Jennifer Apicella (left) of the PRN and Fady Saad (right) of Cybernetix Ventures have announced a strategic partnership. | Source: Pittsburgh Robotics Network

Cybernetix Ventures yesterday announced a strategic partnership with the Pittsburgh Robotics Network. The early-stage venture capital firm said it is part of its long-term robotics cluster engagement efforts. 

The partnership is a joint initiative to set Pittsburgh’s robotics startups up for success, and bring more of the cluster’s investable robotics opportunities to global markets. The Pittsburgh Robotics Network (PRN) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering innovation and growth in southwestern Pennsylvania. 

“The Pittsburgh Robotics Network is one of the top robotics clusters in the U.S., with a powerhouse team and strong robotics innovators emerging,” stated Fady Saad, founder and general partner of Cybernetix Ventures. “Like our firm, the PRN is focused on markets-driven, actionable, scalable use cases for robotics. We are excited to amplify their efforts and connect the cluster further with the larger investment community.”

Founded in 2021, Cybernetix focuses on robotics, automation, and industrial AI investments. The venture capital firm works with robotics clusters around the world to elevate the most promising robotics founders and startups to the global stage. 

Cybernetix expands robotics focus

Cybernetix aims to connect the PRN’s startups with the firm’s diverse ecosystem of potential customers, later-stage investors, financial institutions, and acquirers. The company will join forces with the PRN as a Leader Premier Partner to provide advice to startups. 

“Cybernetix Ventures is a premier investment firm for robotics, and this partnership represents a unique opportunity for not only robotics companies, but for accelerating the commercial adoption of robotics solutions overall,” added Jennifer Apicella, executive director of the PRN.

“Both Cybernetix Ventures and the PRN share a set of aligned values that promise to bring significant benefits to robotics companies on the path to commercialization,” she said. “We admire their unique expertise and understanding of how robotics will directly contribute to the advancement of specific industries, both now and into the future.”

The partners announced their collaboration at the Agriculture & Robotics Summit, where the PRN welcomed innovators, investors, and industry to Pittsburgh to explore the future of smart agriculture. Cybernetix, which has focused on vertical robotics applications in manufacturing, logistics, construction, and healthcare since its inception, participated in the event as a launchpad for its expanded focus on agriculture and climate robotics.

“The new use cases and overall necessity for robotics innovation in agriculture have accelerated the sector’s investment potential, and we will explore investments in agriculture and climate robotics to add to our solid portfolio,” Saad said.

PRN head to speak at the Robotics Summit

Apicella will be taking part in a panel discussion at the 2024 Robotics Summit & Expo, which takes place on May 1 and 2 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. She will be joined by Stephen M. Muck, executive chairman of Advanced Construction Robotics; Brandon Contino, CEO of Four Growers; and Andy McMillan, chair of the board of directors at Cirtronics.

During the session, “Paving the Road to Success in Robotics Commercialization,” attendees can learn how the four industry leaders have conquered obstacles, scaled operations, and transformed ideas into viable products. 

This will be the largest Robotics Summit ever. It will include more than 200 exhibitors, various networking opportunities, a Women in Robotics breakfast, a career fair, an engineering theater, a startup showcase, and more! The PRN is also a sponsor of the Robotics Summit. Registration is now open for the event.

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Goodbye to the hydraulic version of Atlas and hello to the electric model designed for commercialization. That’s the message from Boston Dynamics Inc., which yesterday retired the older version of its humanoid robot after 15 years of development and today showed a preview of its successor.

“The next generation of the Atlas program builds on decades of research and furthers our commitment to delivering the most capable, useful mobile robots solving the toughest challenges in the industry today: with Spot, with Stretch, and now with Atlas,” said the company in a blog post. Spot is a quadruped used in facilities inspection and other tasks, and Stretch is designed to unload trucks.

Boston Dynamics began with humanoids by sawing one of its pneumatically powered quadrupeds in half back in 2009. By 2016, the Waltham, Mass.-based company showed that its robot could walk, open a door, and maintain its balance while being shoved by a person holding a hockey stick, all without a tether.

Roboticists continued to improve Atlas, giving it a smaller form factor and more sensors, training its artificial intelligence, and enabling it to do increasingly impressive feats. They ranged from parkour and dancing to taking tools through a mock construction site.

In fact, it was that demonstration of Atlas manipulating a plank, picking up a bag of tools, and taking it to a worker that earned Boston Dynamics an RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award. The company will be exhibiting at the RBR50 Showcase at the Robotics Summit & Expo on May 1 and 2.

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Boston Dynamics evolves with the times

As capable as the YouTube darling was, the older version of Atlas still had limitations, both in range of motion and in terms of size and power usage. Boston Dynamics noted that it designed its legged robots to operate in unstructured environments, and it acknowledged that Atlas was initially a research and development project rather than a commercial product.

In the meantime, the company itself changed owners, from Google in 2013 to SoftBank in 2017 and most recently to Hyundai in 2020. Along with those changes came an increasing focus on robots such as Spot and Stretch serving industrial needs. To continue pure research, Hyundai founded the Boston Dynamics AI Institute in 2022.

“The AI Institute recently launched a new version of Spot with an API [application programming interface] designed for researchers,” said Robert Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics. “We’re talking about how to jointly solve some big challenges — the diversity of manipulation tasks we need to do with this robot [Atlas] is huge, and AI is essential to enabling that generality.”

Playter told The Robot Report that Boston Dynamics needs results within two to three years, while the AI Institute has more of a five-year timeframe.

Robot lessons apply to fleets, new Atlas

“It takes a solid year from a clean sheet to a new robot,” said Playter. “We wanted to know that we could solve essential dexterous manipulation problems before releasing the product.”

Boston Dynamics learned numerous lessons from commercializing Spot and Stretch, he said. It has improved control policies, upgraded actuation, and minimized joint complexity. The new Atlas has three-fingered grippers.

The Orbit fleet management software, which initially applies to indoor deployments of Spot, could also help supervise Stretch and Atlas.

Atlas gets ready for mobile manipulation in industrial settings. Source: Boston Dynamics

“Everything we understood, from the time of launching Spot as a prototype to it being a reliable product deployed in fleets, is going into the new Atlas,” Playter said. “We’re confident AI and Orbit will help enhance behaviors. For instance, by minimizing slipping on surfaces at Anheuser-Busch, we proved that we can develop algorithms and make it reliable.”

“Now, 1,500 robots in our fleet have them running,” he added. “It’s essential for customers like Purina to monitor and manage fleets as a vehicle for collecting data. As we develop and download new capabilities, Orbit becomes a hub for an ecosystem of different robots.”

Safety and autonomy are basic building blocks

Boston Dynamics has considered safe collaboration in its development of the new Atlas. ASTM International is developing safety standards for legged robots.

“We recognized early on that Atlas is going to work in spaces that have people in them,” said Playter. “This sets the bar much higher than lidar with AMRs [autonomous mobile robots].”

“We started thinking about functionally safe 3D vision,” he recalled. “We started with Stretch inside a container, but ultimately, we want it going everywhere in a warehouse. Advanced, functionally safe, remote vision and onboard systems are essential to solving safety.”

While Spot and Atlas are often teleoperated, Playter said this is a necessary step toward greater levels of autonomy.

“Making the robots knowledgeable about different types of objects and how to grasp them, teleoperation is just a tool for providing examples and data to the robot,” he explained. “It’s not a useful way of building intuition, but it’s easier if you can operate robots at a higher and higher level. Like you don’t need to tell Spot where to plant its feet, you don’t want to tell Atlas where to grasp.”

In the new video below, the previous version of Atlas handles automotive parts and real products weighing up to 25 lb. (11.3 kg).

Atlas ready for rivals in the humanoid race

Over the past two years, the number of humanoid robots in development has rapidly grown. It now includes Agility Robotics‘ Digit, Tesla’s Optimus, and Figure AI‘s Figure 01. In the two past weeks alone, Rainbow Robotics, Sanctuary AI, and Mentee Robotics have all made announcements.

Investment has also been flowing to humanoid companies, with 1X Technologies raising $100 million in January, Figure AI raising $675 million in February, and Accenture investing in Sanctuary AI in March.

Humanoid robots have advanced in parallel with generative AI, and Playter said he welcomes the competition.

“There were three seminal events: Boston Dynamics got acquired for $1 billion, interest in Tesla’s robot validated what we’ve done for a long time, and the emergence of new AI holds the promise of generalization of tasks,” he said. “They’ve inspired lots of new players, but having new tech isn’t all you need to have a commercial product. You need to focus on a use case, build a reliable machine, and manufacture it in a way to build a business. We want to avoid a ‘humanoid winter,’ so rollouts have to be real.”

Playter added that practical design and proper implementation of AI will help differentiate robots rather than focusing on making them more human-like. The new version of Atlas demonstrated that point in how it stood up in the video at the top of this article.

“It’s not talking to a robot that moves the needle, but whether you can build a robot that eventually does 500 tasks,” he said. “Anthropomorphism blows things out of perspective. We did not want a human-shaped head for Atlas. We want people to remember it’s a machine and that it can move in ways humans can’t.”

The financial stability of the businesses involved will also be relevant for commercial success, said Playter. 

“It takes sustained investment; these are expensive products to launch,” he noted. “Having products already out helps build momentum.”

Atlas is humanoid — to a point. Source: Boston Dynamics

When will we see the new robot in the wild?

Boston Dynamics will begin testing the all-electric version of Atlas with parent company Hyundai and select partners next year, said Playter.

“We’re beginning in their factory,” he told The Robot Report. “In addition to the target application of a lot of parts movement — a special kind of logistics in automotive production — I think that will evolve as the dexterity of the robots improves over time.”

“We see robots in the workplace as an evolution, a continuum from Spot to Atlas,” asserted Playter. “Each product in the series informs the launch of the next.”

“Industries will have to figure out how to adapt and incorporate humanoids into their facilities,” he said. “We’ll actually see robots in the wild in factories beginning next year. We want a diversity of tasks.”

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Locus says its systems are now involved in picking 6 million to 7 million units per day. | Source: Locus Robotics

Locus Robotics Corp. today announced that it has surpassed 3 billion total picks across its global customer deployments. The company reached this milestone just 33 weeks after it recorded its 2 billionth pick. It claimed that the achievement underscores its continued rapid growth and solidifies its position as a leader in autonomous robotics automation for the warehouse. 

The Wilmington, Mass.-based company said its 3 billionth pick was a Carhartt T-shirt. The pick occurred at a Carhartt facility in Hanson, Ky. Just milliseconds later, other items were picked at more than 300 Locus customer sites around the world. 

“Surpassing 3 billion picks across our global deployments is a significant milestone that reflects the trust our customers have placed in our innovative robotics solutions,” stated Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics. “As we continue to push the boundaries of innovation, we remain focused on our mission to revolutionize the supply chain industry and empower our customers to drive operational efficiencies and productivity gains in order to thrive in an increasingly complex and demanding fulfillment landscape.”

Founded in 2014, Locus Robotics provides autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) that collaborate with human pickers to increase warehouse efficiency. Locus serves the retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and third-party logistics (3PL) industries and offers a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model.

Locus continues to ramp up operations

It took nearly seven years for Locus to reach its first billion picks. Since then, the company’s growth has accelerated rapidly. It reached 2 billion picks just 11 months later, and now 3 billion just 33 weeks later. Locus received a 2024 RBR50 award for hitting 2 billion picks. 

“I first saw a demo of the Locus bots the year the company was founded. I instantly understood the potential this system had,” said Steve Banker, vice president of supply chain services at ARC Advisory Group. “Their impressive growth trajectory is a clear indication of the value their proven solutions bring to customers, enabling them to improve productivity, lower costs, and stay ahead of the competition.”

During the 2023 peak holiday season, LocusBots picked more than 331 million units. This is a 66% increase compared with the 2022 peak holiday season. In all of 2023, Locus picked a total of 1.2 billion units, an 82% increase over the previous year. 

As the industry continues to evolve, Locus Robotics said it remains committed to driving innovation and delivering cutting-edge robotics systems that enable its customers to scale and meet growing demand. The company asserted that its focus on research and development ensures it is well-positioned to continue to grow rapidly. 

Despite its growth, Locus has also seen some recent setbacks. In January, the company confirmed it had a “small, targeted RIF,” or reduction in force. It did not specify how many employees were affected by the layoffs. Faulk said that Locus overhired and overestimated how much business it would get after the COVID-19 peak. 

Locus Robotics at the Robotics Summit

Sean Pineau, head of 3PL segments at Locus Robotics, will be speaking at the Robotics Summit & Expo, which takes place on May 1 and 2 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Pineau will present a session on “AI in the Warehouse: What You Really Need to Know” at 1:45 p.m. ET on Wednesday, May 1. He will discuss the considerations and potential benefits and impacts of implementing AI in the warehouse.

Locus will also take part in the RBR50 Showcase in Booth 448 on the show floor. The showcase will feature current and past RBR50 winners and their innovations. 

The 2024 Robotics Summit & Expo will be the largest ever, according to WTWH Media, which also produces Mobile Robot Guide and The Robot Report. It will include up to 5,000 attendees, more than 200 exhibitors, various networking opportunities, a Women in Robotics breakfast, a career fair, an engineering theater, a startup showcase, and more! Registration is now open for the event.

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maxon says it can provide all key components of a tightly integrated robotics drive from a single source. | Source: maxon

maxon group has launched its new drive systems portfolio specifically designed for modern robotics applications. The company said it believes that developers and startups should focus on their core value drivers and challenges and leave it to maxon to take care of key complexities typically associated with robotic actuators, including high performance, reliability, supply chains, integration, and testing. 

Modern robots require highly scalable manufacturing of complex and high-performance actuators, asserted maxon. Therefore, robustness and reliability are key, especially for systems operate in unstructured environments, the company added. maxon said this is one of its strengths because it designs and tests all of its robotics products to the highest quality standards. 

The Sachsein, Switzerland-based company’s new portfolio contains 15 different actuators divided into two families: High Efficiency Joints and High Precision Joints. It said each provides unique benefits to address a broad range of industrial applications. 

maxon’s High Efficiency Joint line

The High Efficiency Joints integrate torque-dense electric motors from maxon’s EC frameless DT motor lineup, planetary gears, electronics, sensing, and support structures into a fully integrated IP67 ingress-protected actuator unit. 

maxon said this line of joints can achieve up to 86% efficiencies and can output high continuous power, thanks to their integrated cooling capabilities. The joint line’s control system can be configured flexibly and support independent control of the joint. 

Target applications are mobile robots in unstructured environments, explained maxon. This includes humanoids, quadrupeds, exoskeletons, or mobile manipulators. The company said its systems enable roboticists to quickly create a high-performing robot that follows modern design principles such as those dictated by deep reinforcement learning and related simulation approaches. 

Thje new High-Efficiency Joint HEJ 90-48-140 provides 140 Nm and 13 rad/s at the joint, is IP67 rated, and contains electronics and sensors for modern robotics control systems. | Source: maxon

maxon targets systems integrators with High Precision Joints

The High Precision Joints are more configurable systems based on strain-wave gearboxes and high-resolution output encoders, said maxon. While these actuators also feature torque-dense electric motors, the company said it’s targeting systems integrators. It said hopes to enable them to quickly create robotics systems like collaborative or industrial manipulators or surgical robots. 

maxon’s High Precision Joints allow the creation of well-optimized robots. When combined with its customer-facing robotics design simulation, optimization, and consulting services, the company said it can ensure that customers obtain the right systems for their applications. 

maxon is a fully vertically integrated provider of actuation systems ranging from brushed to brushless motors, sensors, gears, and electronics. The company said this enables it to provide robotics actuators that are high-performing, low-cost, and adaptive to customer requirements.

maxon’s High Precision Joints feature strain-wave gearboxes with no backlash and high-resolution output encoders. | Source: maxon

See maxon at webinar and Robotics Summit & Expo

Carsten Horn, applications engineering manager at maxon, and Dario Renggli, business development engineer at maxon, will participate in a free webinar at noon EDT on Wednesday, April 17, on “Motion Control for Healthcare Robotics Applications.”

In addition, Tobias Wellerdieck, head of robotic drive systems at maxon, will be speaking at the Robotics Summit & Expo, which will be on May 1 and 2 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. His talk, “Holistic Drive System Optimization for Robotics,” will discuss the challenges that come with developing robotic systems for new, complex markets. 

maxon will also be exhibiting on the Robotics Summit & Expo show floor at Booth 327. The company is also a Gold Sponsor of the event. Registration is now open.

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Project CETI is a nonprofit scientific and conservation initiative that aims to decode whale communications. | Source: Project CETI

Off the idyllic shores of Dominica, a country in the Caribbean, hundreds of sperm whales gather deep in the sea. While their communication sounds like a series of clicks and creaks to the human ear, these whales have unique, regional dialects and even accents. A multidisciplinary group of scientists, led by Project CETI, is using soft robotics, machine learning, biology, linguistics, natural language processing, and more to decode their communications. 

Founded in 2020, Project CETI, or the Cetacean Translation Initiative, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to listening to and translating the communication systems of sperm whales. The team is using specially created tags that latch onto whales and gather information for the team to decode. Getting these tags to stay on the whales, however, is no easy task. 

“One of our core philosophies is we could never break the skin. We can never draw blood. These are just our own, personal guidelines,” David Gruber, the founder and president of Project CETI, told The Robot Report. 

“[The tags] have four suction cups on them,” he said. “On one of the suction cups is a heart sensor, so you can get the heart rate of the whale. There’s also three microphones on the front of it, so you hear the whale that it’s on, and you can know the whales that’s around it and in front of it.

“So you’ll be able to know from three different microphones the location of the whales that are speaking around it,” explained Gruber. “There’s a depth sensor in there, so you can actually see when the whale was diving and so you can see the profiles of it going up and down. There’s a temperature sensor. There’s an IMU, and it’s like a gyroscope, so you can know the position of the whale.”

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Finding a humane way to tag whales

One of the core principles of Project CETI, according to Gruber, is to use technology to bring people closer to animals. 

“There was a quote by Stephen Hawking in a BBC article, in which he posited that the full development of AI and robotics would lead to the extinction of the human race,” Gruber said. “And we thought, ‘This is ridiculous, why would scientists develop something that would lead to our own extinction?’ And it really inspired us to counter this narrative and be like, ‘How can we make robots that are actually very gentle and increase empathy?’”

“In order to deploy those tags onto whales, what we needed was a form of gentle, stable, reversible adhesion,” Alyssa Hernandez, a functional morphologist, entomologist, and biomechanist on the CETI team, told The Robot Report. “So something that can be attached to the whale, where it would go on and remain on the whale for a long amount of time to collect the data, but still be able to release itself eventually, whether naturally by the movements of the whale, or by our own mechanism of sort of releasing the tag itself.”

This is what led the team to explore bio-inspired techniques of adhesion. In particular, the team settled on studying suction cups that are common in marine creatures. 

“Suction discs are pretty common in aquatic systems,” said Hernandez. “They show up in multiple groups of organisms, fish, cephalopods, and even aquatic insects. And there are variations often on each of these discs in terms of the morphology of these discs, and what elements these discs have.”

Hernandez was able to draw on her biology background to design suction-cup grippers that would work particularly well on sperm whales that are constantly moving through the water. This means the suction cup would have to withstand changing pressures and forces. They can stay on a whale’s uneven skin even when it’s moving. 

“In the early days, when we first started this project, the question was, ‘Would the soft robots even survive in the deep sea?’” said Gruber. 

An overview of Project CETI’s mission. | Source: Project CETI

How suction cup shape changes performance

“We often think of suction cups as round, singular material elements, and in biology, that’s not usually the case,” noted Hernandez. “Sometimes these suction disks are sort of elongated or slightly different shaped, and oftentimes they have this sealing rim that helps them keep the suction engaged on rough surfaces.”

Hernandez said the CETI team started off with a standard, circular suction cup. Initially, the researchers tried out multiple materials and combinations of stiff backings and soft rims. Drawing on her biology experience, Hernandez began to experiment with more elongated, ellipse shapes. 

“I often saw [elongated grippers] when I was in museums looking at biological specimens or in the literature, so I wanted to look at an ellipse-shaped cup,” Hernandez said. “So I ended up designing one that was a medium-sized ellipse, and then a thinner ellipse as well. Another general design that I saw was more of this teardrop shape, so smaller at one end and wider at the base.” 

Hernadez said the team also looked at peanut-shaped grippers. In trying these different shapes, she looked for one that would provide increased resistance over the more traditional circular suction cups. 

“We tested [the grippers] on different surfaces of different roughness and different compliance,” recalled Hernandez. “We ended up finding that compared to the standard circle, and variations of ellipses, this medium-sized ellipse performed better under shear conditions.” 

She said the teardrop-shaped gripper also performed well in lab testing. These shapes performed better because, unlike a circle, they don’t have a uniform stiffness throughout the cup, allowing them to bend with the whale as it moves. 

“Now, I’ve modified [the suction cups] a bit to fit our tag that we currently have,” Hernandez said. “So, I have some versions of those cups that are ready to be deployed on the tags.”

Project CETI uses drones to monitor sperm whale movements and to place the tags on the whales. | Source: Project CETI

Project CETI continues iterating

The Project CETI team is actively deploying its tags using a number of methods, including having biologists press them onto whales using long poles, a method called pole tagging, and using drones to press the tags onto the whales. 

Once they’re on the whale, they stay on for anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Once they fall off, the CETI team has a mechanism that allows them to track the tags down and pull all of the gathered data off of them. CETI isn’t interested in making tags that can stay on the whales long-term, because sperm whales can travel long distances in just a few days, and it could hinder their ability to track the tags down once they fall off. 

The CETI team said it plans to continue iterating on the suction grippers and trying new ways to gently get crucial data from sperm whales. It’s even looking into tags that would be able to slightly crawl to different positions on the whale to gather information about what the whale is eating, Gruber said. The team is also interested in exploring tags that could recharge themselves. 

“We’re always continuing to make things more and more gentle, more and more innovative,” said Gruber. “And putting that theme forward of how can we be almost invisible in this project.”

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Version 1.0 of the EELS robot during field testing in Alberta, Canada, in September 2023. | Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In a collaboration that was 17 years in the making, Carnegie Mellon University, or CMU, researchers worked with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to create an autonomous snake-like robot. The Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor, or EELS, is a self-propelled robot. NASA scientists said they hope to use EELS to search for signs of life in the ocean beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s Enceladus moon.

EELS was developed at NASA’s JPL with collaboration from Carnegie Mellon, Arizona State University, and the University of California, San Diego. Howie Choset, CMU’s Kavčić-Moura Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computer Science, Matt Travers, a senior systems scientist at the school’s Robotics Institute (RI), and Andrew Orekhov, a project scientist in the RI, contributed to the project. 

The resulting robot can navigate extreme terrains, including ice, sand, rocks, cliff walls, deep craters, underground lava tubes, and glaciers. The CMU team developed the controllers for the robot. In addition, an early prototype used modules developed by HEBI Robotics, a university spinout that Choset founded in 2014. 

“Enceladus is essentially covered with water,” Choset told The Robot Report. “But it’s underneath the rock that forms the moon. In the South Pole, the rock and ice are about 2 km [1.2 mi.] thick, and there are geysers that spit the water out from the underground ocean into space. So, there’s a belief that if you fly a spacecraft to Enceladus, land, and then get into the geysers, you may be able to swim in this extraterrestrial ocean.” 

EELS snake robot built for space applications

“So, we’ve been working on snake robots for a very long time,” Choset said. “And what’s nice about snake robots in general, is they can use their many joints and their slender physique to thread through tightly packed volumes and get to locations that people in machinery otherwise can’t access.”

This makes snake robots good for many applications, including search and rescue, he said. In this case, EELS will use these capabilities to wriggle into cracks in Enceladus’ layer of ice. EELS stands out from other snake robots because of its “wheels.” These wheels look more like corkscrews than traditional wheels, said Choset. 

“When those corkscrews rotate, they kind of penetrate the ice a little bit, but also gives the mechanism the ability to roll forward,” he explained. “So the robot has the ability to propel itself, not only with the snake-like motion but also these corkscrew wheels that allow it to traverse icy surfaces really quickly.” 

Choset said these wheels will help the robot to better move across ice until it can find a crack or geyser hole to crawl into.

“The autonomy that we developed is the robot’s ability to get into a tight space, and then use the constraints of that tight space to propel itself forward,” he said. 

But that’s only half of the battle. Once the EELS robot has found its way into one of these holes, it has to be able to swim through Enceladus’ ocean to search for potential signs of life. Choset’s team already had experience building swimming snake robots. 

“We built a variety of snake robots, but the one we most recently built was a swimming one called HUMRS, which stands for ‘Hardened Underwater Modular Robot Snake,'” Choset said. The CMU team was able to apply what it learned while developing HUMRS to this project with NASA JPL. 

Connections bring the right people on board

Choset’s long-held connections within the industry brought him onto the EELS project, along with his expertise in designing snake-like robots. 

“I went to Caltech as a graduate student, and JPL was part of Caltech,” he said. “So, whenever there’s an opportunity to work with JPL, the Jet Propulsion Lab, I jump on it, because it reminds me of my young graduate student days.” 

It wasn’t just the chance to work with JPL that brought Choset on board, however. He was recruited by Rohan Thakkar, a researcher who worked in Choset’s group 17 years ago as a high school student. 

“I think it’s important for people to realize that it’s not just a bunch of engineers getting together to build some mechanism as if they’re reading from a recipe or a cookbook,” Choset said. “Engineering is very important, but I want people to recognize the engineers behind the engineering.”

Choset said that personal connections, like the one between him and his CMU students, are what keeps the industry running. 

Editor’s note: HEBI Robots will exhibit at Booth 448-12 at the Robotics Summit & Expo, which will be on May 1 and 2 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Registration is now open.

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This week, we announced the honorees for the 2024 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Awards. On the podcast episode this week, the entire The Robot Report editorial staff brings its opinions, observations, and highlights of the 2024 awards program. Host Steve Crowe discusses the awards with editors Mike Oitzman, Eugene Demaitre, and Brianna Wessling.

Listen as the editors discusses some of their favorite robotics companies and products from this cohort of honorees. You’ll learn what impressed the editors about several of the winners and what’s notable in this year’s program.

Digit named Robot of the Year

2023 was the year of humanoids, and Agility Robotics has taken an early lead with commercial trials. The company’s Digit humanoid stole the show at ProMAT, where it demonstrated its ability to pick up totes from a shelf, walk over to a conveyor, and place the totes onto the conveyor.

Autopicker wins Application of the Year

Cincinnati-based Brightpick, which spun out of Photoneo, was named the inaugural Application of the Year winner. In 2023, Brightpick unveiled Autopicker, which it said is the first commercially available AMR that can pick and consolidate orders directly in warehouse aisles.

Electric Sheep is Startup of the Year

San Francisco-based Electric Sheep’s unique business model allows it to bring in revenue as it takes its time deploying its technology. This business model led to it being named Startup of the Year.

Note that the rules for the RBR50 state that innovations have to be announced within the calendar year. Keep that in mind as your organization plans its product roadmap, and be sure to submit your nomination the next iteration of the RBR50 later this year.

Come celebrate at the 2024 RBR50 Gala

We introduced three new categories in 2024 – Robot of the Year, Application of the Year, and Startup of the Year – and will be holding the inaugural RBR50 Gala on May 1 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the end of Day 1 of the Robotics Summit & Expo.

The gala offers a chance to connect with the world’s leading robotics innovators. It’s also an evening of celebration to honor leading roboticists and their impressive achievements.

Tickets to the gala are available through Wednesday, April 17.

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The post Inside the 2024 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Awards appeared first on The Robot Report.

State-of-the-art surgical and healthcare robotics depend on precise motion control. Source: maxon

Technological advances continue to drive growing adoption of robotics in healthcare, particularly for surgical applications. Robots promise to enhance precision and safety, with 5% to 10% of robot-assisted procedures reportedly resulting in positive patient outcomes.

The global market for surgical robots is about $18 billion and could grow to $83 billion by 2032, according to Statzon. In addition, a Bain & Co. study found that 78% of U.S. surgeons are interested in robotics, but many procedures have yet to benefit from automation.

Robotics developers, suppliers, and integrators, as well as healthcare providers and practitioners, should understand how the latest, best-in-class motion-control components can improve accuracy and enable the next generation of patient care.

Learn more about motion control for healthcare robotics applications in a free webinar at noon EDT on Wednesday, April 17.

How to build better healthcare robotics

In this webinar, Carsten Horn, applications engineering manager at maxon, and Dario Renggli, business development engineer at maxon, will join Eugene Demaitre, editorial director for robotics at WTWH Media.

Horn has more than 20 years of engineering and research and development experience with robotics. Renggli specializes in healthcare applications and works at maxon’s headquarters in Switzerland. They will discuss the following topics:

• Trends in customer demands and designing for the future
• The industry’s needs for precise actuation and motion-control systems
• The pace of healthcare robotics development
• How regulatory requirements affect the design of surgical systems
• Common challenges for healthcare robot controls
• Considerations for off-the-shelf components and subassemblies versus custom designs
• The growing importance of software and artificial intelligence
• How to identify and partner with product and service providers

Register now to watch this webinar and have your questions answered live. This robotics engineering conversation will be available on demand after the broadcast date.

Sponsors:

The post Webinar: Learn about motion control for healthcare robotics applications appeared first on The Robot Report.

The Phoenix humanoid robot is being developed to enable embodied AI and support general-purpose applications. | Credit: Sanctuary AI

Humanoid robot developer Sanctuary Cognitive Systems Corp., or Sanctuary AI, is entering a new strategic partnership with automotive components supplier Magna International Inc. Through this expanded partnership, Sanctuary plans to equip Magna’s manufacturing facilities with general-purpose AI robots.

The Vancouver-based company also plans to engage Magna to manufacture the Sanctuary Phoenix robots under contract in the future. Aurora, Ontario-based Magna has been an investor in Sanctuary AI since 2021, and it acquired autonomous vehicle startup Optimus Ride in 2022.

Yesterday’s announcement with Magna follows Accenture’s recent investment in Sanctuary for an undisclosed amount.

Phoenix includes human-like design, AI

“We founded Sanctuary AI with the goal to become the first organization in the world to create human-like AI,” stated Geordie Rose, co-founder and CEO of Sanctuary AI. “World-changing goals like these require world-changing partners.”

“Magna’s position as a world leader in the use of robots today makes this partnership an essential advancement for our mission,” he added. “We’re privileged to be working with Magna, and believe they will be a key element in the successful global deployment of our machines.”

Sanctuary Phoenix includes human-like dexterous hands and arms. Since it launched the robot in May 2023, the company has invested heavily in the development of manipulation capabilities, perception features, and artificial intelligence models that control the humanoid robot.

In December 2023, Sanctuary secured patents for numerous technologies developed both internally and through strategic acquisitions from external sources. The company acquired the latest assets from Giant.AI Inc. and Tangible Research.

Sanctuary is iterating on humanoid design by perfecting hand-eye coordination and AI model training. | Credit: Sanctuary AI

Sanctuary AI builds relationship with Magna

“The intent of the relationship [with Magna International] has always been threefold,” Rose told The Robot Report. “One is that they were an investor.”

“Another would be they would participate in manufacturing the robots at some point,” he said. “And the third would be there could be a consumer of the robots as a customer. So all of those three things are obviously related to each other. All of them are good for both parties.”

“So we’ve continued to impress [Magna] with our velocity and acceleration in terms of developing the technology from something that was a twinkle in our eyes six years ago to something that can actually perform real-world work tasks,” Rose noted.

The workflow opportunities for an agile humanoid at Magna are endless, according to Rose. “The key to getting a good fit in the short term is understanding how to overlap that type of analysis with the type of capability that you can deliver,” he said. “So this is a difficult thing for companies that are early stage, including us, because of the ‘drinking your own Kool-Aid’ phenomenon.”

“A lot of companies will release a whole bunch of hype both to their customers, their investors, and internally in themselves — they start to believe that they can do things they can’t, and they make bad decisions about how they position their technology,” Rose continued. “So we have to be clear-eyed about what’s actually possible with our [robot] and then be very diligent in trying to understand the details of how the workflow actually works in practice, and then overlap the two.”

“When you do that with this type of technology, what you find is that the first use cases all fall into the following categories: There is an aspect of mobility, that’s best treated with wheels, where the robot has to move from place to place within an environment. And then there’s the aspect of manipulation,” he explained.

Magna also said its team is excited about the possibilities for intelligent mobile manipulation. It said it expects to automate various tasks and to improve the quality and efficiency of its manufacturing and logistics processes.

“Magna is excited to partner with Sanctuary AI in our shared mission to advance the future of manufacturing,” said Todd Deaville, vice president of advanced manufacturing innovation at Magna. “By integrating general-purpose AI robots into our manufacturing facilities for specific tasks, we can enhance our capabilities to deliver high-quality products to our customers.”

Learn from Agility Robotics, Amazon, Disney, Teradyne and many more.

A key success factor for robotics startups

As Sanctuary AI begins the process of commercializing Phoenix, it plans to contract with Magna for the production of part or all of the robot going forward. Sanctuary asserted that finding the right manufacturing partner to build its robots at high volumes is best outsourced and that manufacturing should be non-core for any robotics startup.

Many robotics startups often fail when they attempt to manufacture their systems in-house, observed Rose. He said he has sought to find the right production partner since the inception of the company.

Sanctuary employs embodied AI and foundation models

Embodied AI is core to the future of Sanctuary AI, which said it is spending all of its intellectual energy on engineering and training the smartest models for these robots. Rose said he is amazed at the evolution of embodied AI over the past decade.

The real race, according to Rose, is to find a way to gather the immense amount of data needed and put the robot into the necessary training situations for the AI models to learn and grow in confidence.

This is where the enhanced relationship with Magna comes in. The product roadmap for the Sanctuary over the next year is to deploy all of the production runs of Phoenix robots into real-world manufacturing environments at Magna facilities. In simple terms, Phoenix will learn by executing tasks every day and gathering training data.

“In the run that we’re about to begin with Magna, we’ll be able to collect data in a commercial environment of the sort that will train a production robot,” Rose said. “So the progression of this, from our perspective, is the ability to collect training data to generate autonomous behaviors. The systems that we’re building this year are going to be consumed in data collection.”

In 2025, Sanctuary said it will iterate on a version of the robot for broader use and sale. Similar to the model used at Rose’s prior company, Kindred, there will be a human in the loop to help robots resolve edge cases while minimizing any impact on day-to-day operations.

Rose summed up the current state of development: “We can go from data collection to a trained policy in less than 24 hours now, where the train policy does as well or better than the people who are doing the task for simple tasks. So that is an amazing thing that I was not expecting — these new transformer-based models are spectacularly good at moving robots, way better than I thought they would be.”

“I think it’s an echo of my surprise that how well large language models can generate text; who would have thought that predicting the next token would allow you to be a coherent understander of the world?” he said. “But it seems like that’s the way they work. And in the space of moving robots, if you’ve got enough data, what can’t you do? You can just talk to the robot and say, ‘Do this thing,’ and it will just do it. It’s magical.”

The post Sanctuary AI enters strategic relationship with Magna to build embodied AI robots appeared first on The Robot Report.

The FoxBot ATL moves pallets in loading docks for Walmart. Source: Fox Robotics

The word’s biggest retailers are continuing to add automation. Walmart Inc. today announced that it has entered into a multiyear agreement with Fox Robotics Inc. In addition to its initial rollout of 19 FoxBot autonomous forklifts, Walmart has invested growth capital for a minority stake in Fox Robotics.

“At Walmart Distribution Center 6020 in Brooksville, Fla., we’re used to pioneering new technology,” wrote Maurice Gray, general manager for the Walmart distribution center, in a blog post. “In fact, 6020 was Walmart’s first high-tech DC. Once again, innovation is afoot in our facility, where associates have been working alongside a new autonomous forklift system that’s bolstering their skills and bettering their jobs while building our business.”

“After a 16-month proof of concept, I’m proud to announce Walmart is taking another step into the future, rolling 19 autonomous forklifts across four high-tech DCs, with the potential for more as we evaluate the benefits to our associates and operations,” he said. “As our facility has worked with Fox Robotics, the developer of autonomous forklifts, we’ve learned a lot. But I can sum it up easily: Automation isn’t just good for business – it’s good for our associates too.”

Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart is the largest private employer in the U.S., according to Statista. The company has worked with other robotics suppliers, and it acquired grocery fulfillment provider Alert Innovation in 2022.

Walmart deploys FoxBots to unload pallets

When trucks arrive at the Brooksville distribution center, Fox Robotics’ Autonomous Trailer Loader/Unloaders (ATLs) use artificial intelligence, machine vision, and dynamic planning to safely and accurately unload pallets, said Gray. The forklifts then move the pallets to be inducted into an automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS).

Gray likened the warehouse associates’ evolving role to playing Tetris. “Instead of unloading the pallets manually, associates become conductors – considering the best, most efficient way to unload trailers based on their own experience,” he said.

For example, Jose Molina, a 26-year associate, has received training to shift from unloading trucks to managing autonomous lifts and tripling productivity, added Gray.

Walmart said that it could roll out more systems from Fox Robotics, pending the continued performance of the FoxBots.

Fox Robotics pulls ahead in dock robot race

“As the leader in autonomous trailer loading and unloading, Fox Robotics is pleased to deepen its relationship with Walmart as a key customer and investor,” stated Marin Tchakarov, president and CEO of Fox Robotics. “We see this collaboration as the latest massive validation point of our technology and product capabilities, solidifying our leadership position in the warehouse shipping and receiving dock automation space.”

In January, Fox Robotics said its autonomous forklifts had autonomously pulled 2.5 million pallets. Founded in 2017, the company said at the time that its installed fleet had doubled in the prior 12 months and that its revenue nearly tripled between 2022 and 2023.

Austin, Texas-based Fox Robotics also has financial backing from BMW i Ventures and Zebra Technologies Corp., raising $20 million in 2022. Its customers include DHL Supply Chain.

“Fox Robotics has unlocked the final step of the fully end-to-end automated warehouse of the future with its FoxBot autonomous loader/unloader capabilities,” added Till Reuter, board member of Fox Robotics and former CEO of Kuka Robotics. “The logistics space is the single biggest market for automation for the next five to 10 years, and the shipping and receiving dock — the gateway to the warehouse — will see a disproportionate share of that growth due to its virtually entirely unautomated present state.”

Other companies working on automating loading-dock operations include Boston Dynamics, Dexterity, Gideon, Honeywell, Mujin, Pickle Robots, and 2024 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award winner Slip Robotics. See the RBR50 honorees at the RBR50 pavilion and RBR50 Gala at the Robotics Summit & Expo.

Learn from Agility Robotics, Amazon, Disney, Teradyne and many more.

The post Walmart makes multiyear agreement with Fox Robotics, takes a stake appeared first on The Robot Report.

AMD’s Kria K26 SOM will power the hardware with the BlackBerry QNX SDP. | Source: AMD

BlackBerry Ltd. announced at Embedded World this week that it is collaborating with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The partners said they want to enable next-generation robotics by reducing latency and jitter and with “repeatable determinism.”

The companies said they will jointly “address the critical need for ‘hard’ real-time capabilities in robotics-focused hardware.” BlackBerry and AMD plan to release an affordable system-on-module (SOM) platform that delivers enhanced performance, reliability, and scalability for robotic systems in industrial healthcare. 

This platform will combine BlackBerry’s QNX expertise in real-time foundational software and the QNX Software Development Platform (SDP) with heterogeneous hardware powered by the AMD Kria K26 SOM. It features both Arm and FPGA (field programmable gate array) logic-based architecture.

“With the QNX Software Development Platform, customers can start development quickly on the AMD Kria KR260 Starter Kit and seamlessly scale to other higher-performance AMD platforms as their needs evolve,” stated Chetan Khona, senior director of industrial, vision, healthcare, and sciences markets at AMD.

“Combining the industry-leading strengths of AMD and QNX will provide a foundation platform that opens new doors for innovation and takes the future of robotics technology well beyond the constraints experienced until now,” he said.

BlackBerry, AMD provide capabilities with less latency

With Kria, an Arm sub-system can power the advanced capabilities of the QNX microkernel real-time operation system (RTOS), said Advanced Micro Devices and BlackBerry. It can do this while allowing users to run low-latency, deterministic functions on the programmable logic of the AMD Kria KR260 robotics starter kit. 

This combination enables sensor fusion, high-performance data processing, real-time control, industrial networking, and reduced latency in robotics applications, said the companies.

They added that customers can benefit from integration and optimization of software and hardware components. This results in streamlined development processes and accelerated time to market for robotics innovations, said AMD and BlackBerry. 

“An integrated solution by BlackBerry QNX through our collaboration with AMD will provide an integrated software-hardware foundation offering real-time performance, low latency, and determinism to ensure that critical robotic tasks are executed with the same level of precision and responsiveness every single time,” said Grant Courville, vice president of product and strategy at BlackBerry QNX.

“These are crucial attributes for industries carrying out finely tuned operations, such as the fast-growing industries of autonomous mobile robots and surgical robotics” he added. “Together with AMD, we are committed to driving technological advancements that address some of these most complex challenges and transform the future of the robotics industry.”

The integrated system is now available to customers.

See AMD at Robotics Summit & Expo

For more than 50 years, Advanced Micro Devices has been a leading innovator in high-performance computing (HPC), graphics, and visualization technologies. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company noted that billions of people, Fortune 500 businesses, and scientific research institutions worldwide rely on its technology daily.

AMD recently released the Embedded+ HPC architecture, the Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family, and Versal Gen 2 for AI and edge processing.

Kosta Sidopoulos, a product engineer at AMD, will be speaking at the Robotics Summit & Expo, which takes place May 1 and 2 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. His talk on “Enabling Next-Gen AI Robotics” will delve into the unique features and capabilities of AMD’s AI-enabled products. It will highlight their adaptability and scalability for diverse robotics applications.

Registration is now open for the Robotics Summit & Expo, which will feature more than 70 speakers, 200 exhibitors, and up to 5,000 attendees, as well as numerous networking opportunities.

Learn from Agility Robotics, Amazon, Disney, Teradyne and many more.

The post BlackBerry and AMD partner to reduce latency in robotics appeared first on The Robot Report.

Electric Sheep is vertically integrating its field operations team with autonomous mowers. | Credit: Electric Sheep

This year, the annual RBR50 Robotics Innovation Awards added new categories: Application of the Year, Startup of the Year, and Robot of the Year. We received numerous submissions for some incredible startups innovating in some interesting markets. The Robot Report‘s team chose autonomous landscaping company Electric Sheep Robotics as the inaugural RBR50 Startup of the Year.

The San Francisco-based company has a novel business plan that is immediately bringing in revenue while it takes its time to evolve the underlying technology. This is different from many robotics businesses, which simply sell or lease systems to integrators and end users.

“We are honored to be recognized by WTWH Media’s Robotics Group with this inaugural award. I want to also acknowledge our dedicated team at Electric Sheep that are passionate about creating the most advanced robotics that can change an often overlooked industry,” stated Nag Murty, co-founder and CEO of Electric Sheep. “We are doing things differently than other robotic companies by using AI and ML at a higher level for localization and high-level control. We are scaling physical agents across the country to care for our outdoor spaces.”

Founded in 2019, Electric Sheep has grown to over 100 employees, and it has raised more than $25 million in funding to date, according to Crunchbase.

You can also learn more about Murty’s entrepreneurial philosophy and Chief Technology Officer Michael Laskey’s design principles on a recent episode of The Robot Report Podcast.

Acquisitions add data for autonomy AI

Electric Sheep develops autonomous robots for outdoor maintenance. Its flagship robot is an autonomous mower backed by the company’s ES1 foundation model.

Based on recent advances in generative AI, ES1 is a learned-world model that enables reasoning and planning for the Verdie robot. ES1 powers both the RAM robot for mowing and now Verdie for edging and trimming lawns and bushes and blowing leaves.

In addition, Electric Sheep acquired four landscaping companies last year and said that this is a key part of its long-term plan. This strategy isn’t just about revenue. The businesses it acquires can also use ES1 and provide crucial data to make the model more effective.

This information can help improve Electric Sheep’s operations, enabling its robots to start working as soon as they arrive at a job site. 

Since taking this two-pronged approach to development and business, the company reported that its sales have grown eightfold. Electric Sheep has set itself apart from other startups by making sure it always has money coming in and by finding a unique way to get important data about its business.

Meet Electric Sheep at the Robotics Summit & Expo 

This year’s RBR50 award winners will be celebrated at the Robotics Summit & Expo, which will be on May 1 and 2 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Electric Sheep will be demonstrate its newest robot powered by ES1, Verdie, the RBR50 showcase on the expo floor.

Attendees at the 2024 Robotics Summit and Expo at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center will have an opportunity to meet members of Electric Sheep’s executive team. Co-founder and CEO Nag Murty will present a session titled “Startup Survival Guide to Lean Times” at 2:30 p.m. EDT on Thursday, May 2.

Murty will be joined by Oliver Mitchell, partner of ff Venture Capital; Fiona O’Donnell McCarthy, principal of True Ventures; and Steve Crowe, executive editor of robotics at WTWH Media. This panel will share tips from experienced investors and robotics companies on what they’re looking for and attendees will learn how organizations can navigate the challenging path to commercialization.

In addition, tickets are available for the first RBR50 Robotics Innovation Awards Gala, which will be at the end of Day 1 of the event. The Robotics Summit & Expo will be the biggest yet, with keynotes and sessions from leading companies, more than 200 exhibitors, up to 5,000 attendees, a Women in Robotics Breakfast, and a Robotics Engineering Career Fair.

Co-located events include DeviceTalks Boston, which focuses on medical devices, and the inaugural Digital Transformation Forum. which will focus on manufacturing. Registration is now open for the Robotics Summit.

Learn from Agility Robotics, Amazon, Disney, Teradyne and many more.

The post Electric Sheep wins 2024 RBR50 Startup of the Year appeared first on The Robot Report.

Two Autopicker mobile manipulators in a warehouse aisle. Source: Brightpick

This year, the annual RBR50 Robotics Innovation Awards added new categories: Application of the Year, Startup of the Year, and Robot of the Year. We received numerous submissions, but the Autopicker system from Brightpick stood out for automating both mobile manipulation and each picking.

Other robots combining mobility with manipulation have come and gone, from Fetch and Freight to Swift, in part because getting to commercially viable levels of reliability has been challenging. Not only has Autopicker added newer artificial intelligence to the mix, but it has also been deployed in existing customer warehouses.

“On the AI side, this was not possible five to six years ago,” Jan Zizka, co-founder and CEO of Brightpick, told The Robot Report. “Serious breakthroughs enable machine learning to generalize to unseen items.”

Autopicker learns with each pick

Autopicker combines a mobile base, a robotic arm, machine vision, and AI for e-commerce order fulfillment. The system reduces the need for warehouse associates to travel with carts, thanks to its patented design, which enables it to pick items from standard shelving and place them in either of two totes.

Brightpick said Autopicker can pick groceries, cosmetics, electronics, pharmaceuticals, apparel, and more with 99.9% accuracy. Its AI algorithms have been trained on more than 500 million picks to date, and they are improving with each pick, added the company.

Announced in February 2023, the system also supports pallet picking, replenishment, dynamic slotting, buffering, and dispatch. It can store up to 50,000 SKUs, said Brightpick. It also offers a goods-to-person option for heavy or hard-to-pick items, and Autopicker can raise its bins to waist height for ergonomic picking.

In the past year, customers such as Netrush and Rohlik Group began deploying the company’s latest system. Autopicker is available for direct purchase or through a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model.

See Brightpick at the Robotics Summit & Expo 

Cincinnati-based Brightpick is a unit of Bratislava, Slovakia-based machine vision provider Photoneo s.r.o. The company said its systems can “enable warehouses of any size to fully automate order picking, consolidation, dispatch, and stock replenishment.”

Brightpick, which has more than 200 employees, claimed that its robots take only weeks to deploy and can reduce labor assigned to picking by 98% and picking costs by half. In January 2023, the company raised $19 million in Series B funding for its U.S. expansion, and it said demand for Autopicker has been strong.

This year’s RBR50 award winners will be celebrated at the Robotics Summit & Expo, which will be on May 1 and 2 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Brightpick will be part of the RBR50 showcase on the expo floor.

In addition, tickets are available for the first RBR50 Robotics Innovation Awards Gala, which will be at the end of Day 1 of the event. The Robotics Summit & Expo will be the biggest yet, with keynotes and sessions from leading companies, more than 200 exhibitors, up to 5,000 attendees, a Women in Robotics Breakfast, and a Robotics Engineering Career Fair.

Co-located events include DeviceTalks Boston, which focuses on medical devices, and the inaugural Digital Transformation Forum. which will focus on manufacturing. Registration is now open for the Robotics Summit.

Learn from Agility Robotics, Amazon, Disney, Teradyne and many more.

The post Autopicker wins 2024 RBR50 Application of the Year for Brightpick appeared first on The Robot Report.

Collaborative Robotics has been developing a system for trustworthy operations. Source: Adobe Stock, Photoshopped by The Robot Report

Collaborative Robotics today closed a $100 million Series B round on the road to commercializing its autonomous mobile manipulator. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said it is developing robots that can safely and affordably work alongside people in varied manufacturing, supply chain, and healthcare workflows. In many cases, this is the same work that humanoid robots are jockeying for.

Brad Porter, a former distinguished engineer and vice president of robotics at Amazon, founded Collaborative Robotics in 2022. The Cobot team includes robotics and artificial intelligence experts from Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, NASA, Waymo, and more.

“Getting our first robots in the field earlier this year, coupled with today’s investment, are major milestones as we bring cobots with human-level capability into the industries of today,” stated Porter. “We see a virtuous cycle, where more robots in the field lead to improved AI and a more cost-effective supply chain. This funding will help us accelerate getting more robots into the real world.”

The Robot Report caught up with Porter to learn more about the company and its product since our last conversation in July 2023, when Cobot raised its $30 million Series A.

Nothing to see here

Collaborative Robotics has been secretive about the design of its robot. You won’t find any photos of the cobot on the company’s site or anywhere else on the Web yet.

However, Porter told The Robot Report that it is already in trials with several pilot customers, including a global logistics company. He described the machine as a mobile manipulator, with roughly the stature of a human. However, it’s not a humanoid, nor does it have a six degree-of-freedom arm or a hand with fingers.

“When talking about general-purpose robots versus special-purpose robots, we know what humanoids look like, but with a new morphology, we want to protect it for a while,” he said. “We’ve been looking at humanoids for a long time, but in manufacturing, secondary material flow is designed around humans and carts. Hospitals, airports, and stadiums are usually designed around people flow. A huge amount of people is still moving boxes, totes, and carts around the world.”

The new cobot’s base is capable of omnidirectional motion with four wheels and a swerve-drive design, along with a central structure that can acquire, carry, and place totes and boxes around the warehouse. It is just under 6 ft. (2 m) tall and can carry up to 75 lb. (34 kg), said Porter.

The robot can also engage and move existing carts with payloads weighing up to 1,500 lb. (680 kg) around the warehouse. How the robot engages carts remains part of the mystery. But by automating long-distance moves and using existing cart infrastructure, Porter said he believes that the Collaborative Robotics system is differentiated from both mobile robot platforms and humanoid competitors.

“We looked at use cases for humanoids at Amazon, but you don’t actually want the complexity of a humanoid; you want something that’s stable and could move faster than people,” Porter added. “There are orders of magnitude more mobile robots than humanoids in day-to-day use, and at $300,000 to $600,000 per robot, the capital to build the first 10 humanoids is very high. We want to get robots into the field faster.”

Collaborative Robotics has kept its actual robot out of public view. | Source: Adobe Stock image Photoshopped by The Robot Report

Robots must be trustworthy

Porter said that he “believes that robots need to be trustworthy, in addition to being safe. This philosophy is driving the design and user-interface decisions that the company has made so far. Users need to understand what the robot should do by looking at it, unlike some of the existing designs of mobile robots currently on the market.”

In addition to a human-centered design approach, Collaborative Robotics is using off-the-shelf parts to reduce the robot bill of materials cost and simplify the supply chain as it begins the process of commercialization. It is also taking a “building-block” approach to hardware and plans to adjust software and machine learning for navigation and learning new tasks.

“The robot we’ve designed is 70% off-the-shelf parts, and we can design around existing motors, while every humanoid company is hand-winding its own motors to find advanced actuation capabilities,” Porter noted. “We designed the system digitally, so we don’t have to hand-tweak a bunch of things. By using 3D lidar, we know the state of the art of the technology, and it’s easier to safety-qualify.”

With large language models (LLMs), Porter said he sees the day when someone in a hospital or another facility can just tell a robot to go away. “It’s about user interaction rather than just safety, which is table stakes,” he said. “We think a lot about trustworthiness.”

Learn from Agility Robotics, Amazon, Disney, Teradyne and many more.

Collaborative Robotics preps for commercialization

General Catalyst led Collaborative Robotics’ Series B round, with participation from Bison Ventures, Lux Capital, and Industry Ventures. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Mayo Clinic, Neo, 1984 Ventures, MVP Ventures, and Calibrate Ventures also participated.

Since its founding in 2022, Cobot said it has raised more than $140 million. The company plans to grow its headcount from 35, adding production, sales, and support staffers.

In addition, Collaborative Robotics announced that Teresa Carlson will be joining it as an advisor on go to market at scale and industry transformation. She held leadership roles at Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Splunk, and Flexport.

“I’m super-excited to be working with Teresa,” said Porter. “We’ve kept up since Amazon, and she thinks a lot about digital transformation at a very large scale — federal government and industry. She brings a wealth of knowledge about economics that will elevate the scope of what we’re doing.”

Paul Kwan, managing director at General Catalyst, is joining Alfred Lin from Sequoia on Collaborative Robotics’ board of directors. 

“In our view, Brad and Cobot are spearheading the future of human-robot interaction,” said Kwan. “We believe the Cobot team is world-class at building the necessary hardware, software, and institutional trust to achieve their vision.”

Editor’s note: Eugene Demaitre contributed to this article.

The post Collaborative Robotics raises $100M in Series B for mysterious mobile manipulator appeared first on The Robot Report.

2023 was the year that humanoid robots took big strides onto the public stage, and Agility Robotics pulled ahead in that race with Digit, which is our first-ever RBR50 Robot of the Year.

At ProMAT last year, Digit stole the show by demonstrating its ability to pick up totes from a shelf, walk over to a conveyor, and place the totes onto the conveyor. At the time, Corvallis, Ore.-based Agility Robotics said the demo was based on a real customer use case.

Later in 2023, the company announced pilots with two major customers: Amazon and GXO Logistics, which claims to be the world’s largest pure-play contract logistics provider. Digit is 5 ft., 9 in (175cm) tall, weighs 143 lb. (64.8 kg), and can carry up to 35 lb. (18 kg).

In October, Amazon and Agility said the humanoid robot was being tested at Amazon’s robotics research and development facility outside of Seattle. The initial use of Digit is to help employees with tote recycling, a highly repetitive process of picking up and moving empty totes once inventory has been completely picked out of them.

In December 2023, GXO announced that Digit is being tested for logistics tasks at a SPANX facility in Georgia. Digit is moving totes filled with products off of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and onto a conveyor. Agility said at the time that Digit will communicate with the AMR fleet manager in the future.

Adrian Stoch, chief automation officer at GXO, said Digit’s potential flexibility gives it a nod over other types of robots, including AMRs with top modules.

“The real application here is end-to-end product flow throughout the warehouse,” he said. “Until now, solutions have been mostly discrete applications: goods-to-person, sorters, wearable tech. Solving discrete problems in one part of the puzzle.”

For companies operating fulfillment centers with a wide product mix or fluctuating demand, the potential flexibility of humanoids could help fill the ongoing labor crisis.

Agility Robotics recently launched Agility Arc, a cloud platform for managing operations, and it partnered with warehouse management systems (WMS) provider Manhattan Associates.

We’ve never seen a humanoid perform real tasks in a commercial setting, until now. Humanoids have long been relegated to research labs, but the goalposts began to seismically shift in 2023.

Learn from Agility Robotics, Amazon, Disney, Teradyne and many more.

See Agility at the Robotics Summit

Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics, will be keynoting the Robotics Summit & Expo, which takes place May 1 and 2 in Boston and is produced by The Robot Report and parent company WTWH Media. His talk, “Humanoid Robots Get to Work,” will explore the technological breakthroughs propelling humanoids like Digit into real-world use cases.

Agility Robotics will also be featured in the show’s RBR50 Showcase. Visit Booth 448 on the show floor to see Digit in action. The showcase will also feature technology from Boston Dynamics, Brightpick, Locus Robotics, and more.

You can also learn more about Agility Robotics and the rest of this year’s RBR50 award winners at the first-ever RBR50 Gala. At 6:00 p.m. EDT after Day 1 of the show, the ticketed reception will allow attendees to network with the people behind this year’s most innovative robots.

Registration is now open for the Robotics Summit & Expo.

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