The robotics industry is at an inflection point where the baton is being passed from the scientists to the practitioners. In historical terms, we are witnessing the Edisons of the world harness the innovations of the likes of Faraday to create life-changing businesses and wealth. Automation has moved from smart manufacturing and logistics to fry cooking and salad tossing.
Robot Stomachs: Powering Machines With Garbage and Urine
May 14, 2021 by
The World Bank estimates that 3.5 million tons of solid waste is produced by humans every day, with America accounting for more than 250 million tons a year or over 4 pounds of trash per citizen. This figure does not include the 34 billion gallons of human organic materials that are processed in water treatment centers across the country each year.
Are Robo-Butlers Really Handy?
February 19, 2021 by
“I am extremely skeptical about the quality of the artificial intelligence behind the housekeeping robot in Samsung’s CES video. They show it performing an extremely wide variety of tasks, from pouring wine to loading the dishwasher to doing laundry. Developing an AI robust enough to go into an unknown consumer home and learn from them how they want to pick up toys is already a hard problem.”
Smiling Robots Alleviate Human Anxieties with Expper Technologies
June 24, 2020 by
Loneliness and isolation are heightened in the midst of the pandemic. Can robots fill a void? Expper’s founder Karén Khachikyan says the company’s robot Robin changes a kid’s perception of medical treatments, where they will no longer feel isolated, lonely, and scared. The innovator explains how his whimsical four-foot robot employs digital facial expressions to form lasting bonds with its young users.
Where We Are Investing Now: Individual Robotics
March 31, 2020 by
We see personal robotics as one dramatic method for bringing the power of new science closer to humans. Our perspective on robotics is broad. Successful robots don’t need to be humanoid. They don’t need to have full bodies; we see haptics is part of robotics, for instance. Robotics, for us, means devices that replicate or […]
The Cambrian Intelligence Case Study and the New Normal: Virtual Offices, Schools, and Manufacturing
March 17, 2020 by
Moving past the hysteria, computer vision is a defining element of intelligent machines transforming mechanical movements into dynamic workflows.
Don’t Worry About Coronavirus, There’s A Bot For That…
March 9, 2020 by
Sitting in New York’s former Engineer’s Society, I spoke with Oleg Kivokurtsev of Promobot and discussed his latest service bot creations that are being deployed across the globe in hotels, office buildings, and hospitals. Fay-Louise Hayden of VentureOut (his New York mentor) shared a vignette of her experiences last month as the imposing humanoid diagnosed tourists in Times Square for […]
It Takes a Village to Deploy a Tactile Telerobot
January 28, 2020 by
Observing MLK Day, I followed in the footsteps of Katherine Johnson at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Her memory still looms large over the Mission Control room that launched Apollo 11’s successful lunar landing fifty years ago. This historic milestone could not have been achieved without the mathematical genius of the African-American pioneer and her team […]
Reopening Cold Cases With Robotic Data Discoveries
August 12, 2019 by
Traveling to six countries in eighteen days, I journeyed with the goal delving deeper into the roots of my family before World War II. As a child of refugees, my parents’ narrative is missing huge gaps of information. Still, more than seventy-eight years since the disappearance of my Grandmother and Uncles, we can only presume […]
In The Spirit Of Ada Lovelace: Female Entrepreneurs Build Next Generation Robots
May 21, 2019 by
Near the end of World War II, Adm. William “Bull” Halsey of the famed Third Fleet steered directly into a typhoon, losing 790 crewmen and 146 aircraft in the Pacific. Dr. Eric Daimler, formerly an innovation fellow with the Obama White House, shared this story with me in 2017 as an illustration of the importance of trusting data. It […]