Dan Kara

Tactile data and virtual sensing company raises additional funding round to expand into new market segments and accelerate growth.

Skyline Robotics is targeting the $40B window cleaning industry with an automation solution that leverages the intelligence of human operators, and the strength and endurance of industrial robots.

Robotics Business Review’s essential announcements for the interval ranging from October 22 – 29, 2021 include notices from Fabric, Tactile Mobility, Drone Base, Fixposition, OMRON and Zebra Technologies.

The investment, led by existing investor Temasek, puts Fabric’s valuation at more than $1 billion.

Group from Technical University Munich wins the Indy Autonomous Challenge, taking home the $1 million Grand Prize. Mike Oitzman, Editor of the Mobile Robot Guide, reviews the first autonomous motorcar event held at the world-famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Robot Report’s Steve Crowe reviewed ABB’s Q3 2021 financials to learn how much the company paid out for Spanish AMR provider ASTI Mobile Robotics.

Stephanie Cannon of Pitney Bowes discusses deploying robotics systems from Ambi Robotics to support E-commerce. Plus Waymo’s self-driving cars and Sword Defense’s robotic sniper rifle.

CNC shops, and their clients, both benefit from the many advantages accrued by incorporating robots into various CNC manufacturing and production processes.

Jon Hirschtick, PTC’s General Manager for the Onshape Division, discusses founding SolidWorks and Onshape, and what is necessary to build and sell (twice) companies offering product design software. Also, “What is your favorite robotics and automation start-up of 2021?”

While deep learning methods have proven useful for autonomous navigation, the approach requires vast amounts of data and computing power, and produces solutions that are inefficient, fragile and unaffordable for many classes of applications. Opteran’s “Natural Intelligence” approach, based on the function of insect brains, provides an alternative for generating complex, autonomous behaviors for machines.

Business, technological, and social drivers, as well as the Covid pandemic, have had an accelerative effect on the mobile robotics sector, particularly for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). Deployments are up and increasing rapidly, and you can expect more of the same in the future.

On Episode 53 of The Robot Report Podcast, Steve Crowe and Mike Oitzman examine Amazon’s recently unveiled Astro consumer robot, the latest in a long line of personal systems designed for use in the home.

Inspection and service work in underground tunnels is the poster child for work that is “dirty, dull and dangerous”. It is also time consuming and costly. MAB Robotics is meeting the challenge with a compact, ruggedized, quadrupedal robot.

The Autonomous Mobile Robotics (AMR) market continues to churn with investments, acquisitions and partnerships. Mike Oitzman, Editor of the Mobile Robot Guide, provides his take on Locus Robotics’ recent acquisition of Waypoint Robotics.

The process of creating optimized, hardware specific, compute architectures can be time consuming and complex. The ROS 2 Hardware Acceleration Working Group (HAWG) is working to simplify hardware acceleration engineering tasks by creating acceleration kernels based on open standards.

QLayers’ 10Q robot is an innovative solution that transforms the traditional method of coating large-scale industrial surfaces into a fully controlled, efficient, and safe process.

While backflipping humanoid robots are exciting to watch, there is a far more pragmatic reality, one where intelligent machines are integrated into the workforce to function alongside humans, performing repetitive, risk-prone tasks, and gathering business critical data while doing so.

A large percentage of small-to-medium manufacturers (SMMs) have missed out on the many benefits of robotic industrial automation. Attend this online session on September 22nd, 2021 to learn about new products and services that support small-to-medium manufacturers. Real world case studies will be presented to illustrate salient points.

In this podcast, Right Hand Robotics’ Yaro Tenzer discusses discuss bin-picking solutions. Plus Waymo expands service into San Francisco and Locus Robotics celebrates their 500Mth pick.

GUSS Automation’s autonomous, precision orchard spraying solution provides growers with a rapid ROI, along with other benefits such as simplified operations, increased efficiency, enhanced safety and reduced labor costs.

Developing SLAM systems is resource intensive, technically challenging, and expensive. In addition, the lack of common and shareable approaches for understanding the operational environment shared by robotics systems and humans has resulted in a multitude of system specific, spatial intelligence silos. There has to be a better way.

It is advanced software, working in conjunction with hardware systems, that has driven the commercial drone sector to new heights. Similarly, software is the key capabilities enabler for other types of robotics systems going forward, including mobile robots.

In this wide ranging interview, Gary Guthart, CEO of surgical robotics provider Intuitive, discusses how Intuitive coped with the Covid pandemic, what must be done to maintain market dominance, and what keeps him up at night.

The Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute’s Suzy Teele recently interviewed READY Robotics’ Juan Aparicio about overcoming the barriers to entry in the industrial automation and robotics sectors.

Episode 51 of The Robot Report Podcast features a discussion of Intel’s recent announcement that the company is discontinuing its RealSense business line. Also on the menu – Tesla’s announces a humanoid robot announcement and Stratom’s autonomous solutions for the US military.