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Amazon’s drive to get as many products to customers as quickly as possible combined with a decade of technological breakthroughs, a labor shortage and skyrocketing e-commerce growth have aligned to create ideal conditions for warehouse robotics startups. This fruitful convergence has led to acquisitions, large funding rounds and at least one robotics IPO next year. […]
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Engineers and robotics fans can nerd out about robots in the lab and the workshop all day long. It’s a very long road from a ridiculously cool, glorified science experiment to robots that can be put to work in production settings. These robots often have to work in some of the harshest conditions imaginable: defusing […]
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Robots have always found it a challenge to work with people and vice versa. Two people on the cutting edge of improving that relationship joined us for TC Sessions: Robotics to talk about the present and future of human-robot interaction: Veo Robotics co-founder Clara Vu and Robust.ai founder Rod Brooks (formerly of iRobot and Rethink […]
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A lot of promising companies come out of work by researchers at universities, or even grad students who have struck on some new innovation. But the transition from tech-focused research group to product-focused startup isn’t easy to make; fortunately three experts in the matter joined us at TC Sessions: Robotics to discuss a few ways […]
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More than 40 years and 1,000 or so patents after selling his first company, AutoSyringe, to healthcare giant Baxter, Dean Kamen still gets a charge describing breakthrough innovation. It’s been five years since his organ fabricating project ARMI (Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute) divided critics. The project made more waves early last month, at the CNN-hosted […]
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Robots relying on AI to learn a new task generally require a laborious and repetitious training process. University of California, Berkeley researchers are attempting to simplify and shorten that with an innovative learning technique that has the robot filling in the gaps rather than starting from scratch. The team shared several lines of work with […]
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It took exactly two minutes for today’s TC Sessions: Robotics fulfillment panel to make its first Amazon mention. The retail giant looms over the category like no other. It played a foundational role with the 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems that birthed Amazon Robotics, and remains the 800-pound gorilla looming in the background of any […]
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A few years ago, I got in the habit of asking researchers the titular question: Are universities doing enough to foster robotics startups? To a one, the answer was invariably, “no.” It was a massive blindspot for some of the world’s leading research institutes, both in commercializing their own work and giving their best and […]
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It’s easy to fall prey to panic around automation. It’s also just just as easy to dismiss it outright. As ever, the truth almost certainly lies somewhere between these two extremes — though precisely where has yet to be determined. Both companies and regulatory bodies will play an important role in determining automation’s impact on […]
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Just over a month ago, I was standing onstage at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, delivering the opening remarks for TechCrunch’s first-ever climate event. It was a surreal moment that perfectly encapsulated the strange time warp we’ve both quickly and slowly been hurdling through over the past two-and-a-half years. It was the first time I’d been […]
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