Product Management Confabulation
What Product Managers are talking about.
There was nothing else like Digit on the ProMat floor last year. The manufacturing supply chain event has gradually morphed into a tech show in recent years. Many of the biggest names in the space were present, showcasing autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), bin picking arms and automated storage and retrieval systems. But Agility’s small army […]
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A 2021 study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78% of fruit production, 54% of vegetable production, and 32% of cereal production. At the same time, the way pesticides are delivered is not ideal: The only way to guarantee enough pesticide distribution is to spray too much. That isn’t great for […]
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As crucial as the ocean is to countless industries, we lack the kind of systematic knowledge of it that we have of the surface. Syrenna has built a versatile robotic platform that you might think of as a mobile weather station for the sea, and is ready to emerge from stealth to enable precise, real-time […]
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Today Figure confirmed long-standing rumors that it’s raising more money than God. The Bay Area–based robotics firm has announced a $675 million Series B on a $2.6 billion valuation. The lineup of investors is equally impressive, including Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Parkway Venture Capital, Intel […]
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When it was first unveiled in the summer of 2021, Xiaomi’s CyberDog designed was best described as a more nightmarish version of Boston Dynamics’ Spot. I had to comb through dozens of versions of the same Black Mirror joke on my timeline that day. Announced this past summer, CyberDog 2 looks a bit more friendly […]
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Uber, along with partners Mitsubishi Electric and autonomous robotics startup Cartken, are launching a service in Japan that will use self-driving sidewalk robots to deliver food to customers. The companies announced that the service offered through the Uber Eats app will launch in a select part of Tokyo by the end of March. An Uber […]
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Few categories are as ripe for automation-fueled disruption as construction. The industry is valued at around $2 trillion a year, in the U.S. alone. Much of that work is strenuous, repetitive and sometimes dangerous — precisely the sorts of problems industrial robotics are built to solve. The other thing construction brings is a wide range […]
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The road to the home robot is one fraught with peril. The number of success stories it’s delivered can be counted on a single hand. The reasons for this massive disconnect are nuanced and complex — much like the insides of our homes. Twenty-years after the first Roomba arrived, the robot vacuum has begun to […]
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It’s easy to lose track of the fact that robotics is as much a software problem as a hardware one. The programming understandably gets overshadowed by the alure of mechatronics, but without the proper software solution, you’ve got little more on your hands than an expensive paper weight. The road to widespread robotics adoption is […]
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There’s no such thing as a future-proof career. This is something I consider nearly any time I write about advances in generative AI. Is there a sense in which I’m contributing to the propagation of my eventual replacement? Probably! But don’t worry, that’s a me problem. As for you, my roboticist friend, you’ll be just […]
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