Product Management Confabulation
What Product Managers are talking about.
The story of warehouse robotics is a story of attempting to keep up with Amazon. It’s been more than a decade since the online giant revolutionized its delivery services through its Kiva Systems acquisition. As Walmart works to remain competitive, it’s taking a more piecemeal approach to automation, through partnerships with a range of different […]
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Sanctuary AI announced that it will be delivering its humanoid robot to a Magna manufacturing facility. Based in Austria, Magna manufacturers and assembles cars for a number of Europe’s top automakers, including Mercedes, Jaguar and BMW. As is often the nature of these deals, the parties have not disclosed how many of Sanctuary AI’s robots […]
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Sometimes nature provides the best blueprints for building effective robots. It can also provide the best material. Billions of years of nature selection has built some pretty impressive machinery, so you can’t really blame engineers for borrowing a bit of inspiration from the world around them. In particular, the field of soft robotics — with […]
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Humanoids have sucked a lot of the air out of the room. It is, after all, a lot easier to generate press for robots that look and move like humans. Ultimately, however, both the efficacy and scalability of such designs have yet to be proven out. For a while now, Collaborative Robotics founder Brad Porter […]
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Robovision has raised $42M to industrialize deep learning tools and make them more accessible to businesses that are not tech companies at their core.
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Agility Robotics on Thursday confirmed that it has laid off a “small number” of employees. The well-funded Oregon-based firm says the job loss is part of a company-wide focus on commercialization efforts. “As part of Agility’s ongoing efforts to structure the company for success, we have parted ways with a small number of employees that […]
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Bay Area/Colombia-based delivery robotics firm Kiwibot this week announced that it has acquired Auto Mobility Solutions. The Taipei firm produces chips specifically for the world of robotics and autonomous driving. Details of the transaction have not been disclosed. Kiwi founder and CEO Felipe Chávez Cortés does, however, tell TechCrunch that rising tensions between the U.S. […]
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For every tech success story, there are countless projects that slam headlong into the brick wall of reality. Apple’s electric vehicle ambitions are one of the most recent — and, frankly, best — examples of a project failing in spite of seeming to have everything going for it. The jury is still out on the […]
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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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