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

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 int

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 lockdo

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

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 g

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 d

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 —

“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 “Aut

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 tende

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 d

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

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 stuf

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 CE

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

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 geograp

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

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-

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 d

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,

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