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

Complementing Robohub is new app “IEEE Spectrum ROBOTS,” which provides some news but has an extensive detailed section for current-day robots of all types: from exoskeletons to remote presence; from military transport to Google self-driving car; from Keepon and Paro to Asimo. For each there are specs, factoids, builder name and cost and interesting graphics and videos. There is also a substantial LEARN section with videos and text by notable and inspirational roboticists.

The news section is analogous to the NY Times: thorough and in-depth reporting on a wide range of topics—in this case the multiple sciences of robotics—by technical authorities in the field or on the IEEE Spectrum staff. The news section joins many other magazine tablet-style news apps such as ScoopIt, Zite and Trapit and news portal sites such as Robohub and The Robot Report.

All in all – and particularly for the non-news sections – the new app it is a worthy addition to the field of robotics.

An even newer site of interest is “Robot Radar” – which provides critical analysis on robotics technology articles published and distributed by the popular press.

Robot Radar‘s list of contributors is a who’s who of robotics in the US and UK and includes Alan Winfield, UWE, Henrik Christensen, GA Tech, Kerstin Dautenhahn, U of Hertfordshire, Benjamin Kuipers, U of MI, Illah Nourbakhsh, CMU, Maja Mataric, USC, Matt Mason, CMU, and Noel Sharkey, U of Sheffield.

Released yesterday by the Human Rights Watch (HRW) organization, the report Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots (herein: the report) and associated press release and video (below), warn of the increasing governmental interest in autonomous, “killer” robots, and the dangers that such technology would pose if ever allowed onto the battlefield.

As mentioned on Robohub before (Rise of the robots: The robotization of today’s military), today’s military is becoming increasingly robotic. In its current iteration, all military strikes carried out by robots are authorized by a human operator, meaning that military decisions – decisions to end human lives – are supported by and traceable through a human chain of accountability.

However as documented by the HRW, governments are showing increasing interest in automating this decision process, thus removing the accountable human from the chain. This line of thought raises the question: who is liable if an autonomous robot kills someone? The HRW argues that autonomous robots “would inherently lack human qualities that provide legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians”. We’ve discussed some of these ethical issues with Noel Sharkey (also featured in the above video) and Ronald Arkin before in our two part series on robot ethics (part 1, part 2).

Precursor technologies (discussed in detail on page 4 of the report) are already being developed and in some cases, deployed on the battlefield. These technologies have the ability to identify and target a threat, but will wait upon human permission before engaging. These technologies include South Korea’s sentry turrets (with a similar installation being carried out by Israel); the US Military’s missile defense systems; and various autonomous aircraft currently in development.

The US Government has confirmed its interest in autonomous military robots, through the release of military development roadmaps. The Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap FY2011-2036 released by the US Department of Defense states that the department “envisions unmanned systems seamlessly operating with manned systems while gradually reducing the degree of human control and decision making required for the unmanned portion of the force structure”.

Similar visions are expressed by the US Army, who state a “current goal of supervised autonomy, but with an ultimate goal of full autonomy”; the US Navy, who state that “while admittedly futuristic in vision, one can conceive of scenarios where UUVs sense, track, identify, target, and destroy an enemy – all autonomously”; and the US Airforce, who foresee that:

Increasingly humans will no longer be “in the loop” but rather “on the loop” – monitoring the execution of certain decisions. Simultaneously, advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input.

These excerpts, all taken directly from unclassified military development roadmaps, show a clear governmental interest in reducing the dependence on humans, with a final goal of autonomous decision making and execution. Thankfully, these roadmaps do question the legal, ethical and political ramifications of fully autonomous “lethal systems”, which have “not yet been fully addressed and resolved”.

The report addresses these legal and ethical questions and calls for the following two resolutions to be made:

To All States:

• Prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons through an international legally binding instrument.
• Adopt national laws and policies to prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons.
• Commence reviews of technologies and components that could lead to fully autonomous weapons. These reviews should take place at the very beginning of the development process and continue throughout the development and testing phases.

To Roboticists and Others Involved in the Development of Robotic Weapons:

• Establish a professional code of conduct governing the research and development of autonomous robotic weapons, especially those capable of becoming fully autonomous, in order to ensure that legal and ethical concerns about their use in armed conflict are adequately considered at all stages of technological development.

In closing, I would like to leave you with an extract from page 8 the report:

In training their troops to kill enemy forces, armed forces often attempt “to produce something close to a ‘robot psychology,’ in which what would otherwise seem horrifying acts can be carried out coldly.” This desensitizing process may be necessary to help soldiers carry out combat operations and cope with the horrors of war, yet it illustrates that robots are held up as the ultimate killing machines.

I personally believe we are at the beginning of the era of robotics, during which robots will become increasingly present in our everyday lives. I only hope that this era and that the robots we develop, will be remembered for more than simply being the ultimate killing machines.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the Robot Dragonfly from TechJect. Developed over four years by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology for the US Air Force, the researchers are now investigating commercial and consumer opportunities through their recently released campaign on the crowd-funding website, IndieGoGo.

True consumer (as opposed to military or hobbyist) UAV’s first truly “took to the skies” with the release of Parrot’s iPhone-controlled AR.Drone in 2010, which has, for the last two years, been relatively unchallenged. Now, with the help of crowd-sourced funding, new takes on consumer UAVs are emerging, some more playful, and some more hobbyist oriented.

Few however are as innovative as the Robot Dragonfly, whose patented and bio-inspired drive/flight system gives it the ability to hover like a helicopter, and dynamically switch to a “gliding mode”, more like a conventional fixed-wing craft. As with all crowd-sourced campaigns, the Robot Dragonfly is not yet a finished or proven product, however if product simulations and current prototypes are to be believed (both shown in following video), its four wings and light weight (25g) should offer an interesting array of dynamic movements and flight possibilities not achievable with conventional UAV designs.

The following promotional video was released by the group along with the crowd-funding campaign. This video gives an overview of the Robot Dragonfly’s development at the Georgia Institute of Technology, takes a look at the existing research prototypes and shows simulations of the final version performing in a number of different situations.

The group are targeting a broad range of markets with their initial release and have suggested applications in Augmented-Reality Gaming, Aerial Photography, Telepresence, Personal and Commercial Security, and in the Military. For more information, see the Robot Dragonfly IndieGoGo campaign, where team-members are actively answering questions and responding to suggestions.

Kickstarter’s recent decision making it very difficult for hardware projects to use the platform just highlights two very useful things to know about crowdfunding. Firstly, not all crowdfunding platforms are equal. And secondly, the decision to disallow renderings and multiple product rewards only affects the lazy kickstarter projects that probably weren’t going to be successful anyway. Lazy crowdfunding projects make two big mistakes; like hoping that the platform will do all the marketing; or using the project as a learning curve in design, manufacturing and delivery.

First of all, there are dozens of crowdfunding platforms these days (Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, When You Wish, FundaGeek, Invest.in, Launcht, Catarse, WeFund, Pozible, Quirky, 33seeds, RocketHub, peerbacker, etc.). Each favours a certain community or marketing approach and some have an approval process. But when push comes to shove, it’s about how much equity you give up, what charges you pay, how long does it take to get your money, and whether or not you can accept donations or have an any funds model.

There are 3 good reasons to turn to crowdfunding for your robot and they describe 3 completely different sorts of projects. Which sort of project you are will determine what sort of crowdfunding platform you choose.

1. You have a big mail list already and can use crowdfunding as a preorder shopfront and also a way of building your community… the community that you already have! This works really well for many musicians, video game and comic book artists, some of whom have raised pretty big funds. This will work for robot or hardware projects when you have a track record of product delivery, are some kind of superstar, or maybe moonlight for a magazine or media company. You can probably ask for $50,000+.

2. You are testing your market strategy, or maybe your marketers. You might need to do several different campaigns. You might need to get some of your funding elsewhere. You definitely don’t want to underprice and overpromise, so try to find your product market fit while also nailing down design specs and your market channel’s price point. You can probably ask for $5,000 – $20,000. Yes, you might need to put your molds on your maxxed out credit cards, but you are much more likely to attract angel backing if you can demonstrate customer interest.

3. You have a dream. This is the heart of crowdfunding. Use it! Sell us on your dream and send us nothing but stickers and t-shirts. Send us updates and a chance to join your community of dreamers. You can probably raise up to $10,000 to fund your prototype. This is a creative project. Use rewards that are an experience, a souvenir, a chance to share the excitement. It’s also a great way to get some customer validation before going any further. If you can’t find people to fund your prototype dreams, maybe your product idea needs more work.

This last approach to crowdfunding robots is underutilized but has been successfully used by many projects which then moved from prototyping into presales. Rumor even has it that Lit Motors crowdfunded their crash tests! This kind of crowdfunding is customer development and very lean startup in methodology. It’s not the same as the Jobs Act style crowdfunding which could lead to later trouble getting VC or angel investment (as reported in PandoDaily).

Click to enlarge and see details.

This mash-up of our list of 160+ robotic start-up companies onto Google’s global map graphically displays how widespread robotic inventions and inventors are dispersed around the world and particularly around major robotic research centers. For the purpose of this mash-up, we are defining a robotic start-up as a company established to develop a concept or product or robotic-related service for sale but doesn’t yet have it all together. They have established a business and are in motion toward their goals but haven’t made any sales or aren’t fully funded, haven’t finished developing the product, or all of the preceding.

Claire Delauney’s Botiful Kickstarter campaign is in its last hours and as she crosses the funded line, Claire shares with us some of her strategies and insights into running a successful Kickstarter. (SF Bay Area Robotics Meetup) No, it isn’t always easy or #botiful, but Claire’s tips include:

• Have a captivating video with a clear message in the opening seconds.
• Engage with audience via updates – extend your story.
• Conversion rates are very low, so you have to reach beyond your own channels.
• It takes 100s of attempts to get media/blog interest.
• Be full time on your campaign, and in hindsight, also engage a PR specialist.

Jeremy Conrad, from Lemnos Labs, had some price point insights:

• Add 40% margin to your max cost estimate to protect against unforeseen.

This is a great tip because many campaigns that I’ve seen operate on a “we only charge what we’ll need to manufacture”. Firstly, this doesn’t leave you with any margin when shit does happen, and potentially leaves you out of pocket or your backers without any rewards. Secondly, unless you only want to make one batch of your robot, how are you going to distribute in future?

Distributors need to have a margin on top of manufacture and if you set the public expectation of your price point below the final market price, then you aren’t an attractive distribution prospect. It’s not enough to think about how to fund the project. You have to think about how to manufacture and distribute afterwards, including packaging and branding, so that future products have some tie in.

I provided an introduction to the Meetup with some Kickstarter “robot” project statistics, which I’ve scraped from their site. I’ll share a full post later on but in brief:

• 50% projects are unsuccessful
• Kickstarter is a long tail business – drop off in $ raised from 1st to 10th is huge.
• Majority of projects are about $3000-$4000
• Average pledge is $80ish but median pledge is closer to $30

• Claire Delauney (Botiful) – Botiful campaign (video & updates)
• Elad Inbar (Robot App Store) – Botiful/RAS blog dialogues
• Saurabh Palan (iRoboticist) – most number of #botiful shares (twitter, facebook and face to face)
• Jeremy Conrad (Lemnos Labs) – promoting and supporting robot startups & events generally

Click to enlarge and see details.

This mash-up of our list of 159 robotic start-up companies onto Google’s global map graphically displays how widespread robotic inventions and inventors are dispersed around the world and particularly around major robotic research centers. For the purpose of this mash-up, we are defining a robotic start-up as a company established to develop a concept or product or robotic-related service for sale but doesn’t yet have it all together. They have established a business and are in motion toward their goals but haven’t made any sales or aren’t fully funded, haven’t finished developing the product, or all of the preceding.

Interestingly, there are very few industrial robot start-up companies; mostly the new companies are service robotic companies, a generic term for every form of robot except those used for industrial-grade manufacturing: surgical; healthcare; defense; space; security; personal service; shop assistance; unmanned aerial, underwater and ground vehicles; toys; vision enabled, etc.

Link to audio file (40:32)

Today we talk with Andra Keay, founder of Robot Launch Pad, robotics startup accelerator based in Silicon Valley, about latest events, lean startup methodology, funding, and gender.

Andra Keay

Andra Keay is a Robot Startup Evangelist passionate about growing robotics, one startup at a time. Supported by key actors in the field including Erin Rapacki and Ryan Calo, Robot Launch Pad aims to bridge the software, web and mobile startup worlds of Silicon Valley and San Francisco with the robotics community and the flourishing local maker sphere. In this interview, Keay tells us about the excellent startup events organized by Robot Launch Pad in April including the Robot Retreat, the Robot Block Party, Mega Startup Weekend and a Cloud Robotics Hackathon. She brings us into her world of lean startup methodology, minimum viable products and tells us about the importance of women in science.

Before launching Robot Launch Pad, Keay completed her Master of Digital Cultures in the area of Human-Robot Interactions at the University of Sydney. Her project on “the Naming of Robots” explored how roboticists express identity and gender through their technology. Passionate about robotics for a long time, she has also been running science and robot workshops for children since 1995, including coaching competition teams in Moonbots, First Lego League and RoboCup Jnr.

Finally, don’t miss Andra Keay’s other blogs, Robot State and Andragy.

Links:

• Download mp3 (23.6MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Robot Launch Pad’s Homepage

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.

Take an existing robot platform – EITHER an autonomous mobile robot (like Adept’s) OR a semi-autonomous drone (like Parrot’s)  – and create a successful business. MVP it. Find customers. Build software/website. Create a market. Distribute it, sell it, support it, grow it. Congratulations, you just won… NO, you just earned a million dollars!

It’s about turning your great idea into products for others to enjoy. That’s difficult. But we’re really excited by the opportunities that exist for great robot businesses built on existing robot platforms. The Joggobot is a great example.

The Joggobot is the creation of Floyd Mueller and Eberhard Gräther of the Exertion Games Lab at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.

This is a great idea. I want one. Who else does? And out of everyone who wants it, who has the money to pay for drone plus software plus marketing plus… Well, probably a lot of people do! Do the research and find your product/market fit.

Maybe crossing the chasm isn’t exciting for robot researchers but by now robotics is very ready for a service industry ecosystem. A relatively small pool of robotics researchers have other things to do than create ‘killer robot apps’! One way to kickstart the robot business model process is to involve select domain experts to better explore need. Another is to have diversity in your design team. At Robot Launchpad HQ we have a heap of ideas for great robot businesses, but ideas are worthless unless someone executes.

Here’s an example: What about ‘lost child finding’ quadrocopters? The average toddler is remarkably adept at slipping away, avoiding restraints, unlocking doors and disappearing into crowds. There’s no replacing parental care though. The average parent wouldn’t be the market, but the average parent would appreciate shopping malls, playgroups, playgrounds, restaurants, sports events etc. that offered simple additional safety services. Put the mall app on your phone and send a photo of your toddler to the mall drones, as a supplement to the existing lost child services.

I personally think that involving the mothers of toddlers into a discussion about robots will unlock a heap of other pain points that might have robot answers. It’s the first steps in the oncoming consumer robot revolution, starting with controllable semiprivate indoor spaces that are halfway between the factory or warehouse and the home. I’m thinking shopping malls, hospitals, airports, sports stadiums, prisons etc.

So the Robot Launchpad Grand Challenge is to create a viable robot business using an existing autonomous aerial or mobile robot. Keeping it simple, think of controllable indoor spaces and easily programmed GUIs using a smartphone and/or a cloud service. You are putting the value in the sandwich between the robot hardware and the internet/phone. Find the customers, create the market. Ship the robot. Support the business. Earn a million dollars and our undying respect in the Robot Startup Hall of Fame!

ENTER NOW!

]]> https://robohub.org/why-robot-startups-now-part-2/ Fri, 11 May 2012 00:58:55 +0000 http://www.robotlaunch.com/?p=330 2. Broader Financial Climate

A positive indicator for robotics startups is the improving financial climate. There are signs that the US housing market is stabilizing. Fannie Mae, the government backed mortgage company, has posted a profit for the first time since 2007 without needing a government bailout. The decline in home prices is slowing, as are mortgage delinquency rates and the rate of American home purchasing is on the rise again.

“We expect our financial results for 2012 to be significantly better than 2011,” Susan R. McFarland, Fannie Mae’s chief financial officer, said in a statement. “As our serious delinquency rate declines and home prices stabilize, we expect to reduce our reserves, which combined with revenue from our high-quality new book of business will drive our future results.” [1]

While not everyone is getting rich yet, the overall financial indicators show that the U.S. economy has rebounded faster than predicted. The stock market has doubled since 2009, corporate profits are surging and the U.S. economy is growing at 3% pa. As financial journalist Daniel Gross puts it:

“Like the world’s first bionic man, the U.S. economy has come back—better, stronger, and faster than most analysts expected, and than most of its peers.” [2]

While this is a U.S. centric view and some of Europe is still in financial crisis, nonetheless China and S.E.Asia are surging and many African economies are showing very promising proportional growth rates. There are other sources that describe the current world economic status but it’s no longer a bad time for a capital intensive industry like robotics to grow. Particularly if business models lower the risk by utilizing lease models or the rapid cheap trial and error methods of startups.

Where Defense budgets are tightening on traditional robotics, like unmanned systems, the Whitehouse is committing spending towards other newer robotics growth areas. All this indicates that robotics is ready to support itself as an industry, rather than be supported as a research project. Legislation is being passed allowing the introduction of driverless cars and by 2015 we may see changes permitting the commercial use of small drones in U.S. airspace.

3. Maturity of Robotics Technology

Rodney Brooks, founder of iRobot and current CEO of Heartland Robotics, is one of many expressing the view that robotics has progressed beyond a cool new research area and into the world of robot products. While making new discoveries is exciting, there isn’t enough effort going in to using those same exciting new technologies in everyday applications.

 ”Users just want to get a task done. They don’t care if it’s a cool robot. You may, but they may not care if it’s a robot at all,” [3]

So, the question now isn’t what robots can we build, it’s what can we do with the ones we’ve built already. The robots that are successful products seem simple and boring, eg. industrial arms, vacuum cleaners, cars. But when applied to the right problem, even simple robots are transformative. The first successful consumer robot was of course iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner with more than 7 million sold worldwide. But the biggest acquisition of a robotics company was Amazon buying Kiva in March 2012 for $775 million.

Kiva’s system relies on small orange turtle like robots that move shelves around in warehouses. The brains are largely on servers. The robots aren’t ‘cool or exciting’. They are barely even robots. But they solve the problem that sank WebVan, one of the most spectacular e-commerce failures. You can only do half your e-commerce in the cloud. Somewhere real products have to be shipped to real places.

Kiva founder Mick Mountz is an MIT engineer who worked at WebVan. “We decided products that could walk and talk on their own would be the best way to solve the problem,” he laughs. [4]

Think of Kiva bots as the hands and feet of the Cloud.  They are not autonomous Star-Trek-like agents, but are wirelessly connected to and controlled by the Cloud in real-time. [5]

Amazon, like WebVan, has to ship product. Reportedly, phsyical order fulfilment cost nearly 9 percent of Amazon’s $40 billion global revenues. This is a big enough pain point for some companies to be willing to trial the Kiva System in a few locations, especially smaller retailers, like Staples in 2004, who faced increasing competition in cloud commerce.

Kiva’s robots today are processing millions of orders a year in retailers’ warehouses across the United States, the UK, and Europe, quietly driving Kiva’s startling 80 percent annual growth. On the distant horizon is a plan to bring Kiva’s approach to the manufacturing sector. [6]

Jeff Bezos from Amazon is also investing heavily in Heartland Robotics. Brooks has a vision of transforming the workplace by making robots that can be safely worked with, shifting robots out of sterile, safe factory environments and bringing them alongside people. His analogy is with mainframe computer systems in the 1960s to the personal computer of the 1980s.

“Originally ordinary people couldn’t touch computers. Now they can. What if ordinary people could touch robots?” [7]

The future of robotics is exciting, but we’ve barely begun to fully explore the potential of the simple robots we already have.

next post: Increasing modularity & commonality plus decreasing component costs

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/business/fannie-mae-profit-signals-a-stabilizing-housing-market.html
2. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/29/myth-of-decline-u-s-is-stronger-and-faster-than-anywhere-else.html
3. http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57391570-76/robots-still-lack-the-human-touch/
4. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markpmills/2012/03/23/amazons-kiva-robot-acquisition-is-bullish-for-both-amazon-and-american-jobs/
5. http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2012/march/innovation-mountz.html
6. http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2012/march/innovation-mountz.html
7. http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2012/05/heartland_robotics_will_unveil.html

1. Disruptions to funding models
2. Broader financial climate
3. Maturity of robotics technology (backlog of product)
4. Increasing modularity vs commonality
5. Decreasing cost of sensors (and other components – via democratizing/sanguine)
6. Object recognition no longer robotics problem (same as next?)
7. Internet of Things
8. Changing manufacturing/prototyping environment
9. Overall internet/software eats the world (or is this also object recognition?)
10. Lean Startup Methodology
11. Popular discussion = zeitgeist

this list is subject to change

1. Disruption to Funding Models

The Kauffman Foundation’s recent report on 20 years of investment in VC funding called it ‘a triumph of hope over experience’.

Venture capital (VC) has delivered poor returns for more than a decade. VC returns haven’t significantly outperformed the public market since the late 1990s, and, since 1997, less cash has been returned to investors than has been invested in VC. Speculation among industry insiders is that the VC model is broken, despite occasional high-profile successes like Groupon, Zynga, LinkedIn, and Facebook in recent years. [1]

Dave McClure from 500 Startups is (in)famous for promoting a ‘spray and pray’ funding style which focusses on making many small early investments, testing often and only keeping the best. However he recently declared that VC’s should be ashamed.

“Because we SUCK at EXACTLY the thing we’re supposed to help entrepreneurs do — build BIG, SCALABLE companies.” [2]

The lean startup mantra of ‘fail fast and cheap, challenge all assumptions’ is shaking up the orthodox investment models. This goes hand in hand with the crowdfunding movement which connects product ideas directly to customers, outsourcing the early stage production funding eg. KickStarter, IndieGoGo, Wefunder, CircleUp, etc.

Crowdfunding sites are springing up like mushrooms since the JOBS (Jumpstart our Business Startup) Act was signed by President Obama on April 5, 2012. Although the details still need some work before the process starts in earnest.

 As the President said at today’s signing, “this bill is a potential gamechanger” for America’s entrepreneurs. For the first time, Americans will be able to go online and invest in small businesses and entrepreneurs. Not only will this help small businesses and high-growth enterprises raise capital more efficiently, but it will also allow small and young firms to expand and hire faster.  [3]

next post: Broader Financial Climate & Maturity of Robotics Technology

1. http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/vc-enemy-is-us-report.pdf
2. http://500.co/2012/04/06/scaling-venture-capital/
3. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/04/05/jobs-act-encouraging-startups-supporting-small-businesses

This reminds me of a guest post “The Five Secret Laws of Startups” by Fake Grimlock on Extreme Startups. Fake Grimlock  is an extremely smart giant robot dinosaur currently terrorizing the startup community. If you haven’t been eaten, then the First law is “Be Shoes”, which intersects with the Third law, “Build things people want” in a very relevant way for robotics. And for those too impatient to go to Extreme Startups right away, the other secret laws of startups were; be awesome at one thing, fight for the user and be contagious. [image below by Fake Grimlock]

“Be shoes” means that crazy new technology is just not useful and “build things people want” is about validating your assumptions in the marketplace, not just building a crazy knee sled because you want one. There’s a lot of amazing knee sled building in the robotics world. That’s not a bad thing for research. But if you want to build a successful robot startup, then amazing knee sleds have got a very very small market. It might change the world one day but only research labs and very early adopters are interested right now. And they are likely to be building their own.

To “be shoes” as a robot startup, you can use lean startup methodology to find out what robot shoes would look like, before investing everything in production. One of these weird shoes was built by a company who knew their market segment very well.

Robots might be new but people haven’t changed much. A successful robot startup is unlikely to be a solo endeavor. Lean startups can benefit from a team approach, to question assumptions and give scope for rapid prototyping, customer development and deep domain knowledge. Eric Ries describes a lean startups as being born out of;

• the use of open source software and free platforms
• agile development methodology
• rapid customer-centric iteration

Successful startups are rarely new products in new markets. Robot shoes improve an existing product. Successful robot startups will resegment existing markets. To a certain extent the robot part of a successful robot startup will and ought to disappear. iRobot’s Roomba is the most successful consumer robot in the world but to most people it’s just a vacuum cleaner. Intuitive’s surgical system augments the doctor. Every toy aisle in the US has disconcertingly lively dolls and toys but very few are called robots.

At the recent Maker Startup Weekend, Dale Dougherty talked about the importance of creating physical products that people wanted. [article by Ahmed Siddiqui] Dougherty pointed out that people pay for physical products all the time, a point sometimes overlooked when cataloguing the difficulties of hardware startups. People pay a lot more for physical objects that are aesthetically satisfying as well. You can want things that you don’t really need.

Two other opportunities for robotics startups are robots as interfaces or translators; and robots as copiers or creators. Examples; robots that convert scientific or mechanical instrumentation or sensors into accessible easy to operate or understand forms, like humanoid robots do; or robots that reproduce something useful, like a 3d printer does.

However, the robot we love the most is the completely new product for a new market. The crazy amazing knee sled 4.0 that flies. There have been very few leaps into the big blue ocean. But the technology used to be a lot more expensive and a lot less common than it is becoming now. The democratization of technology is well demonstrated by the DIY drones movement.

As Chris Anderson from Wired and DIY Drones explains, a few years ago autonomous air vehicles cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and there were only a handful. As more are made, the technology gets cheaper. As the technology gets cheaper, more are made. This takes drones out of the rarified military and industrial air and into the hands of the hobbyist, small businesses and consumers.

Robot startups will flourish as stealth technologies, re segmenting markets and making better shoes. But as we become more familiar with new robotic capabilities, as robots cross the chasm under the guise of toys, hobbies and domestic appliances, robots will launch new markets as new products. We just don’t know what yet. Imagine what startups will happen when every second kid on the street has access to a drone!

Robot Launch Pad is a community interested in exploring robot startups from a lean customer centric perspective. We’re involved in a lot of great events in Silicon Valley. This is just the start of the discussion about robot startups and it’s taking off!

So, be startup robot shoes – kind of like Go Go Gadget shoes, only MORE AWESOME.

For the 1st time in startup weekend history, teams are asked to build robot startups in a 54hr challenge. Using just a mockup OR an existing robot platform OR all the robot resources you possess, can you pitch and develop a fantastic robot business? Winning teams get a chance to pitch their business idea at the DEMO conference in front of crowds of VCs/angels/media/fans.

Mega Startup Weekend will be held on April 13-15 at Microsoft. Mega Startup Weekend is the largest Startup Weekend in the Bay Area and in the world, hosting over 300 attendees in 3 different verticals – robots, gaming and mobile.  This is our annual Celebration of Entrepreneurship, hosted by Microsoft BizSpark, Startup America, and DEMO.

Please share this information with other roboticists and see you there! The mighty Robot LaunchPad team will be mentors and organizers at the Mega Startup Weekend event. (Use “robotlaunch” as promocode and get 25% discount.)

But how can I build a robot startup in just 54 hours? 

The key is to build a robot business model. Anyone can use existing robot technologies to create a brilliant new robot business. That’s why we’ve put examples here for every level of robot skill – from technically minded robot noob, to skillful robot/software programmer, to uber DIY robot drone with duck tape types.

1. Technically minded robot noob – create a mockup. If you can identify a market need and robot products that exist or can be easily converted, then build the business model not the robot. Eg. Maybe supermarkets could use robot arms to help shoppers reach products on top shelves. Find a market need that robots could do, then build a business model and a mockup.

2. Skillful roboticist or coder – leverage existing robots with accessible APIs and create new apps and markets. Eg. Existing autonomous mobile platforms could deliver food/luggage/shopping at large airports/hotels/malls. Need ipad/iphone app connecting it up and a business plan.

3. You DIY robots for breakfast? – you can build anything in 54 hours. Go on, surprise us!

Rodney Brooks says that the next generation of robots will be more closely integrated with people in manufacturing and the workplace. Today’s challenge isn’t ‘what can a robot do?’, it’s ‘what should a robot be doing now’?

[‘Deserted Robot’ by Artists for Charity on deviantart]

And if you don’t know us, allow me to introduce the core robot launchpad people.

 Andra Keay – Culture Hacker | Robot UX

After years of studying robotics from a human-robot interaction perspective, my hacker, maker, DIY genes have cursed me to tinker. Lean startup methodology is a great way to empower people centred design, so I want to grow robotics culture the lean way.

 Ahmed Siddiqui – Startup Weekend Organiser and CEO GoGo Mongo.

Ahmed calls himself a startup junkie. After winning his first Startup Weekend,  he now organizes Startup Weekends all over Silicon Valley. He also writes for Venture Beat and as an entrepreneur, is looking to shake up the robotics space.

 Erin Rapacki – Product Marketing Manager @ Adept Mobile Robots

Also known as RobotDiva, Erin has worked or interned at a wide range of robot companies. She speaks and writes extensively about robotics as a business and robots as a product. [Don’t miss her as guest speaker at blackbox Cofounder dinner – thurs march 22]

 Michael Harries – Chief Technologist @ Citrix Startup Accelerator

Michael left robotics for the ‘real’ world of business, as the technology futurist for global technology company Citrix. Now he’s running their Startup Accelerator and sees the convergence of robots, phones and cloud in his future.

We are a group of volunteers. And we’re growing as you join us. It’s clear there is a need for a robot startup community, one that bridges robotics with the startup world, the business world, the mobile & internet world, the design world and the creative communities. [If I left a world out, sorry, you are all invited.]

We’re bootstrapping and we’re iterating all the time. We’ll make mistakes but we’ll fix them. As we reach out to more people, we realized that you don’t know who we are, or why we’re doing this. It’s not for the money. One day we might grow into an organization or forum or business but not yet. It’s our community too, it’s platform agnostic, unaligned and open.

]]> https://robohub.org/winners-of-cloud-robotics-hackathon/ Tue, 13 Mar 2012 17:46:10 +0000 http://robotlaunch.com/?p=234 ….. straight from Robotics Hackathon HQ…..

(Our CONGRATULATIONS to ALL especially Silicon Valley team OLogic !)

We are very happy to announce the results of the Cloud Robotics Hackathon 2012. We combined all the project evaluations from the judges and chose the top three projects which will be awarded awesome prices.

#3

In third place we find an excellent project that uses a complex robot behaviours to encourage discipline and cleanliness in humans. We really enjoyed the humorous presentation, usage of the cloud and autonomous navigation.

Team No Pain, No Game from Montreal wins the third prices comprises of the following items:

• Ticket to the StartUp Festival
• A GitHub six-month bronze plan

#2

The second place goes to a very impressive project involving autonomous navigation, path planning, communication via the robotic cloud, a crafty game board, and funky smiley faces on a smartphone. The complexity, the attention to detail, and the overall completeness of the projects were most impressive and showed the awesome hacking skills of the team.

Team Oddwerx from Santa Clara wins the second prices comprises of the following items:

• Ticket to the StartUp Festival
• A GitHub one-year bronze plan

#1

The first place goes to the most cloudy of all projects. One that involves shiny lights, felt and lots of colours. This project uses a very interesting communication and collaboration system between robots that helps them fetch messages from the cloud even if they don’t have direct access to the web. This project also tackles the interesting area of education and regards though the use of a game. We really enjoyed the technical complexity, robot communication and human interaction featured in the project

Team LightingBots from Montreal wins the second prices comprises of the following items:

• A Karotz robot
• Ticket to the StartUp Festival
• A GitHub one-year silver plan and a GitHub T-shirt for each team member

More Projects

Unfortunately, we cannot give prices to everyone although we think every team did great and truly impressed us with what they could come up in a single weekend. We invite you to have a look at all their amazing project presentations.

 Keep Hacking Robots, Keep Hacking the Future.

See you Next Year!

More than 60 people showed up to the Hackathon, making us the largest event next to the Montreal Hackerspace which had 100 on opening night. We had 10 teams working over the weekend and have posted demos of working cloud enabled robots from the final session. There were events in 7 locations around the globe, so each location had a presentation and semifinal and the mothership in Montreal will be choosing the final winner today.

The two Santa Clara/Silicon Valley teams voted best and moving through to the finals are: Oddwerx (by OLogic) and HomeCast.

Oddwerx used their own robot(s) to play tic tac toe as your avatar or proxy, so that you and your friend can be located anywhere but control the robot moves via cloud. Hopefully the Oddwerx robot will be on kickstarter soon.

HomeCast used the DFRover and developed a ‘house sitter/home watchdog’ to roam the house while you are away, checking on temperature, humidity, videoing pets/intruders etc. The possibilities are limited only by the range of sensors.

 One of the semifinalists from Montreal is RobotGrrl with her RoboBrrd mesh network. It’s great! http://robotgrrl.com/blog/tag/hackathon/

1. Build robot

2. Connect robot to cloud

3. Make robot do something useful or fun

Join us at the Citrix Startup Accelerator for the launch of the Robotics Hackathon. The Robotics Hackathon is sponsored by RobotShop.com and Google. While the main hackathon is taking place in Montreal, the event is open to teams from all over the world. Cloud robotics is the future! So, we thought that a great way to launch ROBOT LaunchPad events would be to invite local Bay Area Robotics Hackathon teams to an opening party in Santa Clara from 2 – 6 PT on Friday March 2nd to coincide with the hackathon launch in Montreal [6pm ET]. INVITE to Santa Clara Launch Party here.

The Robotics Hackathon is going to be heaps of fun and you don’t need to be a robot scientist to join us! See the main Robotics Hackathon site for all the rules and requirements. Register your team by February 18 to receive a free DFRobotshop Rover.

We also plan to host the closing event and pitch submissions at the Accelerator. If there’s enough interest the venue may be open all weekend, however Bay Area teams may prefer to work closer to their homes, use the Google Hackathon Hangout and simply join us for start and finish of the Hackathon.

ROBOT LaunchPad is a robotics startup community and events. We thought a fantastic first event would be to host a launch party in Santa Clara for Bay Area Robotics Hackathon teams. Sign up for our newsletter for more ROBOT LaunchPad events coming soon, including pitchfests and startup weekends.

Bay Area Robotics Hackathon Launch Party hosted by ROBOT LaunchPad and Citrix Startup Accelerator

In Robots Podcast episode #93, Sabine interviews Erin Rapacki, who previously worked at DEKA, iRobot, and Anybots, and is currently Product Marketing Manager for Mobile Robots at Adept Technology. In the interview, she argues that robotics research should be more driven by real-world problems in need of marketable solutions, and that they should take advantage of available platforms, such as those available from Adept, rather than continually reinventing the mobility aspect of their projects. She also discusses the prospects for cloud robotics and states that many of the missing pieces roboticists have been waiting on have arrived, mentioning faster processors, tablet computers, and the Kinect. Ms. Rapacki recently authored a guest post on the IEEE Spectrum Automaton blog, titled “Dear Reader, I Have News for You: Robots Are Boring” in which she states:

How to win a tech conference startup competition | VentureBeat.

.. I have come to the realization that certain types of startup concepts always do well, while others just don’t… The key thing to consider is that these are tech conferences, so you should have something inherently “techie.”  The majority of the audience members are engineers, or else marketing and sales professionals pretending to be engineers.

Ahmed suggests that three types of startup are usually successful; programming made easy, mashups, and fancy algorithms. He also found that areas like health and education were not popular although that may be changing. In that case, the new trend towards having different verticals at startup events may make developing startups for industries like health more appealing. We all know there is a huge market for health related products, but when you are competing for attention against a slick race car addon, a sweet fashion shopping tool and new social or (unsocial) network…

JUST ADD ROBOTS to a roomful of entrepreneurs

in search of a WINNING STARTUP IDEA!

The ROBOT launchpad connects startup and robotics communities. We take the successful startup weekend and boot camp model to launch existing hardware (robots) into new business ideas. As robotics technology becomes more affordable and widespread, the search is on for the next generation of robot businesses – robots that fulfil consumer or small to medium size enterprise needs.

The robots are ready. Are you?

Real Robot

Each ‘robot launchpad’ uses real robots, robot platforms or robot hardware ready for new business models. It’s not about building robots so much as building businesses around them.

One Weekend

We know you’re busy. But youcan pull amazing startup ideas together in 48 hours and still have a blast! We’re also doing shorter intense events like a pitchfest and meetup.

Roomful of Entrepreneurs

Are you business focussed but love robots? Are you a robot geek who wants to learn how startups work? Or are you a developer or designer from the areas of mobile devices, software, web and internet technologies looking for new horizons? We also welcome applications from people with domain knowledge in areas that could benefit from robots (eg. health). We expect strong demand for spaces so there will be an application process.

Winning Startup Idea

Robots and a roomful of entrepreneurs makes for one great weekend – at the end, you make your pitch to industry judges from robotics, startup, investor and venture capital communities.