rethink robotics

Here’s everything you missed at TC Sessions: Robotics 2022

In case you missed it, robots took over TechCrunch on Thursday, July 21. We played host to the robotic industry’s leading startups, researchers and academics at TC Sessions: Robotics. The event

Harmonizing human-robot interactions for a ‘new and weird’ world of work

Robots have always found it a challenge to work with people and vice versa. Two people on the cutting edge of improving that relationship joined us for TC Sessions: Robotics to talk about the present

Rodney Brooks and Clara Vu will discuss human-robot interaction at TC Sessions: Robotics 2022

Robots have transformed automation across industries such as agtech, automotive, logistics, manufacturing and warehousing. Yet even the most advanced robots typically work in restricted workcells away

Robust.AI raises a $15M Series A to improve problem solving for collaborative robots

Robust.AI today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A, led by Jazz Venture Partners. Existing partners Playground Global, Liquid2, Fontinalis, Jaan Tallinn and Mark Leslie also participa

Researchers explore sound to help improve robotic perception

Robots primarily rely on two basic senses: vision and touch. But even the latter still has a long way to go to get up to the speed with the former. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are lookin

Remembering the startups we lost in 2018

There are few things in this world more difficult than launching a successful startup. It takes talent, know-how, money and a hell of a lot of good timing and luck. And even with all of those magical

Universal Robots snags 20 Rethink refugees after bot maker goes belly up

A mind is a terrible thing to waste, they say, and in the aftermath of Rethink Robotics shutting down last month there were plenty of good minds looking avoid that fate. Fortunately Universal Robots h

Rethink Robotics closes after acquisition plans fall through

I’ve said it right here on these very pages: If hardware is hard, robotics are next to impossible. That truism is not better exemplified by this week’s closure of Rethink Robotics. A well-respecte
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Teaching robots to learn how to learn

Several of Rethink’s Sawyer robotics are crammed into a small corner of a lab at UC Berkeley’s S

Artificial intelligence is not as smart as you (or Elon Musk) think

DeepMind's AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the best human Go player in the world. It was a defining technological moment not unlike IBM's Deep Blue beating chess champion Garry Kasparov, or IBM Watson beatin

This famous roboticist doesn’t think Elon Musk understands AI

Earlier this week, at the campus of MIT, TechCrunch had the chance to sit down with famed roboticist Rodney Brooks, the founding director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence La

Teaching robots to learn about the world through touch

Slowly, but surely, the Baxter robot is learning. It starts as a series of random grasps — the big, red robot pokes and prods clumsily at objects on the table in front of it. The robot is learning t

‘A robot doesn’t have to shoot back,’ Rodney Brooks says of machines in the military

Rethink Robotics co-founder and CTO, former CSAIL director and all-around robot luminary Rodney Brooks joined the Disrupt New York stage this afternoon to tackle some complex questions, ranging from r

Rethink Robotics and iRobot founder Rod Brooks is coming to Disrupt NY

In 1997, robotic scientist Rodney Brooks predicted a future where sensors and robots would be pervasive, and people could simply tell a door to open. His prognostication has come to pass. Brooks will

Rethink Robotics makes its workplace bots easier to train and redeploy

Robots are invaluable tools in the workplace, but they often still require a specialist to train in anything more than elementary tasks. Rethink Robotics is helping improve that situation with a power

Rethink Robotics, Home Of Baxter, Brings A New Robot Arm To The Party

Remember Baxter, the robotic arm with a smiling face that you can teach to do simple, repeatable tasks? Well he has a little brother! Rethink Robotics’ Sawyer is a smaller, lighter Baxter with a