With the Apple Car firmly in the rearview, the company is reportedly exploring yet another notoriously difficult path: home robots.
In spite of those efforts, however, the company has fared best when it focused its resources back into its robot vacuum.
The hockey puck design that’s prevalent across robot vacuums isn’t ideal for anything beyond the core functionality it’s built for.
That’s likely a big part of the reason the company is selling it as a development platform.
There’s nothing wrong with teleop in many scenarios, but it seems unlikely that people are going to flock to a home robot that’s being controlled by a human somewhere far away.
The latter has made snake robots a compelling addition to search-and-rescue teams, as the systems can squeeze into spots people and other robots can’t.
That means a lot of ice, as NASA researchers are planning to send it to Saturn’s small, cold moon, Enceladus.
Twenty-first-century flybys from Cassini have revealed a water-rich environment, making the ice-covered moon a potential candidate for life in our solar system.
The eventual plan is to use the snake robot, Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS), to explore oceans beneath the moon’s crust and finally answer one of the universe’s big, open questions.
In fact, CMU spinout HEBI Robotics designed the modules being used in this early version of the system.
The no-code development platform previously focused its outreach on robotics firms.
They were like, ‘we’re not a robotics company — we do food processing, we do PLC automation, we do boats, we’re not robots.’”Further complicating messaging was the fact that — while the company is simply named “Viam” — its various social media platforms are “Viam Robotics,” owing to the fact that it was unable to secure the four-letter word.
Viam’s large office overlooking New York City’s Lincoln Center has a lab space, where members of the local robotics community are invited in to use its platform to develop automation applications.
“When people ask me what I do and what [Viam’s software] does, I usually use an example from their life.
We are a platform that lives at the intersection of real-world hardware and real-world software and the cloud and machine learning.
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 maintenance of open source robotics projects, with a particular focus on the OSRF’s own robot operating system (ROS).
First released in 2007 by erstwhile Bay Area incubator Willow Garage, ROS has played a foundational role in robotics development for decades.
In a show of support, Nvidia and Qualcomm have both signed on as “Platinum” members for the new alliance, along with Alphabet’s X spinout Intrinsic.
Former Open Robotics CEO Brian Gerkey (who current serves as Intrinsic’s CTO) has been appointed to the OSRA’s board of directors.
Naturally, Nvidia wants a piece.
Keeping things in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Jetson Thor, a new computer designed specifically for running simulation workflows, generative AI models and more for the humanoid form factor.
Nvidia notes of the new silicon:The SoC includes a next-generation GPU based on NVIDIA Blackwell architecture with a transformer engine delivering 800 teraflops of 8-bit floating point AI performance to run multimodal generative AI models like GR00T.
Naturally, Nvidia wants a piece of the action.
The next several years will present a fascinating race for market share between humanoids and mobile manipulators, and Nvidia wants a piece of all of that action.
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 at large, there are few better fields to be expert in at the moment than Robotics and AI.
With more than 60 entries this week, there are plenty of jobs and companies to choose from, across a broad range of different segments from mail sorting to surgery to space.
To everyone who lost a job, recently graduated or is just looking for something new, here’s to finding your next big thing.
ACK Robotics (10 roles)Advanced Construction Robotics (3 roles)Aescape (7 roles)Aigen (16 roles)Ambi Robotics (2 roles)ANYbotics (24 roles)Astrobotic (40 roles)Aurora (63 roles)Austrian Institute of Technology (1 role)Avidbots (12 roles)Baubot (12 roles)Bloomfield Robotics (5 roles)Bridge Appliances Inc (2 roles)Carnegie Robotics (3 roles)Chef Robotics (9 roles)Collaborative Robotics (8 roles)Covariant (14 roles)Crimson Tech (3 roles)Cyvl.ai (3 roles)Dexterity (39 roles)Edge Case Research (3 roles)Exotec (176 roles)Formic (7 roles)Formlogic (10 roles)Four Growers (4 roles)Foxglove (2 roles)Gather AI (5 roles)GrayMatter Robotics (8 roles)Hellbender (6 roles)Honeywell (10 roles)Identified Technology (5 roles)Kef Robotics (3 roles)Kewazo (2 roles)Matic Robotics (12 roles)Medra AI (2 roles)Mine Vision Systems (2 roles)Motional (19 roles)National Robotics Engineering Center (3 roles)Near Earth Autonomy (7 roles)Neya Systems (6 roles)Nimble Robotics (9 roles)Onward Robotics (3 roles)Point One Navigation (5 roles)Pudu Robotics (2 roles)Reframe Systems (3 roles)Roboto AI (1 role)Robust AI (12 roles)Sanctuary AI (12 roles)Scythe Robotics (7 roles)Seegrid (10 roles)ST Engineering Aethon (4 roles)Stack AV (40 roles)Standard Bots (8 roles)Stratom Inc (7 roles)Symbotic (95 roles)The AI Institute (18 roles)Titan Robotics (3 roles)Vayu Robotics (4 roles)Vecna Robotics (5 roles)Vention (19 roles)Volley Automation (6 roles)
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 with BMW.
Now Apptronik is getting in on the action, courtesy of a partnership with Mercedes-Benz.
Apptronik can demonstrate clear interest from a leading automotive name, while Mercedes signals to customers and shareholders alike that it’s looking to the future.
Apptronik is a University of Austin spinout best known for its work on NASA’s Valkyrie humanoid robot.
It’s not a flat-out refutation of the form factor, so much as an acknowledgement that — in spite of investor enthusiasm — it’s not the ideal tool for every job.
This week’s Modex supply chain show inAtlanta told its own story — one populated by very few humanoids.
A number of the players I spoke with continued to express skepticism around the widespread adoption of humanoid robots in the workplace.
I heard very few outright rejections of the humanoid form factor.
These instances, which now require human intervention, could be the ideal scenario for humanoids, whether operating autonomously or teleoperated, as in the case of Reflex, the other humanoid robotics firm present at Modex.
The halls of Modex this week are lousy with solutions to the problem of inventory.
Recent years have given us drone solutions and Dexory’s massive AMR (autonomous mobile robot) with a telescoping scaffolding structure.
At its core is a tall (but not Dexory tall) AMR that serves as a launching and landing pad for a drone.
You can’t really see it from the image I took, but the drone is actually tethered to the inside of the AMR platform.
The Ottawa-based firm says the drone can operate for up to five hours before needing to return to the base for a recharge.
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 startup, was drawing its own crowd.
Passersby requested something from the Reflex robot, and it spring into action, grabbing the item off the shelf (it didn’t hurt that the company was giving out free food and beverage).
The system has a wheeled base, which is perfectly effective for navigating these kinds of layouts.
He adds that the current timeline involves having 10 to 20 Reflex robots in the world, followed by “hundreds” next year.
