Product Management Confabulation
What Product Managers are talking about.
Robots made their stage debut the day after New Year’s 1921. More than half-a-century before the world caught its first glimpse of George Lucas’ droids, a small army of silvery humanoids took to the stages of the First Czechoslovak Republic. They were, for all intents and purposes, humanoids: two arms, two legs, a head — […]
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Agricultural robotics are not a new phenomenon. We’ve seen systems that pick apples and berries, kill weeds, plant trees, transport produce and more. But while these functions are understood to be the core features of automated systems, the same thing is true here as it is across technology: It’s all about the data. A huge […]
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The snake robot form factor has existed for decades. In addition to the diversity it adds to the world of automation, the design has several pragmatic attributes. The first is redundancy, which allows for the system to keep chugging even after a module is damaged. The second is a body that makes it possible for […]
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Since the last time we spoke, Viam didn’t pivot exactly, according to founder and CEO Eliot Horowitz — it’s more of a “rebrand.” Roughly six months ago, the Manhattan-based startup made a concerted effort to broaden its focus. The no-code development platform previously focused its outreach on robotics firms. It’s a large and rapidly expanding […]
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There are countless reasons why home robots have found little success post-Roomba. Pricing, practicality, form factor and mapping have all contributed to failure after failure. Even when some or all of those are addressed, there remains the question of what happens when a system makes an inevitable mistake. This has been a point of friction […]
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The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) this week announced the launch of the similarly named Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA). The new initiative is designed to maintain development for and maintenance of open source robotics projects, with a particular focus on the OSRF’s own robot operating system (ROS). First released in 2007 by erstwhile Bay […]
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Los Angeles-based Gitai said Tuesday that its autonomous robotic arm has nailed a tech demonstration outside the International Space Station. Gitai CEO Sho Nakanose told TechCrunch in an interview last year that the company aims to reduce in-space labor costs by 100 times, in the same way that SpaceX and other providers have dramatically reduced […]
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It’s tough to argue with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang when he notes, “Building foundation models for general humanoid robots is one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today.” The humanoid form factor is one of the most hotly contested topics in the world of robotics at the moment, raising venture capital by […]
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It’s extremely heartening to see our little list effectively double since the last time we did one of these. While it’s true that layoffs continue to plague the tech industry at large, there are few better fields to be expert in at the moment than Robotics and AI. With more than 60 entries this week, […]
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Pilot season has officially begun for the world of humanoid robotics. Last year, Amazon began testing Agility’s Digit robots in select fulfillment centers, while this January, Figure announced a deal with BMW. Now Apptronik is getting in on the action, courtesy of a partnership with Mercedes-Benz. According to the Austin-based robotics startup, “as part of […]
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