Service

The July 4 holiday week saw funding for companies developing self-driving capabilities for vehicles, robots, and other devices.

Restaurants, nursing homes, museums, and theme parks are just some of the places where service robots and AI are becoming useful. Nations must develop strategies and address fears of automation taking jobs.

Robots that make pizzas, deliver e-commerce goods, and greet customers dominated the robotics news cycle as summer began.

Some of the robot intelligence trends discussed at Automatica 2018 included the need for good data, how cobots can help smaller businesses, and the roles of AI and human workers.

For the past several years, developers and vendors around the world have been working on assistive robots. Their products came closer to market with displays at Automatica.

Robots are coming to retail, as HSBC Bank's flagship location in Manhattan is the first bank branch in the U.S. to use SoftBank's humanoid Pepper robot for greeting and informing customers.

This week saw variations across the robotics funding landscape, artificial intelligence support companies and Internet of Things systems.

High costs, end user difficulties, and poor audio/video have hampered the growth of telepresence robotics. Can new models and applications help grow the market beyond niche uses?

OhmniLabs' open platform aims to create easier and less expensive customized telepresence robots.

Artificial intelligence and related technologies have made great strides where large data sets can be analyzed quickly. But experts say there's still a long way to go before AI applications meet the general intelligence expectations of the public.