Robotics
Bleeding edge robotics companies focused on a wide range of automation categories, including logotics, agtech, delivery, healthcare, home robotics and food service, along with the latest university and laboratory research into soft robotics, nano robotics and more.
Muscle tissue harvested from mice cells move ‘biohybrid’ robots
Sometimes nature provides the best blueprints for building effective robots. It also can provide the best material. Billions of years of natural selection has built some pretty impressive machinery, so…
Collaborative Robotics is prioritizing ‘human problem solving’ over humanoid forms
Humanoids have sucked a lot of the air out of the room. It is, after all, a lot easier to generate press for robots that look and move like humans.…
Agility Robotics lays off some staff amid commercialization focus
Agility Robotics on Thursday confirmed that it has laid off a “small number” of employees. The well-funded Oregon-based firm says the job loss is part of a company-wide focus on…
Robot delivery firm Kiwibot buys Taipei chipmaker, citing US/China tensions
Bay Area/Colombia-based delivery robotics firm Kiwibot this week announced that it has acquired Auto Mobility Solutions. The Taipei firm produces chips specifically for the world of robotics and autonomous driving.…
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Apple’s electric car loss could be home robotics’ gain
For every tech success story, there are countless projects that slam headlong into the brick wall of reality. Apple’s electric vehicle ambitions are one of the most recent — and, frankly, best — examples of a project failing in spite of seeming to have everything going for it. The jury…
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Understanding humanoid robots
Robots made their stage debut the day after New Year’s 1921. More than half-a-century before the world caught its first glimpse of George Lucas’ droids, a small army of silvery humanoids took to the stages of the First Czechoslovak Republic. They were, for all intents and purposes, humanoids: two arms,…
Orchard vision system turns farm equipment into AI-powered data collectors
Agricultural robotics are not a new phenomenon. We’ve seen systems that pick apples and berries, kill weeds, plant trees, transport produce and more. But while these functions are understood to…
NASA’s snake robot is designed to search out life in the icy oceans of a Saturn moon
The snake robot form factor has existed for decades. In addition to the diversity it adds to the world of automation, the design has several pragmatic attributes. The first is…
Since the last time we spoke, Viam didn’t pivot exactly, according to founder and CEO Eliot Horowitz — it’s more of a “rebrand.” Roughly six months ago, the Manhattan-based startup…
Large language models can help home robots recover from errors without human help
There are countless reasons why home robots have found little success post-Roomba. Pricing, practicality, form factor and mapping have all contributed to failure after failure. Even when some or all…
Nvidia and Qualcomm join Open Source Robotics Alliance to support ROS development
The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) this week announced the launch of the similarly named Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA). The new initiative is designed to maintain development for and…
Gitai’s autonomous robot installs panel outside the ISS, showing orbital repairs in action
Los Angeles-based Gitai said Tuesday that its autonomous robotic arm has nailed a tech demonstration outside the International Space Station. Gitai CEO Sho Nakanose told TechCrunch in an interview last…
Nvidia enlists humanoid robotics’ biggest names for new AI platform, GR00T
It’s tough to argue with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang when he notes, “Building foundation models for general humanoid robots is one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI…
It’s extremely heartening to see our little list effectively double since the last time we did one of these. While it’s true that layoffs continue to plague the tech industry…
Pilot season has officially begun for the world of humanoid robotics. Last year, Amazon began testing Agility’s Digit robots in select fulfillment centers, while this January, Figure announced a deal…
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Humanoid robots face continued skepticism at Modex
If your robotics startup is looking to raise, there’s close to a 100% chance you’re going to get two questions from potential investors: 1) How are you incorporating generative AI? and 2) Have you consider building a humanoid? The first is easy enough to answer. If you’re running a robotics…
One undeniable trend from this year’s Modex conference: suddenly everyone is into truck unloading. The past couple of years have gone from a few select companies to seemingly everyone in…
Cypher’s inventory drone launches from an autonomous mobile robot base
Doing inventory sucks. I feel the need to reiterate this any time I discuss the topic here. Having performed a bit of it during my years of retail work, I…
Agility’s Digit wasn’t the only humanoid holding court at Modex in Atlanta this week. On the opposite end of the Georgia World Congress Center, Reflex Robotics, a younger and smaller…
Verve Motion’s robot backpack helps workers lighten their load
Wander the Modex floor long enough and you’ll stumble upon some wearable robotics. The category has nowhere near the presence of AMRs (autonomous mobile robots) or storage and retrieval systems,…
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Locus Robotics’ success is a tale of focusing on what works
“We’re fundamentally a software company,” Locus CEO Rick Faulk says with a laugh. We look like a robot company, but we’re actually a software company.” It’s a familiar refrain from companies whose most public-facing products are hardware. That’s certainly the case with Locus, which produces the best-known AMRs (autonomous mobile…
Bear Robotics, a robot waiter startup, just picked up $60M from LG
LG Electronics may no longer be a household name in smartphones, but it still sees a big future in gadgets like robots. Today, the company confirmed a $60 million investment…
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The loneliness of the robotic humanoid
Perhaps a few years from now, the halls of the Georgia World Congress Center will be peppered with humanoid robots the week of Modex. In 2024, however, Digit stands alone at the supply chain show. It’s a testament to Agility’s healthy head start over competitors like Figure, Tesla, 1X and…
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Covariant is building ChatGPT for robots
Covariant this week announced the launch of RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1). Peter Chen, the co-founder and CEO of the UC Berkeley artificial intelligence spinout tells TechCrunch the platform, “is basically a large language model (LLM), but for robot language.” RFM-1 is the result of, among other things, a massive…
AALTO seeks to democratize high-speed internet access through solar-powered drones
In the beginning of 2021, Alphabet shuttered Loon. It was a familiar story within the annals of Google X history: an ambitious moonshot with tremendous upside that sputtered out prior…
Saildrone’s first aluminum Surveyor autonomous vessel splashes down for Navy testing
Ocean intelligence company Saildrone has just put the first of a new generation of Surveyor autonomous vessels in the water: an aluminum version that the Navy is keen to take…
Amazon generates a lot of trash. Precisely how much is a matter of some debate. In 2021, the company says it used 214 million or so pounds of single-use plastic…
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Agility Robotics’ new CEO is ‘focused on the here and now’
There was nothing else like Digit on the ProMat floor last year. The manufacturing supply chain event has gradually morphed into a tech show in recent years. Many of the biggest names in the space were present, showcasing autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), bin picking arms and automated storage and retrieval…
AgZen’s RealCoverage wants to keep pesticides only where they are needed
A 2021 study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78% of fruit production, 54% of vegetable production, and 32% of cereal production. At the same time,…
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Syrenna’s WaterDrone is the ocean-monitoring ‘underwater weather station’ of the future
As crucial as the ocean is to countless industries, we lack the kind of systematic knowledge of it that we have of the surface. Syrenna has built a versatile robotic platform that you might think of as a mobile weather station for the sea, and is ready to emerge from…
