Retrofitting autonomous navigation to industrial vehicles with Polymath
Plus your own robot Grimlock! IEEE Robotics Startup Bootcamp, ROS By-The-Bay and more!
Two more great events in the SF Bay Area this coming week, after a packed house at Hardware Collective’s Get into Robotics at Circuit Launch!
We’ve also set the date, August 26th, for the IEEE Robotics Startup Bootcamp - a one day set of office hours and roundtables covering the fundamentals of getting your startup off on the right business track, and then covering manufacturing from prototype to production.
We pioneered the format at ICRA 2023 to incredible feedback from robotics founders, and hope to provide the workshops again at IROS 2023. The one day workshop on August 26th will be held at Circuit Launch in Oakland, and we’re taking applications to attend now.
The ratio of investors, advisors and manufacturing experts to startups will be 1:1, so it’s a solid day of problem solving and knowledge capture that’s impossible to get online or from any one source.
Big thank you to everyone who has become a paid subscriber - it makes you an angel investor in the work I do at Silicon Valley Robotics and as a startup advisor, and accelerator. And maybe we can do more to share your experience and expertize with the robotics startup community. Mentor Office Hours, maybe startup profiles. We’ll keep exploring.
Quick Reads:
Polymath provides safety-critical navigation for autonomous vehicles, making it effortless to retrofit self-driving navigation to any industrial vehicle. - SVRobo.org
XPRIZE Rainforest announces finalist teams - Robotics Tomorrow
The Robots We Were Afraid of Are Already Here - New York Times
In the world of restaurant robots, sometimes smarter isn’t always better - Franchise Times
Robotics Chef ‘Beastro’ takes Orders, Cooks and Cleans up - controlled by Unitronics - Robotics Tomorrow
Light-Speed Advances In Robotics: Doing The Dishes And More - Forbes
Cerabras unveils world’s largest AI training supercomputer - Venturebeat
ChatGPT broke the Turing test - the race is on for new ways to assess AI - Nature
The In-Credible Robot Priest and the Limits of Robot Workers - Scientific American
A new generation of robots seems increasingly human - The New Yorker
Google is training robots the way it trains AI chatbots - The Verge
Robots need better batteries - Nature
Powering up - a revolution in robotics and artificial intelligence - Nature
USAID Delivers Skydio Autonomous Camera Drones to Ukraine to Document War Crimes - USAID
Why The Future Of Disaster Relief Will Rely On Robots - Inverse
Wisk Conducts First Public Autonomous eVTOL Flight - Aviation Week
Orbiting astronaut controls robot team on Earth - European Space Agency
Norway’s Vard & Korea’s Samsung compete to develop autonomous vessels - AJOT
ABS Approves Fully Autonomous Ship Framework - MarineLink
Autonomous Water Taxis Planned for Busan - MarineLink
The State of Autonomous Vehicle Development [Video] - TruckingInfo
Waymo to focus on ride-hailing services, pushes back autonomous trucking efforts - Reuters
Kodiak, Drivewyze Piloting New Autonomous Truck Inspection Program - TruckingInfo
Backup driver of an autonomous Uber pleads guilty to endangerment in pedestrian death - NPR KQED
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic form body to oversee safe ‘frontier AI’ development - TechCrunch
AWS Expands Amazon Bedrock With Additional Foundation Models, New Model Provider, and Advanced Capability to Help Customers Build Generative AI Applications - Amazon Press Center
Amazon will pay 15% less for iRobot as the robot vacuum maker takes on new debt - Siliconeer
Researchers develop low-cost sensor to enhance robots’ sense of touch - Science Daily
Are Silicon Valley’s cities prepared to regulate autonomous vehicles? - Silicon Valley Business Journal
Industrial Automation: who Leads the Robot Race? - Visual Capitalist
Britain has a robot problem - we have too few - Telegraph UK
Don’t Ask Dumb Robots If AI Will Destroy Humanity - Wired
Remembering Joanne Pransky - Brian Heater at TechCrunch
Robotics Events:
August 1st “Off the Clock with Women in Robotics and InOrbit” networking event for women and non-binary people in robotics or interested in robotics.
August 3rd “ROS By-the-Bay” with Kat Scott, Eric Chen and lightning talks.
August 22nd SVR Robotics Technical Network
August 22nd - Founders & Funders Night Out
August 26th - IEEE Robotics Startup Bootcamp
September 19-21 “Disrupt’s Hardware Stage” from TechCrunch
(plus Brian Heater at Actuator says you save $600 till August 11 and save 15% on top of that with promo “ACTUATOR”)
September 19-21 - FIRA USA Salinas: Robotics and Autonomous Farming Solutions - FIRA
Save the date - September 22 - for Sustainable Robotics for Good with Synapse
September 28 - The Autonomous Systems Showcase - Deep Tech Showcase
October 1-5 - IROS in Detroit - IEEE RAS
October 25 - The Food AI Summit - Alameda CA - Call for Speakers open - from The Spoon
Exhibition Details
July 7 - August 31, 2023
Tickets & Hours
Thursday - Friday: 4PM - 8PM
Saturday - Sunday: 1PM - 5PM
'MACHINES' & MINGLE:
Weekly happy hour at Difference Machines
Gray Area
2665 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Deeper Reads:
I also enjoy Noahpinion’s dives into global production economics:
So the question of which industries China will dominate, which will go to the developed democracies in the U.S., Europe, and East Asia, and which will be offshored to developing countries like India and Vietnam, is a very hard one to answer. But it’s also a very important question, whether you’re an investor, a businessperson, or a government policymaker trying to affect the outcome. The flip side of “Which industries will China dominate?” is “Which industries will the U.S. and its allies fail to dominate?”.
Cool Robots:
Hasbro and Robosen are introducing Grimlock — so you can own the king of the Dinobots, too, for a cool $1,700 all by itself.
Two more humanoid robots to be added to the ever expanding humanoid robot post! I promise I’m working on it this weekend :) And hey, go ahead and send me your robot videos or pictures.