Automata, a company that combines software and hardware to automate science labs around the globe, has raised $40 million in an equity-based round of funding, as the U.K.-based startup looks to double down on recent growth across Europe and the U.S. Founded out of London in 2015, Automata in its original guise targeted myriad industries…
One can’t accuse Bonsai Robotics of lacking focus. The Bay Area-based firm is starting with trees — specifically nut trees. Like most labor-intensive sectors these days, farms have suffered from a profound lack of available workers, so the startup began striking deals with OEMs to outfit heavy farming equipment with its vision-based autonomy. This morning,…
If you’re lucky, once a year you get to put together a panel built on pure kismet. Pairing Gill Pratt with Marc Raibert was exactly that for me. The two go back several decades, to the salad days of MIT’s Leg Lab. [A version of this story originally appeared in TechCrunch’s robotics newsletter, Actuator. Subscribe…
“The aim of Intrinsic is to democratize the access to robotics,” Wendy Tan White, CEO of Intrinsic, told me at TechCrunch Disrupt last week, where she appeared alongside Brian Gerkey, director of Open Robotics, which was recently acquired by Intrinsic. The acquisition of OSRC – the commercial arm of Open Robotics – received a mixed…
Agility Robotics will soon be able to make 10,000 bipedal humanoid robots per year. When I spoke with Agility CEO Damion Shelton and CTO Melonee Wise onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last week, they also claimed that the company is creating jobs rather than taking them from humans. “If you start with an…
Stanley Wilson died a decade ago, battling a six-alarm fire at a Dallas, Texas, condominium complex. Two additional firefighters were taken to a hospital and two residents were treated on site for smoke inhalation, but all survived. A pair of reports were made public the following year, citing issues with training and risk assessment, among…
The pandemic had a profound impact on countless careers, but few jobs were hit quite like nursing. As hospitals overflowed, staff was forced to take on impossible long shifts, risking their own health in the process. In many ways, it was the perfect environment to introduce a robot like Diligent’s Moxi, a system designed to…
Last month, Skydio announced that it was shutting down its consumer drone business. DJI continues to dominate the category globally, but when the Shenzhen-based firm found itself on the wrong side of a U.S. government ban, Skydio was there to reap the benefit. The Bay Area company has since found success catering to the enterprise…
Learning may well be the most exciting frontier in the whole of robotics. The field itself dates back decades. The 80s, for instance, brought exciting breakthroughs in learning by demonstration, but a slew of research projects out of schools like CMU, MIT and UC Berkeley point to a future in which robots learn much like…
Humanoid robots are pretty cool, and Agility Robotics‘ bipedal robot Digit is up there in terms of advanced tech (it even has a face!). Today, the company announced it’s getting ready to crank up its RoboFab, which can build more than 10,000 Digits per year. Obvious Skynet jokes aside, I, for one, welcome our new…