The Husky A300 is designed to be tougher and have longer endurance than the A200. Source: Clearpath Robotics

Developers of robots for indoor or outdoor use have a new platform to build on. In October, Clearpath Robotics Inc. released the Husky A300, the latest version of its flagship mobile robot for research and development. The Waterloo, Ontario-based company said it has improved the system’s speed, weather resistance, payload capacity, and runtime.

“Husky A200 has been on the market for over 10 years,” said Robbie Edwards, director of technology at Clearpath Robotics. “We have lots of experience figuring out what people want. We’ve had different configurations, upgrades, batteries and chargers, computers, and motors.”

“We’ve also had different configurations of the internal chassis and ingress protection, as well as custom payloads,” he told The Robot Report. “A lot of that functionality that you had to pay to add on is now stock.”

Husky A300 hardware is rugged, faster

The Husky A300 includes a high-torque drivetrain with four brushless motors that enable speeds of up to 2 m/s (4.4 mph), twice as fast as the previous version. It can carry payloads up to 100 kg (220.4 lb.) and has a runtime of up to 12 hours, said Clearpath Robotics.

The company, which Rockwell Automation acquired last year, noted that the platform can integrate third-party components and accessories including depth cameras, directional lidar, dual-antenna GPS, and manipulators. Husky A300 has an IP54 rating against dust and water and can withstand industrial environments or extreme temperatures outdoors, it said. 

“Before, the Husky was configured on a bespoke basis,” said Edwards. “Now we’re off at a more competitive price, which is great for our customers, and it now comes off our production line instead of our integration line.”

Founded in 2009, the company has tested its hardware and software near its office in a wide range of weather conditions.

Clearpath’s integration with Rockwell has gone smoothly so far, with Rockwell’s procurement team easing access to components and manufacturing, said Edwards. He observed that some of Rockwell’s customers in mining or other industrial automation could find new use cases in time.

The Husky A300 can withstand dust and temperature variances. Source: Clearpath Robotics

Clearpath includes ROS 2 support with A300

Husky A300 ships with Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 Jazzy plus demonstrations of Nav2, MoveIt 2, and other developer utilities.

“Over the past two years, there was a big push to get all Clearpath products to ROS 2 Humble because its configuration management system made life easier for our integration team and customers,” recalled Edwards. “We also provide support for simulation, and URDF [Unified Robot Description Format] is configured.”

Many of Clearpath’s R&D customers were familiar with ROS, C++, and Python, so it offered visualization and simulation tools in addition to the ROS stack, he added. However, as the company got non-expert customers, it wanted to enable them to also work with Husky.

“Academics who aren’t roboticists but want to do data collection can now do so with a simple Python interface, without learning ROS,” Edwards said. “We’ve maintained a level of flexibility with integrating different payloads and compute options while still giving a pretty good price point and usability.”

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Husky AMP a ‘turnkey’ option

Clearpath Robotics is offering a “turnkey” version of the robot dubbed Husky AMP, or autonomous mobile platform. It comes with a sensor suite for navigation, pre-installed and configured OutdoorNav software, a Web-based user interface, and an optional wireless charging dock.

“Robotics developers can easily integrate payloads onto the mounting deck, carry out a simple software integration through the OutdoorNav interface, and get their system working in the field faster and more efficiently,” said Clearpath.

“We’ve lowered the barrier to entry by providing all software function calls and a navigation stack,” Edwards asserted. “The RTK [real-time kinematic positioning] GPS is augmented with sensor fusion, including wheel odometry, and visual and lidar sensors.”

“With a waypoint following system, the robotics stack does the path planning, which is constrained and well-tested,” he said. “Non-roboticists can use Husky A300 as a ground drone.”

More robot enhancements, use cases to come

Clearpath Robotics is considering variant drive trains for the Husky A300, such as tracks for softer terrain as in agriculture, said Edwards.

“Husky is a general-purpose platform,” he said. “We’re serving outdoors developers rather than end users directly, but there’s a lot of demand for larger, high-endurance materials transport.”

For the A300, the company surveyed its client base, which came back with 150 use cases.

“I’ve seen lots of cool stuff — robots herding animals, helping to grow plants, working in mines, participating in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge in fleets of Husky and [Boston Dynamics’] Spot,” Edwards said. “Husky Observer conducts inspections of sites such as solar farms.”

“The benefits for industrial users also help researchers,” he said. “Making the robot cheaper to deploy for faster time to value also means better battery life, weatherproofing, and integrations.”

Edwards added that Clearpath has received a lot of interest in mobile manipulation with its Ridgeback omnidirectional platform.

“This trend is finding its way outdoors as well,” he said. “On the application engineering side, developers have put put two large Universal Robots arms on our Warthog UGV [uncrewed ground vehicle] for things like changing tires.”

The Husky A300 can carry different sensor payloads or robotic arms. Source: Clearpath Robotics

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Imagry says its software enables buses to autonomously handle complex situations such as roundabouts. Source: Imagry

Autonomous vehicles often rely heavily on prior information about their routes, but new technology promises to improve real-time situational awareness for vehicles including buses. Imagry said its “HD-mapless driving” software stack enables vehicles to react to dynamic contexts and situations more like human drivers.

The company also said its AI Vision 360 eliminates the need for external sensor infrastructure. It claimed that its bio-inspired neural network and hardware-agnostic systems allow for SAE Level 3/4 operations without spending time on mapping.

“We’ve been focusing on two sectors,” said Eran Ofir, CEO of Imagry. “We’ve been selling our perception and motion-planning stack to Tier 1 suppliers and automotive OEMs for autonomous vehicles. We signed a 10-year contract with Continental and are jointly developing a software-defined vehicle platform.”

“And we’ve started working with transportation operators on providing autonomous buses,” he told The Robot Report. “For example, in Turkey, France, Spain, and soon Japan, we’re retrofitting electric buses to be autonomous.”

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Imagry trains in real time with supervision

Imagry was established in 2015 with a focus on computer vision for retail. In 2018, it began focusing entirely on autonomous driving. The company now has about 120 employees in San Jose, Calif., and Haifa, Israel.

Imagry said its technology is similar to that of Tesla in relying on 3D vision for perception and motion planning rather than rule-based coding or maps.

“Most players in the industry use HD maps with 5 cm [1.9 in.] resolution, telling the vehicle where lights, signs, and lane markers are,” said Ofir. “Our system teaches itself with supervised learning. It maps in real time while driving. Like a human driver, it gets the route but doesn’t know what it will find.”

How does Imagry deal with the need for massive data sets to train for navigation and obstacle detection and avoidance?

“We wrote a proprietary tool for annotation to train faster, better, and cheaper,” Ofir replied. “The data is collected but doesn’t live in the cloud. The human supervisor tells the vehicle where it was wrong, like a child. We deliver over-the-air updates to customers.”

“The world doesn’t belong to HD maps — it’s a matter of trusting AI-based software for perception and motion planning,” he said.

Ofir cited an example of a vehicle in Arizona on a random route with no communications to centralized computing. Its onboard sensors and compute recognized construction zones, skateboarders, a bike lane, and stop signs.

“The capability to drive out of the box in new places is unique to Imagry,” asserted Ofir. “We can handle righthand and lefthand driving, such as in Tokyo, where we’ve been driving for a year now.”

How does the bus know when to stop for passengers?

It could stop at every bus stop, upon request via a button at the stop (for the elderly, who may not use phone apps), or be summoned by an app that also handles payment, responded Ofir. Imagry’s system also supports “kneeling” for people with disabilities.

Why buses are a better focus for autonomy

Imagry has decided to focus on urban use cases rather than highways. Buses are simpler to get to Level 4 autonomy, said Ofir.

“Autonomous buses are better than ride hailing; they’re simpler than passenger vehicles,” said Ofir. “They drive in specific routes and at a speed of only 50 kph [31 mph] versus 80 kph [50 mph]. It’s a simpler use case, with economies of scale.”

“The time to revenue is much faster — the design cycle is four years, while integrating with a bus takes two to three months,” he explained. “Once we hand it over to the transport operator, we can get to L4 in 18 months, and then they can buy and deploy 40 more buses.”

In addition, the regulations for autonomous buses are clearer, with 22 countries running pilots, he noted.

“We already have projects with a large medical center and on a public road in Israel,” Ofir said. “We’re not doing small pods — most transport operators desire M3-class standard buses for 30 to 45 passengers because of the total cost of ownership, and they know how to operate them.”

In September and October, Imagry submitted bids for autonomous buses in Austria, Portugal, Germany, Sweden, and Japan.

Software focus could save money

By being vehicle-agnostic, Ofir said Imagry avoids being tied to specific, expensive hardware. Fifteen vendors are making systems on chips (SoCs) that are sufficient for Level 3 autonomy, he said.

“OEMs want the agility to use different sets of hardware in different vehicles. A $30,000 car is different from a $60,000 car, with different hardware stacks and bills of materials, such as camera or compute,” said Ofir. “It’s a crowded market, and the autonomy stack still costs $100,000 per vehicle. Ours is only $3,000 and runs on Ambarella, NVIDIA, TI, Qualcomm, and Intel.”

“With our first commercial proof of concept for Continental in Frankfurt, Germany, we calibrated our car and did some localization,” he added. “Three days after arrival, we simply took it out on the road, and it drove, knowing there’s no right on red.”

With shortages of drivers, particularly in Japan, operators could save $40,000 to $70,000 per bus per year, he said. The Japanese government wants 50 locations across the country to be served with autonomous buses by the end of 2025 and 100 by the end of 2027.

Autonomous buses are also reliable around the clock and don’t get sick or go on strike, he said.

“We’re working on fully autonomous parking, traffic jam assist, and Safe Driver Overwatch to help younger or older drivers obey traffic signs, which could be a game-changer in the insurance industry,” he added. “Our buses can handle roundabouts, narrow streets, and mixed traffic and are location-independent.”

Phases of autonomous bus deployment

Technology hurdles aside, getting autonomous buses recognized by the rules of the road requires patience, said Ofir.

“Together with Mobileye, which later moved to the robotaxi market, Imagry helped draft Israel’s regulatory framework for autonomous driving, which was completed in 2022,” recalled Ofir. “We’re working with lawmakers in France and Germany and will launch pilots in three markets in 2025.”

Testing even Level 3 autonomy can take years, depending on the region. He outlined the phases for autonomous bus rollout:

1. Work with the electric bus for that market, then activate the system on a public road. “In the U.S., we’ve installed the full software and control stack in a vehicle and are testing FSD [full self-driving],” Ofir said.
2. Pass NCAP (European New Car Assessment Programme) testing for merging and stops in 99 scenarios. “We’re the only company to date to pass those tests with an autonomous bus,” said Ofir. “Japan also has stringent safety standards.”
3. Pass the cybersecurity framework, then allow passengers onboard buses with a safety driver present.
4. Autonomously drive 100,000 km (62,137 mi.) on a designated route with one or more buses. After submitting a report to a department of motor vehicles or the equivalent, the bus operator could then remove the human driver.

“The silicon, sensors, and software don’t matter for time to revenue, and getting approvals from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration [NHTSA] can take years,” Ofir said. “We expect passenger vehicles with our software on the road in Europe, the U.S., and Japan sometime in 2027.”

Imagry has joined Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE) and will be exhibiting at CES in January 2025.

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Robot orders and shipments declined over the past year, reported A3. Source: Association for Advancing Automation

Like other industries, robotics has faced uncertainty around the economy and U.S. elections. The number of robots ordered and their total value declined in the first nine months of 2024, according to the Association for Advancing Automation, or A3.

From January through September 2024, North American businesses ordered 23,034 robots valued at $1.4 billion, a 1.9% decline in units and a 2.2% drop in revenue in comparison with the same period in 2023. A3 reported declines in semiconductors, electronics, and photonics of -32% and automotive components of -21%. Robot orders had already dropped 30% in 2023 from 2022.

The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based organization attributed the slowdown to tight capital budgets, high interest rates, and slowed industrial output, particularly in electric vehicles. Also this week, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) reported on global robot adoption, noting that the U.S. ranks 11th.

The dollar value of orders and shipments reportedly declined in 2024. Source: Association for Advancing Automation

A3 finds signs for hope

However, there were some positive signs, noted A3. Orders increased in food and consumer goods (+60%), life sciences/pharmaceuticals/biomedical (+43%), and metals (+8%).

In the third quarter of this year, North American companies ordered ordered 7,329 robots valued at $475 million, reflecting a 14.1% increase in units and an 8.8% rise in revenue compared with Q3 2023. While non-automotive orders accounted for 4,113 units or 56%, automotive component orders increased by 61%, even as automotive OEM orders contracted by 15%.

“Industry feedback suggests cautious optimism, with many companies forecasting a stronger rebound in 2025,” the association stated in its latest report.

Non-automotive orders surpassed automotive orders in the first three quarters of 2024. Source: Association for Advancing Automation

Burnstein posts open letter, discusses outlook

Jeff Burnstein, president of A3, posted an open letter to President-elect Donald Trump, saying that automation is key to reshoring manufacturing to the U.S. He recommended that the federal government work with the robotics industry to develop a strategy to effectively compete economically and in national security.

The Robot Report spoke with Burnstein about his letter and A3’s latest report.

How do the latest quarterly statistics support your points?

Burnstein: We’re still seeing declines in robot orders, but they’re shrinking.

People in industry said once the elections are over, we’ll have clarity — we’ll see. It depends on industrial policy changes, such as support for electric vehicles versus internal combustion engines.

Your letter mentions the need for a national robotics strategy, as do A3’s advocacy principles. How would that mesh with the incoming administration’s stated goals of streamlining government?

Burnstein: They can happen at the same time. If the priority of the next administration is to bring back manufacturing, automation is necessary, regardless of whether it shrinks the federal government.

The [White House] Office of Science and Technology Policy could put more emphasis on robotics and automation.

With Tesla‘s Optimus, Elon Musk is a notable proponent of humanoid robots, and he has been named co-leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency. Do you think he’ll be helpful to the industry?

Burnstein: I don’t know exactly what his role will be, but you’d think that with somebody who knows and has applied the technology, he’s understand the robotics industry quite well.

New robot orders by types of application. Source: Association for Advancing Automation

Policy recommendations include more federal attention

Do robotics R&D and workforce development require more federal funding and coordination?

Burnstein: We’re trying to point to general principles. There should be someone in the government — a “robotics czar” — focused on how robotics, AI, and automation can make America more competitive. It is a priority in other countries.

If the priority is to create more jobs, then these fit together. One way is to automate; the other is to train the workforce. We have to have more state programs and coordination at the national level.

What are A3’s stances on issues like deregulation, tariffs, and tax cuts, which are mentioned in A3’s principles? How might they help or hurt the U.S. robotics industry?

Burnstein: On tariffs, I can’t comment yet. We have an advocacy committee meeting, chaired by Brendan Schulman of Boston Dynamics, in January.

On taxes, there should be incentives for companies that automate and expense it upfront.

We see a real need for looking at how we speak about automation and robotics. The last National Robotics Initiative was during the Obama administration. We can debate about whether investments were too focused on basic research, but coupled with tax incentives, it was a start.

As regulations go, there are some that if changed, they could help companies adopt automation. We’d need to explore that more closely, but A3 has pointed out that robots are a job creator, not a destroyer.

Now that the elections are over, what’s the status of the Congressional Robotics Caucus? Do you know any incoming members of Congress?

Burnstein: U.S. Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Rep. Robert Latta of Ohio are the co-chairs. I’ve heard that McGovern was very strong about wanting the caucus to be more active.

I appeared before the Senate AI Caucus, and there’s a growing awareness that AI and robotics go together, so I’m hopeful.

Do you expect a response to your letter from the White House?

Burnstein: We got a response that they received it, and I’m hopeful for outreach to work with A3 and other organizations. The National Association of Manufacturers [NAM] sent letters before and after the election, and a lot of people signed them.

A3’s advocacy principles. Source: Association for Advancing Automation

A3 to work with lobbyists, other organizations

Are A3’s principles in line with Henrik Christensen‘s National Robotics Roadmap? 

Burnstein: We are generally aligned, I participated in putting it together. I think there are other like-minded organizations, such as NAM. We want to focus on all industries that robots and automation can assist.

How can the robotics industry elevate its profile in Washington?

Burnstein: For the first time, we’ve hired a lobbying group, which will begin on Dec. 1. We think there’s a good opportunity, and both sides of the aisle are interested in the same things: bringing back jobs, keeping the U.S. competitive, and not falling behind in a whole bunch of areas, not just manufacturing.

Does A3 have plans to work with other organizations, such as the ARM Institute or robotics clusters, to advocate for the industry?

Burnstein: I haven’t seen much activity lately from the National Alliance of Robotics Clusters, but there will be coordination with similar groups.

As I said, our advocacy committee will meet right before the inauguration. At A3’s Business Forum in January, we may also talk with various groups.

Right now, we’re outlining general principles of working with the next administration on taxes, workforce development, and other issues.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated with a link to A3’s full report, released today.

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ANELLO offers an evaluation kit for its navigation and positioning system. Source: ANELLO Photonics

Self-driving vehicles, mobile robots, and drones need multiple sensors for safe and reliable operation, but the cost and bulk of those sensors have posed challenges for developers and manufacturers. ANELLO Photonics Inc. yesterday said it has closed its Series B funding round for its SiPhOG inertial navigation system, or INS.

“This investment not only validates our SiPhOG technology and products in the marketplace, but will [also] allow us to accelerate our manufacturing and product development as we continue to push the boundaries and leadership for navigation capabilities and performance to our customers who want solutions for GPS-denied environments,” stated Dr. Mario Paniccia, co-founder and CEO of ANELLO Photonics.

Founded in 2018, ANELLO has developed SiPhOG — Silicon Photonics Optical Gyroscope — based on integrated photonic system-on-chip (SoC) technology. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said it has more than 28 patents, with 44 pending. Its technologies also include a sensor-fusion engine using artificial intelligence.

“I spent 22 years at Intel and started this field of silicon photonics, which is the idea of building optical devices out of standard silicon processing, mostly focused on the data center,” recalled Paniccia. “Mike Horton, my co-founder, was a sensor gyro expert who started a company called Crossbow coming out of UC Berkeley.”

“Everyone doing autonomy was saying lidar and radar, but customers told Mike that if we could build an integrated photonic chip, they’d be very interested,” he told The Robot Report. “If you look at fiber gyros, they work great but are big, bulky, and expensive.”

“The stuff on our phones are MEMS [micro-electromechanical systems]-based today, which is not very accurate and is very sensitive to temperature, vibration, and EM interference,” Paniccia explained. “With the the same concept as a fiber gyro — the idea of light going around a coil, and you measure the phase based on rotation — we integrated all those components on a single chip, added a little laser, and put electronics around it, and you now get SiPhOG, which fits in the palm of your hand.”

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SiPhOG combines compactness and precision

SiPhOG brings high-precision into an integrated silicon photonics platform, claimed ANELLO. It is based on the interferometric fiber-optic gyroscope (FOG) but is designed for compactness, said Paniccia.

“It’s literally 2 by 5 mm,” he said. “On that chip, we have all the components — the splitters, the couplers, the phase modulators, and the delay lines. We measure about 50 nano-radians of signal, so a tiny, tiny signal, but we measure it very accurately.”

The system also has a non-ASIC, two-sided electronics board with an analog lock-in amplifier, a temperature controller, and an isolator, Paniccia said. It has none of the drawbacks of MEMS and uses 3.3 volts, he added.

Paniccia said the SiPhOG unit includes an optical gyro, triple-redundant MEMS, accelerometers, and magnetometers. It also has two GPS chips and dual antennas and is sealed to be waterproof.

The ANELLO IMU+ is designed for harsh environments including in construction, robotics, mining, trucking, and defense. Source: ANELLO

Navigation system ready for multiple markets

Autonomous systems can work with ANELLO’s technology and the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) for navigation, positioning, and motion tracking for a range of applications, said the company.

“We’re shipping to customers now in orchards, where the leaves come in, and the water in them essentially acts like a tunnel, absorbing GPS,” Paniccia said. “Our algorithm says, ‘I’m losing GPS, so weigh the navigation algorithm more to the optical gyro.’ You want the robot to stay within a tenth of a meter across a distance of half a mile. Long-distance, we’re looking at 100 km of driving without GPS with less than 100-m lateral error.”

In addition, SiPhOG is built for scalability and cost-effectiveness.

“VC friends tell me that automakers are putting six lidar systems on a car, and each one is $10,000 each. It’s never going to get to mass market,” Paniccia said. “We have an optical technology for land, air, and sea. And whether that land vehicle is for agriculture or construction, or in the longer term, trucking or autonomous cars, we can do it.”

“You can literally tape SiPhOG to a dashboard and plug it into the cigarette lighter,” he said. “We have self-alignment correction, and within 15 minutes, you can have GPS-denied navigation capability. We’re also shipping this system for indoor robots like in construction.”

“If I put three SiPhOGs in a cube, I can have the same performance but at one-fifth the size and weight and a quarter of the power for precision in three dimensions,” said Paniccia. “That’s exciting for drones and maritime.”

Investors to accelerate ANELLO 

Lockheed Martin, Catapult Ventures, and One Madison Group co-led ANELLO’s unspecified Series B round. New Legacy, Build Collective, Trousdale Ventures, In-Q-Tel (IQT), K2 Access Fund, Purdue Strategic Ventures, Santuri Ventures, Handshake Ventures, Irongate Capital, and Mana Ventures also participated. 

“We’re committed to fostering the art of the possible with investments in cutting edge technologies, including advancements in inertial navigation that have the potential to enhance autonomous operations in GPS-denied environments,” said Chris Moran, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures. “Our continued investment in ANELLO reflects our mission to accelerate technologies that can ultimately benefit national security.”

ANELLO said it plans to use its latest funding to continue developing and deploying its technology. The company has worked with the U.S. Department of Defense to optimize its algorithms against jamming or spoofing.

“Every week, there’s an article about a commercial flight or defense-related mission getting GPS jammed, like thousands of flights to and from Europe affected by suspected Russian jamming,” noted Tony Fadell, founder of Nest and a principal at investor Build Collective. “GPS has become a single point of failure because it’s too easily compromised with various jamming and spoofing techniques.”

“ANELLO’s proven and commercially available optical gyroscope is the only navigational tool that can take over, [offering] precision over long periods of time, the size of a golf ball, low-power, low-cost, that’s immune to shock and vibration,” he added. “ANELLO will save lives in the air, on the road, and over water.”

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Zenoh is middleware designed to enable scalable data communication across technologies. Source: ZettaScale

While multiple industries could benefit from mobile robots, the standard Data Distribution Service or DDS middleware has difficulty keeping up in wireless environments, according to ZettaScale Technology Ltd. This limits communications and scalability, said the France-based company.

ZettaScale has developed the Zenoh protocol, which it said provides robust communication in dynamic environments for vehicles, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and robots. In 2022, the company spun out of DDS research and development for traffic control in aerospace and military applications, explained Angelo Corsaro, chief technology officer and CEO of ZettaScale.

Last month, the Eclipse Foundation announced the release of Eclipse Zenoh 1.0.0, an open-source protocol to integrate communication, storage, and computation in embedded systems and across cloud platforms. The foundation and ZettaScale noted that the new release builds on years of work and real-world deployment experience.

DDS works well, with limits

In 2015, efforts to design a resilient protocol to replace IP for the next-generation Internet were still based on telephone circuit switching. DDS was optimized for its original intent, but it had limitations, noted Corsaro.

“Our team also did some of the early smart-city work, [such as] Nice in France and with Schneider and Cisco in Barcelona,” he told The Robot Report. “One struggle we had was that, for systems spanning from a microcontroller to a data center, we had to put together two to three different protocols for data flow. DDS wouldn’t fit on a microcontroller, and the wire protocol wasn’t designed for constrained networks.”

“The issue is DDS was used outside of its design space,” Corsaro explained. “When we designed DDS, the use case was a closed system a wired network, and the assumption that there was low packet loss. And that happens in a system that is well-dimensioned.”

“So DDS came out of naval combat management system, where you have a system that is completely well-dimensioned,” he added. “There is, on average, the 50% CPU and the network that is left empty. And everything is dimensioned so that you can use multicast and you don’t lose packet. Systems are powerful and symmetrical. In that context, DDS rocks, but if you move out of that context, then it gets complicated.”

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Zenoh designed to manage data at rest and in motion

Corsaro said he wanted to solve two problems. The first was to develop a protocol that would work with low-power embedded systems and constrained networks.

“The other ideas was unifying the abstraction that we use for dealing with data in motion, so distributing data and data at rest, which means query,” recalled Corsaro. In efforts to decentralize data storage for “fog computing” in Barcelona, he found that protocols were needed to retrieve data distributed across the network.

“Zenoh removes the topological constraint on where to deploy the computation, so you can operate over arbitrary meshes at Internet scale,” Corsaro said. “This discussion of where we should put it — on the cloud versus the edge — becomes irrelevant because you keep the storage and compute where it makes sense, and the data always takes the shortest path.”

From telecom to ROS 2

The DDS researchers started working on Zenoh with funding from telecom companies, which enabled it to experiment and validate in the context of smart-city telemetry across 5G networks, said Corsaro.

“It was by accident that people started using it in robotics, because for us, we were really focused on telecommunications,” he noted. “When we started showing how you could use it with ROS [the open-source Robot Operating System], it really took off.”

As ZettaScale spun off, TG Tech Auto saw an opportunity to bring its protocols into the automotive space, and it partnered and became a shareholder.

“We see a huge convergence from both robotics and automotive, and Zenoh was adopted by General Motors’ uProtocol initiative,” Corsaro said. “It’s the convergence of architecture and technology. There are actually cars today in Asia that are actually running on ROS 2.”

ROS 2 is taking a lighter-weight, “code-first” approach, while the AUTOSAR consortium is working on a structured exchange and interoperability format. However, ROS 2 needs to come up to automotive certification standards, acknowledged Corsaro.

Companies such as Intrinsic and Apex.AI are working on bridging the platforms. Intrinsic is using Zenoh with ROS 2 Jazzy Jalisco.

“It’s a very interesting time,” Corsaro said. “Imagine if the same protocol could be used for both robotic platforms and autonomous driving. We see robotics as essentially the early adopters.”

ZettaScale demonstrated Cyclone DDS and Zenoh, Version 1.0.2 of which is now available, at ROSCon last month in Kyoto, Japan.

Zenoh streamlines communications, adaptively routes data, and distributes storage for efficient fleet management. Source: ZettaScale

ZettaScale continues automotive work

Early adopters of Zenoh include major automakers such as Volvo and smart-city companies.

Eclipse Zenoh 1.0.0 includes shared memory and zero-copy support, advanced end-to-end protection, high-performance access control, and specific extensions for robotics and automotive protocols.

“We’ve shown how we can handle real-time video of a self-driving car and put recognition in the loop,” said Corsaro. “You don’t want to go through the network when sending lidar images, point clouds, or big images, but few people were using the zero-copy API [application programming interface] that was in ROS.”

ZettaScale is working closely with partners in Japan and Europe, and it has support personnel in the U.S.

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A ‘humanoid for hospitals,’ Moxi has an arm for opening doors and operating elevators. Source: Diligent Robotics

As development continues on humanoid robots, one mobile robot is already at work in hospitals. Diligent Robotics Inc. today announced that its Moxi robot has completed 110,000 autonomous elevator rides at health systems across the U.S.

The mobile manipulator has a single arm for opening doors and pushing buttons to operate elevators. Moxi’s achievement marks a milestone in artificial intelligence-driven automation for unstructured healthcare environments, said the Austin, Texas-based company.

“Achieving autonomy in robotics, particularly in health care environments, is an incredible challenge,” stated Andrea Thomaz, CEO of Diligent Robotics and a 20-year AI veteran. “Navigating elevators seems simple, but the unpredictable nature of shared spaces, real-time changes, and the need for accuracy make it one of many hard tasks that humanoids deployed in human environments need to solve.”

“With Moxi, we’ve demonstrated the ability to integrate AI into environments where collaboration between people and robots is vital for success,” she added. “As of today, we are completing over 20,000 fully autonomous elevator rides each month, something none of our competitors are doing.”

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Moxi moves to greater autonomy

Founded in 2017, Diligent Robotics noted that it has integrated Moxi into existing healthcare workflows, such as delivering supplies and transporting laboratory specimens around the clock. The company said its robot has helped improve operational efficiency and enabled busy staffers to focus on patient care rather than routine transport tasks.

Diligent CEO Andrea Thomaz with Moxi. Source: Diligent Robotics

Diligent Robotics used “humans in the loop” to develop Moxi’s autonomy and ability to interact with elevators.

“There are two approaches: Waymo, which used its own drivers and did R&D until its product was fully autonomous, and Tesla, which got its product out in the wild with real customers and has increased autonomy with supervision over time,” Thomaz told The Robot Report. “We took the latter approach.”

“This milestone means we no longer need close human supervision, which is a significant one for mobile manipulation,” she said. “The number of rides per day really shows that we’ve gotten past R&D and are working in production.”

When it first deployed its robots, Diligent staffers supervised operations on site. They obtained labeled data for AI models, explained Thomaz. The company can now supervise its fleet of 100 robots in 20 sites remotely.

“A lot of our early partner hospitals got used to our staffers being around to do everything the robots would need,” Thomaz said. “In fact, it has been easier for hospitals taken live in the past few months, because they had fully autonomous robots from the start. For sites that were previously under human supervision, we went through a data-collection phase and asked the staff not to do anything.”

Moxi opens doors, a model for other actions 

How hard was it to get Moxi to operate elevators?

“They became a roadmap for autonomy,” replied Thomaz. “Nearly every delivery pass involves an elevator req, from the pharmacy or lab in the basement up to the patient wards. For the simplest elevator, you push a button and get on.”

“The most complex one in operation today, you have to scan a badge to activate the buttons and then push them,” she told The Robot Report. “There are a lot of patient floors that are secure. It’s a complex manipulation skill for a dual device, primarily because of the speed of swiping.”

By solving the problems of manipulating a variety of doors and elevators, Diligent Robotics is developing end-to-end action models.

“Our ability to develop models that are specific to these small skills is creating an infrastructure of training models that could then be applied to other skills,” Thomaz said. “They’re not large, general-purpose models, but we’re excited to have a fleet we can leverage to build foundation models.”

Complex environments still pose challenges

Moxi can communicate with people around it through its screen, shown here in idle mode. Source: Diligent Robotics

As environments with trained but busy personnel, a high degree of safety regulations, and the general public — some of whom are not well — hospitals are particularly challenging for robots.

“That’s why we treated this with white gloves; we’re not just dropping robots in to learn on their own,” noted Thomaz. “We spent two years deploying robots with people because of the sensitive environment and to get the robots to operate efficiently.”

For instance, she cited interventions where healthcare staffers push the emergency stop button and can manually move a robot out of the way for something like an urgent gurney. They sometimes forget to turn the robot back on so it can continue its mission.

“We’ve released a feature where the robot can ask on its screen for someone to un-e-stop it,” Thomaz said. “There are other environments, such as an elevator bay with six different cars and patients coming in and out, that are still complex.”

“Moxi also uses data to avoid routes or elevators that are always busy,” she said. “We collect that data and have preferred elevator bays for at night versus during the day.”

Diligent Robotics works to normalize robots 

With aging populations and workforce challenges, demand for automation is likely to grow, said Diligent Robotics. Moxi provides an example of how robots can address human needs, it said.

“I’ve been talking about Moxi as a ‘humanoid for healthcare.’ We’re doing the things that people are talking about what humanoids could do,” Thomaz said. “Bipedal locomotion isn’t the hardest part — it’s applicability of mobile manipulation. Most humanoids are still proofs of concept.”

“When I walk through hospitals where Moxi is deployed, it’s the first robot that many people have encountered,” she added. “Patients are getting used to seeing a future with robots.”

“Achieving full autonomy to enable hospital-wide transport tasks is just scratching the surface of what humanoid robots like Moxi will do in hospitals and beyond,” said Thomaz. “The knowledge and trust that we gain from healthcare settings will inform future product developments. We look forward to building humanoid social robots to collaborate and assist with caring for people in many different settings.”

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CaseFlow orchestrates case-picking robots and workers, noted new CEO Karl Iagnemma. Source: Vecna robotics

Vecna Robotics today announced that it has closed $14.5 million in additional funding from existing investors and brought on Karl Iagnemma as CEO. The Waltham, Mass.-based company provides mobile robots for materials handling.

Iagnemma has been a robotics researcher and an entrepreneur. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he authored publications on robotics and artificial intelligence that have been cited more than 20,000 times.

“I got my Ph.D. in 2001 and led the Robotic Mobility Group at MIT from 2001 to 2013, where I did fundamental research into wheeled mobile robots, the foundational technology for autonomous mobile robots [AMRs] and robotaxis,” Iagnemma told The Robot Report.

At MIT, Iagnemma met Daniel Theobald, a fellow alumnus and founder and chairman of Vecna Robotics, while working on a DARPA project. In 2020, Iagnemma made an angel investment in the company.

“I was convinced that Vecna had the world’s best technology to address key workflows in this space,” he said. “It’s a $275 billion opportunity, with 2.5 billion sq. ft. of warehouse space.”

From autonomous vehicles to mobile robots

In 2013, Iagnemma co-founded and served as CEO of autonomous vehicle (AV) developer nuTonomy, which conducted public robotaxi pilots in Singapore.

“nuTonomy launched the first fully Level 4 self-driving vehicles in urban environments,” he recalled. “We raised about $20 million but saw that we needed billions to proceed.”

Tier 1 automotive supplier Aptiv acquired nuTonomy in 2017 for $405 million.

“We then saw that we needed an even bigger partner,” Iagnemma said. “That’s what led us to Hyundai in 2019.”

He was founding CEO of Motional, a $4 billion joint venture between Aptiv and Hyundai Motor Group. In May 2024, Hyundai acquired shares of Motional from Aptiv for $448 million.

“Automation in logistics today is similar to the current state of robotaxis, in that there is a massive market opportunity but little market penetration,” stated Iagnemma.

“I join Vecna Robotics at an inflection point in the material handling market, where operators are poised to adopt automation at scale,” he added. “Vecna is uniquely positioned to shape the market with state-of-art technology and products that are easy to purchase, deploy, and operate reliably across many different workflows.”

What’s the biggest difference between AVs and AMRs?

“With autonomous vehicles, you have to watch out for drunk jaywalkers, the weather, and baby strollers,” replied Iagnemma. “AMRs are ready to be deployed at scale today.”

“One of the first things I did when I joined Vecna is I went to a 1.2 million sq. ft. customer site,” he noted. “There were remarkably few people, and the robots were operating very reliably. It was a more constrained environment [than for AVs], but the robots are still complex. They’re not just technology but products that must operate continuously.”

Iagnemma joins as CaseFlow is released

Vecna Robotics makes autonomous forklifts, tuggers, pallet trucks, and pallet jacks. It also offers the Pivotal software and a round-the-clock Command Center to help manufacturers, warehouses, and distribution operators automate critical tasks, maximize throughput, and quickly scale.

“Pivotal is a great example of the large-scale thinking that is embodied in Vecna,” said Iagnemma. “Some competitors are building widgets for specific workflow products, but Vecna is developing an ecosystem. It’s not just a product for one use case but an AI system that optimizes the performance of every asset, including automation and workers.”

Last month, Vecna introduced the CaseFlow system for optimized human-robot case picking. It offers CaseFlow through a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model.

“I was excited to join with the release of CaseFlow,” Iagnemma said. “Case picking is one of the highest-value workflows, and this is the only truly flexible way to do it. We’ve seen customer sites with ROI [return on investment] in less than a year, with more than doubling of productivity. It’s not just a simulation.”

Vecna prioritizes strategic partnerships, enhanced products

In June, Vecna raised more than $100 million in a Series C round and named Michael Helmbrecht as chief operating officer. The company’s previous CEOs included Dan Patt and Craig Malloy.

Vecna said it plans to use its latest $14.5 million in funding to accelerate technology and product enhancements.

“My goal as CEO is to continue investing in product development and ‘deepen our moat’ in the automated forklift area,” said Iagnemma. “Another is to achieve scale through new products and strategic partnerships, not at the facility scale but at the enterprise scale.”

“Karl Iagnemma combines exceptional robotics expertise with hands-on leadership, making him the perfect fit to drive innovation and propel Vecna Robotics into its next phase of growth,” said Nick Solaro, general partner at Drive Capital. “We are confident that his extensive network will be instrumental in forging key strategic partnerships, securing the company’s long-term leadership in the market.”

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Fulcrum can ensure that Cantilever has high-quality infrastructure data to analyze. Source: Gecko Robotics

Robotic maintenance of large structures and critical infrastructure is only as useful as the data it yields. Gecko Robotics Inc. has announced its Fulcrum software for data acquisition and quality. Its first public use was this week.

The Pittsburgh-based company, best known for its robots that can climb and maintain tanks, has also developed drones and software. It said its Cantilever operating platform uses artificial intelligence and robotics (AIR) for data analysis and to support fast decision-making at scale.

Jake Loosararian, co-founder and CEO, and Jennifer Padgett, engineering manager at Gecko Robotics, explained to The Robot Report how Fulcrum and Cantilever can enable new levels of insights from robotic inspection.

Fulcrum enables data analytics from multiple sources

What is Fulcrum?

Loosararian: Jenn designed and built Fulcrum. Its design is centered around creating an API [application programming interface] for robots.

It’s all in support of our goal for Gecko — to protect critical infrastructure. This requires information about the built world.

Robots armed with different sensors turn the physical world of atoms into bits. The key is ensuring those bits drive useful outcomes.

The sensors on robots and drones can collect a lot of data — how do you determine what’s useful?

Loosararian: We collect so much and different types of information with our robots that climb walls or from fixed sensors. It’s not enough to just gather and post-process this data. We want to get as close to the process as possible.

Fulcrum is specifically built to gather data sets for high-fidelity foundation models. It’s designed not just to ensure quality data from all types of robots and sensors, but also to accelerate our ability to capture data layers for our Cantilever enterprise software.

For example, they can be used to predict when a tank would leak, a bridge collapse, or a naval vessel need to be modernized.

Padgett: We’re building a validation framework with our subject-matter expertise. We’ve collected millions of data points, while humans typically gather data points every square foot or two.

With Fulcrum, we understand the data as you’re collecting it and double-check it. We’ve optimized for inspections of concrete in missile silos, as well as tanks and boilers.

Gecko Robotics offers understanding of infrastructure health

How is Gecko Robotics pivoting from robotics hardware to AI?

Loosararian: We’ve traditionally developed hardware for data collection. Data quality is the starting point.

We’re helping people to understand what their livelihoods are based on by giving a full picture. Inspections affect everything from driving across a bridge to turning on the electricity.

We believe in democratizing data. We can’t build all the robots ourselves, and I recently talked onstage about the potential for humanoid robots like Tesla’s Optimus.

We’ve developed AI and built an ontology to connect things to monitor and maintain infrastructure health. Building and operating critical infrastructure is a matter of global competitiveness.

Padgett: With AI for pre-processing and low-level heuristics on key modules, Gecko can deliver useful data for customers. Fulcrum is really meant to provide higher-level analytics at the edge.

Jake, you mentioned the API and working with other robots. Who are you working with?

Loosararian: We’ve already made partnerships and are vetting a dozen companies for the kinds of tools that will be certified under the Gecko umbrella. We want to onboard as many robots as we can.

At the same time, we’re very skeptical of which robots are actually valuable. As we go to market with the platform, we understand which tools are good for marketing versus actually helping the business.

We’re not interested in research projects; we’re interested in companies that want specific, real-world impacts within 90 days. Right now, there’s a lot of skepticism around hardware and software, but with our robots and AI-powered software, the savings are real.

We’ve built up abstracts for how to interact with certain types of robots, drones, and marine systems. This makes it easy to add; by working them into our communications protocol, we’re language-agnostic.

We’re also interested in new types of sensors and how they can affect outcomes.

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Predictive maintenance key to value proposition

What industries can this help?

Loosararian: It’s not one industry; it’s everyone. Infrastructure is huge — from aircraft carriers to mining companies. We’ve got products and services that help them understand the state of their assets.

Right now, we’re focusing on built structures using next-generation IoT [Internet of Things] sensors. With fixed robots, mesh networks, and 5G, we’re imagining beyond that.

Cantilever is already providing data on 500,000 assets, and it’s already making changes in the way customers operate.

We’re constantly being pinged by companies that want us to integrate automated repairs and cleaning, which are important functions to maintaining safety and environmental sustainability.

We want to ensure that we can meet growing demand for things like shipyard maintenance with the growing scarcity of qualified people. Fulcrum has the ability to offer relevant information, changing the standard operating procedures from human-collected data.

So is the goal to apply IoT and AI to spot issues before they become problems?

Loosararian: We can know what the robot is doing, what it should be collecting, and get the analysis. With the life-extension AIR module, we can look at the data layers in concrete, carbon steel, and stainless steel to extend the useful life of critical infrastructure.

Fulcrum is also part of capex [capital expenditure] optimization. Users want to avoid replacing things, having downtime, or suffering from catastrophic failures. They need specific data rather than broad strokes so they don’t have to worry about overpaying to replace something that doesn’t yet need to be replaced.

Another opportunity is process optimization. For example, an oil company needs to understand how a higher sodium concentration in the Gulf of Mexico will impact its assets. That’s built into the Cantilever data pipeline from Fulcrum.

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Standard Bots will use READY Robotics APIs to make its AI control software usable with multiple robot models. Source: Standard Bots

Standard Bots Co. today said that it has acquired all of the intellectual property, or IP, of READY Robotics, which had developed the ForgeOS robot-agnostic operating system. Standard Bots said the acquisition of READY Robotics’ software, patents, and trademarks will enable its own software to work across robot brands.

The New York-based company and founding partner of the New York Robotics Network said it plans to market READY’s application programming interface (API) with its own training software. It also plans to bring its user interface (UI) and artificial intelligence platform to NVIDIA Omniverse and other robot makers.

“The READY team over many years wrote some amazing software — a unified API that talks to every major robot brand,” stated Evan Beard, CEO of Standard Bots. “With this acquisition, I’m more excited than ever about what we’ll be able to offer the market in the coming months.”

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READY Robotics worked on robot accessibility

READY Robotics had raised $40 million over the past eight years and had partnered with companies such as Toyota and NVIDIA. It also offered consulting services and launched a palletizing system.

However, READY reportedly had difficulty persuading robot manufacturers to work with ForgeOS, and funding plans fell through. The Columbus, Ohio-based company shut down in August.

Kel Guerin, co-founder of READY Robotics and a founding member of the New York Robotics Network, expressed optimism that Standard Bots would continue to make robots more accessible with ForgeOS.

“I am excited to see how Standard Bots will continue to democratize the robotics space using READY Robotics’ technology,” he said. “I firmly believe that Standard Bot’s goal of empowering developers to more easily use robots is essential in moving the industry forward.”

In July, Standard Bots raised $63 million in Series B funding. It did not disclose the terms of its purchase of READY Robotics assets, and it did not hire any former staffers.

The company has acquired only the IP of READY Robotics, not any hardware, Beard told The Robot Report.

“READY Robotics’ set of APIs is the perfect piece for deploying our AI platform,” he said. “By offering a unified API, UI, and AI platform for developers that works across every robot brand, we’re not just growing our company — we’re elevating the entire field.”

StandardOS provides developers and AI researchers with tools for building applications, integrations, and more. Source: Standard Bots

Standard Bots builds AI to ease robot training

Standard Bots said it is focused on using AI to train robots through demonstration learning. The company claimed that its vertically integrated approach will make robots easier to train and use.

“Using the latest advancements in AI, our robots are capable of both performing many new tasks and performing many existing tasks with much more versatility,” said Beard. “We’re building a platform where people can take advantage of this. Specifically, they can collect training data, fine-tune and train on top of a foundation model, build an application on top of these models, and easily deploy to any major robot brand.”

He asserted that Standard Bots’ technology can help avoid much of the time and expense currently spent on developing industrial robot applications.

“AI is such a paradigm shift in the industry,” Beard said. “But we also need better hardware to run them. A lot of robot arms don’t have APIs for good real-time control and can’t prevent an AI model from driving them into a collision.”

He cited the example of how self-driving cars have a safety layer that is above whatever a particular vehicle’s AI model is saying.

“This is an opportunity to create new robots designed from the ground up to run AI models with safety built in,” said David Golden, co-founder of Standard Bots. “The existing market is minuscule compared with the opportunity with AI. With the right AI-centric platform, it can be 100 to 1,000 times cheaper to build apps for dexterous manipulation.”

RO1 robot just one platform for foundation models

Like READY Robotics, Standard Bots has developed hardware. The RO1 arm is stronger, faster, and more accurate than competing robots and has a built-in 3D camera, according to Standard Bots.

If Standard Bots has a robot arm to go with its AI platform, why does it need READY Robotics API?

“There are resellers that will only sell FANUC systems,” Beard acknowledged. “In our view, we want to spread our technology as fast as possible. The way to do that is to be robot-agnostic.”

Standard Bots has already developed applications for its robot, which is made in the U.S. and available for sale or through a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model.

“At Fabtech, we launched welding, and at IMTS, we launched a machine-tending solution. At Pack Expo this week, we’re demonstrating palletizing,” said Beard. “Right now, we have a best-in-class solution for each use case. And using AI, our solutions will stand alone in the market in terms of capability and versatility.”

“We’re seeing really strong growth, from Fortune 500 customers and NASA all the way down to smaller companies that need one or two robots,” he added. “It all comes down to ease of setup. You don’t have to be an expert. Nobody else is providing this end-to-end control.”

Research labs working on foundation models are already using Standard Bots’ integrated systems, Beard said. The company also provides handheld devices for imitation learning, allowing a robot to generalize behavior and correct its motion in real time.

“We’re providing the tools to collect data, fine-tune it, and build applications on it,” Beard said. “Imagine a robot unloading a UPS truck. We can help end customers fine-tune a foundation model, create, and deploy an application for this. And since all our robots can be connected, there’s closed-loop improvement.”

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Physical Intelligence demonstrates the application of foundation models to training robots for tasks such as assembling boxes and folding laundry. Source: Physical Intelligence

Foundation models promise to give robots the ability to generalize actions from fewer examples than traditional artificial intelligence approaches. Physical Intelligence today announced that it has raised $400 million to continue its development of AI for a range of robots.

“What we’re doing is not just a brain for any particular robot,” Karol Hausman, co-founder and chief executive of Physical Intelligence, told The New York Times. “It’s a single generalist brain that can control any robot.”

The San Francisco-based company last week posted an explanation of its first generalist policy, which it claimed will make robots easier to program and use.

“To paraphrase Moravec’s paradox, winning a game of chess or discovering a new drug represent ‘easy’ problems for AI to solve, but folding a shirt or cleaning up a table requires solving some of the most difficult engineering problems ever conceived,” wrote Physical Intelligence.

“Our first step is π₀, a prototype model that combines large-scale multi-task and multi-robot data collection with a new network architecture to enable the most capable and dexterous generalist robot policy to date,” said the company. “While we believe this is only a small early step toward developing truly general-purpose robot models, we think it represents an exciting step that provides a glimpse of what is to come.”

It’s still early days for foundation models

Early demonstrations of such generalist robot policies include folding laundry, assembling boxes, and dynamically putting objects into containers. Sergey Levine, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, shared these videos during his keynote address on building robotic foundation models at RoboBusiness last month.

Physical Intelligence acknowledged that foundation models that can control any robot to perform any task “are still in their infancy.” It said it is working on the data and partnerships to pretrain these models and enable new levels of dexterity and physical capability.

Physical Intelligence’s full research paper is available online.

Venture capital sees potential in AI plus robots

Physical Intelligence raised $70 million in seed financing earlier this year, and the company told The Robot Report that its valuation has risen to $2.4 billion. Jeff Bezos, executive chairman of Amazon, led the company’s latest funding round, along with Thrive Capital and Lux Capital.

Physical Intelligence thanked its investors on its website: “We are grateful for the support and partnership of Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, OpenAI, Sequoia Capital, and Thrive Capital.”

The company is currently hiring.

Other recent fundraising rounds supporting work to apply foundation models to robotics include $675 million for humanoid developer Figure AI, $300 million for Skild AI, $6.6 billion for OpenAI, $100 million for Collaborative Robotics, and Accenture’s plus more recent Canadian funding of Sanctuary AI.

More companies working on AI and robotics include Covariant AI, whose team was hired by Amazon; Intrinsic, which used NVIDIA models; and Vayu, which is developing delivery robots. Apptronik is also working with NVIDIA on a general-purpose foundation model for its Apollo humanoid.

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The UR AI Accelerator toolkit includes reference hardware and software. Source: Universal Robots

The latest advances in artificial intelligence promise to improve robot capabilities, but engineers need to bring the technologies together. Universal Robots A/S last week announced its UR AI Accelerator, a hardware and software toolkit to enable the development of AI-powered collaborative robot applications.

The UR AI Accelerator is an extensible platform for developers to build commercial and research applications, said the Odense, Denmark-based company. It is also intended to accelerate research and reduce the time to market for AI products, Universal Robots said at ROSCon.

“If you’re building solutions on our platform, it will decrease your time to deployment while also de-risking the development of AI-based solutions,” stated James Davidson, chief AI officer at Teradyne Robotics, parent organization of Universal Robots.

“People spend an enormous amount of time on the connective tissue of these systems — selecting hardware, finding compute and cameras, and on compliance,” he told The Robot Report. “On the software side, developers have to decide what model to use and how to optimize it with the hardware.”

“We’ve pulled that together in a platform for reference applications and libraries to build solutions quickly,” Davidson added. “That way, developers can choose what toolsets and languages they want to use and spend their time on high value-added capabilities.”

AI Accelerator runs NVIDIA models for faster deployment

NVIDIA Isaac libraries and models running on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin system on module bring AI acceleration to Universal Robots’ PolyScope X software. Isaac Manipulator can enhance cobot performance, and the toolkit includes the new Orbbec Gemini 335Lg 3D camera, the company added.

Universal Robots said the accelerator provides built-in demonstration programs to enable pose estimation, tracking, object detection, path planning, image classification, quality inspection, state detection, and more. While the UR+ ecosystem offers compatible hardware for cobot applications, the AI Accelerator provides functionality options.

“The AI Accelerator is fundamentally designed to make robots easier to deploy for inspection, picking, and other functions,” said Davidson. “We’re trying to bring up the utility of solutions to be leveraged more quickly by partners.”

“If you’re a roboticist, with component AI for reference projects, you can do dynamic motion planning and obstacle awareness,” he noted. “If you’re an AI developer, we have robotics components through ROS with NVIDIA wrapped around it, and you can go to our ecosystem.”

Universal Robots focuses on cobot app dev

For its AI Accelerator, Universal Robots identified enablers that it could put together to solve application problems by moving up the stack, Davidson explained.

“We vetted the AI components and designed reference examples for the hardware and software package,” he said. “The time saved depends on the application. This can have a huge impact on things like inspection or palletizing. Building a foundation model is very different from learning physical AI or integration.”

The platform is designed to be flexible. It can use simulation and digital twins, but it doesn’t require them, said Davidson.

“Think of simulation as addressing problems — synthetic data generation can bridge the sim-to-real gap, primarily in visual applications,” he said. “We are hopefully enabling customers to go further into the physical side.”

Universal Robots and partners such as NVIDIA offer an AI Accelerator to ease cobot development. Source: Universal Robots

AI Accelerator, PolyScope X just the first steps

Universal Robots plans to show systems developed with its platform and AI at its PolyScope X Festival next month. The company, which claimed that it has sold more than 90,000 cobot arms worldwide, said PolyScope X is compatible with its e-Series and UR20 and UR30 cobots.

Davidson added that AI is starting to enable robots to be more reliable and to perform a wider range of tasks.

“Instead of programming a robot for piece picking, we’re moving to functional manipulation and more complex assembly tasks,” he said. “For a robot to grab a cup, it needs to handle multisensory inputs, such as visual and tactile data. Feedback and closed-loop systems will be key.”

“With our objective to take physical AI to an entirely new level, AI Accelerator is just the first to market of a series of AI-powered products and capabilities in UR’s pipeline, all with the focused goal of making robotics more accessible than ever before,” said Davidson. “We’re engaged with customers and partners.”

“The hype around AI is starting to die down, but all agree that it is continuing to make progress,” he said. “We’re at an inflection point. When I asked at trade shows two to three years ago how many people were using AI, only one or two people raised their hands. Now, 75% of people raise their hands.”

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Micromobility trials in Vancouver International Airport could lead to wider deployments. Source: A&K Robotics

Demand for mobility assistance in spaces such as airports is increasing as populations age and more people travel. Robots and autonomous vehicles can help meet that demand amid persistent labor shortages, according to A&K Robotics Inc.

Since 2016, the Vancouver, B.C.-based company has been developing electric micromobility platforms and self-driving robotic pods to help improve quality of life and environmental sustainability.

“We’re not replacing wheelchairs in airports and other facilities,” said Jessica Yip, co-founder of A&K Robotics. “Our pods are intended to help people with mobility limitations.”

A&K Robotics rolls out airport robots in phases

In July, A&K Robotics said it is bringing its Cruz self-driving robotic pods at the Vancouver International Airport (YVR). The company had already tested its systems at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in 2022. 

Jessica Yip, co-founder of A&K Robotics

“[Co-founder] Matt [Anderson] and I envisioned going to several airports when we started the company,” acknowledged Yip. “We then decided to focus on quality over quantity.”

“We had previously delivered one or two robots for relatively short durations,” she told The Robot Report. “It takes resources to bring a team and a 400-lb. mobile robot to each facility.”

“We knew we’d take a multi-stage approach to commercialization,” added Yip. “We researched the problem space and came to the conclusion that the automated mobility experience is really important to an airport’s customers — and to its business.”

“We’re prioritizing airports with high standards for operations and efficiency versus those that want robots as a novelty for marketing,” she said. “We’re focused on real-world operations and building our product to enable airports and airlines to have a high level of customization for branding.”

Finding value at the dawn of digitalization

In most airports, wheelchairs and shuttles must be manually fetched and brought to passengers and gates, noted Yip. Just knowing where they are in million-square-foot facilities or even parking lots can be a challenge requiring staffers to walk long distances and spend precious time.

“YVR has 10 million sq. ft., fire and ambulance service, IT, wildlife and aquariums, and plumbing — it’s actually a small city,” Yip said. “We have a great opportunity to test a mobility use case where there’s demand right now.”

“Our pods are connected IoT [Internet of Things] devices, and we’re building dashboards and tools for airports to know where their fleets are and their battery status,” she explained. “By digitizing control, they could even remotely deploy a pod to a gate.”

“We’re just on the cusp of learning what value we can bring with robots enabled by AI, sensors, and data,” she said.

Partnerships to boost Canadian robotics

Last month, A&K Robotics announced strategic partnerships to promote the adoption of robotics across Canada. It is working with telecommunications leader Bell Canada, battery and charging provider Delta-Q Technologies, and assistive charity the Rick Hansen Foundation to build an ecosystem of robots, cloud infrastructure, electric vehicle systems, and new manufacturing facilities.

“Some critical technologies are necessary for self-driving systems to scale,” explained Yip. “For quality of service, we need 5G connectivity, and we’re working with Amazon Web Services for cloud services to deploy fleets.”

“When robotic sensors pick up environmental changes, our systems will perform better at scale than in ones or twos,” she added. “They can detect if a gate is boarding and divert other robots to avoid congestion.”

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A&K Robotics expects micromobility to grow globally

The global micromobility market could expand from $79.1 billion (U.S.) to $243.2 billion by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of 17.4%, predicted Maximize Market Research Pvt. Ltd. It cited advances in IoT and battery technology. A&K Robotics said it is poised to lead in that growth.

“We’re currently focused on a few strategic accounts in the Canada, the U.S., and Europe that each have five to 10 units,” said Yip. “We need boots on the ground and want to develop an initial model to implement mobility that we can then replicate.”

What are some of the differences between regions?

“In the EU, the responsibility for providing wheelchair assistance lies with the airport and its service provider, while in North America, that responsibility is with the airline, from budget to luxury,” replied Yip. “From a passenger standpoint, the EU model is better, especially if one gets bounced around among connecting flights.”

North American airports are beginning to realize that they need to invest in mobility assistance for older passengers, she said.

“Our long-term goal is to integrate mobility in a way that’s sustainable for us and the airport,” concluded Yip. “Airports are also launchpads for smart-city applications. It doesn’t make sense to deliver a pizza with a five-seater car; there have to be more sustainable options.”

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Robotic Crew founders at RoboBusiness 2023. Source: Ricardo Petrazzini

While U.S. companies have outsourced technology work overseas for more than 20 years, quality and political concerns have brought back design, programming, and other engineering tasks back closer to home. Robotic Crew offers staffing in Latin America for robot development, as well as operations and fleet management.

 “About two years ago, we spun out of WeDevelop, a company that was providing software engineers,” said Ricardo Petrazzini, founder and CEO of Robotic Crew. “Robotics is at the stage software was at in 2005, and many vendors and integrators don’t yet realize how Latin American talent can help them.”

The Coral Gables, Fla.-based company said it can remotely handle electrical and software engineering tasks such as design and testing. It is one of two Latin American businesses offering such services, Petrazzini told The Robot Report.

“When I went to RoboBusiness 2023, I met a Ph.D. from MIT who said he was flying to China to understand how things work in factories there with people without high school training,” he recalled. “International networking is a must, and countries like Argentina are a huge untapped source of engineers.”

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Robotic Crew promises to put humans in the loop

Not every vendor or end user has the resources for its own operations center, noted Petrazzini. Latin America offers an advantage over India of being in the same time zones as most North American daytime materials handling operations, helping to keep people in the loop affordably.

“We’re not providing hardware or software; we’re providing people. Within robotics, staffing for operations roles is a challenge,” he said. “We can offer good fees for a senior engineer with 10 years of experience with C++ or Python.”

Robotic Crew said it can work with any robotics operations, or RobOps, platform, such as those from InOrbit or Formant, because there’s still a need for people to manage robot fleets.

“If a company wants to operate 10,000 robots across multiple sites, having one person for four robots is prohibitive,” Petrazzini added. “Even as artificial intelligence helps us get to 1:50, you’d still need 200 people to monitor those 10,000 robots. But customers care more about uptime than the ratio of robots to staffers.”

“We can even host projects,” he said. “We have a partnership with a lab in Buenos Aires, and the client becomes the remote guy. We also have office space in Austin, and I have been traveling across the U.S.”

Petrazzini sees a global opportunity

While it has started with logistics operations, Robotic Crew has met with both startups and mature companies in aerospace, maritime, automotive manufacturing, healthcare, and integration and consulting. It has been in talks with a company working in kitchen robotics.

“We’re having three to four discovery calls per week, and our goal is to become the best-known RobOps staffing company to the U.S.,” said Petrazzini. “We also offer a good deal for engineers in Latin America, compared with their salaries at a petrol company or a multinational.”

He plans to be at RobOpsCon and RoboBusiness 2024 next week in Silicon Valley.

“InOrbit was one of the first companies I met at last year’s show, and since then, a lot of people have been asking me about RobOps,” Petrazzini said. “The geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China has forced robotics suppliers and operators to rethink how they do things, providing an opportunity for Latin America.”

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The past year has been eventful for robotics developments, with economic headwinds, new applications, and excitement around humanoids and AI. John Bubnikovich, president of ABB’s Robotics Division in the U.S., will be among the panelists discussing the future of robotics innovation at RoboBusiness in California next week.

In that keynote panel, Bubnikovich will join NVIDIA’s Amit Goel, DHL’s Joan-Wilhelm Schwarze, and Teradyne Ventures’ Eric Truebenbach in analyzing the drivers of innovation and how to scale automation.

As one of the world’s largest producers of industrial automation, as well as collaborative and mobile robots, ABB Robotics is in a good position to observe the latest trends. Bubnikovich provided The Robot Report with a sneak peek at the perspectives he’ll share at RoboBusiness.

Bubnikovich offers advice for robotics startups

What’s the biggest trend in robotics at the moment?

I believe the biggest trend in robotics is how many end users are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to make their robotic systems smarter and more adaptive.

At ABB Robotics, we define four areas for industrial applications of AI-powered robotics: 

• Generating insights: AI can analyze large datasets and generate meaningful insights that form the basis for decision-making. 
• Optimization: From macro-level energy management to micro-level path planning for robot movements, AI optimizes operations and increases efficiency.
• New capabilities: With AI robots can perform a broader range of complex tasks that were previously difficult to automate. By leveraging data and algorithms to optimize processes, robots execute tasks faster and more precisely, with greater in dynamic and unstructured environments. 
• Human-machine collaboration: AI makes robots and automation more accessible and user-friendly, enabling people without programming knowledge to guide and control a robot or machine.

What advice do you have for ensuring product-market fit, especially in a tight and competitive market?

Robotic OEMs, and in many instances their system integrator (SI) partners, must get as close to their customers and potential customers as possible, in order to truly understand their needs, and the performance metrics they are hoping to achieve. 

The incredible advancements in robotic technology over the past few years have opened up automation to a far wider range of industries and applications. Many of these are relatively new, with little in the way of prior models to emulate.

OEMs and SIs must be consultative and work closely with customers to achieve the best results. Patience is also a virtue, as the time it takes to specify, test, and install a robotic system in a new application can be very time consuming.

Tools like ABB’s RobotStudio offline simulation programming software is a valuable resource to test the design and performance of a potential robot system before any commitment is made.

What advice do you have for young robotics startups?

Make sure there is a viable market for your specific technology, and focus on becoming the best possible solution for companies that need what you have to offer. Seek to collaborate with end users in your target industry segment, and work with them to test and validate your offering.

Be nimble and flexible so you can quickly modify your technology as your earn more about what your potential customers want and need.

Cultivate a solid foundation of investors, but communicate a realistic growth and profitability schedule. Pursue product expansions only after you have fully refined your core technology and have established the infrastructure to support your growing customer base. 

What are you looking forward to about RoboBusiness?

I am looking forward to participating in the keynote panel with such an esteemed group of industry leaders, and I am eager to establish a rapport with them and the many other robot cognoscenti who will be attending the event.

I’m also excited to see the new technology concepts from both the startups and more advanced-stage entities that will be displaying their latest developments in the exhibit area. Though ABB is a long-tenured robot OEM, we continue to embrace an entrepreneurial spirit, and being among such robotics industry innovators for a couple of days will be inspiring!

Join ABB Robotics and more at RoboBusiness 2024

In addition to robotics innovation and enabling technologies, RoboBusiness will focuses on investment and business topics related to running a robotics company. Other keynotes at the event will feature:

• Rodney Brooks, co-founder and chief technology officer at Robust AI, as well as co-founder of iRobot and Rethink Robotics
• Sergey Levine, co-founder of Physical Intelligence and an associate professor at UC Berkeley
• Claire Delaunay, chief technology officer at farm-ng
• Torrey Smith, co-founder and CEO of Endiatx

RoboBusiness will also include more than 60 speakers, over 100 exhibitors and demos on the expo floor, 10+ hours of dedicated networking time, the Pitchfire Robotics Startup Competition, a Women in Robotics Luncheon, and more.

RoboBusiness will be co-located with DeviceTalks West, which focuses on the design and development of medical devices. Thousands of robotics practitioners from around the world will convene at the Santa Clara Convention Center, so register now to ensure your spot!

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The post ABB Robotics previews innovation drivers to be discussed at RoboBusiness appeared first on The Robot Report.

Premier Labs is a new venture studio with offices in Pittsburgh and Atlanta. Source: Premier Labs

While many startups come out of universities and search for problems to solve, another model is the “venture studio,” in which a company creates startups in response to customer needs. Premier Automation LLC today announced Premier Labs, a venture studio focused on building businesses that use proven automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence to address industry challenges.

Premier Automation is a systems integrator with more than three decades of experience enhancing productivity, efficiency, and worker safety across various industries. The company said it has worked with some of the world’s largest manufacturers and leading engineering companies.

Premier Labs will rely on the expertise of Premier Automation’s 150 employees in Monroeville, Pa., and Alpharetta, Ga., and its access to a diverse range of customers.

“Premier Automation has long been dedicated to advancing industries through innovative automation solutions,” said Mike Gunniers, president of Premier Automation. “Premier Labs furthers that commitment by creating commercial solutions to shape the future of industrial operations through automation, robotics, and AI.”

Venture studio model sees rapid growth

Corporate venture studios have seen significant growth of nearly 625% in recent years, said Premier Labs.

Joel Reed, former director of the Pittsburgh Robotics Network, is president of Premier Labs. Source: LinkedIn

“It’s a relatively new concept of the past five to 10 years,” said Joel Reed, president of Premier Labs. “Typically, early-stage venture firms pool capital to invest, but venture studios build startups from the ground up. They tend to be earlier in the life cycle than incubators or accelerators, serving as co-founders with larger equity share and control.”

The studio will provide start-up capital, in-house residency, and access to Premier Automation’s network of engineers, investors, and advisors.

“We provide valuable resources, beyond capital, that startups have had trouble accessing — market understanding, industry experience, and customer relationships,” Reed told The Robot Report. “We can start in Premier’s market segments and creating companies based on the pressing problems we hear from our daily interactions.”

Premier Automation has a history in drive systems for industrial motors, traditional industrial automation, and robotics, he noted.

Premier Labs will mostly use off-the-shelf components to avoid the lengthy research and development times that are a barrier to adoption.

“Integrators tend to build one-off systems based on a specific customer’s requirements,” explained Reed. “Premier Labs operates separate from Premier Automation with a solutions approach, allowing us to address problems shared across customer and market segments.”

“But we leverage the integrator mindset to use right resources, or proven technologies, for the right purpose, which is a more capital-efficient approach for us and our customers,” he added.

“We’re intensely focused on customer problems and the immediate value proposition,” Reed said. “We also don’t aim to automate everything in a workflow, allowing us to consider more practical solutions such as collaborative robotics.”

Premier Labs has customers in its pipeline

Premier Labs said it is already working on commercial opportunities in metals production, manufacturing controls, and food service.

“We’re not restricted by industry or application and may consider other industries such as logistics, retail, or any application that requires industrial-scale robotics,” said Reed. “We started with a robust pipeline from Premier Automation’s experiences. And we rely on a framework for capturing ideas and quickly validating product-market fit, which is a struggle for many startups..”

Premier Labs is looking to collaborate with U.S. manufacturing professionals looking to drive change, innovators seeking to commercialize a concept, and investors focused on industrial automation.

“Pittsburgh is a natural place for this to emerge from, in my experience,” Reed noted. “We have breadth and depth both in our technology and manufacturing communities.”

“And we are unified in helping bring robotics to industries that typically struggle to adopt new solutions,” he continued. “While we have a small team today, we will expand that nationally through stakeholder networks.”

“We’ve built an engaged network of advisors, and the enthusiasm for our approach has exceeded expectations,” stated Reed. “We aim to leverage Premier Automation’s connections and collaborate with leaders experienced in addressing industry challenges, focusing on founders and team leaders with relevant expertise.”

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The post Premier Automation launches Premier Labs, a venture studio for industrial robots and AI appeared first on The Robot Report.