATE #2 11/2/2016: Fortune originally report the funding for Rokid as $65 million. They revised it to “more than $50 million.”

Fundings

Zymergen, an Emeryville, Calif.-based biological materials engineering company that leverages both robotics and big data, has raised $130 million in Series B funding. SoftBank Group led the round, and was joined by Iconiq Capital, Prelude Ventures, and Tao Capital Partners and return backers Data Collective, True Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, DFJ, Innovation Endeavors, Obvious Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures. Zymergen is attempting to produce industrial chemicals used in making products such as soap, ink and paint – a $3 trillion market. By creating the building blocks of these products from non-petroleum sources and creating microbes automated in what they call ‘Robotics for high-throughput biology.’ Read more.

Rokid, a Silicon Valley and Chinese AI and robotics company with a novel Jibo-like social assistant, has raised around $50 million in Series B funding. Advantech led the round, and was joined by existing investors IDG Capital Partners and Walden International.

Navya, a French developer of driverless electric and robotic vehicles, has raised $33 million in new VC funding. Keolis, Valeo and Group8 (Qatar) were joined by return backers Rebolution Capital (now part of 360 Capital Partners, CapDecisif Management and Gravitation.

Clearpath Robotics, a Canadian mobility company, raised $30M in a Series B funding round led by iNovia Capital with participation from Caterpillar Ventures, GE Ventures, Eclipse Ventures, RRE Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. The bulk of the capital will be used to scale up manufacturing, hire employees and expand go-to-market strategies for the self-driving vehicles made with Clearpath’s OTTO division for materials handling and transport in factory and warehouse environments.

“Factories operate like small indoor cities, complete with roads, traffic, intersections and pedestrians,” said Matt Rendall, CEO, and co-founder of Clearpath. “Unlike city streets, a factory floor is a controlled environment, which makes it an ideal place to introduce self-driving vehicles at scale. Companies like Google, Tesla and Uber are still testing, whereas our self-driving vehicles are commercially available today.”

Oryx Vision, an Israel-based developer of solid state depth sensing solutions for autonomous vehicles, has raised $17 million in Series A funding. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round and was joined by Maniv Mobility and Trucks VC.

Chronocam, a French startup developing bio-inspired vision systems for autonomous vehicles, received $15 million in a Series B round led by Intel Capital, Renault, 360 Capital Partners, iBionext Growth Fund, and Robert Bosch Venture Capital.

Hangar Technology, an Austin, Texas-based developer of autonomous data capture using drone technology, has raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by Lux Capital. Hangar is presently in hiring mode and beta testing its drone photography on real estate sites.

Optimus Ride, a Boston-based developer of autonomous driving technology, has raised $5.25 million in seed funding co-led by NextView Ventures and FirstMark Capital.

Modbot, a San Francisco startup, raised $4 million in a seed round led by Visionnaire Ventures and included Eclipse, AME Cloud Ventures, Morado Ventures and Autodesk, Inc.

“We’re seeing the emergence of a new era for robotics. Robotic systems are being democratized and becoming accessible to a rapidly growing audience, which is a key force shaping the future of making things,” said Maurice Conti, director of applied research and innovation at Autodesk.

“Our collaboration with Modbot is aimed at advancing robotics research so we can equip manufacturers of all sizes to take advantage of technologies that were once available to only a few large companies. Modbot is a pioneer in this area and we’re already seeing great results from our work together.”

OptoForce, a Hungarian sensor maker, received an undisclosed amount of equity funding from Danish investor (and prev CEO of UR) Enrico Krog Iversen and two VCs that invested in previous funding rounds. Iversen will join OptoForce’s board of directors.

OnRobot, an Odense, Denmark startup that manufactures a grasping device that can easily adapt to Universal Robots and other co-bots, got around $1M in equity funding from Enrico Krog Iversen, Thomas Visti and The Danish Growth Fund.

Acquisitions

Delair-Tech, a French UAS manufacturer, has acquired Gatewing from Trimble and also signed a strategic alliance with both Trimble and Microdrones, a German UAS maker, to be Trimbles preferred providers for UAS solutions. 100+ Gatewing employees are involved in the sale, however, no financial terms were disclosed.

“This transaction is part of our continuing program to tighten our corporate focus,” said Ron Bisio, vice president of Trimble’s Geospatial Division. “Trimble will remain actively engaged in the market by leveraging its brand-agnostic software technology for a broader range of UAS platforms.”

Rockwell Automation, an industrial automation and information conglomerate, acquired Maverick Technologies, a large American integrator of industrial robots, for an undisclosed amount.

FLIR Systems, a big vision systems provider, acquired Point Grey Research, a developer of machine vision cameras for use in industrial, retail, scientific, traffic, mapping, and other advanced imaging applications, for approximately $253 million in cash.

Howco, a provider of construction, transportation, mining and heavy equipment spare and replacement parts to customers worldwide, was acquired by Drone Services USA for $3.5 million to add an international and West Coast distribution capability and presence. Drone Services USA plans to continue acquiring companies to enable it to become a primary developer and manufacturer of low altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and related technologies.

OPS-Ingersoll, a Germany-based integrator of robots and automation systems for the mould and die industry, sold a substantial but minority interest to two Chinese partners: Leeport Holdings and Guangdong Greatoo Molds. The goal is to optimize a strategic position in Asia through the two partners’ networks.

Shenyang Blue Silver Group (SBS Group), China, acquired 85% of the Ecoclean Group within the Dürr Group for around $134 million in August. The Ecoclean Group has annual sales of $224 million, 850 employees and 10 sites in 8 countries, and provides cleaning and surface processing systems – some of which are robotic – for industrial part manufacturers, mainly in the auto industry. Dürr is a provider of painting, sealing and handling robots for the global auto industry. Shenyang Blue Silver has 700 employees and also has $224 million in annual sales. One of their activities is as an integrator of industrial robots for material handling.

Ralf W. Dieter, CEO of Dürr AG: “We are pleased to have found in SBS Group an ideal strategic partner for Ecoclean. The SBS Group has a clear strategic focus on machinery for processing parts in engine and transmission production and will be gaining in Ecoclean a company that is well positioned in this area.”

IPOs and Failures

None.

George “Geohot” Hotz Presents the Comma One at Disrupt SF. Source: TechCrunch/YouTube

Silicon Valley and other technology centers have their share of brilliant minds. Some of them have similarly outstanding egos. A few of those have very short fuses. Such is the story of George Hotz.

Source: YouTube

Hotz is certainly brilliant. He was the first person to unlock the iPhone and hack the PlayStation3. Recently his 2,000-line deep learning code, plus car hacks to capture the car’s digital systems, and his driving model, has learned how and written code to drive a car. He demonstrated this to a Bloomberg reporter earlier this year after which he got some funding, hired a team of engineers and turned that software into an inexpensive product – the green thing in his hand – which he promoted at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September. The green device, the Comma One, is a $999 aftermarket add-on kit with a $24 monthly subscription fee for select Honda and Acura cars. The device replaces the rear-view mirror and captures the car’s radar, steering, braking system and gas pedal. It also adds a camera.

Hotz said that there were 750 of these devices at work in Beta test vehicles around the area, state and country.

The TechCrunch video is in two parts: Hotz’s 7-minute product presentation and an in-depth Q&A with Darrell Etherington which is also informative and worth watching.

Part of Hotz’s talk was a review and critique of other companies making self-driving kits and self-driving cars. “Shippability” was his criteria and by that token, only Tesla has shipped and delivered a self-driving car. He was particularly hostile to the Cruise Automation people saying that they had sold out their original intention to build and sell an aftermarket kit. [For another spin on Cruise, see below.] The most politically correct thing I can say about that portion of his presentation was that his remarks were youthful.

Enter the NHTSA (National Highway Transportation Safety Agency) with a strongly worded query and special order about the safety of Comma One.

“Recently, NHTSA has become aware that your company intends to sell a product, the “comma one,” that you claim allows certain Honda vehicles (and potentially certain Acura vehicles) to operate in a semi-autonomous mode. In a blog post dated October 20, 2016, you described your product as an “advanced driver assist system,” or “in traditional auto manufacturer terms: as “lane keeping assist” and “adaptive cruise control.” You assert that the product “should be legal.”

“This “aftermarket upgrade,” as you describe it, is replacement motor vehicle equipment and your company is a manufacturer of motor vehicle equipment subject to the requirements of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act (Safety Act), 49 U.S.C. Chapter 301, under NHTSA’s oversight. It is essential that you are aware of and in full compliance with your legal responsibilities to ensure vehicle safety before introducing this product into commerce.”

The NHTSA Special Order (SO) said that Comma.ai must respond under oath and accompanied by an affidavit, to 15 “requests,” or be fined up to $21,000 per day and/or become the subject of a civil action to compel responses. The SO asked Hotz to describe, in detail, how the Comma One is installed, what features it offers, how the driver can use the product, what conditions constitute safe operations of the device, what types of operator controls, roads, areas, speeds and environmental conditions such as weather or time of day may a car equipped with the Comma One operate safely and what testing procedures have been implemented to attest to those claims. Each of the questions requires a detailed description of the basis to determine safe operation conditions.  Finally, by replacing the rearview mirror, how will the Comma One block or obstruct the drivers’ ability to have sufficient rear view.

[I don’t know if the NHTSA’s letter and SO are particularly harsh but, certainly, their concern for safety is evident as it should be; and as it should be for Hotz and the Comma.ai team. Governments and their regulations are an integral part of the process of bringing a new product like the Comma One to market. Certainly, it was in their domain to request testing and safety methods from Comma. But Comma’s response was definitely not predictable.]

A day later Hotz Tweeted the bottom three messages you see (read from bottom to top). Thus Hotz cancelled Comma’s first official product even though an admirer says it was the best autonomous driving experience (top Tweet).

Hotz said that Comma would turn its attention to “other products and markets.” It’s unclear what those new products will be. But it is clear that this is a major change in direction at Comma, perhaps even the beginning of its demise.

There’s a saying that at some point every startup needs to bring in an adult to handle the difficult, distasteful, and often diplomatic tasks that happen in business and with strong-willed inventors.

Perhaps now would be a good time for Comma.ai to hire that adult (although it might be a little late).

Cruise Automation

For those of you who thought the billion dollar acquisition of Cruise was a fluke, read on. One billion dollars! That’s what GM paid earlier this year. $300 million in cash; $300 million in GM stock and the remainder in incentives to retain key employees.

Up until news about the acquisition, Cruise was known as the developer of an aftermarket kit to turn select cars into self-driving cars. Actually Cruise had abandoned the kits almost a year earlier to build software instead. That’s what attracted GM.

A new article in Fortune by Erin Griffith sheds some insight and details into Cruise, its two founders, Kyle Vogt and Daniel Kan, and its importance to GM.

“Since the deal closed, Cruise has more than doubled its staff. The company’s office is filling up quickly. Office space in San Francisco is already scarce and pricey, and Cruise has a unique challenge: It needs to drive cars in and out of the office. Beneath Cruise’s barnlike warehouse is a fleet of Chevy Bolts, each outfitted with LiDAR laser sensors. There’s only one ramp in and out of the basement. The cars are starting to feel crowded too.

Cruise could solve its problem by moving its operations to the suburban sprawl of Silicon Valley proper. Like all the automakers, GM has an innovation outpost in Palo Alto. But no one at Cruise has even visited it. Staying independent is too important.”

Read the complete Fortune article here.

If you liked this article, you may also want to read these articles about autonomous cars:

• Comma.ai cancels comma-one add-on box after threats from NHTSA
• What to expect from autonomous cars
• How much can customers test robocars?
• The inevitability of the global march toward self-driving vehicles
• Two New Year’s resolutions for developers of automated vehicles
• comma.ai’s neural network car and new technology in robocars

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter

CB Insights Drone Quarterly Financing Trends to VC-Backed Companies shows a downward trend. The Robot Report’s monthly funding reports show something different: a change in the nature of drone applications getting funded.

According to CB Insights, there was $55 million invested in eight VC deals for the drone industry in the third quarter, compared with almost $106 million invested in 13 deals in the second quarter. In the third quarter of 2015, $134 million was invested in 12 drone-related companies, part of a banner year for drone startups.

In The Robot Report’s July, August and September monthly funding reports one can see a marked change in the type of drone-related company funding from previous months: all are applications-related and none are for the construction of drones. Many of those companies funded use DJI drones for their applications.

Flying drones – $95.1 million funded and an additional $400 million paid for an acquisition:

• The Drone Racing League raised $12 million for drone racing contests.
• Intel acquired Movidius for an estimated $400 million. Movidius’ vision chips and systems are now flying and avoiding collisions in DJI drones.
• Airobotics, an Israeli startup, got $22.5 million to scale up production of their inspection drones for industrial mining, sea ports, oil and gas and other industrial facilities.
• DroneDeploy secured $20 million for their app that flies drones and collects data to make maps and models for ag, construction, facility inspection and mining.
• Mavrx got $22.4 in two different funding rounds. Mavrx is a service provider using drones and software to collect, analyze and prescribe actions for farmers.
• MicaSense raised $7.4 million. They are an integrator of sensors and analytics software which they make for drones that they resell.
• PRENAV raised $6.5 million in seed funding for their vision-guided infrastructure inspection drones.
• Flyability raised $4.3 million for their safe drones for inaccessible places inspection.
• Appolo Shield got a small seed round for their drone forensics and shielding software and device.

Underwater drones – $15.6 million funded:

• Saildrone raised $14 million for their ocean data collection drones.
• Autonomous Marine got $1.6 million for their data collection drones which they operate as a service provider.

Bottom line

As the drone industry gets over the fun of flying and separates into two distinct domains: (1) consumer-friendly flying cameras and (2) the business of providing data from overhead for a variety of business purposes, one can see the commoditization process happening: manufacturers of drones are consolidating and service providers are proliferating. This is what is showing up in the funding reports and also the news as companies that attempted to do it all rejigger themselves to become service providers and/or value-added resellers. 3D Robotics is an example of the latter.

Each year the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) surveys and tabulates data from its worldwide network of robotics associations. The two 2016 annual World Robotics Industrial Robots and World Robotics Service Robots reports represent the IFR’s analysis of 2015 results.

World Robotics Industrial Robots

By the end of 2019, there will be around 2.6 million industrial robots at work around the world – one million more robots than in 2015. That reflects a compounded annual growth rate of 12%. 70% of those robots work in the auto, electrical/electronics and metal/machinery industries. In 2015, growth occurred in the electronics industry, which boasted an 18% rise; the metal industry posted an increase of 16%, with the automotive sector growing by 10%.

Worldwide sales of industrial robots set a new record in 2015: 254,000 units sold; 12% more than 2014. 66,700 units sold in China of which 20,400 were made in China. The IFR didn’t provide sales values for industrial robots (I guess we’ll have to buy the book).

Asia is the strongest growth market with 156,000 units for the region, a 16% increase over 2014, but that figure is much lower than the 27% projected. The rate of growth of China-made robots penetrating the market also didn’t grow at the projected rate but it did grow at a healthy 31% rate. Slower but smarter.

Photo: Robot Report

With three national 10-year plans, the current one entitled “Made in China 2025,” Beijing is attempting to stimulate the in-country robotics industry on two levels: that manufacturers use robots to increase their productivity and global competitiveness and as robot and robotic components manufacturers to reduce the amount of foreign purchases of robots. This national plan applies to service robots too.

The IFR suggested that the trends fueling this steady increase of robot installations will be led by the collaboration of humans and machines, simplified applications, and lightweight and relatively portable robots. Two-armed robots, mobile solutions and the integration of robots into existing environments will also contribute as will an increased focus on modularity and lower overall prices.

World Robotics Service Robots

1.  Professional service robots

The total number of professional service robots sold in 2015 rose by 25% to 41,060 units; up from 32,939 in 2014. The sales value increased by 14% to $4.6 billion.

The IFR is projecting that during the period 2016 through 2019, about 333,000 units will be sold with a value of $23.1 billion – a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 10%:

• Logistic systems will increase considerably during the 4-year projection period to about 175,000 units thereby accounting for 53% of the total forecast – 19,000 logistic systems were installed in 2015, 50% more than in 2014 and accounting for 46% of the total units and 17% of the total sales in 2015
• Defense will account for about 75,000 units – in 2015 11,207 defense applications robots accounted for 27% of the total number of service robots sold
• Field robots (mostly milking robots) make up about 34,600 units
• Medical robots and exoskeletons will account for 14,750 devices
• A new emerging group will be professional cleaning robots with about 11,700 units

2.  Personal service robots

5.4 million service robots for personal and domestic use were sold in 2015, 16% more than in 2014. Sales increased by 4% to $2.2 billion. [Note: Service robots for personal and domestic use are recorded separately as their unit value is generally only a fraction of that of many types of service robots for professional use. Personal service robots are produced for a mass market with completely different pricing and marketing channels.]

The IFR is projecting that during the period 2016 through 2019, about 42 million units will be sold with a value of $22.3 billion – a 40% CAGR:

• 31 million units of robots for domestic tasks (vacuum cleaning, lawn-mowing, window cleaning and other types) with an estimated value of $13.2 billion.
• 11 million units of entertainment and leisure robots will be sold with an estimated value of about $9.1 billion.
• 37,500 eldercare and therapy robots will be sold. This number is expected to increase substantially in the next decade.

3.  Service robotics start-up companies

The combined professional and personal service robotics segment is currently dominated by 43% European, 37% North American and 20% Asian producers. The composure of start-ups in the service robotics sector, however, is quite different. Quoting from the IFR’s press release:

“It is interesting to see the rising number of start-ups in this relatively new market. Around 620 companies have been identified. The US is currently in the lead with nearly 10% of all start-ups.”

SoftBank, the Japanese telecom conglomerate, led a group that included Iconiq Capital, Prelude Ventures, Tao Capital Partners, and seven others in a $130 million funding round for Zymergen to help the company grow its workforce and scale its operations in Silicon Valley.

Zymergen is a startup with a focus on biology, analytics and robots. The company is attempting to produce industrial chemicals used in making products such as soap, ink and paint – a $3 trillion market according to Fortune Magazine. Zymergen creates the building blocks of these products from non-petroleum sources and creates new kinds of chemicals that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to develop. The creation of the microbes used by Zymergen are automated in what they call ‘Robotics for high-throughput biology.’

A recent Fortune article describes the process here.

“The company has a robot workforce to do things like stir liquid around in a petri dish while human scientists supervise thousands of robot-controlled trials in a given week. Zymergen then takes the data from these microbe experiments and uses a proprietary algorithm to sort through millions of different genetic combinations to guide the experiments and develop the best chemical.”

Credit: Zymergen

Zymergen attempts to precisely automate every step and can build and test thousands of strains enabling quicker and predictable breakthroughs. Their automated lab generates more data than manual lab work and they feel that this level of automation and analytics speeds up the data capture and improves operations and engineering.

“Our platform enables us to process and prioritize the enormous volume of data we collect to efficiently explore the near infinite design space for microbes. Prioritizing from among vast exploration possibilities [by decoding biology with machine learning] is the key to successfully engineering new strains. Our proprietary software lets us review large regions of the genome to pinpoint areas of interest which then guides additional tests with increased precision and reliability.”

Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston startup attempting to do the same sort of thing, also received $100 million in funding in June. With those funds the company plans to obtain 600 million base pairs of manufactured DNA and from that develop not-pharmaceutical manufacturing processes in new areas such as commodity chemicals, industrial enzymes and human health markets.

According to TechCrunch, Ginkgo currently makes products for the flavor, fragrance and food industries as well as works with DARPA to produce probiotics that will help U.S. soldiers stave off stomach bugs they might pick up overseas.

Ginkgo will also be using some of the cash to finish building Bioworks2 – a rendering shown to the right. The new, 70,000 square-foot automated facility is being built to test prototypes of Ginkgo’s designer DNA and create those new products.

Source: Viv Labs

Dag Kittlaus, founder and CEO of Siri, Inc., produced and uploaded an app into the Apple App store February 2010. The app quickly rose to 1st in the ‘Lifestyle Section.’ In March, Steve Jobs called Kittlaus to start a dialogue which led to Apple acquiring Siri shortly thereafter in April.

Siri cost Apple around $200 million. In addition to the acquisition of the technology, the purchase was also a smart competitive move because Siri was working on adapting the app to work on Nokia and Android phones. At the time they sold the company to Apple, Siri had 24 employees. As the team moved into the Apple apparatus, and for the next 18 months, Kittlaus headed the team at Apple that applied Siri technology to the iPhone 4S which was launched in October 2011, the month Steve Jobs died.

The Siri app was free for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users. The algorithms that made the app work, however, were the product of years of defense-sponsored research at SRI International. SRI spun out Siri, Inc. in 2008 to commercialize their work. This included the three Siri founders: Kittlaus, Tom Gruber, CTO, and Adam Cheyer, VP Engineering. They named the company “Siri,” a Norwegian girls’ name. Silicon Valley venture capital firms Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures poured $24 million into the technology that Kittlaus, Gruber and Cheyer built into the Siri app.

After Jobs died, Kittlaus resigned and went back to Chicago to be near his family. Liv, his mother, was a native of Norway, and met Dag’s father, Karl, when he was serving with the U.S. Air Force in France. The couple settled in Palos Heights, Ill., a Chicago suburb, and had two sons. Whenever possible, Liv took them to visit her parents and sister in Norway. Doug went to Norway and completed his MBA at BI Norwegian Business School, in Oslo and stayed in Norway for seven more years. He began his career in technology at the Scandinavian telecom giant, Telenor Mobile. Returning to the United States, he worked at Motorola for five years and then went to work with SRI and the Siri project.

Source: YouTube/TechCrunch

In 2012 Kittlaus and a small group – including Cheyer and Brigham – created a new startup, Viv Labs and their AI Viv, named after Kittlaus’ mother but also the Latin root meaning live. In May 2016, Kittlaus demonstrated Viv at a TechCrunch Disrupt event in New York. The demonstration showed that Viv was a breakthrough accomplishment in providing a single conversational user interface (UI) to recognize our words, determine our intent, and then write code to effect that intent. At the demonstration, Kittlaus said that search wasn’t going anywhere but as Viv and other new AI assistants become more capable and become the primary resource for users, people really won’t want to go back to the old way.

Now enter Samsung, 5G, and the Internet of Things. On October 5, 2016, Samsung announced that it had acquired Viv Labs for an undisclosed amount. As part of the acquisition, the Viv founding team will work closely with Samsung’s Mobile Communications business but continue to operate independently.

“Unlike other existing AI-based services, Viv has a sophisticated natural language understanding, machine learning capabilities and strategic partnerships that will enrich a broader service ecosystem,” said Injong Rhee, CTO of the Mobile Communications business at Samsung Electronics. “Viv was built with both consumers and developers in mind. This dual focus is also what attracted us to Viv as an ideal candidate to integrate with Samsung home appliances, wearables and more, as the paradigm of how we interact with technology shifts to intelligent interfaces and voice control.”

In addition to their phone business, as we near 2020, when the new 5G telecom systems begin to be deployed, starting first in Korea in 2018 and Asia in 2019 and 2020, appliance makers such as Korean Samsung foresee the interaction of their devices with the Internet in all sorts of ways. Machine-to-machine technology, including robots, self-driving cars and other cognitive computing systems that are able to make decisions and solve problems without human intervention, is here now but growing in capabilities daily, and will soon be engrained in our daily lives as the capabilities of the 5G networks kick in. Human-machine-interaction, such as that offered by Viv, will be facilitated by 5G.

[NOTE: Samsung isn’t the only buyer of this type of UI technology. Last month Google acquired API.ai, a 2011 startup providing a virtual digital assistant. In December 2014, the company pivoted to focus on becoming a developer platform for natural language processing (NLP). Their platform enables developers to create their own voice apps across a range of end markets, including the mobile device, wearables, robotics, automotive, and smart home markets.]

{NOTE 2: In a move similar to Samsung’s acquisition of Viv to enable integrating it with Samsung home appliances, Amazon just partnered with KITT.ai, another developer of conversation-driven interfaces for developers, to make it easier for developers to use voice-controlled products using the Alexa Voice Service.].

What is 5G?

5G is the fifth generation of wireless technology and offers big advances in the number of simultaneous connections that mobile networks can support – up to a million connections per 1/3 mile. Apart from providing massive capacity, 5G users will see significantly improved network speeds and low latency, well beyond the capabilities of 4G. Data speeds on 5G are estimated to reach 20 times faster than current 4G networks. Estimates suggest that 5G users would be able to download a full-length, high-definition movie in just one second. In addition, 5G is expected to come with an ultra-low latency rate of less than 1 millisecond. Existing 4G networks have a latency of 10 milliseconds. Latency is defined as the amount of time it takes for a packet of data to get from one point to another. The ultra low latency also means that advanced applications, such as autonomous driving, can be supported by 5G networks with precision.

Bottom line

Personal assistants are all about simplifying the process of performing daily tasks. They are what you would expect from a knowledgeable executive assistant to maximize productivity and minimize your involvement, a person who really knows you and doesn’t require you to explain things again over and over. The list of vendors is impressive: Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, Baidu, Microsoft, Apple, SoftBank, all the car companies, smaller companies like Jibo, and many large consumer product providers – including Samsung.

To date, none have achieved that sweet spot where end users are fully satisfied. The holdup has been the software, the need for extensive coding, and the ability to identify “intent” from sounds recognized as words. The breakthrough technology that Viv is offering is a way to change the way programmers work with computers and developers offer their products. Programmers will no longer have to instruct step-by-step procedures in rigid code, but instead they’ll just have to describe the process and intent and the AI will develop the code – it will write the programs needed on the fly. And developers will just need to add Viv as their conversational UI.

September continued the big-money spree for funding robotic startups. 10 good-sized deals and three little ones. Almost $220 million (bringing the year-to-date total well over $1 billion)! Plus, another $2.2 billion paid in September for six acquisitions.

Fundings

Carbon 3D, a Silicon Valley 3D printer startup, raised $81 million from a group of 6 investors led by BMW Group and Sequoia Capital, GE, Nikon, JSR and GV. The funds will be used for international expansion. Parts made on Carbon machines, using the company’s resins and elastomers, have different mechanical properties and a smoother surface than parts produced on traditional CNC machines because they’re not deposited layer by layer, cut or milled. Instead, they’re sculpted by precisely applying light and oxygen to a liquid pool of material. BMW and Ford are early users of this technology. Carbon CEO and co-founder Joe DeSimone said:

“We believe that 3-d printing is a misnomer. It’s historically 2-d printing over and over again and the breakthrough we [had] and wrote about in the research journal Science laid out our approach where we use light and oxygen to grow parts.”

Zymergen, a Silicon Valley integrator of lab robotics in industrial biotech, raised $42 million in a Series A funding led by Data Collective and including AME Cloud Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurveston, HVF, Innovation Endeavors, Obvious Ventures, True Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures.

Mazor Robotics (in August) completed the second tranche of the equity investment by Medtronic pursuant to a previously executed agreement between the parties. Mazor issued new securities representing 3.40% percent of Mazor’s issued and outstanding share capital at a price equal to an aggregate purchase price of $20 million.

Saildrone, an Alameda, CA startup, raised $14M in a Series A funding round led by Social Capital with additional funds from Capricorn Investment and Lux Capital. The funding will be used to expand Saildrone’s fleet of sailing drones, enhance Saildrone’s data processing capacity, and scale commercial operations.

Drone Racing League has raised $12 million in new VC funding co-led by Lux Capital and RSE Ventures. Other backers include MGM, Sky Prosieben, Hearst Ventures, CAA Ventures, Vayner/RSE, Courtside Ventures, Sierra Maya Ventures and individual angels.

Sarcos Robotics, a Salt Lake City maker of military exoskeleton robots, has secured $10.5 million in funding from investors including Microsoft, Caterpillar Ventures, GE Ventures, Cottonwood Technology Fund and two unnamed private investment firms. Sarcos says it will use the funds to grow its team and bring its Guardian line of robotics to market. Beyond the obvious military applications, Sarcos envisions possibilities for the machines in a number of industries, ranging from oil and gas to mining to construction and manufacturing.

“There is substantial demand for robots that can carry out challenging tasks that are too dangerous or difficult for humans.  Our human-operated robots are designed to perform meaningful, highly dexterous work in real-world settings while keeping people out of harm’s way,” said Ben Wolff, Sarcos’ CEO.

Rapyuta Robotics, a spin-off from the ETH Zurich, recieved $10M in a Series A funding round from SBI Investments, a Japanese VC. Funding will be used to support and expand its engineering team in order to accelerate development of additional features and new products, testing, and product release schedules plus funding of sales, and marketing efforts. Rapyuta is aiming to commercialize the RoboEarth project of enabling robots to talk and learn with and from other robots over the cloud.

Mavrx, a San Francisco startup using imagery and data to make prescriptions for the ag industry, raised $10M in a Series A round led by Eclipse with Bloomberg Beta and Visionnair Ventures.

Titan Medical, a Canadian startup involved in the design and development of a robotic surgical system, completed a public offering which raised $7.2 million. John Hargrove, Titan’s CEO, said: “We believe we have [with these new funds] sufficient funds on hand to enable us to move forward with the advancement of human factors and usability studies of the surgical system.”

Navisens, a SF software, systems and AI startup, got $2.6 million in seed funding in a round led by Resolute Ventures with participation from KEC Ventures, Amicus Capital, Arba Seed Investment Group, and angel investor Gokul Rajaram. The company is introducing its patent-pending technology, motionDNA, a location solution that employs motion sensors for both indoor and outdoor location solutions.

OnFarm, a Fresno, CA ag startup, got an additional $125k in seed funding from 500 Startups, a Silicon Valley VC focusing on providing seed funding and startup coaching. OnFarm is developing a network of sensors, weather, maps, equipment and historical crop data and providing analytical and prescriptive data as a service.

Appolo Shield, an Israeli startup that is moving to Silicon Valley, received $120k in seed funding from Y Combinator. The company is developing an anti-drone system to actively protect sensitive areas. Their software takes control of intruding drones and commands them to land.

Raptor Maps, a Somerville, MA startup, received $200k in seed funding from Y Combinator (in August). Raptor is providing RaaS by capturing images and providing mapping data.

Acquisitions

Apple acquired India-based Tuplejump, a machine learning startup for an undisclosed amount. This is after an August acquisition of Turi, another machine learning platform for, what Geekwire suggests as upwards of $200 million.

Intel acquired Irish Movidius, a maker of image-processor chips for drones and virtual reality for $400 million. Movidius’ chips help drones and smartphones recognize faces and read signs without needing to stream to the cloud and wait for a response.

GE pays $1.4 billion to acquire two metal-based additive manufacturing makers:

1. Arcam AB, based in Mölndal, Sweden, invented an electron beam melting machine for metal-based additive manufacturing, and also produces advanced metal powders. Its customers are in the aerospace and healthcare industries. Arcam generated $68 million in revenues in 2015 with approximately 285 employees. In addition to its Sweden site, Arcam operates a metal powders operation in Canada, and DiSanto Technology, a medical additive manufacturing firm in Connecticut, as well as sales and application sites worldwide.
2. SLM Solutions Group, based in Lübeck, Germany, produces laser machines for metal-based additive manufacturing with customers in the aerospace, energy, healthcare, and automotive industries. SLM generated $74 million in revenues in 2015 with 260 employees. In addition to its operations in Germany, SLM has sales and application sites worldwide.

Hocomo, a Swiss provider of robotic and sensor-based rehabilitation solutions, merged with Chinese DIH International to provide comprehensive rehab solutions. Financial terms were not disclosed. DIH International is a corporate holding group from Hong Kong with offices in China, Korea, the Netherlands and the US. The merged entity will become a full solution provider for the entire rehabilitation marketplace.

Cabinplant A/S, a Danish integrator of food processing equipment including a sardine packing robot cell, has sold 80% of their shares to CTB, a Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet) company that designs, manufactures and markets ag, dairy and poultry processing equipment. Cabinplant employs 300 people and has representatives in more than 30 countries worldwide. No amount was disclosed regarding the transaction, however based on 2015 sales of $43M (from their annual report), and presuming a 10X revenue (predicated on what GE paid for the two 3D printer companies), it seems likely the selling price was in the range of $200M to $400M.

CTB’s chairman and chief executive officer Victor A. Mancinelli said, “The acquisition helps CTB to broaden the range of poultry processing options it can offer its customers as well as expanding into new market areas for processing, such as seafood and vegetables. Cabinplant’s knowledge of the food industry and its innovative approach to product development and implementation fit very well with CTB’s approach to its core markets.”

Failures

• Richter-Hansen A/S
• Flexilane
• PMN Industri A/S
• Quark Robotics (ES)

IPOs

• None. Nada. Zip.

There are many robotics clusters around the world successfully providing for the needs of their respective communities and a few not really achieving their desired goals. Odense and the Danish clusters certainly fall into the former category. They do so because they are organized at every level to be offering and have people that are business smart, humble and cooperative in approach, and public-spirited in nature.

On a recent trip to Denmark, a country with less than 6 million people, I saw firsthand the magnitude and power of a successful, working robotics cluster and how it can be an equalizer as well as an instigator. For example, Denmark is 7th in global robot density, i.e., the number of multipurpose industrial robots per 10,000 employees in the manufacturing sector (behind Korea, Singapore, Japan, Germany, Sweden and Taiwan) and Denmark doesn’t have an auto industry contributing to those figures.

The four maps on the right show the location and types of companies involved in the robotics industry in Denmark. These companies design, develop, manufacture and integrate robots and are included in the directories of The Robot Report. [Did you know The Robot Report has a large directory covering the robotics industry and that they are all plotted on a global map, which is freely accessible online?]

In the lower center of each map is the island of Fyn and in the upper center of Fyn is Odense, the city and area I visited.

What’s a cluster do?

Clusters are organized to bring together and share expertise, funding, leadership, and coaching to help make businesses successful, productive, profitable and employ people from the community. Clusters help stimulate innovation and startups, and keep workers and stakeholders informed and happy in, and pleased with, their industry. They offer expertise in international trading and collaboration. [For the purposes of this article, when I refer to a cluster I’m talking about those focused on fostering the development of robotics.]

Clusters don’t just happen by accident. They need knowledge sharing, community spirit and participation by all of the stakeholders. They need nearby universities to crank out students (particularly grad students) while researching breakthrough technologies. [Some examples of top-notch technical universities and the areas they cover include the Boston-Cambridge area (MIT, Boston University and Harvard), Pittsburgh (Carnegie Mellon University), Zurich (ETH Zurich and University of Zurich), Silicon Valley and SF Bay Area (Stanford and UC Berkeley), and Tokyo (University of Tokyo and Tokyo Institute of Technology).]

Clusters need successes so that there’s money to invest, mentors to provide coaching, and stories to be told.

They need a strong technical educational system not only to provide new talent, but to research and develop new solutions to local problems.

Finally, clusters need organization and help navigating technology transfer issues, local regulations, securing governmental incentives, startup help and scale-up assistance. Universities and government-sponsored funding agencies often offer these services as do accelerators and venture capital firms – but with varying levels of capability. Successful cluster organizations help cut through all the bureaucracies and expedite what needs to be done.

How are clusters established?

Clusters can be planned. In China, the national government has outlined and funded a massive plan to make robotics a domestic industry instead of buying robots from offshore companies. They have mandated 20 regional universities and local governments to work together to develop the technologies, incubate and fund startups, provide them with office and factory space, funding incentives, and get them up and producing.

Another example is in the U.S.: the University of California San Diego (UCSD) is investing in making itself a hub for cognitive, embedded technologies and communication sciences involved in robotics by adding teaching/research staff (as UCSD is doing), by working together with venture capitalists, local tech businesses (particularly Qualcomm, whose microchips are widely used in smartphones and other wireless devices), local military research labs, startup companies, and the research labs and programs already existent at UCSD and in the area. 

(San Diego has major industry and defense employers with many robotics technologies and applications. There are also significant manufacturing sectors in San Diego and nearby Tijuana. And UCSD is a major plus as well. It already has a Flow Control & Coordinated Robotics Lab, a Computer Vision and Robotics Research Lab, an Intelligent Systems, Robotics and Control Lab, the Artificial Intelligence Group, and the Contextual Robotics Institute, to name just a few… plus it is located in beautiful La Jolla north of San Diego. UCSD is also nearby the Scripps and Salk Institutes.)

Not all planned clusters achieve their goal. Each of the stakeholders has to play their part and serendipity also has a role in making a successful robotics cluster. Numerous cities and areas have tried and failed. Many are hopeful of success (and we are hopeful for them as well). Many are successful and productive such as RoboValley in The Netherlands, the Boston/Cambridge cluster, the cluster in Pittsburgh and the SF Bay Area/Silicon Valley cluster. It really needs active community spirit and some level of altruism. An example is the Silicon Valley cluster which struggles to get beyond an elitist flavor (which I perceive as selfishness). They have everything going for them: frequent get-togethers, lots of success stories, plentiful sources of money, multiple accelerators, really talented people including the scattering of the Willow Garage people, but they can’t shake the elitest label. Billionaire Scott Hassan founded Willow Garage with a public-spirited goal to develop a general-purpose personal robot to move around a house and help the daily life of people. Willow Garage was founded in 2006 (and closed in 2014) and operated something like Bell Labs and Xerox Parc did in, and for, the PC industry: it developed the open source robotics software system (ROS) and the TurtleBot and PR2. Willow Garage funded 60 research scientists each year in an ever-changing cadre that have since migrated to prominent robotics startups and businesses around the Bay Area (and world), all stimulated by an altruistic billionaire.

The Odense cluster

“The Odense cluster began 25 years ago when Maersk was planning to build an advanced shipyard in Odense and robotic welding and the advanced software for operating self-programming robots were to play big roles. They sought help and made sizeable donations to South Denmark University (SDU). Many of the key people in today’s robot scene were educated during that period, (e.g., Claus Risager was a project engineer at the shipyard and now heads the Danish Technological Institute (DTI) with a robotics division in Odense. Enrico Iversen, Thomas Visti and Esben Østergaard, CEO, COO and CTO of Universal Robots (UR), all graduated from SDU).  As the shipyard closed the robotics people moved around. The SDU assisted in the creation of UR. The MIR people [a recent mobile robotics startup in Odense with Thomas Visti as CEO] were involved in the early stage of UR. It is all a very well connected community. At the same time the Danish culture is very much a sharing one and much less competitive than the US system. As the shipyard closed down the Mayor and local politicians have been very supportive of the creation of new companies to support the local economy. Many people from that time have been key to the success. It is an ideal combination of technology, business development and entrepreneurs,” said Henrik Christensen, a Dane that was a founder of EURON and later headed the US group that produced the American Roadmap for US Robotics. Christensen is now the director of the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego.

Clusters often ride on the coattails of successful companies. This is certainly the case with the Odense cluster. Universal Robots (UR) has become a country-wide hero in Denmark and particularly in Odense, where it is headquartered and where it employs 300+ people. Universal Robots recently sold to an American supplier of test equipment, Teradyne, for $315.4 million (according to Teradyne’s Edgar filing) making many of UR’s top people multi-millionaires. And those very same people are already reinvesting some of their money in new ventures in Odense.

The Odense cluster is multi-layered. They cooperate with national government-sponsored organizations such as RoboCluster; they work hand-in-hand with the main local university (U of Southern Denmark) and hundreds of other robot companies, research organizations and national clusters and networks. The chart below – which you can enlarge by clicking on it – provides details of the 30+ higher education programs, 10+ knowledge and research institutes, 80+ robot and automation companies and 10+ clusters and networks, plus the 2,200+ robotics-related jobs in the Odense area.

On my visit I asked each person I met whether they had personally received any support from the Danish or Odense cluster and each offered a story or two that showed they had a favorable impression of those interactions, particularly with the Odense apparatus. One person said he was able, through the mayor’s office, to expedite a zoning approval; another was able to work with the university (University of Southern Denmark) regarding research and finding talent; another said he got help finding local vendors capable of sub-contracting their needs; and many told me about encouraging foreign visits and assisting with foreign visitors. Others taught classes at SDU and hosted open houses at their robotics-related companies. They all told me about timely investments made by the Danish Growth Fund and other state-sponsored funding entities. I’d say that since everybody I talked with could cite an example of how they were helped by and spoke favorably toward the cluster, that the cluster was operating successfully.

Another mark of a good cluster is the ability to provide local, regional and international media with timely newsworthy facts and figures; not just generic publicity but real and timely information. Universal Robots is a classic example: from their beginning they have had a bevy of PR firms working for them and operating from a policy of always providing real information, no matter the situation or circumstance.

Bottom Line:

Generosity is a mental health principle: it is therapeutic. Lack of generosity takes many forms: tightness, negativity and elitism. There are many robotics clusters around the world successfully providing for the needs of their respective communities and a few not really achieving their desired goals. Odense and the Danish clusters certainly fall into the former category of successfully meeting the needs of their communities. In my opinion, they do so because they are organized at every level to be offering and have people in place that are business smart, humble and cooperative in approach, and public-spirited and generous in nature.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also want to read:

• Integrators are dead, long live the integrator
• Danish co-bot maker Universal Robots sells for $350 million
• August fundings and acquisitions

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Source: GoPro

GoPro fans and the financial world have been looking forward to GoPro’s new Karma since GoPro announced last December that it was working on building its first drone. When they delayed the release from early summer until now, it only served to raise expectations.

Update: DJI, the Chinese drone maker, responded to GoPro’s Karma launch with a new small, totable, full-featured camera drone which they call Mavic Pro.

In a grand gesture for their launch, GoPro took over the Squaw Valley ski resort near Lake Tahoe for their presentation. GoPro’s founder and CEO, Nicholas Woodman, introduced the Karma and also a new line of HERO5 cameras to hundreds of international press at the event.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqZ-vEsnQoY

“We’re stoked to launch Karma and show how much more it is than a drone. Karma packs Hollywood-caliber aerial, handheld and gear-mounted image stabilization into a backpack for $799. It’s so easy to use, a beginner can have fun straight away…

“With these new products, we’re delivering on our promise to make it easy to capture and share engaging stories. HERO5’s ability to auto-upload photos and videos to a GoPro Plus account dramatically simplifies mobile, on-the-go editing, sharing and enjoyment. This is a game-changing experience that we will continue to build upon.”

For existing GoPro users looking to purchase their first drone, the Karma provides “an awesome out-of-the-box experience.” Flip out the foldable propeller arms and landing gear and it’s ready to fly. The Karma is solidly constructed, slickly styled, and rugged (plus all the parts are replaceable).

The Karma consists of multiple components in addition to the flying unit.

• A detachable three-axis gimbal system keeps the camera steady and its position at the front enables the capture of wide-angle video without the propellers in the picture.
• Unlike the gimbals in other drones, the Karma Stabilizer can be removed and used for handheld shots, using another attachment accessory called the Karma Grip. The battery-powered Grip has controls for turning on/off the Stabilizer and the recorder, and tagging clips during recording.
• Karma’s controller, which includes its own screen rather than relying on a smartphone or tablet, along with GoPro’s control software, is quite intuitive.
• Karma folds down neatly into an included backpack — making it fully portable and very professional.
• When shooting video, the Karma Controller has an Auto Shot Paths feature, one of many presets included in the kit. These presets let you create smooth, professional-looking shots. For example, in Cable Cam mode, Karma travels back and forth along a line; the user just needs to set points A and B.

Bottom Line

This long-anticipated launch, expected by many in the financial community to add an important new competitor in the drone-making market, does add a formidable and deep-pocketed player. The commercial drone industry is consolidating with service providers private-labeling Chinese drones and reselling them with their value-adding sensors, speciality cameras and custom software. GoPro’s new Karma consolidates and packages their years of experience in action photography into a very capable and professional system competitively priced at $799. Just add a camera/video. Karma’s begin shipping October 23rd.

Source: Uber

As autonomous cars begin to hit world markets in pilot tests and other ways, and before the International Federation of Robotics clarifies whether those vehicles are robots or not, two research firms have combined those vehicles with other robots. Their results are below.

Source: The Economist

The number of research reports covering the robotics industry has grown exponentially in the last few years. 109 have been previewed on The Robot Report thus far in 2016. The latest batch of 46 shown below brings the Y-T-D total to 155. Even though multiple vendors produce reports on the same topics, almost all show double-digit growth. [Here are links to the previous two recaps: [1, 2].]

• Service and industrial robots (6)
• Commercial and military drones (10)
• Professional service robots (7)
• Agricultural robots and drones (2)
• Exoskeletons and medical robots (5)
• Industrial robots (12)
• Underwater vehicles (2)
• International Federation of Robotics Annual Reports (2)

Service & industrial robots

Robotics market forecasts
August 2016, 24 pages and 248 charts, Tractica, $4,200
Tractica, by categorizing autonomous vehicles as service robots, estimates that 2016 industrial robots will drop to 41% of total robotics revenue, with the remaining 59% coming from non-industrial robots.  The non-industrial service robots sector largely consists of consumer robots, enterprise robots, military robots, autonomous vehicles and supporting components, and UAVs. The combined global robotics industry will expand from $34.1 billion in 2016 to $226.2 billion by 2021, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46%.

Global driverless car components market
August 2016, Allied Analytics, $3,792
The component market servicing the driverless car market is comprised of radar sensors; video cameras; LiDAR sensor; ultrasound sensors and a central computing system. Companies profiled include Google, Inc.; Daimler AG; Ford Motor Company; Toyota Motor Corporation; BMW AG; Audi AG ; AB Volvo ; Dutch Automated Vehicle Initiative (DAVI); Autonomous Lab; and Volkswagen. 

Robotics: technologies and markets
June 2016, 239 pages, BCC Research, $6,650
The global robotics market reached nearly $24.9 billion in 2015. The market should reach over $25.9 billion and $31.5 billion in 2016 and 2021 respectively, increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.0% from 2016 to 2021.

Global robotics R&D spending
July 2016, 55 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
The analysts forecast the global R&D spending market in the robotics industry to grow at a CAGR of 17.29% during the period 2016-2020.

Global cloud robotics
August 2016, 140 pages, Occams Business Research, $3,900
Rising internet and cloud infrastructure, rapid progress of wireless technology and rapid development of software frameworks and services for computational, storage, and communications infrastructure of modern data centers are the major drivers for the cloud robotics globally.

Artificial intelligence market forecasts
August 2016, 23 pages and 332 charts, Tractica, $4,200
Forecasts that annual worldwide AI revenue will grow from $643.7 million in 2016 to $38.8 billion by 2025. Tractica has created a taxonomy of 191 real-world use cases for AI, organized into 27 different industry sectors and corresponding with six major technology categories, plus multiple combinations of technologies.

Commercial & military drones

Global commercial drones
May 2016, Orion Market Research, $3,495
Global commercial drones market is expected to grow at an exponentially high CAGR of 41% for the forecasted period of 2016-2021.

The future of commercial drones: an appraisal
August 2016, 101 pages, Valour Consultancy, $4,589
An analysis on the applications for which UAV’s have currently been used and an extensive list of potential uses which represent future sources of service revenues. Also UAV frames, power trains, control and communications and future instrumentation packages are also examined.

Commercial and military drone market
August 2016, 90 pages, Mind Commerce, $1,995
The global drone market is anticipated to reach $4.2 billion by 2025 with a CAGR of 9.2%. By 2018, UAVs will be used by nearly every major manufacturing company to control logistics.

Consumer drones market
June 2016, 66 pages, Tractica, $3,800
Worldwide sales of consumer drones reached $1.9 billion in 2015 and will reach a market value of $5.0 billion by the end of 2021. Unit shipments will increase from 6.4 million units in 2015 to 67.7 million units annually by 2021.

Drone payload market
August 2016, 171 pages, Markets and Markets, $5,650
The drone payload market is estimated to be valued at USD 3.63 billion in 2016 and is projected to reach USD 7.72 billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 16.25% between 2016 and 2021.

US DoD UAS Payloads
September 2016, Frost & Sullivan, $1,500
The DoD has been transitioning from acquiring new UAS to upgrading current platforms, sensors payloads, and overall capabilities. This report outlines the market payload size, and driving and restraining factors.

Global anti-drone market
July 2016, 116 pages, BIS Research, $3,800
Anti-drone systems are expected to generate $210 million in 2016. Report profiles Airbus, Blighter Surveillance Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, Finmeccanica, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SAAB, Thales and Boeing.

Anti-drone market to 2022
March 2016, 137 pages, Markets and Markets, $5,650
The global anti-drone market is expected to reach $1.14 bn by 2022.

Global solar-powered UAV market
July 2016, 66 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
The global solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) market will grow at a steady CAGR of nearly 13% through 2020.

Global UAV Sense & Avoid Systems
July 2016, 136 pages, BIS Research, $3,999
The UAV sense and avoid systems market, being an emerging market, will experience an exponential rate of growth expected to continue for next decade. This high rate of growth is attributed to the rising demand of UAVs in diverse commercial applications.

Professional service robots

Global service robotics
August 2016, 80 pages, Renub Research, $1,243
The global service robotics market (defense, ag, logistics, medical, construction, mobile platform, inspection, underwater, rescue, security and others) to surpass $7 billion by 2020.

Global cleaning robots
August 2016, Allied Analytics, $3,792
Details floor, pool, window and lawn robots and profiles Dyson, Ecovacs, Infinuvo, iRobot, Philips, LG, Neato, Intellibot, Yujin and Samsung.

Global smart robots
June 2016, 84 pages, Infiniti Research, $2,500
Analysts forecast the global smart robots market to grow at a CAGR of 20.65% during the period 2016-2020. 52 companies are mentioned. Emergence of IoT predicted as key driver.

Law enforcement robots
July 2016, 649 pages, Wintergreen Research, $4,100
Law enforcement robot markets at $1 billion in 2015 are anticipated to reach $5.7 billion by 2022.

Global security robots market
August 2016, 103 pages, Arcluster, $4,150
Forecasts the global security robots market to reach $2.7B by 2020.

Global IT robotic automation
July 2016, 196 pages, Accuray Research, $4,200
This report covers robotic as well as robot-like s/w apps (virtual rather than physical) and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 59% over next decade and will reach $49.3 bn by 2025.

Global military UGV market
July 2016, 123 pages, Strategic Defence Intelligence, $4,800
The global military UGV market values US$444.8 million in 2016, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.76%, to value US$707.8 million by 2026.

Agricultural robots & drones

Agricultural robots and drones
August 2016, 163 pages, IDTechEx, $4,975
Thousands of robotic milking parlours have been installed worldwide, creating a $1.9bn industry that is projected to grow to $8bn by 2023. more than 300k tractors equipped with autosteer or tractor guidance will be sold in 2016, rising to more than 660k units per year by 2026. This report also reflects on the agrochemical business and forecasts that crop protection chemical suppliers will no longer be able to ignore developments in the world of agricultural robotics. This is because their rise will change the amount and types of chemicals used, and will force suppliers to seriously consider re-inventing themselves as providers of crop protection, whatever its form, and not just narrow chemical suppliers.

Global agriculture robotics
July 2016, 80 pages, Nineteen Columns Market Research, $5,500
Outlines and classifies; profiles emerging AI vendors; describes needs and market segmentations.

Exoskeletons & medical robots

Global exoskeleton robots market
February 2016, 49 pages, Infiniti Research, $2,500
Infiniti forecasts the global exoskeleton robots market to grow at a CAGR of 50.85% during the period 2016-2020.

Global exoskeletons market
August 2016, 103 pages, Arcluster, $4,150
Global exoskeleton market to reach $3.75 billion by 2021.

Surgical robots and surgical assist robots
May 2016, 156 pages, Wintergreen Research, $4,100
Hip and knee orthopedic surgical robot device markets at $222 million in 2015 are anticipated to reach $5 billion by 2022.

Global handicap assistance robots
May 2016, 53 pages, Infiniti Research, $2,500
Forecast Global Handicap Assistance Robots Market to grow at a CAGR of 32.12% by the number of units shipped, during the period 2016-2020.

Telemedicine & connected health & mobile healthcare devices
July 2016, 189 pages, Mind Commerce, $1,995
The fast growing area of Health Care IT Solutions is encompassing many different technologies including Internet of Things (IoT), broadband wireless, robotics, telepresence, artificial intelligence, machine communications, Big Data and Analytics.

Industrial robots

Global industrial robots
August 2016, 79 pages, Renub Research, $1,252
Global Industrial Robotics Market is expected to be more than US$ 37 Billion by 2020. Automotive and Electrical & Electronics industry together expected to control close to 70% market share.

Global  industrial robots
July 2016, 142 pages, Novonous, $5,000
Estimates that Global Industrial Robots Market will achieve annual CAGR of 15% till 2020.

Collaborative robots market
August 2016, 157 pages, Markets and Markets, $5,650
The global market for collaborative robots is expected to grow at a CAGR of 60.04% between 2016 and 2022 from USD 110.0 million in 2015 and reach USD 3.3 Billion by 2022.

Industrial robots market
April 2016, 110 pages, Zion Market Research, $4,200
The report includes a detailed value chain analysis and an analysis of Porter’s Five Forces model as it relates to industrial robotics.

Global parallel robots
July 2016, 61 pages, Infiniti Research, $2,500
The report forecasts the global parallel robots market to grow at a CAGR of 5.7% through 2020.

Global foundry and forging robots
July 2016, 97 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
The global foundry and forging robots market will grow steadily at a CAGR of more than 7% to 2020. APAC countries will remain the fastest growing area within the market.

Global packaging robots
July 2016, 68 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
Predicts the global packaging robots market to grow at a CAGR of more than 9% through 2020.

Asia Pacific (APAC) material handling market
August 2016, 82 pages, Knowledge Sourcing Intelligence, $3,800
APAC) Automated Material Handling Market is estimated to grow from US$7.604 billion in 2015 to US$14.364 billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 9.47% over the forecast period.

Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) material handling market
August 2016, 89 pages, Knowledge Sourcing Intelligence, $3,800
EMEA automated material handling is estimated to grow from US$6.677 billion in 2015 to US$11.894 billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 10.10% over the forecast period.

North America material handling market
July 2016, 87 pages, Knowledge Sourcing Intelligence, $3,800
North America Automated Material Handling Market is estimated to grow from US$3.535 billion in 2015 to US$5.923 billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 8.98% over the forecast period.

Global palletizing equipment, conventional and robotic
August 2016, 64 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
Slow, but steady growth of 3.91% CAGR during the period 2016-2020 is forecast.

Global palletizing machinery (robotic and other)
July 2016, 453 pages, Global Industry Analysts, $4,950
Segments various types of end-of-line machinery and robotics and profiles 207 companies in the field.

Underwater vehicles

Global unmanned underwater vehicles
August 2016, 170 Pages, Accuray Research, $4,200
The Global Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV) Market is poised to grow at a CAGR of around 12.2% over the next decade to reach approximately $7.25 billion by 2025.

Global autonomous underwater vehicles
July 2016, 125 pages, Azoth Analytics, $2,000
Market is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 15.5% through 2021.

International Federation of Robotics annual reports

The fact-based backbone for many of these research reports is the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) annual World Robotics Industrial Robots and World Robotics Service Robots reports. These two books represent the official tabulation and analysis from all the robot associations around the world.

The 2016 reports cover 2015 activity. The two 2016 reports can be purchased for $2,000. The industrial report will be published and available for purchase September 29, 2016 and the service report on October 12, 2016.

InterDrone concluded their 2nd annual trade show and conference in Las Vegas. The differences between the 2015 event and this one reflect the rapid changes in the industry and can be seen as a predictor for the next few years.

In 2015, it was all about the fun of flying and where you could get a drone, outfit it with cameras and accessories, and go fly. Three makers (Shenzhen DJI Innovations, 3D Robotics (3DR), and Yuneec) had the largest booths and retail resellers, carrying case makers, camera sellers, GoPro, and other accessory makers all had booths. DJI, 3DR and Yuneec had all received massive scale-up fundings during the year.

2016 was all about professionals doing their business with drones.

• The head of the FAA gave the keynote address
• The crowd of 4,000 was 1/3 larger than 2015
• The speakers list and panels were a serious step up from 2015 and included:Commercial uses in surveying, agriculture, big payload movement
  • Service-providing instead of selling
  • Uses for first responders
  • All forms of filming, mapping and photography
• Multiple booths for hoods and FPV (first-person-view) headsets to be able to better see what the onboard camera is seeing
• Instead of DJI and GoPro being the dominant players, Parrot and Yuneec held significant presences with their commercial focus

Parrot, the French provider of the original AR. drone that premiered their quadcopter at Sharper Image stores and now sells hundreds of thousands of various sized single-wing and quad-style drones worldwide, was there with their SLAM Dunk autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance kit for developers.

In time for the Christmas season, but not seen at the InterDrone show, is Parrot’s new DISCO FPV smart flying wing with what they call “cockpit glasses,” a headset to see what the onboard camera is seeing. Very slick!

Parrot has decided, as a corporate policy, that the commercial uses of drones should be a big contributor to Parrot’s income stream and they’ve acquired and invented to make that happen. They’ve invested in senseFly, Pix4D, MicaSense and Airinov – all companies providing drones for professional use. I interviewed Parrot’s founder, chairman and CEO Henri Seydoux last year who said:

“We are moving forward with our external growth policy initiated in 2011 and focusing on new products with high-potential, outstanding and complementary technological expertise, applications for commercial and retail customer segments, strong operational and financial synergies. Parrot intends to meet the needs of professionals moving into the civil drone age and firmly believes in the commercial potential of this market, (on which the Parrot AR.Drone has already enabled us to gain global recognition) and I am very pleased that we can also serve the commercial drone market as well.”

“Agriculture is one of the fastest-growing market segments for unmanned aircraft commercial applications. The sensors required to capture accurate data are a critical part of the solution, and [our recent acquisition of MicaSense and Airinov] brings this technology to the table.”

Yuneec, with the biggest booth at the show, is copying the success that DJI has had providing low-cost professional-grade drones for upgrading and resale through a distributor an international integrator and rebranding network, is making inroads into what was initially a DJI-dominated industry.

BOTTOM LINE: The commercial drone industry is maturing similar to the way industrial robots matured: a few major manufacturers providing their drones to thousands of integrators, resellers and value-added service providers which extend the sales reach of the manufacturers. Most of the recent research reports on the industry show CAGR rates ranging from 16% to over 40% for commercial drones and 9% to 15% for military/defense drones.

FANUC_R2000iB at work. Source: Wikipedia Commons

For many years integrators have engineered, built and installed automation machinery for their manufacturer clients. As manufacturing has begun to move from mass production to mass customization, the integration process has required more flexibility and increasingly used robots as part, if not all, of the solution.

On my recent research trip to Odense, Denmark, the value offered by integration firms was clearly evident in the integrator companies I visited. Each quietly went about helping their manufacturer clients solve production problems by designing, building, testing and installing complete or partial automated manufacturing lines and systems. They all appeared to be having success pains: each had recently moved into larger quarters and were quickly filling the new space, and each was finding it difficult to hire all the technical talent they sought.

What is an integrator?

Instead of robot manufacturers customizing their products for all the applications customers require, they rely instead on distributors and integrators to apply their expertise to help the end user customize their robots to fit their unique needs. The multiple roles integrators play in the growing robotics industry has gone unsung, yet they are an integral part of the robotics distribution channel. There is even an integrator certification program offered by robotics associations around the world.

Each of the Big Four robot manufacturers (KUKA, Fanuc, ABB and Yaskawa Motoman) have hundreds of integrators licensed to work with them in sales, service and support of their robots. There are hundreds more integrators that are hardware agnostic, i.e., they select the robot manufacturer that best solves their customer’s requirements. [The Robot Report’s directory of integrators lists more than 450 integrators and plots them on a global map. If you know of an integrator company not on the list and map, please let us know by emailing tips@therobotreport.com. Thanks.]

Recently, with the advent of plug-and-play collaborative robots and the growing use of newer and more user-friendly methods of training and programming, it was thought by many that integrators would become a dying breed replaced by super capable and easy to install and integrate multi-purpose robots. We’re not there yet, nor, are we likely to be there for many years to come. Hence the title of this article.

Integrators offer specialized engineering and programming services that many manufacturers either don’t have the staff to handle, or don’t want to invest in that level of staff. Integrators come in, help define the problem and solution, and then build and test it. Then they pack it up and move it to the manufacturer’s facility and install and integrate it into their in-house systems. They train the operators and when the system and operators are working successfully, they walk away. Job done.

Odense, Denmark

Odense, Denmark, is a pleasant, suburban-style city with a population of 172,000 and a workforce of around 80,000, on an island (Funen) whose workforce (excluding Odense) approximates 140,000. Robotics have played a significant role in the history of the area but particularly in recent years. The four robotic integrators profiled below – all headquartered in or near Odense – employ around 500 workers.

EGATEC A/S

EGATEC A/S specializes in automated end-of-line packaging and palletizing solutions. Rosborg, Denmark is a nursery that grows and sells miniature flowerpots and spices. Rosborg is one of EGATEC’s clients and the two are working together to automate Rosborg’s end-of-line packaging process – a step that handles 12 million plants per year by hand.

Rosborg is already mechanized. They’ve automated their potting and seeding operations. Plants then are placed on mobile trays slowly moving towards the harvesting stations where fully-grown plants are picked, wrapped and packaged for boxing and palletizing. These latter steps are presently done by hand and are the steps being automated by EGATEC.

EGATEC recently acquired A-One Packaging, a supplier of packaging machines for the food industry, to complement their own end-of-line packing robot cells.

Jorgensen Engineering A/S

Jorgensen Engineering A/S specializes in designing and engineering automation for food processing systems. Baby food; pet food; sacks; cans; powders; even the insertion of a measuring spoon (rightmost photo); etc. The 150-person company installs 50+ robots a year into client food-handling production lines. According to Marketing Manager Jesper Johansen (left and center photos), there has been a significant emphasis on hygiene and a shift toward the use of robotics in their solutions perhaps because of the milk powder scandal in China back in 2008. It was about that time that Jorgensen noticed that clients were insisting on robotic solutions for their food handling production problems and stressing that the solutions needed to be sterile and hygienic.

Integrators such as Jorgensen often have to work around client space limitations. I saw one in-process project at the Jorgensen facility that had a big gap in the work area. When I asked about it I was told that it provided space for an existing post located right in the middle of the new production line.

Gibotech A/S

Gibotech A/S and their Gibocare division, are integrators that specialize in providing automation solutions for the healthcare industry using machines, robots and control systems.

I visited with Mikkel Bjerregaard, the Sales Director (left photo). In the center picture, to help a client sort incoming medicines and samples, they developed a robotic vision, handling and sorting solution with their own special-purpose gripper. In the rightmost picture, they helped a hearing aid manufacturer automate the placement of intricate filters (circled in red) on the tip end of plastic sticks and then place those sticks into containers and those containers into shipping boxes.

Cabinplant A/S

Although I didn’t visit Cabinplant A/S, they are another of the integrator companies located in the Odense area. But this one just sold 80% of their shares to CTB, a Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet) company. CTB designs, manufactures and markets agricultural, dairy and poultry processing equipment but, at the present time, they don’t utilize robots in their products and solutions. Cabinplant, on the other hand, designs, manufacturers and integrates food processing automation that often includes robotic equipment. For example, they make and sell a successful sardine cutting and packing robot cell (ever wonder how those little sardines get packed so neatly crisscrossed in those little cans? Or, who cut off their heads and tails?).

CTB’s chairman and chief executive officer Victor A. Mancinelli said, “The acquisition helps CTB to broaden the range of poultry processing options it can offer its customers as well as expanding into new market areas for processing, such as seafood and vegetables. Cabinplant’s knowledge of the food industry and its innovative approach to product development and implementation fit very well with CTB’s approach to its core markets.”

Reading between the lines, one can see that the investment in Cabinplant, an integrator using the latest technologies, and CTB, an integrator needing those very same technologies, was a strategic move that’s a win-win for both companies. It’s also a win for the Odense robotics community… another success, more millionaires to reinvest their time and money in the community, and more positive notoriety for the area. All that is fodder for another article of the coattail effects on the Danish and Odense robotics clusters.

Stay tuned.

PrecisionAg’s editor Eric Sfiligoj has prepared a list of the top 10 technologies that are shaping precision ag today. Most involve some level of robotics, navigation, sensors and variable rate dispensing.

Republished with permission from PrecisionAg – Meister Media Worldwide

1. GPS/GNSS

It’s hard to tell exactly where the state of precision agriculture today would be without GPS — literally. From virtually the moment agriculture gained access to position locating satellites in the 1990s, operators and manufacturers have found various ways to tie into these tools to make managing field work much easier and accurate. “In North America and Europe, growers can turn on the tractor and get to work almost immediately,” says T.J. Schulte, Marketing Manager for Trimble Agriculture Division.

Looking beyond these capabilities, experts say that satellite technology is truly deserving of its “global” moniker. “No longer can we refer to all these systems as GPS — that’s not an accurate description when referring to new Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receiver technology today,” says Greg Guyette, President of Insero. Instead, he adds, GNSS covers all countries’ satellite constellations including GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo.

2. Mobile Devices

After figuring out where precision agriculture stands on the planet, the next most important innovation these past 20 years would have to be the development of mobile devices. The world today would be an entirely different place without them, according to Illinois Grower John Reifsteck. “Without the cell phone, we probably would still be sitting in the barn a lot, waiting for someone to come to the barn and make things work,” says Reifsteck.

Today, cell phones have morphed into a whole host of useful mobile devices including smartphones and tablets. So ingrained has this technology become that experts estimate that there are more mobile devices on today — 7.25 billion — than people (around 7.2 billion).

As of 2016, most precision agriculture manufacturers that dabble in the mobile devices market have spent most of their time trying to expand the capabilities these products can offer to users. “We run our business on the 20-minute rule when it comes to getting information to the user,” says Dr. Marina Barnes, Vice President of Marketing for FarmersEdge. “If you can’t get your technical data to work for the farmer within the first 20 minutes after he receives it, he’s probably never going to use it.”

3. Robotics

Robots are taking on many tasks in agriculture these days (with varying levels of success), including planting greenhouse crops and pruning vineyards. And there’s been no shortage of activity in agronomic crops. The biggest push has been for autonomous machines that are remotely controlled using telematics. Kinze engineers have created an autonomous grain cart system (designed to plug into any tractor) in which the cart follows a combine through the field at safe distance.

Launched in 2011, AGCO’s Fendt Guide Connect leader-follower technology also connects two machines by means of GNSS signal and radio, so that both can be controlled by just one driver. AGCO is continuing to develop the concept based on customers’ input on their farming needs, says Sepp Nuscheler, Fendt Senior Communications Manager at AGCO.

In a different approach, the Fendt MARS (Mobile Agricultural Robot Swarms) project utilizes small corn seeding robots that are lightweight, energy-efficient, highly agile, cloud-controlled and operated from a tablet app. There’s no cab but one off-field operator managing a fleet of multiple MARS units. They can work around the clock and have low maintenance needs. “Look for some exciting developments to be shared on the MARS project in Q4 of this year,” says Nuscheler. “This is one direction we see the future of ag robotics heading — small but smart and many.”

4. Irrigation

Innovations in precision irrigation technologies are growing even more crucial as growers face water scarcity due to drought, aquifer depletion, and water allocations. One recent advance is telemetry, says John Campbell, Manager of Technology Advancement and Adoption with Valley Irrigation. Products now allow growers to remotely monitor and control nearly every facet of their irrigation operation. The systems save water, time, fuel, and wear and tear on vehicles.

In the future, Campbell says producers will be integrating soil moisture monitoring, weather data and variable-rate irrigation (VRI) into their systems.

Ze’ev Barylka, Director of Marketing and Sales at Netafim USA, adds Precision Mobile Drip Irrigation as another major advance. PC dripline is pulled through the field by a center pivot or linear move irrigation system. As the driplines are pulled behind the system, the integrated emitters deliver a uniform pattern across the full length of the irrigated area. Because the driplines deliver water directly to the soil surface, evaporation and wind drift are virtually eliminated, allowing more water to reach the root zone.

5. Internet Of Things

One of the newest buzzwords to hit precision over the past few of years is the “Internet of Things” (IoT). Simply defined, it’s the concept of connecting any device with an on/off switch to the Internet (and/or to each other). This network of connected things could also include people with wearable devices.

The idea has been demonstrated in the consumer market in the “connected home,” for instance, where appliances, security systems, and the like communicate with each other and the homeowner. Craig Houin, Data Management Lead at Sunrise Cooperative, says connected components in agriculture could include field sensors (for logging real-time weather, soil moisture, and temperature data) and aerial/satellite imagery for field monitoring. Such device communications could also be used in dispatching programs, sales interaction tools, and other business management applications.

Most recently, a number of ag start-ups and component suppliers (hardware, software, etc.) are using LPWANs (Low Power Wide Area Network) in place of or to augment cellular networks in wireless data transmission. “These networks are designed to carry small amounts of data transmitted intermittently over long ranges,” says Paul Welbig, Director of Business Development at Senet Inc. Because the devices that communicate with the LPWA networks do so with very low power, their battery lives are substantially longer than the current cellular offerings. This coupled with low cost network usage provides a very compelling total cost of ownership advantage over other options.

6. Sensors

Wireless sensors have been used in precision ag and/to gather data on soil water availability, soil compaction, soil fertility, leaf temperature, leaf area index, plant water status, local climate data, insect-disease-weed infestation, and more. Perhaps the most advanced and diverse technologies to date are found in water management. Across the country, increased regulation of water use and water scarcity will continue to drive improvements in this area. In fact, BCA Ag Technologies’ Ben Flansburg says soil moisture and rainfall sensors have been some big sellers. And many more producers in California are using moisture sensors to help irrigation scheduling.

On-the-go sensor information has become more valuable as well. On-board applicator options developed over the past few years include GreenSeeker (Trimble), OptRx (Ag Leader), and CropSpec (Topcon). They communicate real-time crop health conditions to help immediately tailor product applications.

Another innovation? WeedSeeker, Trimble’s weed detection sensor made for precise site-specific application of herbicides. “Its use is growing in geographic regions where weeds have developed a tolerance to standard glyphosate-based broad spectrum herbicides,” notes Mike Martinez, Marketing Director.

7. Variable Rate Seeding

Given all the newer/exciting technologies for precision agriculture on this list, it might be a surprise to see variable-rate application (VRA) seeding here. According to Sid Parks, Manager of Precision Farming for GROWMARK, this has been able to maintain its importance in part because of its nature. “It appeals to a growers’ natural inclination to try to maximize a field to take advantage of all of the possibilities of increasing the yields possible by paying extra attention to the factors that impact seed growth,” says Parks. “It’s a little different than variable-rate fertilizer because VRA seeding relies on your ability to gather accurate data for the start of the agricultural process, the seed itself.”

Another factor working in VRA seeding’s continued importance to overall precision agriculture is the fact it as a category has plenty of room to grow. “Although folks have been using VRA seeding practices since the mid-1990s, it still is probably only being used on 5% to 10% of the planted acres today,” says Parks. “But the ability to gather good, useful data for VRA seeding is getting much better, so the chances of more growers using this practice in their yearly operations will continue to improve going forward.”

8. Weather Modeling

Visit most of the nation’s ag retail locations and chances are some kind of weather tracker will be on display. Per­haps no other variable is as important — and completely unpredictable — as the weather.

But help is on the way. “Over the past 25 years, you’ve gotten a lot of important technologies developed that would be even more valuable with quality weather modeling, but we are now at a point where assuring good crop yields is key to making certain the world has food solutions that work,” says Jeff Keiser, Vice President of Strategic Sales and Marketing for Iteris. “Here at Iteris, we’ve been in the data modeling business for more than 30 years. Our first agricultural system, ClearAg creates a platform for agriculture and expands into other modeling areas such as water use, soil properties, and crop growth.”

An example of this, says Keiser, involved a potato grower in the Northern Plains that found harvesting his crop at a certain temperature was key for maintaining crop quality and integrity. In the past, this grower sent scouts out into the field to manually assess soil temperatures before sending in the harvest equipment. “But by using ClearAg, this grower was able to take all their soil readings remotely and he was able to accomplish his harvest a lot more efficiently than ever before,” he says.

9. Nitrogen Modeling

Although some forms of variable-rate fertilizer have been used for decades, nitrogen modeling has become more pronounced recently. “Our clientele has been using variable-rate technologies for fertilizer applications since the mid-1990s,” says Matt Waits, CEO for SST Software. “However, the complexity of the nitrogen cycle and how it is in a constant state of flux has always made managing nitrogen difficult.”

Recently, SST Software has partnered with Agronomic Technology Corp. (ATC) to introduce Adapt-N. According to ATC CEO Steve Sibulkin, Adapt-N was first introduced in 2014 and is becoming an important tool for properly managing nitrogen use. “There’s a belief in agriculture that today’s environmental pressures will only get worse as the industry moves forward,” says Sibulkin. “The vast of majority of growers want simple methods to use to be able to address these concerns. That’s what Adapt-N and other nitrogen modeling processes are currently bringing to the table.”

10. Standardization

The call for compatibility across equipment manufacturers’ components — primarily through ISOBUS standards — continues to go out. Official initial efforts to implement this began about eight years ago with the formation of the Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation. The group now includes more than 170 companies, associations, and organizations that are actively collaborating to make the standards work.

Industry participants that have to deal with equipment compatibility “on the ground” continue to be frustrated, however. Third-party tech experts often struggle to manage competing suppliers’ products. Says Tim Norris, CEO of Ag Info Tech, LLC, Mount Vernon, OH: “There will be a point hopefully where components get to be pretty much plug-and-play — and it’s a lot better than it was — but it’s still a real issue.”

Case IH autonomous concept vehicle. Source: cnhindustrial

Case IH (Case New Holland International Harvester) displayed their new cab-less tractor at a farming show in Iowa. The presentation was to show off what they hope will be the future: an autonomous tractor without a steering wheel, pedals or a cab for the driver.

John Deere driverless tractor.

Case IH isn’t the only tractor maker with a cab-less vehicle. Deere has had two iterations of their cab-less concept tractor which has received much attention but resistance in buying. Autonomous Tractor Corp. has their SPIRIT driverless tractor, Fendt, an AGCO company, has their GuideConnect follow-me style system where a lead driver can have many following vehicles.

Certainly, there are advantages to the use of these types of autonomous tractors. They are lighter and will, therefore, reduce soil compaction; they cost much less – one Deere engineer said that cabs, air conditioning, controls and monitors, and other creature comforts in those cabs, often add 50% to the overall cost of a tractor; and one operator can control many of these new tractors; etc.

Case IH autonomous concept vehicle in action.

There are also safety, liability, insurance and legal complications that will need to be handled before this type of farm vehicle can become commercially available. And public acceptance of this type of tractor hasn’t happened yet. There are no buyers.

The new Case concept tractor comes equipped with cameras, radar and GPS, and remote operating software enabling farmers to remotely monitor operations through an app on their computer, tablet or phone. ASI (Autonomous Solutions Inc.), a Utah provider of mobile robots, platforms and navigation systems, partnered with Case in the development of Case’s new cab-less tractor. ASI’s Mobius navigation and collision-avoidance system – included in the new tractor –  is already being used in the mining industry. ASI also makes self-driving kits to retrofit tractors and other vehicles.

Autonomous tractor kit.

“There are no federal rules specifically addressing self-driving tech for tractors, largely because farm equipment is designed for use in fields where it doesn’t pose the same level of risk to other vehicles or people as a self-driving vehicle on a public road. The closest thing to national regulations are safety standards set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but the agency does not have any rules directly aimed at self-driving technology.

That lack of regulations is one reason that the future reached the farm first. But another is pure necessity: There’s a labor crunch in rural America – young people move to the cities, leaving the average age of U.S. farmers at 58 [68 in Japan].”

As new technologies begin to impact farmers – and younger, more digitally adept farmers take more control over their farms and their data – the merits of cab-less tractors and the ability to operate them remotely will finally begin to make fiscal sense. Perhaps as early as the next decade.

August was another big month for funding robotic startups. 18 deals. Almost $430 million (bringing the year-to-date total well over $1 billion)! Plus, another $1 billion paid in August for four acquisitions. 

Fundings:

[Note that three of the companies receiving fundings this month were designers and manufacturers of solid-state LiDAR technology — Velodyne, Innoviz and Quanergy.]

1. Airobotics, an Israeli UAV startup focusing on providing an all-purpose drone solution for industrial applications, raised $22.5 million (in February). Funders, led by CRV,  included BlueRun Ventures, Noam Bardin, Richard Wooldridge and UpWest Labs. The company has 70 employees.
2. Blue Ocean Robotics, a Danish VC and accelerator, announced that an anonymous private investor bought 6.7% of Blue Ocean shares for $1.5 million. Blue Ocean intends to sell over 33% of their shares to get funds to finance their rapid growth (from 3 people in 2013 to 110 people today, plus 21 associated companies in 11 countries).
3. DroneDeploy, a San Francisco-based startup has raised $20 million in Series B funding to (1) grow their drone data management platform and (2) for hiring, product development, sales and marketing. Scale Venture Partners led the investment and was joined by High Alpha Fund.  The DroneDeploy platform allows users to plan flights, pilot drones either one at a time or in fleet formations, and gather and analyze myriad data types to create detailed maps and 3-D models. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to $31 million.
4. Emotech, the UK-based maker of the Olly robot, a product similar to Amazon’s Echo device, has raised $10 million from Chinese venture investors Alliance Capital and Lightning Capital.
5. Farmbot, a Central California startup offering an open source DIY robot and system for home gardens, raised $813,000 from a crowdfunding campaign.
6. Farmers Business Network, an Iowa-based developer of an ag industry software and analytics system, raised $20 million to help farmers avoid spending on what they don’t need as they provide data to help compete with Monsanto and Dupont.
7. Formlabs, a designer and manufacturer of 3D printing systems based in Somerville, Mass., has raised $35 million in Series B funding from Foundry Group and Autodesk.
8. Glowforge, a Seattle-based 3D laser printer company, has raised $22 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Foundry Group and True Ventures. Last year Glowforge set a crowdfunding record by raising $27.9 million in just 30 days. Glowforge printers can be used to cut and engrave on pretty much any surface — exciting DIY and crafts people with their machine, which is smaller and less expensive than most alternatives.
9. Innoviz Technologies, an Israel-based developer of sensors and systems for autonomous vehicles, has raised $9 million in Series A funding. The round included Vertex Venture Capital, Magma Venture Partners, Amiti Ventures, and Delek Investments. Innoviz joins two other LiDAR makers getting funding this month: Velodyne and Quanergy. Read more.
10. Kraken Sonar Inc., a Canadian startup providing sonar, sensors and underwater robotics systems, closed a non-brokered private placement of 7,159,534 shares at a purchase price of $0.12 (USD) per share totaling $827,126.
11. Mavrx, a San Francisco-based developer of aerial imagery technologies focused on the ag industry and big data, has secured $12.42 million of a Series A round, according to a regulatory filing.
12. MicaSense, a Seattle-based agriculture sensor maker, raised $7.4 million from French drone and electronics company Parrot. The recent round piggybacks on Parrots’ previous $2m investment in the company in 2014. MicaSense creates sensor devices that attach to drones. RedEdge, its first product, is a multispectral camera able to capture data over precise wavelengths.
13. NVBots, a Boston-based developer of automated 3D printing solutions, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding led by Woodman Asset Management.
14. Petnet, a Los Angeles startup providing personalized feeding for pets, raised $10 million in a Series A financing. Petco led the round.
15. PRENAV, a Silicon Valley unmanned aerial systems startup, raised $6.5 million in seed financing from lead investor Crosslink Capital, along with Haystack, Liquid 2 Ventures, WI Harper Group and investors Pear Ventures, Toivo Annus, and a number of other investors.
    “Using drones to inspect structures such as cell towers and wind turbines typically requires an expert pilot because GPS isn’t adequate for close proximity flight,” according to Nathan Schuett, CEO of PRENAV.  “The PRENAV system is the first drone to be approved by the FAA that will enable these types of missions to be performed autonomously, where the flight is controlled by a bot on the ground.”
16. Quanergy Systems Inc., a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based provider of solid state LiDAR sensors and smart sensing solutions, has raised $90 million at a valuation of over $1 billion. Backers include Sensata Technologies, Delphi Automotive, Samsung Ventures, Motus Ventures and GP Capital. Read more.
17. Seegrid, a maker of vision-based autonomous industrial vehicles and systems, announced today that the company has raised approximately $12M of equity capital from Giant Eagle, its majority shareholder, and several other existing and new investors, and has a commitment for an additional $13M from Giant Eagle as needed.
    “Seegrid is poised to repeat its 100-percent revenue growth from last year,” said Jim Rock, Seegrid’s CEO. “Seegrid continues to expand its customer base, which currently includes leading global companies such as Whirlpool, Daimler, and Jaguar Land Rover. Our customers use Seegrid’s driverless autonomous vehicle robots to streamline their manufacturing and distribution operations and improve their outstanding safety processes.”
18. Velodyne LiDAR, a Morgan Hill, Calif.-based provider of  technology that lets self-driving cars see and avoid what’s around them, has raised $150 million in equity funding from Ford Motor Co. and Baidu. Velodyne expects an exponential increase in LiDAR sensor deployments in autonomous vehicles and ADAS applications over the next several years, driving high revenue growth. To fulfil the high demand for Velodyne’s products, the company will continue to expand its resources across engineering, operations and manufacturing. In connection with this minority investment round, the Company plans to expand its board of directors to include two independent industry executives. Read more.

Acquisitions:

1. Bionik Labs, a Canadian provider of rehab solutions for individuals with neurological disorders, acquired all of the outstanding shares, assets and liabilities of Interactive Motion Technologies, a Watertown, MA provider of upper extremity rehab robotics, in April, for $23.65 million.
2. DPE Deutsche Private Equity has agreed to sell Westfalia Group, a German maker of towing equipment and integrator of robotic warehousing solutions, to Horizon Global Corp. for around $186 million (including assumed debt).
3. Otto Motors, a SF startup developing self-driving truck system kits, was acquired by Uber for an undisclosed amount. Bloomberg suggests the price is $680 million assuming certain targets are met. The deal was worth about 0.9% of Uber. Also part of the deal, Otto gets 20% of any trucking business profits they end up creating. Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer and one of Otto’s founders, will take charge of Uber’s self-driving car operations as well as continuing to run Otto’s trucking business.
4. Zimmer Biomet has entered the growing surgical robotics field with the purchase of France’s Medtech for an estimated $132 million. According to an SEC filing, Zimmer Biomet agreed to buy 1.4 million shares  from founder Bertin Nahum and other stockholders at a price of $55 per share, as well as all outstanding convertible bonds and warrants previously issued by Medtech to private equity firm Ally Bridge Group. In addition, as soon as possible, and subject to review by the French federal regulator, Zimmer will make an all-cash tender offer to acquire the balance of Medtech shares.

IPOs and stock related:

• None

Failures:

• Neros Automation (DK)

Source: Ford Velodyne LiDAR/YouTube

In anticipation of the need for LiDAR devices in cars with assisted steering and other self-driving technologies, both Velodyne and Quanergy received funding. Quanergy raised $90 million and Velodyne got $150 million.

Source: Frost & Sullivan;VDS Automotive SYS Konferenz 2014/

As can be seen in the chart provided by Frost & Sullivan, LiDARs will play a big role in all phases of the emergence of self-driving vehicles. Hence the immediacy of these two investments in LiDAR technology.

Velodyne LiDAR, a Morgan Hill, Calif.-based provider of technology that allows self-driving cars see and avoid what’s around them, has raised $150 million in equity funding from Ford Motor Co. and Baidu. Velodyne expects an exponential increase in LiDAR sensor deployments in autonomous vehicles and ADAS applications over the next several years, driving high revenue growth. The funds will be used to help Velodyne lower the cost of their LiDAR to between $300 and $500, the price point at which mass adoption becomes practical.

“LiDAR continues to prove itself as the critical sensor for safe autonomous vehicle operation,” said David Hall, founder and CEO, Velodyne LiDAR. “This investment will accelerate the cost reduction and scaling of Velodyne’s industry-leading LiDAR sensors, making them widely accessible and enabling mass deployment of fully autonomous vehicles. We are determined to help improve the goal of safety for automotive vehicles as soon as possible, as well as empower the efficiency autonomous systems offer.”

“We want the cost to be low enough to be used for all cars. We envision a safer world for the millions of automotive drivers across the globe,” said Marta Hall, Velodyne President of Business Development.

Quanergy Systems Inc., a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based provider of solid state LiDAR sensors and smart sensing solutions, has raised $90 million. Backers include Sensata Technologies, Delphi Automotive, Samsung Ventures, Motus Ventures and GP Capital. Quanergy’s solid state LiDAR is included in the frontal piece of the Mercedes test car shown on the right. The solid-state nature of the LiDAR is a significant cost savings and the expected trade price (once full production begins) will be less than $250.

LiDARs aren’t the only components getting funded

In a NY Times story, Delphi and Mobileye said that they had formed a partnership to provide a core self-driving platform to automakers by the end of 2019.

The Mobileye-Delphi collaboration “will accelerate the time to market” and enable carmakers to produce vehicles capable of driving themselves “without the need for huge capital investments,” said Amnon Shashua, chairman and chief technology officer of Mobileye.

Delphi, the former parts division of General Motors, and Mobileye, an Israeli company known for producing the sensors and other technology that help cars recognize obstacles in the road, are both major component providers to the auto industry.

A Bird’s Eye View of AT&T’s Drone Inspection Program, Source: AT&T/YouTube

CNN just inaugurated their new drone division. So have many other news organizations. Network providers are also setting up drone operations for a variety of purposes.

FAA’s new regulations

Part 107 of the Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) clarifies how media are allowed to operate drones, and make it easier for smaller news teams and production companies to utilize these aircraft systems.

“It is going to be easier than what existed with the previous rules,” said Robert Kirk, partner with Wilkinson, Baker, Knauer, LLP.

Under the old rules, you couldn’t operate within 500 feet of people. The new rules specify that a UAS can’t operate over people directly (with the exception of production crews and news teams). Previously, to cover certain events, a news organization had to rent the roof of a garage to get this buffer—but now the rules say you can hover over a news vehicle or much smaller roped-off area.”

The new rules also expand operations to what is essentially termed “civil twilight,” which to the FAA is a very specific time of day. To operate one hour before or after “daylight,” a drone will require lights or other illumination. Previously, those operations were prohibited entirely.

CNN launches CNNAir

Dedicated to aerial imagery and reporting, CNN’s new AIR Division has two full-time operators and a dozen drones of various sizes making up their fleet.

CNN intends to use their drones to add context and understanding to their stories as well as enhancing the production value of their images. They expect their new AIR Division will help improve the storytelling aspect of CNN’s reporting.

CNN, partnering with Georgia Tech, was able to get the FAA to make CNN a “pathfinder” and gave them permission to explore news-gathering opportunities with drones which they did for 18 months prior to launching their new AIR Division.

AT&T, T-Mobile Netherlands and Nokia

AT&T has also been exploring various uses of drones. One very likely use is to launch a tethered drone to hover above a sports or political event to provide enhanced LTE wireless coverage to handle the extra load of people sending photos and videos to share the moment. Flying COWs (Cells on Wings) can also provide communications for disaster response teams.

Another use is to perform aerial inspections of cell towers. By using drones AT&T service people are able to access parts of a tower that a human cannot.

T-Mobile Netherlands recently began using drones to inspect the condition of its network infrastructure. Jeffrey Leentjes, network specialist of T-Mobile, said: “Normally it would take a week of using a cherry picker to get the right photos of the special stadium antennas and antenna masts and perform the checks of these. Now the drone flew around the station and mast in just 15 minutes and we got the right images for our check.”

Nokia is also using drones to conduct network testing. It flew around the Dubai International Stadium gathering network data and key performance indicators as well as tower inspection, radio planning and line of sight testing.

Source: Jibo/YouTube

Bringing a complex new product to market is an intensive process fraught with problems. Getting hardware ready for manufacturing is often the easy part; it’s the software and regulatory compliance that’s often the most challenging. Here are three examples: Ford Motor Co., Velodyne LiDAR and Jibo.

Ford Motor Co.

Ford announced plans to begin delivering fully driverless vehicles – cars without a steering wheel or pedals – in the next five years. It plans to initially target ride-sharing fleets and package delivery services with deliveries to individuals later in the decade. Since human drivers are the most costly piece in the metrics of commercial fleet operations, autonomous driving is the next big push to reduce costs and improve productivity and safety.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, Ford said that it was “keenly focused on fully driverless cars with concern over semiautonomous features [such as adaptive cruise control, emergency braking, and steering assistance] and whether drivers can take over quickly enough when driverless systems are disabled. We’re not going to play in this middle-of-the-road approach,” said Raj Nair, Ford’s product chief.

Ford has decided to not take the incremental approach that many other car companies are taking partly because the regulatory and insurance aspects of autonomous driving haven’t been worked out yet, nor has the artificial intelligence of the control software.

Photo: Velodyne LiDAR HDL-32E

Velodyne LiDAR

Ford also announced a $75 million investment in Velodyne, a Silicon Valley LiDAR maker. Ford’s investment in Velodyne is aimed at helping both Ford and Velodyne successfully recognize objects and navigate traffic. The funds will also be used to help Velodyne lower the cost of their LiDAR to between $300 and $500, the price point at which mass adoption becomes practical.

Baidu, a large Chinese web services and search provider, also participated in the $150 million investment in Velodyne.

Velodyne’s LiDAR sensors provide a full 360 degree 3D environmental view and are used in autonomous vehicles, industrial equipment/machinery, and for 3D mapping and surveillance. As can be seen in the chart provided by Frost & Sullivan, LiDARs will play a big role in all phases of the emergence of self-driving vehicles.

Source: Frost & Sullivan;VDS Automotive SYS Konferenz 2014/

Velodyne’s problem is to get their LiDARs down in cost so that the company can be a major provider of LiDAR sensors for all new vehicles.

Source: Jibo The World’s First Social Robot for the Home/YouTube

Jibo

In a setback to global customers that pre-ordered Jibo’s, Jibo announced that they cannot deliver and will refund those orders, leaving only US and Canada orders unchanged. Jibo had previously announced a general delivery delay of nine months earlier this year.

In the email update to its international backers Jibo writes: “After exploring all the options, we have come to the conclusion that we will not be able to deliver Jibo to your country”, adding this is because the bot “won’t function up to our standards in your country.”

International orders add layer upon layer of localization issues: electrical certifications, language, speech recognition, cultural nuances, etc. Jibo’s solution to these mounting problems was to cancel all international orders and endure the disappointment of customers in the 45 countries involved.

Jibo, a cute social robot that premiered in a very successful IndieGoGo campaign in mid-2014, is now only going to ship to backers in the U.S. and Canada, with deliveries beginning in late October. From social media reports, it seems that there is still a lot of tumult about the software side of Jibo, the SDK, and the app site amongst insiders at Jibo as well as app developers. The consensus is that the initial round of Jibo’s to begin delivery in late October will be very limited in what they can do or what services they can offer.

Hunan Changsha 5S robot store. Source: gog.cn

Chinese consumer manufacturer Midea, after having spent over $4 billion to acquire 94% of German robot maker Kuka, is planning to spend an additional $1.5 billion to turn itself into China’s preeminent robot powerhouse.

Midea plans to build a factory located in Foshan City to expand its capacity to manufacture and assemble robots and robot components. Much of the production will be to produce automatons for homes and individuals, robots similar to SoftBank’s Pepper. Midea expects to ramp up production at the new facility from an initial 7,000 robots annually to 17,000 or more, within 10 years.

Midea is China’s biggest manufacturer of air conditioners, refrigerators and home appliances, employing around 135,000 people. Their investments in robotics as a user and also by buying Kuka, establishing a robot factory, and creating an automaton for home use – underscores their ambition to lead China in automation and robotics.

Midea’s recent investments follow a series of government-led initiatives labeled China Manufacturing 2025, which is aimed at transforming China’s manufacturing industry from low-end mass production into a more profitable model harnessing new technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.

“Midea’s strategy is to be the Chinese leader in robotics and automation,” said Wang Cairong, secretary general of the China Artificial Intelligence Robot Industry Alliance, an industry association. “It may even be a global giant in this field. The Chinese government needs and encourages new “heavyweight” companies in this sector.”

International Data Corporation (IDC) has awarded five pioneering players in the warehouse robotics market with the 2016 IDC Innovators Award. Companies selected met the following criteria: revenue of less than $50 million with an innovative technology, or a groundbreaking new business model, or both.

IDC is a global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. With more than 1,100 analysts worldwide, IDC offers global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. Each year they award hundreds of innovator companies in trending industry segments. 2016’s broad trending segments included:

•     Internet of things platforms
•     Cloud services enablement
•     Platform as a service
•     Machine learning and analytics
•     Image analytics
•     Supply chain execution (under which the sub-group Warehouse Robotics was included)

“Robotics are increasingly being leveraged within warehouses to increase productivity and deliver efficiency improvements. Innovators, such as those that we have identified with these awards, are developing intelligent and collaborative robots to help manage the increased flow of goods through modern warehouses and support picking and packing strategies more aligned to the needs of today’s omni-channel commerce,” said John Santagate, research manager, Supply Chain Execution at IDC Manufacturing Insights.

The five selected IDC award winners

1. Locus Robotics, the Andover, MA startup headed by distribution center owner Bruce Welty. Locus uses sophisticated mapping software for quick set-up and deployment of mobile robots within a warehouse setting.
2. Fetch Robotics, the San Jose, CA startup headed by mobile robot expert Melonee Wise, provides a “robot as a service” business model, offering a cost-effective solution for businesses who might otherwise select a non-robotics option due to cost constraints.
3. Rethink Robotics‘ software allows for ease of set-up and operability with embedded safety features that enable robots to work collaboratively with humans. Rethink, founded by ex-MIT professor and iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks, has helped define the business need and use case for collaborative robotics.
4. Clearpath Robotics, a Canadian startup headed by Matt Rendall, makes two self-driving mobile platforms enabling factories and warehouses to deploy a fleet of vehicles that can move a wide range of materials. Clearpath also makes the popular all terrain Grizzly and Husky mobile robots.
5. GreyOrange Robotics, an Indian startup founded by Samay Kohil, is producing and selling a Kiva look-alike product line with a goods-to-man robotic system that helps automate inventory management.

Warehouse robotics is definitely an emerging robotics industry segment as old-style AGVs are getting eyes and providing point-to-point movement. Combined with clever picking, storing and stocking methods and devices involving both humans and robots, this industry segment is able to handle more picks at a faster rate more reliably than before, hopefully keeping up with consumer demand. Many startups are focused on this area of warehouse robotic innovation complicated when Amazon decided to take Kiva Systems inhouse and not resell their systems. This caused a temporary technology void which is beginning to be filled by these new award-winning vendors – and many others.

New vendors are being announced frequently, e.g.: inVia Robotics just today came out of stealth mode to launch their “goods-to-box” combination of a grabit robot for picking and a transit robot to move picked goods from place to place.

Congrats to the winners!

Spin-offs are disrupting, but often necessary. Here are two recent examples: iRobot sold off its Defense & Security Business Unit to a private equity firm, and Harvest Automation sold the IP and work in process of its warehousing robot group to a new venture-backed startup.

iRobot sells Defense & Security Business Unit to Arlington Partners

iRobot’s Defense & Security Business Unit, according to their annual report, averaged $50 million in sales for three years in a row (2013, 2014 and 2015) while home robots rose from $428 million to $560 million during the same period. The defense unit had difficulty as the wars ended in Iraq and Afghanistan and the DoD and DARPA reduced spending. Simultaneously iRobot was being hounded by activist shareholders to rid itself of the unit so that it could focus on the consumer market. This led to a heated proxy fight about adding activist board members. iRobot won that fight but also announced that it had changed its strategy and decided not to pursue DoD funded research.

iRobot appears to be going about ridding itself of non-consumer products and services. In February 2016, iRobot reached a deal with Arlington Capital Partners, a DC-based private equity firm focused on DoD and government vendors, to sell the unit to Arlington for $45 million. The deal was concluded in April when Arlington established a new company, Endeavor Robotics, manned by the 100-person iRobot staff and Defense Unit executives, and housed in the same but separate facilities adjacent to iRobot.

Less publicized but similarly focused on getting the company 100% into the consumer market was the announcement by iRobot that they were planning to “end our remaining Remote Presence marketing and business development initiatives. As we reported on our Q4 2015 call, we had already reallocated R&D resources, from a next generation Remote Presence platform, to consumer opportunities. Going forward, 100% of the company’s resources will be exclusively focused on the consumer.” Their Remote Presence Unit consisted of the AVA line of mobile robots and their joint ventures with InTouch Health and Cisco. When I asked what this meant, iRobot responded:

“During the second quarter, iRobot made the decision to end its remaining Remote Presence marketing and business development initiatives – ending the productizing of Ava 500. While iRobot believes that there is a future in remote presence, the Ava 500 market didn’t develop fast enough to justify sustaining the ongoing investment. As iRobot previously reported on its Q4 2015 investor call in February, the company had already reallocated Remote Presence R&D resources, from a next generation Remote Presence platform, to consumer opportunities.

As iRobot’s greatest opportunities currently lie in developing robotic solutions for the home, the company must put its focus toward this effort to reach its full potential. Going forward, 100% of the company’s resources will be exclusively focused on the consumer market.”

Through its venture unit, iRobot has invested in 6 River Systems, a startup attempting to provide a warehousing solution to the problems caused by Kiva Systems and their novel goods-to-man mobile robot system taken in-house by Amazon and becoming unavailable to all others. That iRobot investment, plus their forthcoming robotic lawnmower, and their new arrangement with Amazon Cloud Services, which may enable connected home access for iRobot products, all offer new commercial opportunities for growth. Also, their new Shanghai facility and Asian e-commerce operation are coming online and they have high hopes for both of those activities.

Endeavor Robotics

“Our team is developing innovative new technology that will propel our growth, as well as actively reviewing acquisition opportunities that will continue to position Endeavor Robotics as an industry leader. The U.S. Department of Defense is planning at least three major ground robot program acquisitions in the next few years. Based on our combat-proven platforms and leading technology, Endeavor Robotics is well-positioned for all three. We anticipate substantial growth over the next several years, both domestically and with our international customers,” said Tom Frost, President of Endeavor Robotics.

“As an independent company dedicated to tactical robotics, Endeavor Robotics will have new flexibility to meet the needs and protect the lives of our customers serving on the frontline and in dangerous environments. We’ve always done our best work when we worked closely with our customers. Our new structure enables us to double down on that strategy. We believe that the future is in open architecture and collaborative solutions and we look forward to making that a reality.”

Shortly after the transfer and their opening vision statements, Endeavor announced two strategic partnerships with RE2 Robotics and Persistent Systems. Both arrangements appear to be geared toward winning the DoD’s three upcoming ground robot proposals.

1. The former deal is to integrate RE2’s manipulator with Endeavor’s robots. “The direct benefit of IOP compliant payloads is that it enables developers to concentrate on their specific areas of expertise. The state of the art manipulation technology that RE2 develops can be easily integrated on Endeavor’s robotic platforms, quickly getting the best capabilities to the warfighter,” stated Jorgen Pedersen, president and CEO of RE2 Robotics.
2. The latter integrates Persistent’s MPU5 radios into Endeavor’s robots. Persistent Systems’ Wave Relay MANET technology, enables operators of Endeavor robots to Increase operational range in urban areas and other radio-challenged environments, by providing operators and supporting personnel views of real-time video and telemetry feeds from all robots within the MANET, and enabling a more secure network to protect information through advanced cyber-security protocols.

Although Endeavor hasn’t announced any new contracts thus far, there was a year’s worth of existing DoD contracts transferred with the sale/spin-off plus they have Arlington Capital to help with funding.

Harvest Automation sells assets, prototypes and IP to NextShift Robotics

A plant-moving robot from Billerica-based Harvest Automation. Source: harvestai/YouTube

Throughout 2015, for a year and a half, Harvest Automation split their energies between their business in agricultural field robots that transported and positioned potted plants, and a new, flexible material handling robot, in a new and separate work division. The new robot would work in factories, warehouses and distribution centers. The results of this new division’s efforts were uncertain, optimistic, and costly. During those 18 months the ag business went dormant and key people left. Joe Jones, one of the founders and CTO, left to lead a startup developing a robotic weeding device for home gardens. Others joined Harvest to help transition the single-purpose field robot with a limited skill set into a multi-purpose, self-navigating, material handling robot in an even bigger warehousing pick-and-transport system. MaryEllen Sparrow came with a background in warehousing and distribution center software to head up the software development team.

Funding got hard because the transition was taking longer and costing more than expected and their first product demonstrations left much to be desired. Although the agricultural side of the business, headed by Charlie Grinnell, was self-sufficient, it didn’t generate enough money to fund the warehousing robot project, and the company, in order to stay afloat and preserve the ag business, decided to sell off the assets, intellectual property and prototypes for the material handling operation for an undisclosed amount a few angel investors including Sparrow.

Harvest Automation and its now-strictly ag business is attempting to recover from being inactive for so long, and is also developing new ag services such as helping pickers by moving their harvested items to the packing station and bringing them containers. Harvest Automation is hoping to expand its target audience from nurseries to vegetable and fruit growers.

NextShift Robotics

NextShift Robotics is the entity created by the angel investors that acquired the IP and prototypes. MaryEllen Sparrow became the CEO. She and a very small team are working to get their new robots to be able to take a tote and transport it from point to point as directed by an elaborate warehouse management and ordering system. This involves improving their method of navigation, their approach to getting goods onto the robot’s carrying platform, and the warehouse management and ordering system control and integration software.

NextShift expects to trial their new creation later this year at a couple of pilot warehouse locations.

Despite all the high-profile billion-dollar acquisitions, eg: ARM by SoftBank, KUKA by Midea and Uber China by Didi Chuxing, M&A are down 19% this year, according to both Forbes and CB Insights. Buyers are buying, but they are seeking cash-positive market-realistic targets. Values (both monetary and vanity) are taking a hit. What’s a startup to do?

According to CB Insights, startups can (1) get bought at a lower valuation and take the hit; (2) lower their cash burn rate and play the long game; or, (3), if they already have strong fundamentals and good growth, continue on.

Source: cbinsights.com

Nevertheless, July’s fundings and acquisitions were substantial, and this month we’ve added a new ancillary category (Related fundings) to give an indication of the level of funding in AI and deep learning startups.

Acquisitions

• Update: When General Motors announced in March that it was buying Cruise Automation, Forbes reported that the undisclosed purchase price was just over $1 billion. GM chief financial officer Chuck Stevens said in a recent earnings call that it only paid out approximately $600 million (split between cash and stock). Payouts above the $600 million ― including earn-outs related to commercial or technological milestones which are estimated by Forbes to be around $400 million ― are being considered by the company to be employment costs instead of acquisition costs.
• 5D Robotics acquired Time Domain, a provider in Ultra-Wideband (UWB) product development and services, for an undisclosed amount. 5D has partnered with Time Domain since 2012, adapting the latter’s PulsON® ranging radios into precision autonomous navigation and positioning solutions for a wide variety of air and ground vehicles. The transaction strengthens the combined entity’s position in vehicle autonomy through a combination of products, intellectual property (over 100 patents), and a staff of over 50 people.
• In a move similar to the 2015 deal where Uber hired almost the complete staff of CMU’s NREC, Toyota hired the entire 16-member software engineering staff of Jaybridge Robotics, the company providing software automation of industrial vehicles across a range of industrial applications including agriculture, mining, marine, and rail. Jaybridge-engineered autonomous systems have logged thousands of hours in the hands of end-users. Jaybridge Robotics, Inc. remains an independent company and will continue to provide support for existing clients.
• Permira, a European private equity firm and the owner of Intelligrated, a Mason, Ohio-based provider of fulfillment solutions, sold its shares to Honeywell for $1.5 billion in cash. Toyota Industries was also bidding on the deal. Permira acquired the company in 2012 for approximately $500 million.
• Voith agreed to sell its 25.1% stake in German robot maker Kuka to China’s Midea thereby cinching the takeover even before the close of the initial tender offer. KUKA and Midea negotiated an agreement whereby KUKA got assurances that jobs and plants in Germany will be protected until the end of 2023 and Midea agreed not to pursue a domination agreement or de-listing of KUKA’s shares. As a result, KUKA’s management endorsed the arrangement and their two biggest shareholders (Voith being one) tendered their shares to Midea. The public tender, plus the two big shareholders, gave Midea 72.18% of the shares. Combined with what they already owned, Midea has 85.69% ownership. From July 21, through August 3, Midea announced another tender offer – with the same valuation and share price – to acquire as many more of the shares as possible. Read more.
• Google bought French Moodstocks, a visual recognition machine learning technology company for an undisclosed amount. Moodstocks’ engineers and researchers have been developing new algorithms for visual recognition of objects, particularly those viewed by cameras in mobile devices.

Fundings

• Wonder Workshop, a Sunnyvale, CA-based maker of robots that teach kids computer science and coding fundamentals, raised $20 million in Series B funding. WI Harper Group and Idea Bulb Ventures co-led the round, and were joined by Learn Capital, Charles River Ventures, Madrona Venture Group and TCL.
• UBTech (Union Brother Technology), a Shenzhen startup developing small consumer humanoid robots, got $100 million in a Series B funding round led by CDH Investments with CITIC Securities. UBTech’s new $1,300 Alpha2 robot is getting lots of media attention and is going on sale in time for Christmas.
• Cambridge Medical Robotics, a UK developer of a robotic system for keyhole surgery, has raised $20 million in Series A funding. Backers include LGT Global Invest, ABB Technology Ventures and Cambridge Innovation Capital.
• Civil Maps, an Albany, CA developer of high-definition 3D maps and centimeter-level localization, got $6.6 million in a seed round from Ford, Motus Ventures and three others.
• Autonomous Marine Systems got $1.6 million in a seed round (in February) that enabled a $1.9 match grant funding with all the funds going towards fulfilling DoD contracts to provide long duration ocean observation.
• Flyability, got $4.3 million from a Series A funding from MKS Alternative Investments, Go Beyond Investing, and Environmental Technologies Fund. Flyability, a Swiss startup, develops Gimball, a collision-proof drone. Flyability hopes to enable new applications in inspection, rescue and security.

Related fundings

According to TechSci Research, the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is projected to grow at a CAGR of around 75% during 2016-2021. Continuous research and development in healthcare, autonomous vehicles, security and access control, robotics-as-a-service, agriculture, cyber security, and other verticals are expected to fuel the growth as are smart wearables, and the head-up display screen market. Frost & Sullivan’s report about deep learning enabling the unravelling of layers of patterns in data is also propelling the AI boom. This is where it becomes really interesting both users and makers of robotics. Frank Chen, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital and private equity firm, said this about deep learning:

It is absolutely non-controversial that deep learning is the most fundamental advance in A.I. research since the start [of A.I.] in 1956. We [Andreessen Horowitz] think A.I. and deep learning can be a fundamental and technology platform shift as mobile and cloud have been in the last 5-10 years… All the serious applications from here on out need to have deep learning and AI inside in exactly the same way that all serious computing systems needed to have Intel chips inside of them. I think now about the startups that we see, that deep learning needs to be inside these new systems as a fundamental technique that we expect to see in all serious applications moving forward.

Read and view more about deep learning here. With Frank Chen’s words in mind, the following companies which got funded recently are blurring the line between robots, robotics and bots powered by AI, cloud computing, and deep learning analytics:

• Prospera is an Israeli startup collecting and providing tools to help growers understand newly available data using computer vision, data science, and machine learning to monitor and analyze crops. Prospera raised $6.75 million in Series A funding in a round led by Israeli VC Bessemer Venture Partners.
• Kimera Systems, a Oregon-based developer of an embedded learning AI, got an undisclosed amount of seed funding. Kimera’s Nigel fuses together a broad range of soft and hard sensor data, achieving moment-to-moment contextual awareness, allowing it to learn and apply what it understands to real-world situations, much like a human does.
• FiveAI, a UK start-up using artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate the arrival of fully autonomous vehicles, got $2.7 million of equity funding in a round led by Amadeus Capital Partners.
• Vision Labs, a Russian vision systems startup, raised  $5.5 million in a Series A round from Sistema Venture Capital. VisionLabs will use the funds to improve its face recognition technology, ramp up sales and expand into new markets including the US, Europe and Asia. The company’s core product is a recognition platform – VisionLabs LUNA – which allows near real-time recognition of millions of faces from video and photo streams in order to identify people.
• FogHorn Systems, a developer of IoT software for industrial and commercial vertical markets, got $14.5 million in Seed and Series A fundings from March Capital, GE Ventures, The Hive and the VC arms of Bosch, Darling and Yokogawa Electric. FogHorn is developing edge intelligence AKA “fog computing”. The company’s fog computing platform is a critical enabler for a new class of powerful real-time analytics, machine learning models and edge computing applications in a wide variety of industrial and enterprise use cases.

Failures

• NavCPU, a Russian mobile robotics startup

Source: Momentum Machines

Re-joining the ranks, Sony announced a return to robotics. Momentum is opening a robot hamburger shop. And Starship is beginning to deliver food to three cities in Europe.

Sony

At a recent stockholders meeting, Sony Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai said that Sony, a conglomerate that has divisions in finance, network services and entertainment in addition to hardware, planned to move toward a more ambitious future and that robotics will play a role in that journey.

“We need to push the envelope to really grow Sony into other parts in all of the electronics business, where we know we could make a difference,” Mr. Hirai told The Wall Street Journal, in an interview. “You can have all these great services and content, but there is a device you need to enjoy it, or actually to feed information to the network,” he said.

Hirai also said that Sony is planning a new wave of consumer robots that will be able to bond with humans, suggesting that Sony will begin selling a competing line of products to SoftBank Robotics’ Pepper home robots, Jibo, and Amazon’s Alexa line. Sony already has an extensive electronics line including GoPro and drone add-on gimbals, cameras and other devices.

Years ago, Sony developed the Aibo robotic dog – a charming interactive product that sold 150,000 units from 1999 to 2006. Toward the end, Sony upgraded Aibo to use a camera to recognize its owner and added extra personalities to its repertoire of moves and responses. Competing companies, particularly Dongbu Robot, a Korean company, use newer technology — and lower costs — to offer Aibo-like toy robot dogs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l2P8Uz0LkA

The business model for new Sony robotic products involves selling a robot that requires a reoccurring subscription service for data and maintenance with frequent software updates, a similar plan to Pepper.

Momentum Machines

A June San Francisco area Craigslist ad advertised for a restaurant generalist to work at a Folsom Street store selling robot-made hamburgers. The store, at 680 Folsom Street, is on the ground floor of a 14-story office building, south of Market Street in the heart of San Francisco.

“This location will feature the world-premiere of our proprietary and remarkable new advances in technology that enable the automatic creation of impossibly delicious burgers at prices everyone can afford. The burgers sold at 680 Folsom will be fresh-ground and grilled to order, served on toasted brioche, and accented by an infinitely personalizable variety of fresh produce, seasonings, and sauces.” [Editorial comment: Wow! What a mouthful!]

SF is home to the popular automat-style restaurant Eatsa which takes orders for quinoa bowls via iPad and places them in cubby-holes ready for payment and pickup. The ordering process for Eatsa is to walk up to an iPad and construct and pay for your order whereupon it gets delivered to a cubby earmarked for you. It is likely that Momentum plans something similar for its new as-yet unnamed hamburger store, perhaps with a more personal delivery method combining other items like drinks and fries.

Starship Technologies

Starship, an Estonian startup funded by two of the founders of Skype, has been testing a mobile delivery robot in 12 countries for the last nine months. The devices have traveled 5,000 miles and met over 400,000 people, according to Starship’s Marketing and Comms Manager:

“We have learnt a lot in those 5000 miles of testing!  We learned that 60-65% of people don’t pay the robot any attention. The robot integrates in public life a lot easier than we thought it would. The remaining % of people are overwhelmingly positive. We were also, of course, trialing the technology and the reliability of the robots. In all of these tests, we were pleasantly surprised.

The tests were conducted mainly in Tallinn, Estonia and London. We also tested in many other countries including the US, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Austria, Spain, etc.

[Regarding our new trial], we haven’t changed much, apart from putting more robots onto the streets for testing. We want to increase the number of miles driven on sidewalks around the world to get even more accurate data.  The major difference between our new testing program in UK, Germany and Switzerland is that, for the first time in our history, we are signing up commercial partners like Just Eat. This enables us to enter into a new phase of testing and start doing real world deliveries in real world environments.

[In answer to a question as to the cost of the robot devices] We are a delivery company, and therefore it is unlikely we will be selling the robots. We will be providing a delivery service which includes the robots, the maintenance, the human oversight and everything in-between! All for a monthly fee!”

Starship will be working with London food delivery startup Pronto as well as German parcel company Hermes and the Metro Group of retailers, plus, Just Eat restaurant food delivery to trial on-your-schedule-delivery of packages, groceries and meals.

The number of research reports studying the robotics industry is growing exponentially. To date in 2016 there have been 109 on subjects ranging from overly broad to very drilled-down views of the industry. Prices range from $800 to $6,500.

Below are short profiles of 62 of those reports and the other 47 can be seen here. Many of the reports duplicate the coverage of others and frequently differ in their forecasts about the future. Some reports are marginally useful, others are full of valuable information. Bottom line: almost all of the reports are forecasting positive double-digit growth for most segments of the robotics industry.

Consistent with previous reports, and with The Robot Report‘s monthly fundings, acquisitions and IPOs recaps, the drone segment has the most activity – 35 of the 109.

The official industry reports, which tabulate the results from all the robot associations around the globe, produced by the International Federation of Robotics, appear at the bottom.

Industrial robotics (9)

• Frost & Sullivan, in a May 2016, 95-page $4,950 report, analyzed the top 10 technologies in advanced manufacturing and automation. Their list includes: additive manufacturing, digital manufacturing, collaborative robotics, agile robots, exoskeletons, micro manufacturing, multi-material joining, composites manufacturing, UUVs, and Maglev.
• Global industrial robotics market, February 2016, Markets and Markets, $4,650
  The global industrial robotics market is expected to reach $79.58 billion by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 11.92% between 2016 and 2022.
• European industrial robotics market, May 2016, 55 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  The analysts forecast the European industrial robotics market to grow at a CAGR of 8.42% during the period 2016-2020.
• Industrial robotics market in APAC, May 2016, 70 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts the industrial robotics market in APAC to grow at a CAGR of 8.7% during the period 2016-2020 in the top 5 segments: automotive, food & bev, industrial machinery, electronics and semiconductor, and other (includes oil and gas, pharmaceutical, plastic and rubber, and heavy industries).
• Asia-Pacific robotics technology market, March 2016, 135 pages, Allied Market Research, $2,850
  An analysis of the APAC countries use and planned use by market, component and application.
• Global robot machine tools, April 2016, 69 pages, TechNavio, $,2500
  Forecasts the global robot machine tools market to grow at a CAGR of 5.13% during the period 2016-2020.
• Global rubber & plastic industrial robotics market, May 2016, 53 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Predicts the global industrial robotics market in the rubber and plastic industry to grow at a CAGR of 18% through 2020.
• Global assembly robots, April 2016, 196 pages, Grace Market Data, $2.980
  Global assembly robots market is expected to see fast growth and rapid change during the period 2016-2022.
• Global welding robots, April 2016, 199 pages, Grace Market Data, $3,600
  Annual shipment and sales revenue in this sector are expected to see two-digit CAGRs over the period 2016-2022.

Professional service & military robots (7)

• Security robots, June 2016, 174 pages, Markets and Markets, $5,650
  The global security robots market was valued $1.34 billion in 2015 and is forecast to reach $2.36 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 8.56% between 2016 and 2022.
• Global construction robots, May 2016, TechNavio, $2,500
  The global market for construction robots will exhibit steady 5% CAGR growth during the forecast period to 2020.
• Global military robots, April 2016, 72 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts the global military robots market to grow at a CAGR of 9.36% during the period 2016-2020.
• Global PR robots market, May 2016, 56 pages, $2,500, TechNavio
  The report predicts the global public relation robots market to grow at a CAGR of more than 26% through 2020.  One of the primary drivers for this market is the rising need to improve productivity and efficiency in the hospitality sector.
• Global educational robots market, May 2016, 57 pages, $2,500, TechNavio
  Predicts the global educational robots market to grow at a CAGR of more than 21% through 2020.
• Global service robotics, December 2015, Markets and Markets, $4,650
  Expected to grow from $6.97 billion in 2014 to $18.02 billion by 2020 at a CAGR of 17.36% between 2015 and 2020.
• Global entertainment robots, July 2016, 54 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  The global market for entertainment robots and guides will grow at a CAGR of over 20% from 2016 to 2020.

Mobile & collaborative robots (4)

• Global collaborative robots market, June 2016, 200 pages, Grace Market Data, $3,800
  Market is expected to witness an exponential growth, with annual shipment and sales revenue from hardware and software growing at more than 42% annually through 2022.
• Global mobile robotics, April 2016, 98 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecast the global mobile robotics market to grow at a CAGR of 12.21% during the period 2016-2020.
• AGVs by vision method by use, May 2015, 141 pages IndustryARC, $5,250
  Notes that battery-less AGVs are gaining market momentum because AGVs can work longer shifts without recharging.
• Unmanned surface vehicles, April 2016, 157 pages, Markets and Markets, $4,650
  The Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) market is projected to grow from $437.57 million in 2016 to $861.37 million by 2020, at a CAGR of 14.51%.

Emerging technologies (4)

• 5G and robotics, July 2016, 65 pages, Mind Commerce, $995
  The 5G-enabled autonomous robot market (which includes robotics, IoT, big data and analytics, and AI companies) is forecast to reach $14.6 billion by 2030. North America will lead the 5G-enabled autonomous robot market with a 41% revenue share.
• Smart machines market, May 2016, 54 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts the smart machines market in the Americas to grow at a CAGR of 14.96% during the period 2016-2020.
• A.I. market by technology, February 2016, 150 pages, Markets and Markets, $4,650
  Artificial Intelligence market forecast to grow from $419.7 million in 2014 to $5.05 billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 53.65% from 2015 to 2020.
• Global robotic software platforms market, May 2016, 54 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts the global robotic software platforms market to grow at a CAGR of 4.17% during the period 2016-2020.

Remote presence robotics (2)

• Teleoperation & telerobotics in industrial IoT, April 2016, 67 pages, Mind Commerce, $1,995
  Overall robotics market for industrial IoT will be worth $45.73 billion by 2021.
• Global telepresence robots, June 2016, 57 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  The global telepresence robots market is forecast to record a CAGR of more than 53% until 2020.

Material handling and logistics (4)

• Automated material handling market, June 2016, 108 pages, Knowledge Sourcing Intelligence, $4,200
  Automated material handling market – including robotic solutions – estimated to be worth $18.55 bn in 2015 and will expand to $33.6 bn by the end of 2021 at a CAGR of 10.4%.
• Global logistics robots industry, June 2016, 153 pages, Big Market Research, $2,000
  Forecasts that the sector will register a 32% CAGR through 2020.
• Global material handling robots, April 2016, 217 pages, Grace Market Data, $3,800
  Unit shipments and sales revenue for the material handling robots sector are forecast to be two-digit CAGRs over the period of 2016-2022.
• US warehouse robotics industry, March 2016, 131 pages, QYResearch, $3,800
  Includes profiles of Amazon, Hitachi, Swisslog, Hi-tech Robotic Systemz, GreyOrange and Fetch Robotics.

Self-driving vehicles and systems (2)

• Global truck platooning systems, June 2016, 71 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Truck platooning is perceived as the future of the transportation industry. Multiple trucks travel at an aerodynamically efficient distance and drive cooperatively by maintaining the distance. EU holds a clear lead for truck platooning by 2025.
• ADAS Market, February 2016, 200 pages, BIS Research, $3,999
  ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems include automated cruise control, parking assistance, collision avoidance, rear view, blind spot detection, speed control, driver drowsiness alert, etc.) shipments expected to reach 60.5 million units by 2022.

Agricultural robots and drones (5)

• Ag drones market, June 2016, 166 pages, Markets and Markets, $4,650
  The agriculture drones market Is forecast to reach $4.2 billion by 2022.
• Global precision ag market, February 2016, 234 pages, BIS Research, $3,999
  Industry to grow to over $7.6 billion by 2022.
• Global agricultural drones and robots market, April 2016, Infinium Global Research, $4,795
  Global agricultural drones market is expected to surpass $3.5 billion while agriculture robotics market is expected to exceed $8.1 billion by 2021.
• Agricultural drones, Apr 2016, 288 pages, WinterGreen Research, $4,100
  The worldwide market for agricultural drones was $494 million in 2015 and anticipated to reach $3.69 billion by 2022.
• A.I. in the ag industry, April 2016, 31 pages, Frost & Sullivan, $1,500
  Describes A.I. use cases in 5 areas of ag: precision ag, ag drones, vertical farming, driverless tractors, and open data. Forecasts that all ag providers will become technology providers.

Healthcare/Surgical robots (3)

• Robotic surgery market, June 2016, 51 pages, Koncept Analytics, $800
  Image-guided laparoscopic control, rehabilitation robotics and expanded use of robots in general surgery are on the rise but expansion is hindered by effect of soft tissue challenges, challenge of laparoscope control, and regulatory risk.
• Wearable robots and exoskeletons, May 2016, 453 pages, Wintergreen Research, $4,100
  Wearable robots and exoskeletons, at $36.5 million in 2015, are anticipated to reach $2.1 billion by 2021.
• Global medical robotics, March 2016, 122 pages, Intelliroi, $4,025
  Global medical robotics market is expected to reach $11.4 billion by 2020 from $4.3 billion in 2015 at a CAGR of 23.2%.

Commercial & Military UAV/UAS market (20)

Trends for drones show an increasing adoption of hybrid-fueled drones; a growing adoption of nano drones; increasing mergers, acquisitions and consolidations; emerging drone insurance; declining selling prices; rising product bundling; and increasing regulations for commercial drones.

Military drones

• Global military airborne collision avoidance systems (ACAS) market, June 2016, 75 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  The report forecast the global military ACAS market to grow at a CAGR of 4.5% during the period 2016-2020.
• Global military UAV market, June 2016, 165 pages, Strategic Defence, $4,800
  Global military UAV market will grow at a CAGR of 4.89% to $13.7 billion by 2026.
• Military & commercial drones, June 2016, 185 pages, Mind Commerce, $1,995
  Press release didn’t provide any teaser or forecast information.
• Global VTOL UAS market, April 2016, 71 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  The global vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) market to grow at a CAGR of around 11% through 2020.
• Military drones market, April 2016, 868 pages, Wintergreen Research, $4,100
  The worldwide market for military drones is $4.4 bn in 2015 and forecast to Increase to $6.8 bn by 2022.
• UCAV – unmanned combat aerial vehicles, March 2016, 44 pages, Strategic Defence Intelligence, $1,950
  Demand for UCAVs will be very high or high in the US, China, and the UK over the next five years.

Commercial non-military drones

• Global commercial drone market, May 2016, 250 pages, TechSci Research, $3,700
  The global market for commercial drones is projected to grow at a CAGR of over 27% during 2016-2021.
• Civil UAS market, April 2016, Frost & Sullivan, $1,500
  The civil unmanned aerial systems (UAS) market is growing rapidly as public agencies are exposed to the benefits of aerial photography, video, and other sensing capabilities.
• UAV payload and avionics market, May 2016, 131 pages, BIS Research, $3,599
  UAV payload and avionics market to grow at a CAGR of 8.3% from 2016 to 2022 and reach over $3.9 billion by the end of 2022.
• Drones for wind turbine inspection, November 2015, 69 pages, Navigant, $4,600
  Revenue for wind turbine UAV sales Is forecast to total $6 billion by 2024; support and inspection services $1.6 billion.
• Smart autonomous flight technology market, April 2016, 212 pages, Wintergreen Research, $4,100
  The worldwide market for smart drone technology (cameras, auto pilots, collision avoidance systems, communication systems, etc.) was $137M in 2015 and is forecast to reach $2.7 bn by 2022.
• Public safety drone market, May 2016, 20 pages, Arcluster, $2,450
  Market for search and rescue and public safety drones is forecast to grow at 127% through 2021.
• Consumer drones, June 2016, 66 pages, Tractica, $3,800
  Forecasts the segment to reach a market value of $5.0 bn by the end of 2021 and that worldwide consumer drone unit shipments will increase from 6.4 million in 2015 to 67.7 million units annually by 2021.
• Consumer camera drones market, April 2016, 881 pages, WinterGreen Research, $4,100
  The worldwide market for camera drones is $2 billion anticipated to reach $21.5 billion by 2022.
• First responder UAVs, January 2016, 344 pages, Market Info Group, $4,950
  Report combines a market and technology forecast with an operating concept and buying guide for the first responder industry.
• Sensors for drones and robots market, March 2016, Yole Development, $6,250
  The sensors for drones and robots market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.4% from 2015 to 2021, reaching a total revenue of $709M by 2021.
• Small drones market, April 2016, 156 pages, IndustryARC, $5,250
  Small drones include medium, micro, mini and nano-sized drones but all vendors seem to be multi-rotor.
• UAV propulsion market, May 2016, 121 pages, BIS Research, $3,599
  The UAV propulsion market is forecast to capture a market value of $2.7 billion in 2015 with gas turbine engine segment the highest share followed by piston, wankel, solar power, electrically powered and hybrid systems.
• Drone transponders, June 2016, 268 pages, Wintergreen Research, $4,100
  The worldwide market for drone transponders is forecast to Start from zero and reach $2.5 billion by 2022.
• LiDAR drone market, May 2016, 125 pages, Markets and Markets, $4,650
  The LiDAR drone market was valued at $16.1 million in 2015 and is expected to reach $144.6 million by 2022 at a CAGR of 35.2% between 2016 and 2022.

The official industry research reports (2)

Source: The Robot Report, via worldrobotics.org

The fact-based backbone for many of these research reports is the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) annual World Robotics Industrial Robots and World Robotics Service Robots reports. These two books represent the official tabulation from all the robot associations around the world.

The 2016 reports cover 2015 activity. The two 2016 reports can be purchased for $2,000. The reports will be published later this summer

First, the KION Group acquires Dematic for $2.5 billion. A week later, Honeywell acquires Intelligrated for $1.5 billion. KION acquires Retrotech and earlier still Egemin, while Kuka acquires Swisslog. What’s going on?

Times are changing in logistics and fulfillment. With a greater and growing share of orders occurring online, the need for speedy fulfillment has increased and older warehousing methods are rapidly getting stressed and becoming outdated. These problems were exacerbated by the fact that businesses put off investing in material handling equipment and systems during the financial crisis years and are now buying to make up for lost time. Also, companies need to relieve the strain on their logistics systems by switching to newer technologies rather than building new facilities with all the consequent racking systems, elevators and conveyors.

The days of AGVs slowly following marked paths in carefully secured areas are gone. Mobility, vision and powerful warehouse and order processing software are the new technologies being offered by inventive new providers like Kiva Systems (acquired by Amazon), Symbotic, Dematic (acquired by KION Group), C&D Skilled (acquired by Euroimpiati), Fetch Robotics, Grenzebach, GreyOrange Robotics, Hatteland, Magazino, RMT Robotics (acquired by Cimcorp), and many others.

Thus the timing is right for consolidations and strategic acquisitions amongst the providers of older technologies and those offering newer tech.

Honeywell acquires Intelligrated for $1.5 billion

Honeywell‘s material handling solutions are somewhat old school providing monitoring and safety systems along with data capture and data collection hardware and software. Their use of the term mobility refers to software on smart tablets rather than mobile devices that roam around warehouses, distribution centers and factories. At the recent material handling tradeshow MODEX 2016, in Atlanta, Honeywell had a small presence showing image and laser-based data collection hardware for barcode and RFID scanning and voice-enabled workflow.

Intelligrated has been a successful integrator of mobile and stationary robotic solutions and systems for 20+ years for manufacturing, warehousing and distribution material handling and automated storage and retrieval. With $900M in annual sales, 3,100 employees in facilities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil and China. In recent years the company has posted double-digit year-over-year growth. Intelligrated brings a large IP portfolio of warehouse automation, order fulfillment and software solutions and has an extensive presence in North American e-commerce and the retail, and food and beverage markets.

Honeywell has money and need, particularly if they want to remain in the fast-changing logistics business, and that’s fodder for making strategic acquisitions before all the good companies get taken by others (as seems to be happening).

The KION Group acquires Dematic for $2.5 billion

The KION Group has been on an acquisitions tear using funding from their largest shareholder, a Chinese state-owned company. Earlier this year they acquired Retrotech, a US integrator of logistics systems, and last year they acquired Egemin, a Belgian maker of warehouse AGVs. Their most recent acquisition is Dematic for which they are paying $2.5 billion.

A bit of history

The material-handling division of forklift maker Linde AG, including the STILL brand of trucks and lifts, was spun off to create the KION Group in August 2006 and was sold to investment funds KKR and Goldman Sachs in December 2006. The KION Group acquired Baoli, a Chinese lift manufacturer, in 2009. In 2012, Weichai Power (whose massive circular office complex pre-dates Apple’s) acquired a 25% stake in KION Group and a 70% stake in Linde. It was, at the time, the largest direct investment by a Chinese company in a German company. In 2013, Weichai, through its subsidiary Shandong Heavy Industry Group, increased its holdings to 30%, and later purchased a 3.3% share from Superlift, the then top shareholder of KION. Weichai subsequently became the new top shareholder with an ownership of 33.3% and the right of control. Recently, the German press reported that Weichai again increased its holdings by another 5%, to a 38.25% stake, which helped Weichai cement control of the group. Weichai Power Co., Ltd is a Chinese state-owned enterprise in Shandong province specialised in the research and development, manufacturing and sale of diesel engines. Its products are used in vehicles, marine vessels and power generators.

Dematic is a manufacturer of AGVs, palletizers, storage and picking equipment including automated storage and retrieval systems, sorters and conveyors, an integrated software platform, and other automation technologies. Revenues were $1.8 billion for 2015 and have grown at a 12% CAGR since 2013. Dematic employs ~6,000 including over 3,000 engineers in software development, R&D, engineering, project management and customer service.

Coincidentally, at the MODEX show, Dematic had the largest display area (4,000 sq ft) showcasing their AGVs and analytics software.

Kuka acquires Swisslog and then Midea acquires 49% of Kuka

In 2014, Kuka acquired Swisslog (for $357 million), a manufacturer and integrator of two distinct robotics-related activities: healthcare solutions and warehouse and distribution solutions. Earlier this year Chinese appliance manufacturer Midea made a stock offer to acquire up to 49% of Kuka and agreed to a non-takeover posture until 2023. Midea has been on an acquisition spree with a cash fund purported to be over $10 billion and a long-term perspective on their investments (as is evident in the Kuka bid). Earlier this year Midea acquired an 80% interest in Toshiba’s home appliance business for around $475 million and established an e-commerce unit for an undisclosed amount.

Bottom line

There are many reasons for the recent spate of acquisitions. Mostly they are predicated on the fact that the newer technology is better than the old and businesses using the old are feeling the need to replace. Business providers predicated on the old, such as KION’s Linde and STILL divisions, or Honeywell’s ancillary products, need to invest in the new methods and products and what better way (if you have the money) than by acquiring the leading vendors in the field. Underlying them all is the influence of Chinese money in China’s quest to make robotics – including the logistics sub-industry – an in-country industry which is a stated goal of the Chinese government.

UPDATE: June 1, 2016: Forbes wrote today that Toyota is in discussions with Google not only for Boston Dynamics but also for Schaft, the Japanese startup that won the DARPA Robotics Challenge — a two-company sale.

May was another big month for robotics – 13 companies were funded to the tune of $111 million. Four companies were acquired with 2 of the 4 reporting selling prices totaling $422 million. And that’s without the $5.2 billion bid for Kuka by Chinese Midea, or the pending sale of Google’s Boston Dynamics.

The financial pages are lighting up over recent stories about these big-money sales. First there was the $5.2 billion offer by Midea Group, a Chinese appliance manufacturer, for Kuka AG, the Augsburg, Germany-based manufacturer of robots and automated systems. Kuka is one of the Big Four of robot manufacturers. On the day of the bid, Kuka’s stock rose from $84/share to $110 where it’s stayed since.

Then came the announcement by Tech Insider that the Toyota Research Institute is in the final phase of negotiations to acquire Google’s robotics company Boston Dynamics, of Big Dog fame. Boston Dynamics spun out of the MIT Leg Lab in 1992 and worked on various military and DARPA funded research projects until Google’s Andy Rubin acquired the company along with 8 other robotics companies. Boston Dynamics never quite adapted to Google and Google’s push to build a consumer robot, hence their being put on the block in March, 2016.

From Forbes, news of a new fund focusing on robotics: Chrysalix VC, a Vancouver, BC venture capital group focused on alternative energy, has partnered with Dutch robotics commercialization center RoboValley to create a new VC fund focused on robotics. The vehicle is targeting E100 million.

Below are the fundings, acquisitions, IPOs and failures that actually happened in May:

FUNDINGS

1. Locus Robotics raised $8 million in a Series A funding from existing seed investors. The funds will be used to expand product development and general marketing of Locus’ novel material handling robots. Locus is a Massachusetts-based company founded specifically in answer to Kiva Systems’ robots being taken in house by Amazon and no longer available to non-Amazon clients. Locus’ founder, Bruce Welty is a Kiva-using distribution center owner, who, as a consequence of Amazon’s actions, had no recourse other than to build a company that uses a fleet of robots integrated into current warehouse management systems to provide robotic platforms to carry picked items to a conveyor or to the packing station thereby reducing human walking distances and improving overall picking efficiencies.
2. Gamaya, a Swiss aerial analytics spin-off from the Swiss EPFL, raised $3.2 million in a Series A funding. Funds will be used to develop their new 40 bands of light hyperspectral imaging sensor and analytics software platform (traditional multi-spectral sensors have 4 bands).
3. Hortau is a California soil moisture monitoring company which raised $10 million to grow and broaden their new system of networked field sensors, weather stations and control units allowing growers to remotely open and close valves and fire up engines for irrigation from cloud-based management software.
4. nuTonomy is a Cambridge-based start-up that raised $16 million in a Series A round of funding from a group of Singapore and US VCs. This is in addition to the $3.6 million raised in January which included funds from Ford Chairman Bill Ford. nuTonomy is planning to launch a fleet of autonomous taxis in Singapore by 2019 and begin testing later this year. NuTonomy is using retrofitted Mitsubishi electric cars and plans to add Renault EVs later this year.
5. Mazor Surgical Technologies, an Israeli company, has sold $11.9 million of their stock, 4% of their shares, to Medtronic, a global medical technology, services, and solutions provider, with a performance agreement to sell another 6% of Mazor shares for up to $20 million. An additional clause of the agreement kicks in if performance milestones are met whereby Mazor can issue an addition 5% of new shares for an additional $20M from Medtronic. Details of the deal are here.
6. Dedrone GmbH, a German startup whose DroneTracker drone detection platform, raised $10 million in a Series A funding from a series of EU and Silicon Valley VCs. In just 15 months, Dedrone has grown to more than 40 employees and 100 distributors in over 50 countries.
7. Astrobotic Technology, the CMU spin-off company working on delivering payloads to the moon, raised $2.5 million from Space Angels Network. Astrobotic has 10 projects with governments, companies, universities, non-profits, NASA, and individuals for their first moon mission.
8. MegaBots, an Oakland, CA entertainment startup, has raised $2.4 million in seed funding to bring robot-fighting to a venue near you. MegaBots plans to use the seed funding to build their robot for the fight against the Japanese team they’ve challenged; and to secure sponsorships, perhaps even a TV contract for a program that tracks the team from building the robots to competing.
9. Zipline International, a San Francisco startup, raised $800k from UPS and $18 million from Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and others to develop their small robot airplane designed to carry vaccines, medicine and blood to remote areas where health workers place text orders for what they need.
10. Cyberhawk Innovations raised $2.9 million in financing to enable UK-based Cyberhawk to expand its commercial development of the drone-captured data inspection market for the oil & gas industry and infrastructure markets.
11. Eonite Perception, a Silicon Valley vision systems startup, raised $5.25 million in a seed round from multiple Silicon Valley VCs. Eonite is building a 3D mapping and tracking system for the virtual reality marketplace using low latency dense depth sensors.
12. eyeSight Technologies, an Israeli vision systems startup, received $20 million from a Chinese VC group, for its vision system of sensing, gesture recognition and user awareness to be embedded into consumer products.
13. AIO Robotics is a Los Angeles startup developing an all-in-one 3D printer scanner with an onboard CAD and modeling system. AIO received an undisclosed amount of seed funding.

ACQUISITIONS

1. 5D Robotics, a San Diego area integrator of unmanned and mobile robotics using ultra-wide band (5D) communications, acquired Aerial MOB, a drone aerial cinematography startup, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition has led to the formation of the 5D Aerial division which will provide 3D mapping, photogrammetry, thermal and multi-spectral imagery data to vertical markets including oil and gas, utilities and construction.
2. Dematic, a global supplier of AGVs and materials handling technology, acquired (in March) NDC Automation, an AGV manufacturer in Australia and New Zealand, for an undisclosed amount.
3. Voith GmbH, a family-owned German group of industrial and engineering companies, has sold 80% of its industrial services unit to buyout group Triton Partners for $342 million to free up capital for planned investments. Voith has a 25.1% share of Kuka’s stock which, if the $5.2 bn Midea offer passes, will be worth close to 40% more than the share value the day before the offer. According to Forbes, Voith ranks 200th in global family-owned businesses with revenue of $7.5 bn and 43,000 employees.
4. ChemChina and a group of other investors including Chinese state funds, acquired Germany’s KraussMaffei Automation, an industrial robot integrator and plastics, carbon fiber, and rubber processor, for $1 billion – in January.

IPOs

• None. Private placements and increased investment from hedge funds, mutual funds and via corporate acquisitions appears to have dried up the robotics IPO pipeline.
• But… Moley Robotics, a UK startup developing a cooking robot, is using the new equity crowd funding rules that passed the FCC last year to offer 2% of their shares via the Seedrs crowd funding site. Details will be released soon to subscribers to the Moley and Seedrs websites.

FAILURES

• RoboDynamics, a SoCal startup with a stylish mobile telepresence robot named Luna, has gone out of business.

Below are short profiles of each of those 47 reports. Many of the reports duplicate the coverage of others and frequently differ on forecasts. Some are marginally useful; others are chock full of valuable information. Bottom line, all the reports are forecasting positive double-digit growth for most segments of the robotics industry.

Industrial robotics (13)

• Global industrial robots, Dec 2015, 113 pages, Grade Market Data, $1,200
  The report forecasts that the number of industrial robots in use will increase from 1.658 million units in 2015 to a new peak of 2.96 million by 2020.
• Global industrial robotics, Jan 2016, 129 pages, Hoovers Research, $3,850
  Forecasts their take on the top 18 robotic companies for the period 2016 to 2022.
• Global industrial robotics in heavy industries, Feb 2016, 46 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts the market for industrial robotics in heavy industries to grow at a CAGR of 6% during the period 2016-2020.
• Global automotive robotics, Nov 2015, 167 pages, BIS Research, $3,395
  Forecasts a “dynamic era of growth due to the rising demand for vehicles of all types.”
• Global articulated robots, Dec 2015, 123 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts this subset to grow at a CAGR of 16.27 over the period 2015-2020.
• Global assembly-line robots, Dec 2015, 54 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Predicts these robots to grow steadily at a CAGR of 7% through 2020.
• Industrial robots in China, Mar 2016, 60 pages, China Research & Intelligence, $2,400
  Forecasts that CAGR of annual installation of China’s industrial robots will surpass 20% during the period to 2020.
• Robot industry in China, Mar 2016, 131 pages, QY Research, $3,200
  The report focuses on China major leading industry players providing information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information.
• Global welding robots market, Sept 2015, 69 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts this segment to grow at a CAGR of 6.09% through 2019.
• Global and Chinese robotic welding systems, Jan 2016, 150 pages, Prof Research
  This report explores Chinese vendors in detail and presents capacity, production value, and 2011-2016 market shares for each company.
• Industrial robots in food and beverage, Nov 2015, 167 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Global industrial robotics used in the food and beverage industry to multiply at a CAGR of close to 29% during the forecast period.
• Material handling robots, Nov 2015, 61 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  The global material handling robotics market to grow at a significant rate of nearly 9% and exceeding $20 billion by 2019.
• Cartesian/Gantry/Rectilinear industrial robots, Feb 2016, 124 pages, Grace Market Data, $2,000
  The use of Cartesian robots, often used as a CNC machine or for milling or drawing, is growing and this report expects that growth to continue through 2021.

Mobile robots & unmanned air, land and sea vehicles (15)

• Global agriculture robotics, Nov 2015, 171 pages, Global Industry Analysts $4,500
  Focuses on unit shipments by 46 profiled companies covering weeding, harvesting, UAS, driverless systems, crop scouting, greenhouse operations, livestock farming and milking robots.
• Global AGV industry, Mar 2016, 125 pages, Research in China, $2,400
  Reports that units in 2015 were up 35% from 2014 and that 27% of global total was in China, up 36% from 2014.
• Global drones market, Mar 2016, 55 pages, Daedal Research, $800
  Profiles key players 3D Robotics, AeroVironment and DJI.
• Global drones market, Mar 2016, 1,114 pages, Wintergreen Research, $4,100
  Forecasts the worldwide market at $6.8 bn in 2015 to $36.9 bn by 2022.
• Global UAV market, Jan 2016, 67 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts the global UAV market to grow at a CAGR of 10.16% during the period 2016 to 2020.
• Global UAV market analysis, Feb 2016, 200 pages, BIS Research, $3,999
  Forecasts that the commercial drones marketplace will have exponential growth in the next 5 years.
• Global defense drones, Dec 2015, 46 pages, TechNavio, $2,000
  Defense drones market forecast to grow at a CAGR of 6% through 2020.
• Global civil and military UAV industry, Oct 2015, 112 pages, Lucintel, $3,900
  Forecasts the combined UAV industry to grow at a CAGR of 7.1% from 2015 to 2020.
• Global small UAV market, Jan 2016, 72 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts growth at a CAGR of 6.52% during the period 2015-2020.
• Unmanned underwater vehicles market, Mar 2016, 255 pages, Markets and Markets, $4,650
  The global market for UUV, ROV and AUV is projected to grow from $2.29bn in 2015 to $4bn by 2020 at a CAGR of 11.9%.
• Global aerial imaging market, Mar 2016, 52 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts the global aerial imaging market to grow at a CAGR of 13.28% during the period 2016-2020 as the transition from high-cost piloted aircraft takes place.
• Global unmanned ground vehicles market, Sep 2015, 123 pages, Markets and Markets, $4,650
  The global UGV market is projected to grow from $6.4 billion in 2015 to $18.6 billion by 2020.
• Global unmanned sea systems, Dec 2015, 55 pages, TechNavio $2,500
  ​Forecasts market growth of 6% CAGR during the period from 2016 to 2020.
• Global oil & gas drones, Feb 2016, 129 pages, Hoovers Research, $3,850
  This report analyzes market dynamics such as drivers, constraints, opportunities, threats and challenges.
• North American oil & gas drones, Jan 2016, Mordor Intelligence, $3,465
  Forecasts this market segment to grow at a 40.7% CAGR to 2020.

Healthcare service robotics (8)

• Prosthetic and therapeutic robotics, Dec 2015, Lux Research
  The prosthetic and therapeutic robotic devices sector will grow into a $1.9 billion and $1.7 billion market by 2025 respectively.
• Exoskeleton robots, Feb 2016, 49 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts the global exoskeleton robots market to grow at a CAGR of 50.85% during the period 2016-2020.
• Rehab robots, Jan 2016, TechNavio, 47 pages, $2,000
  Forecasts the global rehabilitation robots market to grow at a CAGR of 24.51% during the period 2016-2020.
• Hip and knee orthopedic surgical robots, Jan 2016, 145 pages, Wintergreen Research $4,100
  This market segment was only $84 million in 2015 but is forecast to reach $4.6 billion by 2022.
• Spine surgical robots, Feb 2016, 313 pages, Wintergreen Research, $4,100
  This market segment is forecast to reach $2.7 billion by 2022.
• Abdominal surgical robots, Dec 2015, 416 pages, Wintergreen Research, $3,900
  Worldwide market valued at $2.2 billion in 2012 and forecast to grow to more than $10 billion by 2021.
• Radiology oncology surgical robots, Jan 2016, 557 pages, Wintergreen Research $4,100
  This market segment is expected to reach $7.3 billion by 2022.
• Traditional and robotic laparoscopic devices, Jan 2016, 95 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts this market to grow at a CAGR of 8.2% through 2020.

Other service robots (5)

• Global robotic vacuum cleaner market, Feb 2016, 51 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Robotic vacuum cleaner market will grow at a CAGR of 15.3% and reach $3.31 billion by 2020.
• Robotic lawnmower market, Jan 2016, 175 pages, Beige Market Intelligence, $2,995
  Forecasts robotic lawnmower market to hit $2 billion by 2021.
• Global telepresence robot market, Mar 2016, 482 pages, Wintergreen Research, $4,100
  Telepresence robots at $825 million in 2015 are forecast to reach $7 billion by 2022.
• Global telepresence robot market, Jan 2016, 167 pages, BIS Research, $2,999
  Forecast to generate $137 million by 2022.
• Smart robots market, Mar 2016, Transparency Market Research, $4,315
  Analyzes key players including iRobot, Honda Motors, Adept Technology, Lely Group, Google, Amazon, Northrop Grumman, Bluefin Robotics, ABB and Yaskawa Electric.

Ancillary businesses (4)

• Global LiDAR market, Mar 2016, 145 pages, Markets and Markets, $5,650
  LiDAR and low-cost variants are expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.4% and reach $3.22 billion by 2022.
• 3D machine vision market, Nov 2015, 151 pages, Markets and Markets, $4,650
  This market segment is expected to hit $1.63 billion by 2020 growing at an estimated 10.5% CAGR.
• Robotic vision market, Mar 2016, 195 pages, Markets and Markets, $4,650
  This segment expected to grow at 10.8% from 2015 to 2020.
• Global UAV payload market, Dec 2015, 112 pages, Strategic Defense Intelligence, $4,800
  Radar, comms, sensors, cameras, gimbal devices all make up the “payload” market which was $2.1 bn in 2015 and is expected to reach $3.2 bn by 2025. Only 3.93% CAGR which reflects both fast growth and costs continuing to drop.

Finally (2)

The fact-based backbone for many of these research reports is the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) annual World Robotics Industrial and World Robotics Service reports. These two books represent the official tabulation from all the robot associations around the globe. The 2015 reports cover 2014 activity. The two 2015 reports can be purchased for $2,275. The IFR industrial robots report forecasts a 15% CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) for the next 4 years and, for the same period, the service robots report forecasts a 19% CAGR for professional and field service robots and 27% CAGR for household, consumer and personal service robots.

Reports covering 2015 will be published this summer.​

Source: cbinsights.com

Funding for robotics startup companies rose dramatically in 2015 reaching record highs in deals and dollars. CB Insights, a VC database provider, reported similar findings as seen in their quarterly financing chart.

Listed below are the results for March including two billion dollar acquisitions.

March fundings:

• 6 River Systems raised $6 million in seed funding from VC firms Eclipse and iRobot Ventures. Founded in 2015 by former Kiva Systems and Mimio executives and based in Boston, 6 River is developing next-gen mobile robot fulfilment solutions for distribution centers.
• SkySquirrel Technologies got $1 million in seed funding. The Halifax Nova Scotia startup is focusing on agricultural crop analytics.
• nuTonomy, a spin out from MIT with offices in Singapore and Cambridge, received $3.6 million in seed funding in January for the development of autonomous vehicle technology to be initially tested in urban driving situations such as encountered by taxis.
• Restoration Robotics, the robotic hair transplant company, got $4.82 million equity funding in January says Octa Finance, a Belize-based news company after researching Restoration’s SEC filed Form D. CB Insights reported $7 million. So maybe there were other investors that will show up on later Form Ds.
• Airware, the San Francisco UAS autopilot maker, got $30 million in a round that included former Cisco CEO John Chambers as an investor. Chambers will join the Airware board of directors.
• Aarav Unmanned Systems, a spinoff from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, received an unknown amount to enable the company to focus on GIS survey, precision agricultural and industrial inspections using UAS.
• Aurora Flight Sciences, a Virginia-based developer of UAS tech for defense as well as commercial customers, has raised an undisclosed amount from Enlightenment Capital, a Chevy Chase, MD investor in aerospace companies. Earlier this month Aurora was awarded an $89 million contract for a vertical takeoff and landing X-plane for the DoD.

March acquisitions:

• ThermoFisher Scientific is acquiring Affymetrix for $1.3 billion. Adding Affymetrix’s products will help ThermoFisher expand its array of lab equipment and robots into biosciences and genetic analysis workflows.
• General Motors acquired Cruise Automation, a startup that develops autopilot systems for existing cars, for an undisclosed sum but, according to Fortune magazine, a figure “north of $1 billion.”
• Pasco Scientific, a provider of educational robots, acquired Ergopedia, the maker of the ErgoBot educational bot, for an undisclosed amount.
• PCS Edventures, a provider of STEM, robotic and UAS educational tools and programs, acquired the assets, IP and inventory of Thrust UAV, an Idaho startup, for $109,000. Shortly thereafter Thrust, a service provider with a racing drone, announced an $825,000 contract to provide their drones to a reseller.

IPOs and failures:

• None

Source: press.3dr.com

3D Robotics unveiled sweeping changes by closing its San Diego facility, reducing staff at its Berkeley headquarters and in Austin, TX, and acknowledging that co-founder and president Jordi Muñoz left the company at the end of 2015.

The latest staff reductions follow more extensive layoffs that took place at the end of 2015, after 3DR shifted its manufacturing operations from Tijuana to Shenzhen to economically mass produce their new Solo quadcopter which was intended to compete with DJI’s Phantom line of quadcopters.

In an interview with Xconomy’s Bruce Bigelow, Anderson described the changes as something that was part of 3DR’s plan all along.

This is a consolidation we’ve been working on since before October of last year. As we shifted from the DIY era to consumer and to enterprise customers, we ended up with a different organization each time.

Anderson omitted talking about the problems 3DR faced with their Solo drone. The Solo started off with a flashy launch video that introduced the product about a year ago. DJI, at about the same time, released their new Phantom 3 with a list of features that surpassed the Solo. Because of producing and warehousing drones in China, 3DR made too many Solos particularly given how fast competitors were dropping prices and flooding the market. They built up a massive and costly inventory. A fully equipped Solo was priced too high for the market. 3DR was forced to lower prices to just $799 plus $199 for the gimbaedl platform, down from the initial price of $1,000 and $400. Keeping up the pressure, DJI cut its Phantom 3 prices ahead of its launch of the Phantom 4, a smarter and more sensor-laden drone all inclusively priced at $1,399.

In another interview with MarketWatch, Anderson said that 3DR was moving to the commercial market due to heavy competition in the consumer drone marketplace.

DJI is doing great, it’s because they are moving so fast, it’s forcing the others to adapt. Some companies are adapting by leaving, and others are adapting by moving upstream to the enterprise, which was always our plan. And [that move] is just accelerating right now.

3DR will now be focusing more narrowly on enterprise customers that are interested in using drones for such projects as utility line and pipeline inspections, and construction site inspections. As part of that move, 3DR announced the release of its Site Scan aerial analytics platform earlier this month. The technology enables corporate customers to conduct inspections and scan work sites with the Solo smart drone, and transmit the data to the cloud for processing and analytics. The system has a software-as-a-service monthly subscription model, which integrates Autodesk software, where using the 3DR Solo drone, businesses can upload aerial images, analytics and other data to the 3DR cloud. The system uses a tablet from Sony, a GoPro camera and starts at $3,249 for the hardware.

​Anderson remains CEO, and Jeevan Kalanithi, 3DR’s chief product officer, becomes president. 3DR had ramped up to more than 350 employees but, with the current layoffs, will be down to below 80. The company’s former president, co-founder Jordi Muñoz, left the company last year as part of the ramping down of 3DR’s operations in San Diego and Tijuana.

“By making job cuts and refocusing, 3DR currently has enough financial runway until the second quarter of 2017 without having to go back to investors,” Anderson said. “We want to make sure we have a good long year of runway,” he said. “You don’t want to have to go back to the market every six months. This is a moment when the investors want to see a profitable, lean operation, and we are doing that.”

A plant-moving robot from Harvest Automation. Source: harvestai/YouTube

In a Boston Globe story by Scott Kirsner, it was revealed that Harvest Automation’s CEO has departed, as have 3/4 of the 30 employees that worked there in 2015. The company is attempting to sell its e-commerce bot and system technology to keep the company alive.

Harvest Automation started in 2009 with a goal of providing robotic solutions to businesses that employed large numbers of low-cost labor. They found a niche within agriculture in nurseries. Growers needed labor to rearrange pots regularly. So Harvest built a rugged little robot that works in swarms to pick up and transplant pots as required. It appeared to be successful with sales doubling in each of the last two years. Their initial clients were some of their initial investors – nursery owners around the U.S. who provided guidance and industry experience as well as funding.

But then John Kawola joined the company in 2012 as CEO and promptly began to develop another labor-saving robot which was to work in warehouses: the OmniVeyor.

Watch the video of how it works here:

Kawola reasoned that the agricultural market was “interesting but small.”  The OmniVeyor was pre-marketed in 2015 and was scheduled to be launched in Spring 2016. Quoting from the Boston Globe article:

It was designed to transport a plastic totebox around a warehouse, so that workers in the aisles could simply pull an item from the shelf and drop it into the tote; then, the bot would go to the next aisle where it needed an item. At the end of the process, the bot would report to a packing station where all of the items in the order would be transferred to a box, sealed up, and sent off to the customer.

Unlike the ag robot group, the warehouse group didn’t have the range of experience offered by their nursery investors and the resulting system and robot were somewhat flawed. According to one distribution center (DC) owner who previewed Harvest’s new OmniVeyor material handling robot, the system required a platform 16″ off the ground upon which the OmniVeyor would slide totes. But warehouse space is at a premium and floor space is even more valuable. It was an unworkable solution. Innovation has to solve problems; not create them. Consequently, the DC owner wasn’t a buyer.

Nor, it seems, were any others. Let’s hope that Harvest Automation is able to find funding to keep its ag robot group going.

Source: The Robo Report

Universal Robots, the Danish manufacturer of a line of collaborative robots (also called “co-bots”), recently published financial statements which provide valuable insights into the growth potential of collaborative robots.

At present, sales of collaborative robots represent just 5% of the overall robot market. The collaborative robotics sector, according to multiple pay-for research reports, is expected to increase roughly tenfold between 2015 and 2020, reaching over $1 billion from approximately $95 million in 2014.

Universal Robots

In financial statements released in February, Universal Robots (UR) reported 2015 revenue of $61.44 million, a 91% increase over 2014, and net profit of $9.6 million before taxes for the year, up 122% over 2014. Unit sales, which began in 2009, have risen at around 75% each year to 3,500 in 2015. At year’s end, UR employed 150 in Denmark and another 50 worldwide, had 7,000 robots at work in the field, and had a global network of integrators and distributors totaling more than 200.

Enrico Krog Iversen, UR’s CEO, said he hopes that 2016 sales will exceed 90% and that UR had moved into larger space in 2014 to handle this level of growth. The new facility has a capacity of 33,000 units per year. At just 75% growth each year, as can be seen in the chart above, UR will hit their plant capacity by the end of 2019!

Last year Universal Robots sold to Massachusetts-based Teradyne, a publicly-traded provider of electronic testing equipment, for $285 million in cash and $65 million in options. Teradyne, with over 3,900 employees and a product line that doesn’t include anything robotic, has a market value of $4.37 billion. Mark Jagiela, President and CEO, said of the acquisition:

This acquisition complements our System and Wireless Test businesses while adding a powerful additional growth platform to Teradyne. Universal Robots is the technology and sales leader in the fast growing collaborative robot market and we are excited to have them join Teradyne.

In regards to the acquisition, Iversen said that Teradyne was opening doors to their customers in the electronics industry which are prime prospects for UR co-bots. Regarding competition, Iversen said, “Our main competitor is manual labor.” Stated another way, within the SME community, a big holdup is educating managers, engineers and workers regarding the value, opportunity, employee performance improvement and quick ROI of deploying co-bots as worker assistants. As this educational process progresses and succeeds, co-bot sales will surely follow.

The Top 8 Robot Companies

Source: Robotics & Automation News

As ambitious as UR’s fast growth figures and forecasted future sales are, they represent just one co-bot competitor serving millions of SMEs. They don’t reflect what the Top 8 robot companies – Fanuc, Yaskawa, ABB, Kawasaki, Nachi, Kuka, Denso, Epson and Adept – have in store. Because each of these companies is publicly held, they are limited in what they can say about the future and don’t provide any information about their plans relating to the introduction and marketing of their brand of co-bots. We do know that ABB has a two-armed robot named YuMi (some of which are installed at various Mercedes Benz factories) and a one-armed as-yet unnamed robot which they acquired from gomTec that will be re-branded and launched later this year; Fanuc recently introduced a heavy-lifting co-bot; Kuka has an elegant lightweight but very expensive co-bot; and each of the other vendors (except Yaskawa), have begun to offer various co-bots. Consequently the unit sales forecast in the chart above doesn’t reflect any effect from the Top 8 companies.

Other co-bots – particularly those that add mobility to their capabilities – are creating new markets for guides, kiosks, store assistants, inventory takers, warehouse and distribution center “gofors”, and countless other applications including mobile personal assistants such as the SoftBank Pepper robot. Many pay-for research reports suggest that these types of co-bots will grow at around 30% annually – a far cry from UR’s growth these past few years – but substantial nonetheless. The SoftBank Robotics Group is producing 1,000 Pepper robots every month and plans to double that number when they begin sales later this year into China.

A bit of history

The European robotics initiative for strengthening the competitiveness of SMEs in manufacturing, called SME Robotics, was funded by the EU FP6 (Framework Programme 6) and started in March, 2005. It was chartered to determine ways to keep labor from being sent offshore to lower labor-cost countries and focused on the large number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) at threat of off-shoring. [SMEs are defined as manufacturing companies having less than 500 employees. The number of SMEs worldwide is estimated to be 6 million.]

The thesis was that if you empowered SME employees with robotic tools, the SME company would become more cost efficient and competitive and therefore not have to be off-shored. Thus the initial marketplace for co-bots was to SMEs.

In a parallel development in America beginning in 2008, Rodney Brooks founded Rethink Robotics and began educating American SMEs about the benefits of the Baxter line of robots he was developing. It’s rare that one man can influence a whole universe of stakeholders. But from his network of MIT students and extensive speaking engagements to his various entrepreneurial activities, he has informed and charmed his vision of what robots can do and how people and corporations can benefit. Timing, of course, played a role as have the rapid changes and lowered costs of new sensors and robotic technologies. But throughout, Rod Brooks has defined the need and sold the sizzle of collaborative robots. At first, his product, the Baxter robot, wasn’t able to fulfill his promises. Universal Robots’ robots, however, did – and their sales took off while Baxter’s stayed minimal. Last year Rethink did a major software upgrade and added a new one-armed robot called Sawyer. Reviews have been favorable for both changes and it appears that Rethink has finally become a real competitor in the co-bots marketplace. (See below for more about Rethink).

The auto company factor: BMW and Mercedes Benz

BMW, which utilizes ~7,500 industrial robots in their factories around the world experimented with UR co-bots last year with significant results. In a human-machine study conducted by an MIT professor, it was shown that teams made of humans and robots collaborating efficiently can be more productive than teams made of either humans or robots alone. They also found that they could increase productivity and also reduce ergonomically challenging tasks done by humans which increased morale and empowered workers with these easily programmed collaborative robots. A BMW spokesman said that, based on the success of these tests, he could foresee doubling or even tripling the number of robots in BMW factories.

When I asked UR’s Iversen whether he had received a multi-thousand purchase order from BMW subsequent to their tests, he playfully responded by saying, “BMW is a strong partner.”

Again, in a parallel development at a Mercedes Benz factory in Germany, in an effort to halve the 61 hours it takes to produce a car, Mercedes is shifting to what it calls “robot farming” – equipping workers with an array of smaller, lighter machines and co-bots. Customization is key to Mercedes’ marketing and buyers are choosing an ever-increasing array of options causing a need for flexibility not presently available from legacy robots. Humans (and their co-bots) are being added to provide that needed flexibility. While robots won’t completely disappear, they’ll increasingly be smaller and more flexible and operate in conjunction with human workers rather than be off working behind safety fences.

We’re moving away from trying to maximize automation with people taking a bigger part in industrial processes again, said Markus Schaefer, Mercedes’ head of production. We need to be flexible.

This trend toward adding humans augmented with co-bots back into the auto assembly process because of their ability to be more flexible than big industrial robots is being felt in studies at many of the car companies in Germany, Sweden and the UK. But it also broadens the co-bot marketplace by adding factories with more than 500 employees.

Rethink Robotics and other competitors

Rethink has recently been developing an international distribution and integrator network for it’s Baxter and Sawyer robots. Along with Sumitomo Corp for Japan and Shanghai Electric for Eastern China, Rethink is working with startup Hunan Cothink Robotics Technology for Northern and Southern China. Cothink will have a capability to process up to 2,000 robots annually. Asia, and particularly China, are integral to Rethink Robotics global expansion plan.

”Chinese manufacturers are facing similar challenges to their counterparts around the world, including rising wages and labor shortages,” said Scott Eckert, president and CEO of Rethink. “In order to stay competitive in a global manufacturing economy, these companies are looking at collaborative robots to help them become more efficient and responsive to customer demand…. Baxter and Sawyer are for sale in China now, with some units already deployed in a number of different customers.  We have a lot of interest from electronics manufacturers as well as consumer products companies and the automotive supply chain.”

Other one- or two-armed co-bot manufacturers include MRK-System GmbH, F&P Personal Robotics, Bosch, MABI Robotic, Smokie Robotics and Kawada Industries.

The list of mobile co-bot providers is much more extensive and includes (to mention just a few) companies like Amazon, Fetch, Grey Orange, Harvest Automation, MetraLabs, and many others. These companies, and their primary applications, will be the subject of a future article.

Bottom line

There’s no doubt that the collaborative robot marketplace will be growing exponentially over the next few years – with UR leading the pack – and price, safety, flexibility and ease of programming being the key determinants as to which vendor(s) are chosen.

When the digital era began I had already guided my company into the software business and had transitioned from its mainframe to big PCs. Shortly after that I sold out and started to change my lifestyle to be less tense and more healthy.

My interest in the next big thing, however, was undiminished. I began to read about robotics. As I set about learning about the industry and those involved, I called my stock broker and asked for a basket of robotics-related stocks that I could invest in for my retirement. He gave me two – which I thought curious. I called another broker and got the same answer. Then I checked Bloomberg and found that they too, at that time, didn’t have a category for robotics nor did they have a list of robot makers.

That’s when I decided to put my research and database skills to work compiling a comprehensive list of publicly-traded and privately-held companies involved in the robotics industry. I quickly found that this was truly a global project. Most of the industrial robot producers were international and the newer service robot providers were mostly privately held and not publicly traded. Since my goal was to be a passive investor, this posed a problem.

As I continued my quest to create the most comprehensive database of robotic providers and ancillary businesses, I was approached by people who wanted to buy or rent my list. I declined all such requests until some financial people approached me about selling my trademark on the term Robo-stox and being able to use my database to set up an industry tracking index, the first use of which was to establish an Exchange Traded Fund (an ETF) reflecting the robotics industry.

We worked together to form a company (ROBO-STOX LLC) and set out to develop an index of the robotics industry. We evaluated all of the robotics companies in my database and culled that list down to a set of 77 stocks, which, when back-tested over 10 years, truly reflected the growth pattern of the industry.

ROBO-STOX LLC has licensed its index to Exchange Traded Concepts who, on October 22, 2013, launched an exchange traded fund (ETF) with the ticker code ROBO. Now anyone with the ability to buy stock anywhere in the world can buy this publicly-traded NASDAQ ETF.

I’ve worked a long time to make this happen and I’m very pleased with the results. It enables investors everywhere to capitalize on the accelerating worldwide growth in robotics. And it lets me do what I originally wanted: passively invest in what I believe to be a continuingly profitable industry, the robotics industry.

In academia, where robotics researchers look to open source as a means of advancing community knowledge, the answer is perhaps more obvious. But in business, it’s clearly a balancing act. And so, ‘To be open, or not to be open?’ — that is the question for our panelists this month.

We asked Frank Tobe, Robert Morris and Brian Gerkey to weigh in. Here’s what they have to say …

Brian Gerkey on “Is open source a good business model for robotics?”

The IT economy has powerfully demonstrated what happens when companies can leverage open source infrastructure when they build new products and services.  A company like Google would never have come into existence had they not been able to rely from the beginning on solid open source tools like Python and GCC.  IBM would arguably have not been able to make its immensely successful pivot from products to services without Linux.  How many startups these days begin as a cloud-hosted machine running some derivative of the venerable LAMP stack? …

Read more →

Robert Morris on “Is open source a good business model for robotics?”

The premise of this question is that robotics companies are manufacturers and that there is choice between an open source and closed source business model.  Robotics companies are best thought of as service companies (even manufacturers, especially when moving beyond early adopters) and openness is not an ‘either/or’ choice, but rather a continuum.  In this day and age the question is, ‘What do you need to keep open create value for your customers?’ …

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Frank Tobe on “Is open source a good business model for robotics?”

Certainly robotics has its share of proprietary software and control systems. Each robot manufacturer markets their products based on the need for secure, proprietary and un-shared systems so that they can ensure stability and control. Whole industries have been set up to bridge those proprietary barriers so that multi-vendor solutions can happen …

Read more →

Corporations are more disciplined and less prevailed upon by conflicting interests than governments; hence long-term planning is a regular part of their management practice. But corporations have neither ethics nor loyalties, and often do marginally (if not outright) immoral things to preserve the profitability of the company over the welfare of the community and workforce.

Entrepreneurial solutions from business start-ups are a whole different category. They don’t necessarily solve anything that needs long-term solving, and they don’t really have a long-term business plan. They address a current whim, need or solution that the inventors feel strongly about. And they make it or fail based on their energy and ability to sell their new product. Only after they are established does long-term thinking kick in, so that the new company can develop new products and services.

Thus, if we are going to answer a question about policy, it’s really governments that we should be looking at. So let’s look at how policy is supposed to work in the US, why it might be failing us, and how taking the long view can help.

How the policy process is supposed to work in the US
The Executive Branch of the Whitehouse is supposed to analyze the future and past with an eye toward meeting and setting strategic goals including those defined in the US charter (its Constitution). They bring in the best minds to discuss problems and their solutions — sometimes behind closed doors and other times publicly. They also study trends and change to see what the future has in store for us. This is where the process of strategic planning — a process whereby goals and objectives are balanced against resources and alternative possibilities for the use of those resources — is supposed to take place.

In compliance with the intent of the Constitution, which provides the moral and ethical parameters to guide the process, the three most prominent objectives of this strategic planning are to provide continued infrastructure, healthcare and security. This planning often gets very specific, as can be seen in many of the DARPA projects: ARPANET, which turned into the Internet; Transit, which became our current GPS system; handheld language translation devices presently used in Iraq and Afghanistan; Stealth planes; Semiconductor gallium arsenide; Robot cars via Grand Challenge competitions; Bionic limbs; and the list goes on and on. DARPA is just one agency that solicits scientific solutions for various aims: NSF, NASA, NIH, USDA are four other prominent translators of Presidential goals into reality.

Sometimes strategic planning is more generalized, as was the recent recognition that the process of offshoring manufacturing to lower-cost-labor countries had serious unintended consequences to America, and that the process should be stopped or seriously changed — this realization prompted the Advanced Manufacturing Initiative, which included a section for robotics development. As the Manufacturing Initiatives were being discussed, there was a timely submission of the presentation to Congress of the US Roadmap for Robotics (which was partially funded by government grants).

As the Robotics Initiative was incorporated into the Manufacturing Initiative, additional unintended consequences could be seen: the need for more technically skilled labor and the reduction of the lower-skilled workforce. Most often, strategic planning is reactive rather than long-term. Consequently, as resources are allocated to these reactive issues, long-term planning suffers and serious issues get put off.

Annually the President presents the results of those analyses and makes a case for the goals he chooses in a state-of-the-union and budget presentation to the Congress and the public. Congress then figures out how or whether the goals and services that the President outlined represent the will of the people, and whether the budget he proposed meets the needs of the existent government plus the new goals/services. They break down the President’s proposals into small tasks and send them to committees that specialize in those tasks. These committees have staff that are schooled in the subjects of the tasks, and these staff members often supplement their own analyses by consulting with outside organizations that represent the various interests and stakeholders involved.

The committees discuss, negotiate, and evaluate the merit of the goals the President has proposed. Then, when they agree to agree, they write laws and regulations that define those goals and present these to the whole of Congress, along with summaries, so that Congress members can evaluate and then pass those new laws and regulations task by task.

Finally, the Judicial System is there to adjudicate how people and companies interpret and comply with those laws.

Thus there are at least three levels where knowledgeable people influence the outcome of the strategic planning and legislative process: at the Presidential fact-finding level; within congressional committees and in the Congress and Senate itself; and at the judicial level.

Infiltrating technology whiz-kids into these positions isn’t enough of a solution; there’s more to the debate than just knowledge of the technology. There are also the ethical considerations, possible long-term consequences and alternative solutions to consider. Hence the need for wise leaders to pick balanced teams of advisors who can collectively cover all aspects of the strategic issues.

Those people who are appointed to presidential advisory, or “thought” positions need to be the nation’s brightest, and most knowledgeable and altruistic — for example, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology headed by Dr. John Holder and the other staff members of the Whitehouse Office of Science and Technology Policy, all of whom are competent selections. Congressional committee selections need to combine the most knowledgeable (and not just the most senior or junior) of the membership; Congress itself needs to have a balance of technology executives amongst its membership (fewer lawyers); and committees’ permanent staff needs to be selected for their technological prowess (not on seniority), and should be regularly vetted for any improprieties between them and lobbyists and special interest groups.

Assuming that most policy-makers start their policy-making careers with the intention of representing the best interests of their respective constituencies (and the country as a whole) by finding the least costly solutions to our problems, how come they don’t do just that?

Why the policy process might be failing us
The short answer is constant scrutiny, instant pressure from media and others, divided loyalties, and inadequate (and sometimes compromised) staff, all of which lead to selfish and protective thinking. The long answer is more thought-provoking.

Ian Goldin, Director of the Oxford Martin School offers some interesting solutions and solution methods. Goldin, a former VP of the World Bank, addresses the why, the how and the what-to-do about it in his new book: Divided Nations: Why global governance is failing, and what we can do about it. He writes:

Globalization increasingly presents a paradox: it has been the most progressive force in history, but the most severe crises of the 21st century will arise due to the very success of globalization. Unless we are able to manage these threats, there is a real danger that globalization will have given birth to its own downfall.

In the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, fundamental political, economic, and technological changes have led to a step-change in global connectivity. Interdependence and innovation have brought unprecedented benefits, and led to the most rapid global rise in incomes and health in history. However, the same processes of integration and innovation have also greatly increased the potential for systemic risk and global crises. Globalization is leaping ahead of the lethargic institutions of global governance.

The number of countries involved in negotiations (close to 200 now) and the complexity of the issues and their interconnectedness have grown rapidly, as has the effect of instant media and other pressures on politicians. These and other factors have paralyzed progress, so the prospect of resolving critical global challenges appears ever more distant.

Goldin believes that the UN would have to gain power over its member nations, with nation states relinquishing much of their current powers to the UN. He further says that without at least a global calamity, this isn’t likely to happen. He thinks that humanity is in denial of the fact that only one solution can prevail: some form of binding global governance… but only for those problems needing collective international action. Alternatively, Goldin points out that much could be tackled by a smaller group of nations: “a coalition of the willing.” He writes:

“What is needed is for NGOs, corporations, professionals, legislators and their staffs, and the public, to face up to the fact that today’s problems cannot be solved by their current approaches, nor by nations acting alone, nor by keeping our heads in the sand. Like it or not, some form of binding global governance must occur.”

Taking the long view

Policy-makers need to be focused on solving long-term strategic issues for their countries and constituencies. But it’s an iffy situation. During President Bush’s term, friends were placed in key advisory roles, often with no background knowledge of the subjects upon which they were to advise. Things are better in the Obama administration. Nevertheless, it’s a lot like the dialogue we’ve had before about which comes first: the technology or the solution.

But the answer is Neither.

What comes first is the problem that needs to be solved, and the commitment to finding a solution. That’s where and when positive things happen. If there’s no advice, long-term problems go unaddressed. China’s communist government has a long-term point of view and the discipline to make their strategic goals happen; few other countries have that power.

It’s not enough to place technology-friendly people in key advisory rolls. Nor is it enough to invest in science. Or efficiently lobby all the key players. Strategic goals need to be defined, talked about and agreed upon. Then the mechanisms of science, law, politics, business, the public, and funding can all focus on the solution.

This essay is an expansion of Frank Tobe’s response to Robotics by Invitation question “What do policy-makers need to do to keep pace with economic development in robotics?”

Read more answers →

This month we asked Robotics by Invitation panel members Rich Mahoney and Frank Tobe for their take on what policy-makers need to do to keep economic development apace with important developments in robotics. Here’s what they have to say …

Rich Mahoney on “What do policy-makers need to do to keep pace with economic development?”

I am not sure how to describe the specifics of what policy makers should do, but I think there are two gaps that policy makers should think about that are associated with the economic development impact of robotics: sufficient funding to support an emerging robotics marketplace; and  detailed descriptions of the innovations needed to solve specific problems …

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Frank Tobe on “What do policy-makers need to do to keep pace with economic development?”

I think the biggest thing happening today is the acceptance of the low-cost Baxter and Universal robots into SMEs and small factories everywhere.  Sales will likely be 2% of the total; 5% in 2014 and possibly 15% in 2015. That’s growth! And that’s before the might of the big four robot makers start selling their low-cost entry robots for SMEs …

Read more → 

[Frank Tobe]
I think the biggest thing happening today is the acceptance of the low-cost Baxter and Universal robots into SMEs and small factories everywhere.  Sales will likely be 2% of the total; 5% in 2014, and possibly 15% in 2015. That’s growth! And that’s before the big four robot makers start selling their low-cost entry robots for SMEs. This has more near-term promise than unmanned aerial or ground vehicles in agriculture and elsewhere. These co-robots are proving that we need more high-tech people and fewer low-skilled people in this globally competitive economy.

What are the major policies that foster, steer, or hinder the robotics industry?

There are at least three levels where knowledgeable people influence the outcome of the strategic planning and legislative process: at the Presidential fact-finding level; within congressional committees and in the Congress and Senate itself; and at the judicial level. Infiltrating technology whiz-kids into these positions isn’t enough of a solution because there’s more to the debate than just knowledge of the technology. There are also the ethical considerations, possible long-term consequences and alternative solutions to consider. Hence the need for wise leaders to pick balanced teams of advisors covering all aspects of strategic issues.

Can you point out some examples of different policies in different regions/countries and their effects?

China is locking up long-term resources contracts for energy, agricultural land, shipping by sending out manpower everywhere to make it happen. Most other countries just compete on price and trade for deals.

What are the other main drivers of economic development? 

Lower costs for sensors, components and robots; global competition; demand for higher quality; new marketplaces for the DDD of robotics: food processing, agriculture, SMEs, healthcare; diminishing low-cost labor; growing population of seniors.

Do you have concrete suggestions for policy-makers?
Think long term. Include unanticipated consequences and alternatives. Cooperate with the other stakeholders to make all happy. Regarding international issues, follow the advice of Ian Goldin.

The complete answers to these questions more complex. To learn more, read Frank Tobe’s in-depth article on how policy should — and does — shape economic development.

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(1) strategic funding from NASA, DARPA, DoD, NSF and other government organizations to do the pure science involved in solving stumbling blocks in robotics, and

(2) entrepreneurial-initiated funding from friends and family, angel investors, VCs and “special people” like Scott Hassan, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, or Sergey Brin.

In addition, some funding is available via macro programs such as the Roadmap for US Robotics, which don’t move at the same speed as the entrepreneur-initiated projects.

Finally, surrounding each of the major universities involved in robotics research and education are clusters of support networks working with and supplementing the universities’ own commercialization activities. Stanford and UC Berkeley in the Bay Area of California; Georgia Tech in Atlanta; CMU in Pittsburgh; and MIT and Harvard in Boston. All of these clusters and commercialization activities are without government stimulus or direction.

Willow Garage is a perfect example of the benefits of special people: Scott Hassan had a vision to jump-start robotics – particularly the open source software side – and he invested hundreds of millions of dollars in that pursuit. From Willow Garage came seven notable spin-offs including an ongoing non-profit to perpetuate ROS.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page from Google established Google X-Labs, invested in Tesla Motors, and many more.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has set up a fund that has invested in all sorts of start-ups: from Uber to Behance to Linden Labs.

The real excitement comes from the special people: They not only enthusiastically give back with profits from their own experiences, but also bring the same level of energy that made them successful to funding of new robotics projects.

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As the robotics industry continues to grow, enters new industries, and provides new applications, strategic focus is necessary or the overall industry will develop haphazardly and spread out around the world. It is important to remember that the first industrial robot was designed and developed in America but almost all industrial robots today are manufactured offshore and the profits from their sale go to offshore companies.

Hector, the eldercare robot, from the EU-funded Companionable Project.

In the EU and Korea they are stimulating the robotics industry to fulfill national strategic goals such as keeping and growing homeland industry AND solving a particular set of problems, eg, how to help educate Korean children to learn a second language, English, using robots to supplement teachers. Another example of this type of strategic funding is the EU-funded SME project which also had twin goals: keep manufacturers from going offshore and provide robotic assistance to small and medium-sized enterprises, a new marketplace which, with robotic automation, will be able to better compete and remain at home.

The US doesn’t have anything similar but it should because robotics is an industry that has passed us by once and could continue that way again without guidance. $100 million in focused stimulation money could go a long way toward re-establishing a leadership role. The American tradition of entrepreneurial funding and product development just can’t work on a project of the size and scope that I am suggesting. And the alternative, just let nature take it’s course, will likely lead to a similar movement offshore as occurred with industrial robot – where the major manufacturers are located in Europe and Japan.

It seems to me that the next breakthrough marketplaces for robotics will be:

• SMEs (robot workers and co-workers in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises)
• Medical and healthcare (nursing assistance, surgeon augmentation, operating room assistance, therapeutic assistance, home care, elder care, remote presence, hospital automation)
• Agriculture (robotically automated planting, weeding, harvesting, sorting and packaging)
• Aerial surveillance and applications
• Embedded systems within our cars, trucks and taxis

Scene from the movie “Robot and Frank”

Of these, the one most beneficial to humanity is in the area of healthcare, thus, $100 million focused on stimulating breakthroughs in that industry might be best spent on developing an eldercare robot similar to the one in the movie ‘Robot and Frank.’ Along that path, that robot could then be turned into a consumer services product for basic home care and, down the road, perhaps even child care. Below is a short list of activities such a robot could provide people wishing to live at home independently:

• Cognitive stimulation and assistance
• Therapy assistance
• Monitor health (blood pressure, pulse, temperature, etc.)
• Collaboratively work with smart home environments and a remote control center
• Provide mobility assistance
• Keeps and reminds of daily calendar
• Reminds and delivers medicines, meals and other items
• Stores and locates lost items
• Can communicate when an emergency is detected
• Can communicate when a security breach is detected
• Can enable visual communication with family members and care givers
• Can coordinate other robotic devices such as floor cleaners, lawn mowers, etc.
• Can assist with basic household and yard chores

Imagine someone with legislative connections spearheading an effort to provide a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) to design, develop, product engineer, build, market and distribute a cost-efficient robotic device for home health and elder care AND doing so before the competition beats us to the punch. The PPP would include at least one major medical devices conglomerate, a consumer products company, a few quality-of-life university labs, a couple of healthcare insurance systems, representatives from Medicare and the FDA, and an experienced healthcare/hospital/homecare business management leadership team. And they would all agree to share (patent and otherwise) in the research and development and give back when their efforts become profitable.

Many global government-funded PPP projects are further along the research path — such as Hector, the eldercare robot pictured above — but none have yet been turned into commercially available healthcare devices. $100 million will go a long way toward catching up and, hopefully, leading the pack.

Many consumer product companies are encouraging development of add-on robotic devices to provide consumer benefits, eg, Bosch is attempting to provide hamper to hamper service for dirty clothes (sorting, washing, drying, folding). But they miss the bigger picture in the process.

By solving the problems involved in providing unobtrusive but comprehensive eldercare, the US-funded PPP will also be solving many of these same consumer product issues, thus, the consumer products partner can make transitional products. The reason for the insurance company partners is because they are footing eldercare bills at present and would welcome cost-reducing robotic solutions once they were available. They can afford to be first-adopters and pay the premium price of the initial products.

Therefore, if the project is timely, well-managed, goal-driven and has the right team players, an industry could be born and stay in America and spread to other areas of robotic consumer products as well.

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Note: A previous version of this article was published under the title $100 million P-P-P investment in healthcare robotics at my blog Everything Robotic.

Frank Tobe’s ‘The Robot Report’ has just launched a great map of global robot startups and he’d like your robot startup information…

Please add to our list of global robotic start-up companies by sending information to info@therobotreport.com. Thank you.
… Click to see the 104 global robotic start-up companies in detail.
… PS: There are 800+ industrial and service robot vendors in our database in addition to the start-ups – see below (left column) – plus 250 research labs and 650 ancillary businesses.