$100m for 1X, drone delivery is not dead, DJI is betting on it!

And three more humanoid robots swell the ranks.

Hats of to IEEE Spectrum for dropping some great gems on Friday. Also for one of my top 3 favorite humanoid companies 1X for closing $100M round!

Welcome to 2024 in Robots & Startups! I look forward to seeing you in person at Silicon Valley Robotics events or at some other robotics conferences.

I’ve been listening to subscriber feedback and am going to double down on the content you are asking for. I will always put a short calendar in free posts, and our occasional paid posts are usually only paywalled for a couple of weeks, because I appreciate everyone taking the time to subscribe and to read these newsletters.

And to show extra appreciation for the wonderful individuals that are supporting Robots & Startups, I will keep detailed robotics event calendars behind the paywall. Did you just switch to a paid subscription? Thank you! It makes you an angel investor in the work I do at Silicon Valley Robotics as a startup advisor, and accelerator.

If you are a robotics company, January is a great time to join Silicon Valley Robotics.

Top three trends in robotics and AI for 2024:

• Humanoids are here! Commercially available, and at a lower price point than you’d think. (new post coming for the 29-30 humanoids currently ‘on market’)

Andra’s Current Top Three Humanoids:

1. Agility Robotics - Digit

2. 1x - Neo

3. this is a rotating cast … Fourier - GR-1, Figure - Figure01, Apptronik - Astra, Westwood - Themis

Robotics valuations will rise

• AI is massively overhyped but watch out for a critical underlying battle for data access supremacy in the 4D world ruled by robotics. Robotics valuations will rise.

One of the reasons robotics valuations will rise is that robotics has been badly undervalued, as venture doesn’t understand the benefits of physical product as well as PE does. The other reason that robotics valuations will rise, is that the VC industry is currently operating at a loss, and is desperate to get some wins back on the board.

Obviously this is a vast oversimplification. It’s still going to be really hard to go from seed to something else. Series B to C valuations still suck, but there are a lot of new investors starting to believe in robotics, so overall, I like the opportunities.

Self-driving Cargo is a winning category

• While there has been a lot of ‘correction’ happening in 2023 for high profile self-driving car startups (Cruise etc.), overall, self-driving cargo is a winning category.

Drone delivery is back… or perhaps a better description is that drone delivery is finally making it out of the hype cycle’s valley of disillusionment and onto the mainstream plateau of ‘just another product’!

Our first months delivering to Walmart customers have made one thing clear: Demand for drone delivery is real. On the heels of our Dallas-wide FAA approvals, today we announced that millions of new DFW-area customers will have access to drone delivery in 2024! WING

Not only that but DJI have announced a delivery drone product for sale, FlyCart30.

Overcome traditional transport challenges and start a new era of dynamic aerial delivery with large payload capacity, long operation range, high reliability, and intelligent features. Discover more, at DJI: https://bit.ly/3vtpZIA

The self-driving cargo category is off to a great 2024! Air, land or sea.

Robotics Events:

7 Feb - Bots & Beer location SF or OAKLAND

8 Feb - InOrbit Robot Space Anniversary Party - Mountain View CA

20-21 Feb - IEEE Serious Open Source 2024 - Mountain View CA

?VIP Robotics event TBC?

6 April - Robot Block Party - exciting new location (more news soon!)

18-21 April 2024 - RoboGames - S

21 April 2024 - Robots on Ice - Palo Alto Winterlodge

Some upcoming academic robotics conferences

• TAHRI 2024 Boulder CO 9 Mar - 10 Mar (Technology Advances for HRI)

• HRI 2024 Boulder CO 11 Mar - 14 Mar

• Haptics 2024 Long Beach CA 7 Apr - 10 Apr

• Robosoft 2024 San Diego CA 14 Apr - 17 Apr

• ICRA 2024 Yokohama Japan 13 May - 17 May 2024

• ARSO 2024 Hong Kong, China 20 May - 22 May 2024

• AIM 2024 Boston MA 14 July - 18 July

• CASE 2024 Puglia Italy 28 Aug - 1 Sep 2024

• IROS 2024 AbuDhabi 14 Oct - 18 Oct 2024

• Humanoids 2024 Nancy FR 26 Nov - 28 Nov

• ICRA 2025 Atlanta Georgia 17 May - 23 May 2025

Robotics News:

Miso Robotics believes it will put its Flippy robot everywhere - Restaurant News

Dextrous Robotics shuts down trailer unloading business - The Robot Report

1X secures $100m in funding - 1X

Toyota’s robots are learning to do housework - by copying humans - Wired

ABB buys Sevensense to give industrial robots eyes and brains - Reuters

Following the Prompts: Generative AI Powers Smarter Robots With NVIDIA Isaac Platform - NVIDIA Blog

Neocis brings in $20m for robotics dental surgeries - The Robot Report

LimX Dynamics' first humanoid robot gains real-time terrain perception - Interesting Engineering

Autonomous Robotic Surgery: Has the Future Arrived? - Cureus

Kodiak intros next-gen Robo Truck with no safety driver at CES 2024 - Forbes

Driverless semi-truck tech to launch between Houston and Dallas later this year - Innovation Map

Gatik autonomous trucks know the road via Goodyear’s smart tires - Forbes

Two states looking to ban autonomous trucks, Indiana and New York - Overdrive

China hits fast forward button for commercialization of autonomous driving - People’s Daily

Robotics and space biology fill research schedule on station - NASA Blog

The Philly company that makes autonomous farm robots just raised $24M - Technical.ly

Deere aims for autonomous crop harvests by 2030: CES 2024 - Finance Yahoo

A robot is carving the National Cathedral. Here's how: (via AdaFruit)

Long Reads:

How 34 labs are teaming up to develop a global robotic brain - IEEE Spectrum

Will superintelligence sneak up on us? New study offers reassurance - Nature

Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage? via OpenReview

Paper by Rylan Schaeffer, Brando Miranda, Sanmi Koyejo presented at NeurIPS 2023

Recent work claims that large language models display emergent abilities: abilities not present in smaller-scale models that are present in larger-scale models. What makes emergent abilities intriguing is two-fold: their sharpness, transitioning seemingly instantaneously from not present to present, and their unpredictability, appearing at seemingly unforeseeable model scales. Here, we present an alternative explanation for emergent abilities: for a particular task and model family, when analyzing fixed model outputs, emergent abilities appear due to the researcher’s choice of metric rather than due to fundamental changes in models with scale. Specifically, nonlinear or discontinuous metrics produce seemingly emergent abilities, whereas linear or continuous metrics produce smooth, continuous, predictable changes in model performance. We present our alternative explanation in a simple mathematical model, then test it in three complementary ways: we (1) make, test and confirm three predictions on the effect of metric choice using the InstructGPT/GPT-3 family on tasks with claimed emergent abilities; (2) make, test and confirm two predictions about metric choices in a meta-analysis of emergent abilities on the Beyond the Imitation Game Benchmark (BIG-Bench); and (3) show how to choose metrics to produce never-before-seen seemingly emergent abilities in multiple vision tasks across diverse deep network architectures. Via all three analyses, we provide evidence that emergent abilities disappear with different metrics or with better statistics, and may not be a fundamental property of scaling AI models.