California is still the epicenter of the robotics revolution
Latest news in autonomous vehicles, humanoids and AI, plus a cool kickstarter robot!
Just published a quick survey of robotics companies around the world using quite a conservative dataset. The USA is responsible for 2525 robotics companies compared to China’s 1350. The UK is the largest robotics nation in the European region, and Australia/New Zealand was a US state, they’d be ranked 5th above Florida with 155.
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Quick Reads:
AI Robotics GPT moment is near - Peter Chen, CEO Covariant in TechCrunch
Robots plus generative AI: Everything you need to know when they work as one - ZDNET
SFO rebuffs Waymo - SF ‘guerilla warfare’ vs. robotaxis heats up - Mission Local
Cruise reportedly knew its robotaxis struggled to notice children and kept them on the road anyway - Futurism
NTT to develop driverless vehicles with Toyota and invest $67M in May Mobility - Reuters
Ambarella demos LLM inference on autonomous driving chip - EETimes
Ghost, now OpenAI-backed, claims LLMs will overcome self-driving setbacks — but experts are skeptical - TechCrunch
Britain says makers, not car owners liable for self-driving crashes - Reuters
China Plans to mass produce humanoids by 2025 - The Robot Report
Humans vs robots: Study compares 27 humanoid robots with humans to see who is superior - TechXplore
Boston Dynamics says robots could be in homes in 10-20 years - Yahoo
Tesla is hiring a bunch of designers so it can start selling humanoid robots by 2027 - Insider
Robot startups see huge market in replacing human workers: ‘We can sell millions of humanoids, billions maybe’ - Fortune
Are robot chips the key to humanoid robots’ development? - CGTN
Robots will be your helper, not your adversary, says robotics firm CEO - Yahoo
Do we need human-like robots? - VOA
Workers are the missing cog as US manufacturing gears up - Reuters
Fei-Fei Li Started an AI Revolution by Seeing Like an Algorithm - Wired
Scientists deploy rescue robots in the desert - CNN
Bloomington Robotics Company is Tackling the Affordable Housing Crisis - Indiana Public Media
Sodexo and Bear Robotics partner to transform healthcare - BusinessWire
Robotics Funding Saw Another Dip in 2023 - TechCrunch
The robots are still rising, albeit with less funding - Crunchbase
This robot pumps gas for you - Fox News
Why this autonomous vehicle veteran joined a legged robotics startup - TechCrunch
Remy Robotics opens bot-run ‘Better Days’ kitchen in NYC - RestaurantDIVE
Chef 600km away preps Wellington lunch with help from Robo Chop - The Post NZ
Giant rideable walking quadruped robot from Sensei, a company renowned for crafting thrilling amusement park rides at Disney - Yanko Design
Robotics Events:
16 Nov - Making It Big: Experts’ Talk Manufacturing Success (Plus Brazilian BBQ)
20 Nov - SVR’s Robotics Technical Network at Autodesk (are you a CTO, technical founder or senior robotics engineer? Ask for an invitation)
4 Dec - SVR’s Startup Mentor Office Hours
4 Dec - SVR’s Founders & Funders Night Out
5 Dec - SVR / AMBay Area Bots & Beer Mixer
12-14 Dec - IEEE Humanoids in Austin TX
Interesting Robotics:
Build your own AI-powered Perseverance Mars rover with this new DIY kit on Kickstarter:
Reviving History: 450-Million-Year-Old Organism Finds New Life in Softbotics
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, along with paleontologists from Spain and Poland, have utilized fossil records to create a soft robotic model of Pleurocystitid. This marine organism, which lived about 450 million years ago, is thought to be among the earliest echinoderms that could move using a muscular stem.
A centimeter-scale quadruped leverages curved-crease origami
CurveQuad is a new addition to the sparsely populated design space of steerable, single-actuator walking robots. At just eight centimeters long and weighing approximately 11 grams, it is relatively small and light for a motor-based walking robot, says Daniel Feshbach, lead author and a doctoral student in the Sung Robotics Lab.
The article, "CurveQuad: A centimeter-scale origami quadruped that leverages curved creases to self-fold and crawl with one motor," is published in the journal Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Researchers presented their work on October 2 at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023), held in Detroit, MI.