Product Management Confabulation
What Product Managers are talking about.
Doing inventory sucks. I feel the need to reiterate this any time I discuss the topic here. Having performed a bit of it during my years of retail work, I can personally attest to the fact that it’s a mind-numbing bore. It is, therefore, a prime candidate for automation. After all, two of the main […]
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Agility’s Digit wasn’t the only humanoid holding court at Modex in Atlanta this week. On the opposite end of the Georgia World Congress Center, Reflex Robotics, a younger and smaller startup, was drawing its own crowd. The booth was centered on a single demo running throughout the week. Passersby requested something from the Reflex robot, […]
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Wander the Modex floor long enough and you’ll stumble on some wearable robotics. The category has nowhere near the presence of AMRs (autonomous mobile robots) or storage and retrieval systems, but exosuits are increasing in acceptance for their ability to eliminate the repetitive stress that comes with lifting and moving heavy loads all day. While […]
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“We’re fundamentally a software company,” Locus CEO Rick Faulk says with a laugh. We look like a robot company, but we’re actually a software company.” It’s a familiar refrain from companies whose most public-facing products are hardware. That’s certainly the case with Locus, which produces the best-known AMRs (autonomous mobile robots) not made by Amazon. […]
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LG Electronics may no longer be a household name in smartphones, but it still sees a big future in gadgets like robots. Today, the company confirmed a $60 million investment in Bear Robotics, the California startup that makes artificial intelligence-powered server robots for restaurants and other venues — autonomous tray towers on wheels that are […]
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Perhaps a few years from now, the halls of the Georgia World Congress Center will be peppered with humanoid robots the week of Modex. In 2024, however, Digit stands alone at the supply chain show. It’s a testament to Agility’s healthy head start over competitors like Figure, Tesla, 1X and Apptronik. This time last year […]
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Covariant this week announced the launch of RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1). Peter Chen, the cofounder and CEO of the U.C. Berkeley artificial intelligence spinout tells TechCrunch the platform, “is basically a large language model (LLM), but for robot language.” RFM-1 is the result of, among other things, a massive trove of data collected from […]
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In the beginning of 2021, Alphabet shuttered Loon. It was a familiar story within the annals of Google X history: an ambitious moonshot with tremendous upside that sputtered out prior to gaining any sort of meaningful traction after nearly a decade. “Despite Loon’s extraordinary technical progress,” X explains with a tinge of melancholy on the […]
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Ocean intelligence company Saildrone has just put the first of a new generation of Surveyor autonomous vessels in the water: an aluminum version that the Navy is keen to take advantage of. But don’t worry – they aren’t putting guns on them. Founder and CEO Richard Jenkins told TechCrunch that the demand for vessels like […]
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Amazon generate a lot of trash. Precisely how much is a matter of some debate. In 2021, the company says it used 214 million or so pounds of single-use plastic in its packaging. Nonprofit ocean conservation firm Oceana, on the other hand, put that figure at approximately ~700 million pounds. That’s a huge gulf, but […]
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