Performing humanoids, real robots doing real jobs, funding is down but manufacturing is back in the USA.
Discover more from Robots & Startups
Performing humanoids, real robots doing real jobs, funding is down but manufacturing is back in the USA.
Plus so many good papers, conferences and blogs! Here's a digest...
I think I better send out two newsletters this week because I have a lot of extra material fresh from the NSF about new programs and reviewing current research directions and performance benchmarking and extending ICorps etc. Also a few accelerator application deadlines coming up and I need more time to go through it all.
Big thank you to everyone who has become a paid subscriber - it makes you an angel investor in the work I do at Silicon Valley Robotics and as a startup advisor, and accelerator. And maybe we can do more to share your experience and expertize with the robotics startup community. Mentor Office Hours, maybe startup profiles. We’ll keep exploring.
Quick Reads:
Desi and Grace at ITU AI for Good Global Summit
Robots say they won’t steal our jobs, or rebel against humans - Reuters and CyberNews
UN recruits robots in strive to meet global development goals - Reuters
Meet the robots attending the UN’s ‘AI for Good Global’ Summit - TNW
US is building factories at a wildly fast rate - Business Insider
AI is making smart manufacturing faster, greener, virtual — and more real - VentureBeat
German Manufacturing Shrinks in June as Demand Weakens - Reuters
US Manufacturing slump deepens, factory gate price pressures subdued - Reuters
Inside the race to build an ‘operating system’ for generative AI - VentureBeat
The mounting human and environmental costs of generative AI - ArsTechnica
Inflection AI, The Year-Old Startup Behind Chatbot Pi, Raises $1.3 Billion - Forbes
Giving robots rights is a bad idea but Confucianism offers and alternative - SciTechDaily
Visual navigation to objects in real homes - Robohub
Navigating to Objects in the Real World - Theophilegervet.github.io
Self-Improving Robots: Embracing Autonomy in Robot Learning - SAILBlog
RVT: Robotic View Transformer for 3D Object Manipulation - NVIDIA
Takeaways from DeepMind’s RoboCat Paper - Eric Jang
Robot cleaning the shores of Lake Tahoe on Fourth of July - KTVU FOX 2
Fourth of July Trash at Lake Tahoe Beaches to be Cleaned Up By Robots - Mercury News
NASA tests first ever robotics moon rover in Mountain View - CBS News SF
Robot takes podium as orchestra conductor in South Korea - Reuters
As Others Burned Millions To Build Robot Restaurants, This Operator Automated His For Just $200k - Forbes
The world’s first robotics tea harvester - SFWeekly
AI comes to the farm: New technology tackles acres of weeds quickly by using robotics and lasers - FOX Business
Lidar remains the secret sauce for truly autonomous cars (despite what Musk says) - The Verge
Humans and AI Fight It Out in the Ring, via Robots: QIBBOT, the fastest teleoperated robot in the world, packs a punch - IEEE Spectrum
Venture capital funding plunges globally in first half despite AI frenzy - Reuters
SofBank Backs Telexistence Robot Startup - Bloomberg Technology
Robotics Events:
Learn about the next wave of industrial robotics at Disrupt’s Hardware Stage - Sept 19-21 in San Francisco - Early Bird Prices Rollback - Save up to $800 until July 5th
(plus Actuator says you save $600 till August 11 and save 15% on top of that with promo “ACTUATOR”)
Today at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2023 - workshops online including Datasets and Benchmarking Tools for Advancing and Evaluating Robotic Manufacturing and Forum to Develop an Open-Source Ecosystem for Robotic Manipulation
July 11-12 - VB Transform: Get Ahead of the Generative AI Revolution - VentureBeat (I have some tickets to give away)
Sep 19-21 - FIRA USA Salinas: Robotics and Autonomous Farming Solutions - FIRA
Sep 28 - The Autonomous Systems Showcase - Deep Tech Showcase
Oct 1-5 - IROS in Detroit - IEEE RAS
IROS is calling for demos - and so is Hello Robot.
Hello Robot is going to have multiple Stretches at IROS and we'd love to see some cool work from our community demonstrated at the Expo! We plan to make a few robots available for community members who would like to showcase their research at IROS, but aren't able to bring their own robots with them.
Demo submissions are due July 15 - if you'd be interested in using one of our robots to participate, please reach out to us as soon as you can!
Cool Robots:
Actobotics Sunset Sale at ServoCity
The end of Actobotics means amazing deals—we’re offering 60% OFF on ALL Actobotics while supplies last! Get the solutions your project needs before they’re gone!
OpenMV is about to go into production with the Cam RT1060 and IDE 4.0.0 and ramping up business after Embark Trucks Shutdown and Merge with Applied Intuition - OpenMV
Deeper Reads:
Far from replacing us, AI and robots actually increases the demand for human labour - Says Law of Economics in Discourse Magazine
On the Decentralization of Robotics (A Story about Trouts, Magic Seeds, and Spidey Senses, Naturally) - Patrick Meier
(And here’s the paper referenced in the article above)
The morphological paradigm in robotics - Sascha Freyberg, Helmut Hauser in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science