These Visionary companies have a big idea and are well on their way to achieving it, although it isn’t always an easy road for any really innovative technology. In the case of Cruise, that meant testing self driving vehicles on the streets of San Francisco, one of the hardest driving environments in the world. Some of our Visionary Awards go to companies who are opening up new market applications for robotics, such as Built Robotics in construction, Dishcraft in food services, Embark in self-driving trucks, Iron Ox in urban agriculture and Zipline in drone delivery. Some are building tools or platforms that the entire robotics industry can benefit from, such as Agility Robotics, Covariant, Formant, RobustAI and Zoox. The companies in our Good Robot Awards also show that ‘technologies built for us, have to be built by us’.

Self-driving vehicles would not be possible without sensors and so it’s not surprising to see two small new sensors in the 2020 Silicon Valley Robotics ‘Good Robot’ Innovation Awards, the Velabit from Velodyne and the nanoScan3 from SICK. We showcase three other innovations in component technology, the FHA-C with Integrated Servo Drive from Harmonic Drive, the radically new Inception Drive from SRI International and Qualcomm’s RB5 Processor, all ideal for building robots.

Our other Innovation Awards go to companies with groundbreakingly new robots; from the tensegrity structure of Squishy Robotics, which will help in both space exploration and disaster response on earth, to the Dusty Robotics full scale FieldPrinter for the construction industry, and Titan from FarmWise for agriculture, which was also named one of Time’s Best Inventions for 2020. Finally, we’re delighted to see innovation in robotics that is affordable and collaborative enough for home robot applications, with Stretch from Hello Robot and Eve from Halodi Robotics.

Silicon Valley Robotics announces its inaugural ‘Good Robot’ Industry Awards this week, celebrating Innovation in products, Vision in action, and the Commercialization of new technologies that offer us the chance to address global challenges.

President: Sabine Haeurt          

Founded: 2012

HQ:  Switzerland

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Solving global challenges gets a boost with the SVR ‘Good Robot’ Industry Awards