North American battery manufacturing capacity quadruples. It's not all for EVs.
The robot market in the US is already 2.5 times greater than the EV market.
Over the next six years North American battery manufacturing technology is expected to quadruple, enabling the production of sufficient batteries for at least 12 million EVs annually by 2030. This would be a 10x expansion of EV sales based on the 1.1 million all-electric vehicles sold in the US in 2023.
According to Argonne National Laboratory's latest forecast, presented in Quantification of Commercially Planned Battery Component Supply in North America through 2035, the total lithium-ion EV battery cell production in North America will exceed 1,200 gigawatt-hours annually by 2030. That's a 20% increase from the 1,000 GWh forecasted just a year ago. The number is a sum of announced battery plant investments.
The problem is that most analysts are looking only from the potential of EVs. Or VTols (a rapidly emerging area). What about robots? The reports also randomly swap US and North American so you have to do a deep dive to get to real capacity.
Currently Amazon alone has deployed approx 1.5 million robots in warehouse and logistics operations. Growth is accelerating. Given that most logistics robots don’t need a full EV worth of batteries, there is wriggle room for robot expansion.
What interests me next is where the location is of battery pack and system assembly companies, which is most likely continuing to be close to vehicle assembly and local lithium-ion cell capacity figures.
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The Solar Prize Round 8 Now Open!
The latest round of the Solar Prize is now open. More than $4.2 million will be distributed to competitors over this three-phase competition designed to catalyze innovations in U.S. solar hardware and software technologies with the capability to be commercialized in 3 to 5 years. Learn more about the launch of the Solar Prize Round 8!
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FOUNDERSUITE ONBOARDING WEBINAR
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IMTS Startup Innovation Pavilion
Present your groundbreaking solutions to a global audience and drive your business forward. We are excited to announce an incredible opportunity for a limited number of emerging companies in the automation and robotics sector to showcase their innovations free of charge at the Innovation Center within AMT’s Automation and Robotics Area.
AMT is particularly interested in companies offering practical solutions that span the digital automation spectrum (ie, we aren’t solely focused on hardware). If you are, or know of, any emerging companies (early stage, wouldn’t yet make sense for them to spring on a booth of their own) that would be a great fit for this unique showcase, please encourage them to submit their proposals using this web form.
About IMTS
The International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) is one of the largest trade shows in the world. It takes place every even number year in Chicago. At IMTS 2022, 100,000 visitors saw 2,500+ exhibitors in 1,400,000 sq ft of exhibit space in Chicago’s McCormick’s Place. During that week, an est. $10B business was conducted (as reported through exhibitor survey).
Robot News
Restaurant robots can cook, serve and bus your meal now - Axios
What they're saying: "There's no doubt the future looks like more robotics in the kitchen," Michelle Korsmo, CEO of the National Restaurant Association, tells Axios.
"It's a question of whether robotics are in the dining room itself," she said. "It depends a lot on the particular restaurant and what experience they're trying to bring."
Robotics Invest discusses application and funding opportunities for the industry - The Robot Report
Robotics Investment: Navigating Hype, Reality and Future Innovation - Forbes
Startups are building robots that can perceive the human world. here’s why VC firms like Khosla and a16z say tht spatial intelligence will be the next big thing in AI - Business Insider
Meet the AI-powered robots that Big Tech thinks can solve a global labor shortage - CNBC
“Robotics is where AI meets reality,” Henrik Christensen, professor of computer science and engineering at University of California at San Diego, told CNBC. “That makes for some very interesting new combinations that I think even five years ago, we could not imagine.”
AI begins ushering in an age of killer robots - NYTimes
Robots steal jobs from unions - study shows decline in unionizations - Phys.org
Elon Musk says Tesla’s Optimus Robot could drive company to $25 Trillion valuation - here’s what experts think - Forbes
Autonomous Warehouse Robotics Startup Raises $100M - IOT World Today (startup?)
A railway company is using a 12m tall robot for maintenance - CNNWorld
Massive Expansion of North American Battery Manufacturing Capacity Ahead - InsideEVs
For older people who are lonely, is the solution a robot friend? - NY Times
Amazon discontinues Astro for Business robot security guard to focus on Astro home robot - Geekwire
Apple’s first Apple Intelligence-based home device could be table-top robot - Business Standard
The US awards 12 regional ‘Tech Hubs’, aiming to fund America’s next Silicon Valleys - ZDNet -
The US CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law in August 2022, provides $10 billion over five years for a Tech Hubs program. The idea of Tech Hubs is to fund 31 "high-potential" regions across the US with pre-existing expertise in "emergent technology sectors."
Robots take center stage at World AI Conference in Shanghai - Forbes
China’s Laws of Robotics: Shanghai publishes first humanoid robot guidelines - South China Morning Post
AI and Robots That Do Your Laundry and Dishes? Dream On, Folks - CNET
Can a robot have a soul? In ‘Sunny’, Rashida Jones and Hidetoshi Nishijima ponder AI’s humanity - LATIMES
Latest in Research on Science and Technology Studies
Vannuccini, Simone and Prytkova, Ekaterina, Artificial Intelligence’s New Clothes? From General Purpose Technology to Large Technical System (April 7, 2021). SWPS 2021-02, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3860041 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3860041
Abstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been quickly labelled a General Purpose Technology (GPT) for its many uses and the high expectations built around a technology that can perform tasks associated with natural intelligence. However, for now, the claim “AI equals GPT" is premature, and eventually, taking into account potential future scenarios, it can turn out to be incorrect. In fact, though every GPT is an influential technology, not every influential technology is a GPT. Checking AI against the definitional criteria of GPT, we come to the conclusion that GPT is a misspecified model of AI: what was meant to be a concept for an individual technology in this case is stretched to cover a growing infrastructural, system technology. For example, the pervasiveness featured in the GPT concept seems to be qualitatively different from the largeness that modern AI demonstrates. In this paper, we suggest an alternative framework drawn from the literature on Large Technical Systems (LTS) as more fit to represent the nature of AI. We map the building blocks of LTS on AI and describe its state-of-the-art through this novel viewpoint. This is a timely exercise, as we witness the formation of an AI industry. A correct understanding of its core technology is needed to identify mechanisms at work, problems in place and eventually the dynamics of this new industry. The LTS framework offers a broader grasp of the infrastructural nature of AI as a technology, with more convenient categories to describe AI and measures to test empirically. We investigate how the implications of AI being an LTS entail the design of adequate public policies and firm strategies.
O'Donovan, Cian and Michalec, Ola and Moon, Joshua, Capabilities for Transdisciplinary Research. An Evaluation Framework and Lessons from the ESRC Nexus Network + (August 5, 2020). SWPS 2020-12, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3667729 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3667729
Abstract
Research framed to address global, grand and societal challenges has brought fresh impetus to calls by funding agencies for transdisciplinary research. Yet the urgency of such calls is not matched by sufficient knowledge of how to foster and maintain the capabilities to do transdisciplinary work. Significant gaps exist in how to cultivate and maintain transdisciplinary methods, practices and the underlying capabilities required to support them. This paper employs a capability approach to construct a realist evaluative framework with which to assess such capabilities. The framework is operationalised through a novel three-stage mixed method procedure which seeks to evaluate transdisciplinary capabilities as they are valued and experienced by researchers themselves. The procedure is tested on a portfolio of five ‘pump-priming’ projects funded by the ESRC Nexus Network +. The paper reports a set of transdisciplinary capabilities valued by nexus research participants and found to varying degrees within each of the research projects. We find that pump-priming investments are sites of research capability development in three ways; through convening cognitive capabilities; cultivating transgressive capabilities; and maintaining backstage capabilities over durations that extend beyond the beginning and end of individual projects. Furthermore, for researchers, it is the transgressive quality of these capabilities that is most salient. Directing greater attention to these different modes of capability development in pump-priming research programmes may be useful in growing and steering research system capacity towards contemporary and future societal needs.
Ciarli, Tommaso and Safarzynska, Karolina, Sustainability and Industrial Challenge: The Hindering Role of Complexity (November 29, 2020). SWPS 2020-18, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3768444 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3768444
Abstract
A transition to a low-carbon economy requires moving to the production of goods that are less energy- and material-intensive than current practices. This may prove difficult, as producer objectives may not align with reducing pollution, unless this is a consumer priority, or is imposed by regulations. It has been argued that changing lifestyles and consumer preferences can drive technological change towards sustainability. In this paper we use the model by Windrum et al. (2009b) to show that the interactions between the populations of consumers, producers and technologies, when product components are interdependent, generate complexity, as a result of which changing consumer preferences may be insufficient to achieve sustainability objectives. Complexity may influence negatively the rate and direction of innovations towards the production of greener goods, causing a vicious cycle. Firms tend to remain stuck in local optima of the existing technological landscape, if most consumers are satisfied with the non-green characteristics of goods. As a result, firms are less likely to explore innovation possibilities to improve environmental performance of their products, which in turn reduces consumer expectations with respect to the environmental quality of future goods. As pro-environment consumers also imitate the higher preferences for non-green characteristics, firms have even higher incentives to improve those characteristics in the current technological paradigm than to explore new greener paradigms. The toy model proposed in this paper can be applied to study diffusion of ‘green’ products in a number of industries and to study environmental policies that can reduce complexity. The paper also offers a selected review of micro and industry level models of sustainable transitions.
Kashino, Takanori, Systematic Literature Review on Academic Entrepreneurship (December 1, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4497852 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4497852
Abstract
Entrepreneurship, the source of innovation that drives economic growth, is an important factor in social development. In recent years, research on entrepreneurial ecosystems to understand entrepreneurship at the system level has been growing, and universities as part of such ecosystems have been attracting attention – specifically, how universities can support entrepreneurship that leads to economic growth from the perspective of contributing to the region and the community, which is the third mission of universities. In this review, we will systematically and critically analyse and evaluate existing research to clarify the impact of universities on entrepreneurship, deepen our understanding of the issue, and derive future research questions. This review introduces the methodology of the review, describes the findings of strengths and weaknesses of the existing studies across the four domains of the review, and describes the research gaps and research questions identified by these findings.
Robot Events
FIRA is back! October 22-24 Woodland CA
SEMICON West + FLEX is just around the corner! Join thousands of attendees from July 9-11, 2024 at Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA.
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And some more robotics conferences:
AIM 2024 Boston MA 14 July - 18 July
RSS Delft NL July 15-19
EMBC Orlando FL July 15-19
Humanoid Robotics Festival Lima Peru Aug 14-15-16
CASE 2024 Puglia Italy 28 Aug - 1 Sep 2024
BioRob Heidelberg DE 1 Sep-Sep 4
Commercial UAV Expo : Sep 03 - Sep 05, 2024 . Las Vegas, United States of America
CLAWAR 2024 Kaiserslauten DE Sep 4 - Sep 6
Actuate Summit : Sep 18, 2024 . San Francisco, United States of America
ICRA@40 Rotterdam NL 23 Sep - 26 Sep
ANTS (Swarm robotics) 2024 : Oct 09 - Oct 11, 2024 . Konstanz, Germany
IROS 2024 AbuDhabi 14 Oct - 18 Oct
FabTech Orlando 15 Oct -17 Oct
ROSCon Odense DK 21 Oct - 23 Oct
CORL Munich DE 6 Nov - 9 Nov
IEEE Future of Telepresence Pasadena CA 16 Nov - 17 Nov
Humanoids 2024 Nancy FR 26 Nov - 28 Nov
ProMat : Mar 17 - Mar 20, 2025 . Chicago, United States of America
ICRA 2025 Atlanta Georgia 17 May - 23 May 2025