2018 was quite an eventful year for the robotics industry. It was full of ups and downs, of course, but it will unfortunately be remembered more for the downs than anything. So before we turn our attention to 2019 trends to watch, let’s recap the major robotics stories of 2018. Make sure to also check…

Funding does not guarantee success. That is a lesson the robotics industry learned the hard way in 2018. Rethink Robotics, which raised $149.5 million in funding, shut down in October. Airware and Jibo suffered a similar fate this year after burning through $114 million and $73 million, respectively. Nonetheless, raising money plays a vital role in…

Jet engines can have up to 25,000 individual parts, making regular maintenance a tedious task that can take over a month per engine. Many components are located deep inside the engine and cannot be inspected without taking the machine apart, adding time and costs to maintenance. This problem is not only confined to jet engines,…

Medtronic has closed the $1.7 billion acquisition of Mazor Robotics and its robot-assisted surgery platform. Medtronic capped the buyout with the announcement that its first jointly produced product won an FDA nod. Last month Caesarea, Israel-based Mazor said its shareholders voted to approve the $58.50-per-ADR-share deal with the world’s largest medical device maker, which has…

Robotics investments in November 2018 totaled at least $639.3 million worldwide with a total of 20 verified transactions. Unverifiable robotics investments have been excluded from this analysis. There are several robotics investments in which the amounts and rounds were not disclosed. If we verify those amounts and rounds, or come across new robotics investments, we will…

The Robotics Summit & Expo 2019 (June 4-6 in Boston, MA at the Seaport World Trade Center) call for speakers is now open. Produced by WTWH Media and The Robot Report, the Robotics Summit & Expo focuses on the technical issues involved with the design, development, manufacture and delivery of commercial-class robotics systems. The Robotics…

Video annotation tool in Brain Builder can help organizations reduce the time and cost of AI data preparation by at least 50%, says Neurala.

RightHand Robotics, a Somerville, Mass-based company founded in 2014 by Leif Jentoft and Yaro Tenzer, closed a $23 million Series B round for its RightPick robotic piece-picking technology. The round was led by Menlo Ventures and included participation from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and existing investors Dream Incubator, Matrix Partners, and Playground Global. Prior to…

Robotics industry pioneer Mick Mountz joins RightHand’s board of directors.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by our sister publication Medical Design & Outsourcing. Intuitive Surgical isn’t resting on its laurels when it comes to the surgical robotics field it dominates. The Sunnyvale, Calif.­–based company is seeking to stay competitive through technologies, including computer-controlled navigated robotic catheters, contrast agents to improve imaging during procedures, and…

NVIDIA announced at its Jetson Developer Meetup the Jetson AGX Xavier Module for autonomous machines, delivering up to 32 TeraOPs (TOPS) of accelerated computing capability. The NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier Module, which the company calls an AI computer, is now available for $1,099 (based on 1,000 unit volume). NVIDIA introduced the Jetson AGX Xavier developer…

Inspecting a damaged building after an earthquake or during a fire is exactly the kind of job that human rescuers would like drones to do for them. A flying robot could look for people trapped inside and guide the rescue team towards them. But the drone would often have to enter the building through a…

DHL Supply Chain has a broad innovation agenda for its warehouses, including the use of augmented reality, AGVs, robotics and everything in between. One labor-intensive task DHL is looking to automate at its warehouse in Beringe, Netherlands is manual picking. To do so, DHL worked with Robomotive, an industrial automation specialist in the Netherlands, to…

Robotiq, a Quebec City, Canada-based maker of plug-and-play cameras, grippers, force sensors and software for collaborative robots, has raised Can$31 million (about US$23.1 million) in funding from global investment firm Battery Ventures. This is Robotiq’s first round of funding. Battery General Partner Jesse Feldman, who specializes in industrial technology investments, will join Robotiq’s board. Robotiq…

Industrial robots deployed today across various industries are mostly doing repetitive tasks. The overall task performance hinges on the accuracy of their controllers to track predefined trajectories. The ability of robots to handle unconstructed complex environments is limited in today’s manufacturing. Two examples are flexible picking of previously not encountered objects or the insertion of…

Earlier this month, I crawled into Dr. Wendy Ju‘s autonomous car simulator to explore the future of human-machine interfaces at Cornell Tech’s Tata Innovation Center. Dr Ju recently moved to the Roosevelt Island campus from Stanford University. While in California, the roboticist was famous for making videos capturing people’s reactions to self-driving cars using students…

Corindus Vascular Robotics‘ CorPath robotic surgical platform was used in a first-in-human telerobotic intervention study in India. The Waltham, Mass.-based company said the study was the world’s first percutaneous coronary intervention conducted from a remote location outside of a catheterization lab. In the trial, five patients at India’s Apex Heart Institute underwent an elective PCI…

The exoskeleton sector continues to evolve, and in some sense has begun
 to normalize. The medical, business and technical press has long reported on exoskeleton technologies designed for medical rehabilitation and as mobility aids, even though commercial success and large-scale adoption has not yet been realized. Recently, however, reportage, along with focus of a number…

This article was republished with permission from Starship Technologies’ blog. Starship Technologies is building a fleet of robots to deliver packages locally on demand. To successfully achieve this, the robots must be safe, polite and quick. But how do you get there with low computational resources and without expensive sensors such as LIDARs? This is…

Walmart has been testing Brain Corp.’s BrainOS-powered autonomous floor cleaners for more than a year. Now it looks like the two companies are ready to take their relationship to the next level. By the end of Walmart’s fiscal year, January 31, 2019, the world’s largest retailer will have 360 BrainOS-powered machines cleaning its floors across…

Despite the hype around the Industrial Internet of Things, analytics at the edge could help manufacturers better manage big data, says Greenwave Systems’ John Crupi.

Motus Labs, a Dallas, Texas-based startup that builds robot joint actuators and drives, came out of stealth mode today and unveiled what has been in the works for five-plus years. The Motus M-DRIVE, which features a gearless drive design, uses mating blocks instead of traditional gear teeth. The M-DRIVE will be available in the second…