Robotics roundup

Once again, your intrepid robotics reporter finds himself in the warm embrace of the Bay. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the warmest I was ever embraced was early summer in Santa Clara. I’m writing this from a juice place in Palo Alto (living the dream), having finished a pair of back-to-back meetings nearby. This week’s big…

You’ll have to forgive me, I spent most of the morning thinking and writing about VR. In the lead-up to Apple’s expected headset announcement at WWDC next week, I did a one-person crash course into the world of extended reality, from its birth in the laboratories in the ’50s and ’60s to the current crop…

First and most importantly: I finally hit Delta Silver Medallion for 2024, courtesy of last week’s trip back to the Bay. Like most of you, I came down with a bad case of wanderlust during the lockdown years and couldn’t wait to get back on the road. Suddenly I’m back to pre-pandemic work levels of…

I’m back in the South Bay this week, banging away at an introduction in the hotel lobby a few minutes before our crew heads to Shoreline for Google I/O. There’s a guy behind in a business suit and sockless loafers, taking a loud business meeting on his AirPods. It’s good to be home. I’ve got…

I’m heading back to the South Bay next week, thanks to Google I/O, which is coming back to the Shoreline Amphitheater. I honestly don’t expect much of anything related to this beat, though AI is going to be all over that thing. That’s hardly a new phenomenon, of course — previous developer conferences have showcased…

I wrote about half of last week’s Actuator on Wednesday in an empty office at MassRobotics after meeting with an early-stage startup. I’m not ready to tell you about them just yet, but they’re doing interesting work and have one of the wilder founding stories of recent vintage, so stay tuned for that. Also, shoutout…

Last fall, Alex and I discussed bringing back the TC+ robotics survey. I gave him the usual caveat: I’m into it, but it will have to wait until I can find the time. You know how these things go — you wake up one morning and somehow it’s five months later. I’ve got excuses if…

“Jidoka” is a new one to me. TRI (Toyota Research Institute) CEO Gill Pratt described the concept as “Automation with a Human Touch.” The anglicized version of the notion is “Autonomation” — both are modified forms of “ automation,” in their respective languages. The word was originally applied to Toyota’s Production System, highlighting the need…

The age-old question in my industry is, “Where are we in a given hype cycle?” For now, crypto news cycle dominance has, thankfully, died now, largely through its own self-destructive tendencies. FTX obviously served as the most prominent recent example of what happens when the tech community believes its own hype. You so badly wish…

A lot has happened in the half-year since we caught up with Ayanna Howard, dean of the Ohio State University’s College of Engineering — not all of it good. The broader economic slowdown has been deeply felt by the robotics industry, across the board, from the smallest startups to the biggest tech giants like Alphabet…

Before they were robots, they were “androids” or “automatons.” The word “robot” is commonly accepted as having arrived in English through — of all places — a Czech play. “R.U.R.” made its public debut in Prague 102 years ago, yesterday. It would arrive in the States a year and a half later, with Spencer Tracy…

I managed to squeeze the remaining vestiges out of CES 2023 in last week’s Actuator. The good news is that things are starting to pick up again like clockwork. If you’ve emailed me about work stuff in the past week, I apologize for the delay — I’ve been out of one frying pan and into…

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important robotics stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday at 11 a.m. PT, subscribe here. Welcome back to Actuator and happy first day of CES! This will never not feel weird to say – and not just because of the highly objective “happy” bit. One of the…

The phrase “mission creep” entered the popular discourse in the early to mid-1990s. It popped up in a number of big papers in articles describing the Somali Civil War. Here’s the New York Times in October ’93: The trick is to do this without inviting what a senior official called “mission creep” — the expansion…

What surprised me most on returning to Boston* for the first time since the onset of the pandemic was just how clustered things are. I’m not a great scheduler and I don’t know the city’s geography particularly well, but after two days spent meeting with more than a dozen startups, it slowly dawned on me…

Greetings from Cupertino, California, where the temperature has cooled down to a far more reasonable 101 degrees. It’s a nice change from the 109 degrees we hit here on Tuesday. I’m out here this week for the big Apple event. There was no robotics news to speak of, but that’s why we’re coming to you…

Monday is Labor Day here in the States. In most households, it’s come to mean one final three-day weekend to mark the end of the summer. It’s a bittersweet feeling that stirs up all sorts of back-to-school excitement/dread buried deep down inside my lizard brain. It’s neither surprising nor particularly upsetting that the day has…

One of the trickiest parts of this gig is setting realistic expectations. The job of writing about robots for a living is a bit of a balancing act between excited optimism and pragmatic realism. How do you temper the excitement of some of the world’s most fascinating technologies with reality’s inevitable encroachment? Covering robots in…

Allow me to borrow a phrase from baseball for a moment. If you follow the sport, you’re likely aware of the concept of the “three true outcomes.” They are, specifically, a home run, a strikeout, and a walk. The throughline between the three is that, in most instances, they’re not determined by the defense. There’s…

Shortly after the Amazon/iRobot news was announced on Friday morning, a colleague asked me if I was surprised. The short answer is yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the news dropped suddenly on what should have been a quiet Friday morning in August. No, in the sense that, of course Amazon is buying…

Yep, Actuator is coming to you a day early — mostly because it felt a bit weird to drop the robotics newsletter right in the middle of the robotics conference. Good news for everyone who’s sick of me telling you to SIGN UP FOR FREE RIGHT HERE: This is the last you’ll be hearing that…

We’re exactly a week out from TC Sessions: Robotics 2022. I’ve been sitting in on prep calls for the past month, and I feel confident in saying this is going to be the best and widest-ranging single-day robotics event. I’ve been helping plan events for various outlets for close to 15 years at this point,…

Maybe it’s the recent holiday weekend here in the U.S., or perhaps it’s the simple truth that we’re currently staring down the mid-summer doldrums, but holy moly, it’s been a slow week on the robotics news front. I know — you’re supposed to hook readers with a compelling first paragraph, but the truth is this…

Welp. Three straight weeks of work travel amid a seemingly endless pandemic finally caught up with me. Forgive me, as I’m writing this under the influence of green tea and antivirals, so thank you in advance to the regularly Herculean efforts of our copy editor, David. Apparently the old adage of things happening in Vegas…

Greetings from Las Vegas, where it’s 105 degrees outside, but it mostly doesn’t matter because you can’t figure out how to get outside. I’m here this week for my first-ever re:Mars. It’s wild being back in Vegas for the first time since January 2020, which hasn’t really changed but is somehow completely different. I’m here…

Greetings from Berkeley, California, where we’ve just wrapped up our first-ever Climate-focused event. It was slightly surreal being back on stage at Zellerbach Hall, given the last time I stepped foot in the building was a very different time, way back in March 2020. I’m writing to you from an extremely sunny sidewalk a few…

Yesterday, we officially announced one more big name for TC Sessions: Robotics. I’ll be speaking with Marty Walsh, the U.S. secretary of labor, at the July 21 event. It’s a bit of a curveball during a day focused on discussions with startups, VC and researchers, but it’s something I’ve been looking forward to discussing for…

If you’ve visited our site at all in recent months, you’re probably aware that we’ve got a couple of big events coming up. We’ll be in Berkeley in a couple of weeks for our first climate event, which will feature Amp Robotics CEO Matanya Horowitz discussing the role of automation in recycling/material reclamation. Super interesting…

Kicking things off this week with some data culled by the folks over at Crunchbase that’s very much in line with what we’ve been saying on Actuator all along. The past couple of years have been genuinely transformational for robotics. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the conversations I’ve been having with startups and VCs…

I know I keep teasing how excited I am about July’s big robotics event, but it’s precisely because of panels like the one we announced earlier this week. We’ve got Rodney Brooks and Clara Vu teaming up for a 2-on-1 fireside to discussing the changing face of human-robot interaction. It’s a big, broad and important…