Andra's adventures down the substack robot rabbit hole!

Or what's interesting in robotics this week?

Feb 21, 2023

From the number of newly launched robot substacks out there, quite a few of us have been migrating from Revue. Honestly, Elon could have made Twitter profitable simply by charging us all a subscription to use Revue. I miss it.

Guess I’m back in the long form writing world. Sigh. I asked ChatGPT to write descriptions of my upcoming talks. If I had just wanted one, then maybe it would have been persuasive but with seven (quite different) talks to be summarized the results were repetitively monotonous.

Coming up!

Robots on Ice is back on Feb 26. It’s a fun fundraiser for the Silicon Valley Ice Skating Association and after the robots (and people) take to the ice we’re warming up with Bots&HotChocz at the Palo Alto Cafe.

Next, we’re celebrating Women’s History Month with a Women in Robotics event combined with Bots&Beer at InOrbit’s new Robot Space in Mountain View on March 1st. You can read about Robot Space here. There are also more Women in Robotics events around the world with more new chapters starting.

Robot News

Did you miss TRI opening doors to media last week? If you read one article about Toyota Research Institute’s robots then you probably read three. Sadly, cabling and wire harnesses is still too difficult for robots.

IFR, the International Federation of Robotics announced the Top 5 Robotics Trends for 2023. “Robots play a fundamental role in securing the changing demands of manufacturers around the world,” says Marina Bill, President of the International Federation of Robotics. “New trends in robotics attract users from small enterprise to global OEMs.”

Did you see point number five coming? Those markets have been around for as long as industrial robots have. Perhaps the issue is that so many people who want robots are now needing to look into secondary markets. The major OEMs have three times as much demand as they can fill these days. I’d love to see IFR produce a graph showing how many robots were requested but couldn’t be shipped last year.

I’m a big fan of EPSRC UK’s work on robotics (and Robohub.org) and the Robot Talk podcast with Prof Yang Gao is great.

Yang Gao is Professor of Space Autonomous Systems and Founding Head of the STAR LAB that specializes in robotic sensing, perception, visual guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) and biomimetic mechanisms for industrial applications in extreme environments. She brings over 20 years of research experience in developing robotics and autonomous systems, in which she has been the principal investigator of over 30 inter/nationally teamed projects and involved in real-world mission development.

And here’s the Robohub podcast as well. The latest features Machina Labs in LA who use robots for sheet metal forming for sort of high-value low-volume production seen in the space industry. Two robotic arms bend the metal into different geometries cutting down the time to produce large sheet metal parts from several months down to a few hours. Robohub’s Abate de Mey talks to Ed Mehr.

Ed Mehr is the co-founder and CEO of Machina Labs. He has an engineering background in smart manufacturing and artificial intelligence. In his previous position at Relativity Space, he led a team in charge of developing the world’s largest metal 3D printer. Relativity Space uses 3D printing to make rocket parts rapidly, and with the flexibility for multiple iterations. Ed previously was the CTO at Cloudwear (Now Averon), and has also worked at SpaceX, Google, and Microsoft.

More news

The Canadian Robotics Council released the reports from their inaugural 2022 Symposium. (There’re actually five reports available in total.)

Get the key insights and recommendations from Canadian robotics experts in this synthesis report. Get the first snapshot of the Canadian robotics industry, including geography, size, sector and robot type in this report. Pan-European Robotics Research Networks: An Insider's Perspective by Florian Krebs. How Open-Source Standards Grow Robotics Ecosystems by Brian Gerkey. And finally, 2022 Canadian Robotics Council Symposium Agenda & Participants' List.

Australia is also in the process of developing a National Robotics Strategy after the interest in the first Australian Robotics Roadmap, now onto the second edition.

Director of Monash Robotics Group, Professor Dana Kulić agrees that “Australia is kind of late to the game” in making robotics a focus of national policy and funding support. She tells Cosmos Australia is known for its high-quality robotics research, but “sometimes the translation from the academic lab to actual deployment has been the critical gap”.

Kulić says having custom-built funding designed to support collaboration between research and industry would be helpful.

“The United States is among the most successful in this regard. There’s this very close interaction between academic researchers and industry, and more flexible arrangements,” she says.

For example, in the US there is a closer industry-academia partnership. Researchers are often involved in start-ups as co-founders or advisers, and the big Artificial Intelligence (AI) and technology companies continue to engage with universities and research institutes on new ideas, she says.

Silicon Valley is in a state of flux, according to the just released 2023 Silicon Valley Index. We're seeing large numbers of people leaving the region without a corresponding influx, and yet the economy is at full employment, lay-offs notwithstanding. We continue to document the nation's largest wealth gaps. Stratified by race, ethnicity, or even gender, those gaps are still more pronounced.

The report also shows how people working from home is no passing fad, and the trend is upending commercial real estate, emptying our transit systems, and shuttering our downtowns. But none of it has cooled our innovation engine, which is churning out record numbers of patents, and a healthy amount of venture capital.

The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association recently profiled an early Silicon Valley Robotics member, Cruise Automation.

Meanwhile amid labour shortages and problems of rural isolation, Japan is relaxing its traffic laws to allow autonomous delivery robots to take to the streets. However, relaxing doesn’t mean removing regulation.

Regulations mean that a maximum speed for the robots is set at 6 km/h to mitigate the "chances of severe injury in the event of a collision," according to Yutaka Uchimura, a robotic engineering professor at Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT).

In Saudi Arabia, Hanson Robotics has provided a ‘Sophia’ called Sara who can speak several Arabic dialects. Sara even has more rights than most women in Saudi Arabia.

In the UK, RoboSalp is getting ready to go to space in 2024 on the Europa Clipper, a Jupiter-orbiting spacecraft carrying science instruments, including a new underwater robot developed at the University of Bristol.

The robotic units in RoboSalp have been modeled on the design and life of mysterious zooplankton. Their unique selling proposition? They have been engineered to operate in unknown and extreme environments, such as extra-terrestrial oceans, as per a press release.