Humanoid robots face continued skepticism at Modex

If your robotics startup is looking to raise, there’s close to a 100% chance you’re going to get two questions from potential investors: 1) How are you incorporating generative AI? and 2) Have you consider building a humanoid? The first is easy enough to answer. If you’re running a robotics firm in 2024, you have […]

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Behold, TruckBot

One undeniable trend from this year’s Modex conference: suddenly everyone is into truck unloading. The past couple of years have gone from a few select companies to seemingly everyone in and around warehouse robotics looking to tackle the problem. Most solutions are some variation on a basic theme: a robotic arm attached to a mobile […]

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Cypher’s inventory drone launches from an autonomous mobile robot base

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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Reflex Robotics’ wheeled humanoid is here to grab you a snack

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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Verve Motion’s robot backpack helps workers lighten their load

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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Locus Robotics’ success is a tale of focusing on what works

“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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Bear Robotics, a robot waiter startup, just picked up $60M from LG

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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The loneliness of the robotic humanoid

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 is building ChatGPT for robots

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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AALTO seeks to democratize high-speed internet access through solar-powered drones

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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