The biggest growth vertical for robotics and AI is middleware or tools for robotics
The biggest growth vertical for robotics and AI is middleware or tools for robotics
Other verticals that are going well for robotics also include food, health and beauty, construction, cargo (including aerial cargo), airport logistics and machine tending.
I’m betting that the demise of Astro is overstated. The home version still exists and Apple is about to announce a home AI play which involves a tabletop robot.
“Amazon Will Brick Its $2,350 Astro Robots Just 10 Months After Release
Business customers will get a refund, and the home version still exists. But … still.”
Very Useful Stuff
If you are a (VC, PE, Grant) funded startup looking to drive pipeline, conduct customer discovery, find of the voice of the customer, or a mixture of these - our team is just the right mixture of nimble and structured.
I’ve seen Fulcrum Sales and Marketing deliver a full pipeline of qualified customers to SBIR startups embarking on fundraising. And they do it affordably. They’re a startup secret weapon and superpower. :)
Opportunities
Apply for the CDL program here
The application deadline is Friday, July 26 2024
Apply for Camp Cleantech here
An event for cleantech startups to connect with partners who can help you scale. From NREL Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center - August 12-14 Denver, Colorado
Nominations Open for Coolest Thing Made in California
Go to CoolestThingCalifornia.com to nominate your California-made product for the 2nd annual Coolest Thing Made in California Contest hosted by CMTA.
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!
AI and Open Government Data Assets Request for Information
The U.S. Department of Commerce is committed to advancing transparency, innovation, and the responsible use and dissemination of public data assets, including for use by data-driven AI technologies. To this end, we are pleased to issue this Request for Information (RFI) to seek valuable insights from industry experts, researchers, civil society organizations, and other members of the public on the development of AI-ready open data assets and data dissemination standards.
IEEE Entrepreneurship Impact Award applications are OPEN
https://entrepreneurship.ieee.org/2024-announcing_impact_award/…
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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
The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: Skild AI Grabs $300M To Build Robot Brains - Crunchbase (see also PYMNTS)
Skild AI, $300M, robotics: The good year for robotics startups continued this week. Skild AI became the latest such startup to raise big, locking in a $300 million Series A led by Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SoftBank Group and Jeff Bezos, through his Bezos Expeditions. The funding brings the company to a valuation of $1.5 billion. The Pittsburgh-based startup isn’t building robots, however, it’s building robot brains. The theory is that those brain models can then be used in a variety of robots and for different tasks — instead of just having one application. It seems a lot of big-name investors agree with that strategy.
Jacobi Robotics raises $5M for motion planning software - The Robot Report
Standard Bots reels in $63M for its AI-powered robotic arms - Silicon Angle
General Catalyst, Amazon Back AI-Powered Robotics Startup - Bloomberg
Rise of the Restaurant Robots: Chipotle, Sweetgreen and Others Bet on Automation - WSJ
Chef Robotics Comes Out of Stealth to Show Off Robot and Reveal Early Customers - The Spoon
Chef Robotics CEO: ‘A lot of robotics companies have made grandiose promises, but they haven’t really shipped any robots. We’re much more practical’ - AFN
A robot built their homes: Texas homebuyers moving into world’s largest-scale 3D-printed community - REaltor.com
World’s first mobile brikclayer robot that boosts construction speed enters US - Interesting Engineering
I haven’t mowed my lawn in nearly two years, and it’s never looked better - CNET
‘Let the robots do it’: Some Philadelphia crews look to modern technology to stay cool - ABC6
One third of the military could be robotic, Milley predicts - Axios
Google Shows Off AI-Powered Robots That Are Ready To Serve - Inverse
Google’s Gemini AI is making robots smarter - Inc. (see also The Verge)
Meet the AI-powered robots Big Tech is betting can solve the global labor crisis - CNBC
FANUC unveils new $110M robotics and automation campus - Assembly
FANUC America has created more than 400 jobs in Michigan since 2019. The West Campus provides advanced product manufacturing and customized automation systems. It includes warehouse space for more than 6,000 quick-delivery robots and tens of thousands of parts.
Latest in Robotics Research
cs.RO cs.AI eess.SY
Real-Time Anomaly Detection and Reactive Planning with Large Language Models
Authors: Rohan Sinha, Amine Elhafsi, Christopher Agia, Matthew Foutter, Edward Schmerling, Marco Pavone
Abstract: …internet-scale data possess zero-shot generalization capabilities that make them a promising technology towards detecting and mitigating out-of-distribution failure modes of robotic systems. Fully realizing this promise, however, poses two challenges: (i) mitigating the considerable computational expense of these models such that they may be applied online,… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: Accepted to Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2024
cs.CV
Map It Anywhere (MIA): Empowering Bird's Eye View Mapping using Large-scale Public Data
Authors: Cherie Ho, Jiaye Zou, Omar Alama, Sai Mitheran Jagadesh Kumar, Benjamin Chiang, Taneesh Gupta, Chen Wang, Nikhil Keetha, Katia Sycara, Sebastian Scherer
Abstract: Top-down Bird's Eye View (BEV) maps are a popular representation for ground robot navigation due to their richness and flexibility for downstream tasks. While recent methods have shown promise for predicting BEV maps from First-Person View (FPV) images, their generalizability is limited to small regions captured by current autonomous vehicle-based datase… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
cs.CV cs.AI cs.RO
MetaUrban: A Simulation Platform for Embodied AI in Urban Spaces
Authors: Wayne Wu, Honglin He, Yiran Wang, Chenda Duan, Jack He, Zhizheng Liu, Quanyi Li, Bolei Zhou
Abstract: Public urban spaces like streetscapes and plazas serve residents and accommodate social life in all its vibrant variations. Recent advances in Robotics and Embodied AI make public urban spaces no longer exclusive to humans. Food delivery bots and electric wheelchairs have started sharing sidewalks with pedestrians, while diverse… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: Technical report. Project page: https://metadriverse.github.io/metaurban/
cs.RO cs.CV cs.LG
Unifying 3D Representation and Control of Diverse Robots with a Single Camera
Authors: Sizhe Lester Li, Annan Zhang, Boyuan Chen, Hanna Matusik, Chao Liu, Daniela Rus, Vincent Sitzmann
Abstract: Mirroring the complex structures and diverse functions of natural organisms is a long-standing challenge in robotics. Modern fabrication techniques have dramatically expanded feasible hardware, yet deploying these systems requires control software to translate desired motions into actuator commands. While conventional… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: Project Page: https://sizhe-li.github.io/publication/neural_jacobian_field
cs.CV cs.RO
OmniNOCS: A unified NOCS dataset and model for 3D lifting of 2D objects
Authors: Akshay Krishnan, Abhijit Kundu, Kevis-Kokitsi Maninis, James Hays, Matthew Brown
Abstract: We propose OmniNOCS, a large-scale monocular dataset with 3D Normalized Object Coordinate Space (NOCS) maps, object masks, and 3D bounding box annotations for indoor and outdoor scenes. OmniNOCS has 20 times more object classes and 200 times more instances than existing NOCS datasets (NOCS-Real275, Wild6D). We use OmniNOCS to train a novel, transformer-based monocular NOCS prediction model (NOCSfo… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: Accepted to ECCV 2024, project website: https://omninocs.github.io
cs.RO cs.LG
Robotic Control via Embodied Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Authors: Zawalski Michał, Chen William, Pertsch Karl, Mees Oier, Finn Chelsea, Levine Sergey
Abstract: A key limitation of learned robot control policies is their inability to generalize outside their training data. Recent works on vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown that the use of large, internet pre-trained vision-language models as the backbone of learned… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: Project Website: https://embodied-cot.github.io
cs.RO cs.CV
Accurate Cooperative Localization Utilizing LiDAR-equipped Roadside Infrastructure for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Yuze Jiang, Ehsan Javanmardi, Manabu Tsukada, Hiroshi Esaki
Abstract: Recent advancements in LiDAR technology have significantly lowered costs and improved both its precision and resolution, thereby solidifying its role as a critical component in autonomous vehicle localization. Using sophisticated 3D registration algorithms, LiDAR now facilitates vehicle localization with centimeter-level accuracy. However, these high-precision techniques often face reliability cha… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: Accepted by IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC) 2024
cs.RO cs.CV
An Economic Framework for 6-DoF Grasp Detection
Authors: Xiao-Ming Wu, Jia-Feng Cai, Jian-Jian Jiang, Dian Zheng, Yi-Lin Wei, Wei-Shi Zheng
Abstract: Robotic grasping in clutters is a fundamental task in robotic manipulation. In this work, we propose an economic framework for 6-DoF grasp detection, aiming to economize the resource cost in training and meanwhile maintain effective grasp performance. To begin with, we discover that the dense supervision is the bottlen… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: 19 pages, 7 figures. Accepted in ECCV 2024!
cs.CV
Event-based vision on FPGAs -- a survey
Authors: Tomasz Kryjak
Abstract: …in low light and high dynamic range, and reduces average power consumption. In addition, the independent operation of each pixel results in low latency, which is desirable for robotic solutions. Nowadays, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), along with general-purpose processors (GPPs/CPUs) and programmable graphics processing units (GPUs), are popular ar… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: Accepted for the 2024 27th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD)
cs.RO
The control architecture of a spherical robot for Minimally Invasive Surgery
Authors: Gabriela Rus, Nadim Al Hajjar, Paul Tucan, Ionut Zima, Calin Vaida, Corina Radu, Daniel Jucan, Damien Chablat, Doina Pisla
Abstract: …in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) play a crucial role in ensuring preci-sion and safety throughout procedures. This paper presents a control architecture developed for a robotic system designed for MIS operations. The modular structure of the control system allows for compatibility with a range of procedures in abdominal and thoracic regions. The proposed… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Journal ref: 6th IFToMM Symposium on Mechanism Design for Robotics, Jun 2024, Timi{\c s}oara, Romania
cs.CV cs.GR cs.RO
WayveScenes101: A Dataset and Benchmark for Novel View Synthesis in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Jannik Zürn, Paul Gladkov, Sofía Dudas, Fergal Cotter, Sofi Toteva, Jamie Shotton, Vasiliki Simaiaki, Nikhil Mohan
Abstract: We present WayveScenes101, a dataset designed to help the community advance the state of the art in novel view synthesis that focuses on challenging driving scenes containing many dynamic and deformable elements with changing geometry and texture. The dataset comprises 101 driving scenes across a wide range of environmental conditions and driving scenarios. The dataset is designed for benchmarking… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: 7 pages
cs.RO
A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework and Methodology for Reducing the Sim-to-Real Gap in ASV Navigation
Authors: Luis F W Batista, Junghwan Ro, Antoine Richard, Pete Schroepfer, Seth Hutchinson, Cedric Pradalier
Abstract: Despite the increasing adoption of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs), there still remain challenges limiting real-world deployment. In this paper, we first integrate buoyancy and hydrodynamics models into a modern Reinforcement Learning framework to reduce training time. Next, we show how system identification coupled with domain randomization improves the RL… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: IROS 2024, IEEE, Oct 2024, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
cs.RO
The OPNV Data Collection: A Dataset for Infrastructure-Supported Perception Research with Focus on Public Transportation
Authors: Marcel Vosshans, Alexander Baumann, Matthias Drueppel, Omar Ait-Aider, Ralf Woerner, Youcef Mezouar, Thao Dang, Markus Enzweiler
Abstract: This paper we present our vision and ongoing work for a novel dataset designed to advance research into the interoperability of intelligent vehicles and infrastructure, specifically aimed at enhancing cooperative perception and interaction in the realm of public transportation. Unlike conventional datasets centered on ego-vehicle data, this approach encompasses both a stationary sensor tower and a… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
cs.CV cs.RO
SALSA: Swift Adaptive Lightweight Self-Attention for Enhanced LiDAR Place Recognition
Authors: Raktim Gautam Goswami, Naman Patel, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Farshad Khorrami
Abstract: Large-scale LiDAR mappings and localization leverage place recognition techniques to mitigate odometry drifts, ensuring accurate mapping. These techniques utilize scene representations from LiDAR point clouds to identify previously visited sites within a database. Local descriptors, assigned to each point within a point cloud, are aggregated to form a scene representation for the point cloud. Thes… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
cs.AI cs.MA cs.RO
Hierarchical Consensus-Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Robot Cooperation Tasks
Authors: Pu Feng, Junkang Liang, Size Wang, Xin Yu, Rongye Shi, Wenjun Wu
Abstract: …balance between immediate reactions and strategic planning, tailoring it to the specific demands of the task at hand. Extensive experiments and real-world applications in multi-robot systems showcase our framework's superior performance, marking significant advancements over baselines. ▽ More
Submitted 10 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: 8 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for presentation at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024)
cs.CV cs.RO
Improving Visual Place Recognition Based Robot Navigation Through Verification of Localization Estimates
Authors: Owen Claxton, Connor Malone, Helen Carson, Jason Ford, Gabe Bolton, Iman Shames, Michael Milford
Abstract: Visual Place Recognition (VPR) systems often have imperfect performance, which affects robot navigation decisions. This research introduces a novel Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) integrity monitor for VPR which demonstrates improved performance and generalizability over the previous state-of-the-art SVM approach, removing per-environment training and reducing… ▽ More
Submitted 10 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: Currently Under Review
cs.RO
Embodying Control in Soft Multistable Grippers from morphofunctional co-design
Authors: Juan C. Osorio, Jhonatan S. Rincon, Harith Morgan, Andres F. Arrieta
Abstract: Soft robots are distinguished by their flexible and adaptable, allowing them to perform tasks that are nearly impossible for rigid… ▽ More
Submitted 10 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: Manuscript: 13 pages, 5 figures ; Supplementary Information: 9 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables
cs.RO cs.HC
RoCap: A Robotic Data Collection Pipeline for the Pose Estimation of Appearance-Changing Objects
Authors: Jiahao Nick Li, Toby Chong, Zhongyi Zhou, Hironori Yoshida, Koji Yatani, Xiang 'Anthony' Chen, Takeo Igarashi
Abstract: …toys, transparent objects like chemical flasks, reflective objects like metal pitchers, and articulated objects like scissors. To address this limitation, we propose Rocap, a robotic pipeline that emulates human manipulation of target objects while generating data labeled with ground truth pose information. The user first gives the target object to a… ▽ More
Submitted 10 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
cs.RO eess.SY
Viability of Low-Cost Infrared Sensors for Short Range Tracking
Authors: Noah Haeske
Abstract: A classic task in robotics is tracking a target in the external environment. There are several well-documented approaches to this problem. This paper presents a novel approach to this problem using infrared time of flight sensors. The use of infrared time of flight sensors is not common as a tracking approach, typically used for simple motion detectors. Howe… ▽ More
Submitted 10 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: For program, see https://github.com/noah-haeske/research/blob/main/experimentProgram.py For sensor datasheet, see https://www.st.com/en/imaging-and-photonics-solutions/vl53l7cx.html#overview
cs.RO cs.AI cs.LG
Towards Interpretable Foundation Models of Robot Behavior: A Task Specific Policy Generation Approach
Authors: Isaac Sheidlower, Reuben Aronson, Elaine Schaertl Short
Abstract: Foundation models are a promising path toward general-purpose and user-friendly robots. The prevalent approach involves training a generalist policy that, like a reinforcement learning policy, uses observations to output actions. Although this approach has seen much success, several concerns arise when considering deployment and end-user interaction with the… ▽ More
Submitted 10 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: Short Paper accepted to RLC 2024 Workshop on Training Agents with Foundation Models
cs.RO cs.AI cs.LG eess.SY
Vegetable Peeling: A Case Study in Constrained Dexterous Manipulation
Authors: Tao Chen, Eric Cousineau, Naveen Kuppuswamy, Pulkit Agrawal
Abstract: Recent studies have made significant progress in addressing dexterous manipulation problems, particularly in in-hand object reorientation. However, there are few existing works that explore the potential utilization of developed dexterous manipulation controllers for downstream tasks. In this study, we focus on constrained dexterous manipulation for food peeling. Food peeling presents various cons… ▽ More
Submitted 10 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
cs.RO cs.AI cs.CV cs.LG
BiGym: A Demo-Driven Mobile Bi-Manual Manipulation Benchmark
Authors: Nikita Chernyadev, Nicholas Backshall, Xiao Ma, Yunfan Lu, Younggyo Seo, Stephen James
Abstract: We introduce BiGym, a new benchmark and learning environment for mobile bi-manual demo-driven robotic manipulation. BiGym features 40 diverse tasks set in home environments, ranging from simple target reaching to complex kitchen cleaning. To capture the real-world performance accurately, we provide human-collected demonstrations for each task, reflecting the… ▽ More
Submitted 11 July, 2024; v1 submitted 10 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: Project webpage: https://chernyadev.github.io/bigym/
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG cs.MA cs.RO
Aligning Cyber Space with Physical World: A Comprehensive Survey on Embodied AI
Authors: Yang Liu, Weixing Chen, Yongjie Bai, Jingzhou Luo, Xinshuai Song, Kaixuan Jiang, Zhida Li, Ganlong Zhao, Junyi Lin, Guanbin Li, Wen Gao, Liang Lin
Abstract: …survey, we give a comprehensive exploration of the latest advancements in Embodied AI. Our analysis firstly navigates through the forefront of representative works of embodied robots and simulators, to fully understand the research focuses and their limitations. Then, we analyze four main research targets: 1) embodied perception, 2) embodied interaction, 3)… ▽ More
Submitted 9 July, 2024; originally announced July 2024.
Comments: The first comprehensive review of Embodied AI in the era of MLMs, 37 pages. We also provide the paper list for Embodied AI: https://github.com/HCPLab-SYSU/Embodied_AI_Paper_List
Robot Events
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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