Left: Vivian Chu and Andrea Thomaz, the co-founders of Diligent Robotics; right: Kathleen Brandes and Ros Shinkle, the co-founders of Adagy Robotics. | Sources: Diligent Robotics, Adagy Robotics

Almost half of all startups that began in 2021 were formed by women, according to human resources cloud software company Gusto. Within the robotics industry, however, it’s a different story. Women make up only 34% of the STEM workforce, according to the National Girls Collaborative Project, and they hold only 16% of robotics and engineering roles. 

Those numbers, however, don’t tell us how many women start robotics companies. There isn’t a lot of data about the number of startups that begin every year or how many robotics companies are operating, in general. Let alone about the backgrounds of the founders behind them. 

To get a picture of how many women are founders of robotics companies, I combed through our 2024 February and March funding recaps. Of the 78 robotics companies that raised money during those two months, and whose founders could be identified, only 10 had a woman on their founding team, just 12.8%.

Of course, this metric doesn’t tell us how many robotics companies in general have female founders, but it does give us a better idea of what that breakdown might look like. This is why I spoke to Ros Shinkle and Kathleen Brandes, the founders of Adagy Robotics, and Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu, the founders of Diligent Robotics, about their experiences within the industry. 

Founders talk about the early days of a startup

Diligent and Adagy are in two very different places as companies. Adagy launched earlier this year, and it specializes in remote intervention services. Shinkle and Brandes are at the beginning of their journey as founders and are part of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator. They’re currently the only employees of the company. 

“Adagy Robotics is currently a remote intervention service for rescuing robots,” said Brandes, the company’s chief technology officer (CTO).

“For example, when a tractor robot fails in the field, instead of calling out to the farmer who has a lot more important things to do in his day, that tractor robot can now call out to our trained operators,” she said. “They’ll take over, drive the robot to safety, and allow it to resume its autonomous operations.”

Adagy looks to a future with AI

Today, Adagy Robotics is starting out with fully human-driven operations, said Shinkle, CEO. In the future, however, the company is interested in layering machine learning and generative AI techniques to assist human operators and allow them to do their jobs more efficiently. The company is also exploring error-prevention techniques for robots. 

“We’re really excited about logistics and manufacturing right now,” Shinkle said. “In particular, I think AMRs [autonomous mobile robots] are widely used in logistics. And although they’re widely used, they still continue to face the same kinds of problems.”

“For example, they often rely on these sort of dense visual clues called fiducials or APR tags to help localize in a facility,” she noted. “If one of those is scuffed or torn or falls down, the robots can get lost. This is a great example of a situation in which we could come in and help the robots get back safely. We’re also excited about manipulation and failed picking tasks as well.”

Shinkle and Brandes described the early days of running a startup as challenging but fun. Every day is about putting out the most urgent fire, said Shinkle.

Ros Shinkle and Kathleen Brandes, the founders of Adagy Robotics, met at Boston Dynamics. Source: Y Combinator

Bringing a startup to maturity 

On the other hand, Diligent Robotics was founded in 2017. Like many robotics companies, Diligent started in a research lab. Thomaz, the company’s co-founder and CEO, was running a robotics lab that Chu, its co-founder and CTO, joined as a Ph.D. student in 2012.

The start of the company was slow, Thomaz said. She was still a professor and Chu a graduate student. Tomaz’s lab earned two National Science Foundation grants that gave Tomaz and Chu the opportunity to learn from around 150 people in the healthcare industry. 

“I don’t know that we would have been able to start this company as two men,” Thomaz said. “Because the thing that we did, for two years at least, was go and embed ourselves in nursing teams, with a robot, and ask nurses, who are 80% women, ‘What would you have this robot do?’”

“I’m not sure we would have been as accepted in that community as a couple of guys with their robot,” she continued. 

Once they had found a use case that would address the needs of the industry, Thomaz and Chu said they spent a summer pitching and looking for venture capital. In total, Thomaz said they spent a year and a half in the research stage before officially launching the company.

Last year, Diligent hit 90 robots working in the field. Its flagship robot, Moxi, aids hospital staffers by performing non-patient-facing tasks like running supplies, delivering lab samples, fetching items from a central supply, distributing personal protective equipment (PPE), and delivering medications. Moxi is now opening 100,000 doors every month across its various deployments.

Diligent is dedicated to diversity

As Diligent Robotics has grown, Thomaz and Chu said they’ve actively tried to keep the company diverse. 

“Early on, we recognized that it’s not only important to have a diverse team, but to have a diverse team at all levels,” Thomaz said. “It’s really good to make sure that your most junior people aren’t the most diverse, and then your more senior people are all one type of person.”

Chu also said the team focused on making job postings well-known among all intersections of the robotics community, instead of just relying on the applications that passively came in. Shinkle echoed similar sentiments when talking about building Adagy’s team as it grows. 

“We believe that diversity is a strength,” Shinkle said. “Diversity of background and diversity of thought leads to stronger problem solving, so that’s definitely a closely held company belief.” 

Female founders find community within the industry 

All four of the women I spoke to both emphasized the importance of finding mentors and a community within the industry. 

“One thing that’s been really helpful is the amazing community, unity, and friendship that women have within the industry,” Brandes said. “We’ve become great friends and are now starting a company together, as one example. And I think fostering that community and having that community continue to grow and expand has been a big component.” 

“For me, it was fantastic seeing these role models that blaze through all of the stereotypes,” Chu said. “It really gives me the confidence to do the same.”

“I’ve had friends that obviously didn’t have that experience, and it’s hard hearing what they’ve had to go through,” she acknolwedged. “I’ve been very lucky to have some amazing champions throughout a lot of my career.” 

The founders also had advice to share with women who are considering starting a robotics company. 

“Reach out to as many people for advice as possible, because there’s so many that have gone through the startup journey,” Chu said. “If you collect a wide variety of people that you can reach out to … you can just continually ask questions.”

“My advice would be to just do it,” Brandes said. “Be confident that your are strong enough and successful enough to do this.” 

“I think robotics is a great place for female leadership,” Thomaz said. “Historically, there’s been a lot of really great trailblazers, and some people who’ve really defined the field like Manuela Veloso and Maya Tarik, and there are a bunch of other people that I’m not naming.”

“But I think that in and of itself makes robotics a great place for women to lead the way in commercialization as well,” she concluded. “It’s a big, broad systems-level problem, which I think requires a diverse solution, and so that’s ripe for a really diverse team.”

Editor’s note: The Robotics Summit & Expo this week will be hosting a Women in Robotics Breakfast and the MassRobotics Engineering Career Fair, among other networking events.

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Advanced Navigation’s Hydrus micro autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) deployed. | Source: Advanced Navigation

Advanced Navigation is bringing humans closer to the ocean with Hydrus, a relatively small underwater drone. The company recently sent Hydrus to the depths of the Rottnest ship graveyard, located in the Indian Ocean and just off the coast of Western Australia. 

The Sydney, Australia-based developer of AI robotics and navigation technology said that upon seeing the gathered data, the team discovered a 210-ft. (64-m) shipwreck scattered across the sea floor. This means the wreck was more than twice the size of a blue whale. 

“We’ve found through all of our testing that Hydrus is very reliable, and it will complete its mission and come to the surface or come to its designated return point,” Alec McGregor, Advanced Navigation’s photogrammetry specialist, told The Robot Report. “And then you can just scoop it up with a net from the side of the boat.”

Robot can brave the ocean’s unexplored depths

Humans have only explored and charted 24% of the ocean, according to Advanced Navigation. The unexplored parts are home to more than 3 million undiscovered shipwrecks, and 1,819 recorded wrecks are lying off Western Australia’s shore alone.

These shipwrecks can hold keys to our understanding of past culture, history, and science, said the company.

The Rottnest graveyard is a particularly dense area for these abandoned ships. Beginning in the 1900s, the area became a burial ground for ships, naval vessels, aircraft, and secretive submarines. A majority of these wrecks haven’t been discovered because the depth ranges from 164 to 656 ft. (50 to 200 m). 

Traditionally, there are two ways of gathering information from the deep sea, explained McGregor. The first is divers, who have to be specially trained to reach the depths Advanced Navigation is interested in studying. 

“Some of the wrecks that we’ve been looking at are in very deep water, so 60 m [196.8 ft.] for this particular wreck, which is outside of the recreational diving limit,” McGregor said. “So, you actually have to go into tech diving.”

“And when you go deeper with all of this extra equipment, it tends to just increase the risks associated with going to depth,” he said. “So, you need to have special training, you need to have support vessels, and you also have to be down in the water for a long period of time.”

The second option is to use remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) or autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). While this method doesn’t involve putting people at risk, it can still be expensive. 

“Some of the drawbacks with using traditional methods include having to have big support vessels,” McGregor said. “And getting the actual ROVs in and out of the water sometimes requires a crane, whereas with the Hydrus, you can just chuck it off the side of the boat.”

“So, with Hydrus, you’re able to reduce the costs of operation,” he added. “You’re also able to get underwater data super easily and super quickly by just chucking a Hydrus off the boat. It can be operated with one person.”

Advanced Navigation uses ‘wet electronics’

One of the biggest challenges with underwater robotics, McGregor said, is keeping important electronics dry. Conventional ROVs do this with pressure chambers. 

“Traditional ROVs have big chambers which basically keep all the electronics dry,” he noted. “But from a mechanical point of view, if you want to go deeper, you need to have thicker walls so that they can resist the pressure at depth.”

“If you need thicker walls, that increases the weight of the robot,” said McGregor. “And if you increase the weight, but you still want the robot to be buoyant, you have to increase the size. It’s just this kind of spiral of increasing the size to increase the buoyancy.”

“What we’ve managed to do with Hydrus is we have designed pressure-tolerant electronics, and we use a method of actually having what we call ‘wet electronics,'” McGregor said. “This involves basically potting the electronics in a plastic material. And we don’t use it to keep the structural integrity of the robot. So we don’t need a pressure vessel because we’ve managed to protect our electronics that way.” 

Once it’s underwater, Hydrus operates fully autonomously. Unlike traditional ROVs, the system doesn’t require a tether to navigate underwater, and the Advanced Navigation team has limited real-time communication capabilities. 

“We do have very limited communication with Hydrus through acoustic communications,” McGregor said. “The issue with acoustic communications is that there’s not a lot of data that can be transferred. We can get data such as the position of Hydrus, and we can also send simple commands such as ‘abort mission’ or ‘hold position’ or ‘pause mission,’ but we can’t physically control it.”

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Hydrus provides high-resolution data

While Hydrus has impressive autonomous capabilities, it doesn’t find wrecks all on its own. In this case, McGregor said, Advanced Navigation worked closely with the Western Australian (WA) Museum to find the wreck.

The museum gave the company a rough idea of where a shipwreck could be. Then the team sent Hydrus on a reconnaissance mission to determine the wreck’s exact location. 

“When we got Hydrus back on board, we were able to offload all the data and reconstruct the mission based on the images and from that, we were then able to see where the shipwreck was,” McGregor said. “One of the good things about Hydrus is that we can actually get geo-referenced data onto the water with auxiliary systems that we have on the boat.”

Hydrus gathered 4K geo-referenced imagery and video footage. Curtin University HIVE, which specializes in shipwreck photogrammetry, used this data to rebuild a high-resolution 3D digital twin of the wreck. Ross Anderson, a curator at the WA Museum, closely examined the digital twin. 

Anderson found that the wreck was an over 100-year-old coal hulk from Fremantle Port’s bygone days. Historically, these old iron ships were used to service steamships in Western Australia. 

In the future, the team is interested in exploring other shipwrecks, like the SS Koombana, an ultra-luxury passenger ship. The ship ferried more than 150 passengers before it vanished into a cyclone in 1912.

However, Advanced Navigation isn’t just interested in gaining information from shipwrecks. 

“Another thing we’re doing with a lot of this data is actually coral reef monitoring. So we’re making 3D reconstructions of coral reefs, and we’re working with quite a few customers to do this,” McGregor said.  

Hydrus reduced the surveying costs for this particular mission by up to 75%, according to the company. This enabled the team to conduct more frequent and extensive surveying of the wreck in a shorter period of time. 

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Bota offers vision systems intended to allow robots to work and move safety. | Source: Bota Systems

Bota Systems will exhibit its recently unveiled sensors featuring a through-hole flange design and enhanced cable management at the Robotics Summit & Expo. The company can be found in Booth 315 on the event’s show floor.

“During the Robotics Summit, we will showcase our complete range of sensors at our booth, and we invite you to experience these sensors in action,” Marco Martinaglia, vice president of marketing at Bota Systems, told The Robot Report. “You’ll see a live demonstration of inertia compensation with a handheld device, and a Mecademic Robot equipped with our cutting-edge MiniONE Pro six-axis sensor will perform automated assembly and deburring tasks.”

The company said it designed its latest sensors for humanoids, industrial, and medical robots. It claimed that they can improve functions in fields such as welding and minimally invasive surgeries.

Bota Systems added that its force-torque sensors can give robots a sense of touch, enabling them to accurately and reliably perform tasks that were previously only possible with manual operators.

Bota Systems designs for ease of integration

“We are particularly excited to have just announced the release of our latest sensor, the PixONE,” said Ilias Patsiaouras, co-founder and chief technology officer of Bota Systems.

“The PixONE sensor’s innovative hollow shaft design allows it to be seamlessly integrated between the robot’s arm and the end-of-arm tooling [EOAT], maintaining the integrity of internal cable routing,” he added. “This design is particularly advantageous as many robotic arm manufacturers and OEMs are moving towards internal routing to eliminate cable tangles and motion restrictions.”

Bota Systems is an official distribution and integration partner of Universal Robots and Mecademic.

In October 2023, the company added NEXT Robotics to its distributor network. NEXT is now its official distributor for the German-speaking countries of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. That same month, Bota Systems raised $2.5 million in seed funding.

See sensors at the Robotics Summit & Expo

“Our vision is to equip robots with the sense of touch, making them not only safer and more user-friendly, but also more collaborative,” Klajd Lika, co-founder and CEO of Bota Systems, told The Robot Report. “We look forward to the Robotics Summit and Expo because it brings together the visionaries and brightest minds of the industry — this interaction is valuable for us to shape the development of our next generation of innovative sensors,” 

This will be the largest Robotics Summit & Expo ever. It will include more than 200 exhibitors, various networking opportunities, a Women in Robotics breakfast, a career fair, an engineering theater, a startup showcase, and more. Registration is now open for the event.

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Locus says its systems are now involved in picking 6 million to 7 million units per day. | Source: Locus Robotics

Locus Robotics Corp. today announced that it has surpassed 3 billion total picks across its global customer deployments. The company reached this milestone just 33 weeks after it recorded its 2 billionth pick. It claimed that the achievement underscores its continued rapid growth and solidifies its position as a leader in autonomous robotics automation for the warehouse. 

The Wilmington, Mass.-based company said its 3 billionth pick was a Carhartt T-shirt. The pick occurred at a Carhartt facility in Hanson, Ky. Just milliseconds later, other items were picked at more than 300 Locus customer sites around the world. 

“Surpassing 3 billion picks across our global deployments is a significant milestone that reflects the trust our customers have placed in our innovative robotics solutions,” stated Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics. “As we continue to push the boundaries of innovation, we remain focused on our mission to revolutionize the supply chain industry and empower our customers to drive operational efficiencies and productivity gains in order to thrive in an increasingly complex and demanding fulfillment landscape.”

Founded in 2014, Locus Robotics provides autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) that collaborate with human pickers to increase warehouse efficiency. Locus serves the retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and third-party logistics (3PL) industries and offers a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model.

Locus continues to ramp up operations

It took nearly seven years for Locus to reach its first billion picks. Since then, the company’s growth has accelerated rapidly. It reached 2 billion picks just 11 months later, and now 3 billion just 33 weeks later. Locus received a 2024 RBR50 award for hitting 2 billion picks. 

“I first saw a demo of the Locus bots the year the company was founded. I instantly understood the potential this system had,” said Steve Banker, vice president of supply chain services at ARC Advisory Group. “Their impressive growth trajectory is a clear indication of the value their proven solutions bring to customers, enabling them to improve productivity, lower costs, and stay ahead of the competition.”

During the 2023 peak holiday season, LocusBots picked more than 331 million units. This is a 66% increase compared with the 2022 peak holiday season. In all of 2023, Locus picked a total of 1.2 billion units, an 82% increase over the previous year. 

As the industry continues to evolve, Locus Robotics said it remains committed to driving innovation and delivering cutting-edge robotics systems that enable its customers to scale and meet growing demand. The company asserted that its focus on research and development ensures it is well-positioned to continue to grow rapidly. 

Despite its growth, Locus has also seen some recent setbacks. In January, the company confirmed it had a “small, targeted RIF,” or reduction in force. It did not specify how many employees were affected by the layoffs. Faulk said that Locus overhired and overestimated how much business it would get after the COVID-19 peak. 

Locus Robotics at the Robotics Summit

Sean Pineau, head of 3PL segments at Locus Robotics, will be speaking at the Robotics Summit & Expo, which takes place on May 1 and 2 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Pineau will present a session on “AI in the Warehouse: What You Really Need to Know” at 1:45 p.m. ET on Wednesday, May 1. He will discuss the considerations and potential benefits and impacts of implementing AI in the warehouse.

Locus will also take part in the RBR50 Showcase in Booth 448 on the show floor. The showcase will feature current and past RBR50 winners and their innovations. 

The 2024 Robotics Summit & Expo will be the largest ever, according to WTWH Media, which also produces Mobile Robot Guide and The Robot Report. It will include up to 5,000 attendees, more than 200 exhibitors, various networking opportunities, a Women in Robotics breakfast, a career fair, an engineering theater, a startup showcase, and more! Registration is now open for the event.

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Project CETI is a nonprofit scientific and conservation initiative that aims to decode whale communications. | Source: Project CETI

Off the idyllic shores of Dominica, a country in the Caribbean, hundreds of sperm whales gather deep in the sea. While their communication sounds like a series of clicks and creaks to the human ear, these whales have unique, regional dialects and even accents. A multidisciplinary group of scientists, led by Project CETI, is using soft robotics, machine learning, biology, linguistics, natural language processing, and more to decode their communications. 

Founded in 2020, Project CETI, or the Cetacean Translation Initiative, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to listening to and translating the communication systems of sperm whales. The team is using specially created tags that latch onto whales and gather information for the team to decode. Getting these tags to stay on the whales, however, is no easy task. 

“One of our core philosophies is we could never break the skin. We can never draw blood. These are just our own, personal guidelines,” David Gruber, the founder and president of Project CETI, told The Robot Report. 

“[The tags] have four suction cups on them,” he said. “On one of the suction cups is a heart sensor, so you can get the heart rate of the whale. There’s also three microphones on the front of it, so you hear the whale that it’s on, and you can know the whales that’s around it and in front of it.

“So you’ll be able to know from three different microphones the location of the whales that are speaking around it,” explained Gruber. “There’s a depth sensor in there, so you can actually see when the whale was diving and so you can see the profiles of it going up and down. There’s a temperature sensor. There’s an IMU, and it’s like a gyroscope, so you can know the position of the whale.”

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Finding a humane way to tag whales

One of the core principles of Project CETI, according to Gruber, is to use technology to bring people closer to animals. 

“There was a quote by Stephen Hawking in a BBC article, in which he posited that the full development of AI and robotics would lead to the extinction of the human race,” Gruber said. “And we thought, ‘This is ridiculous, why would scientists develop something that would lead to our own extinction?’ And it really inspired us to counter this narrative and be like, ‘How can we make robots that are actually very gentle and increase empathy?’”

“In order to deploy those tags onto whales, what we needed was a form of gentle, stable, reversible adhesion,” Alyssa Hernandez, a functional morphologist, entomologist, and biomechanist on the CETI team, told The Robot Report. “So something that can be attached to the whale, where it would go on and remain on the whale for a long amount of time to collect the data, but still be able to release itself eventually, whether naturally by the movements of the whale, or by our own mechanism of sort of releasing the tag itself.”

This is what led the team to explore bio-inspired techniques of adhesion. In particular, the team settled on studying suction cups that are common in marine creatures. 

“Suction discs are pretty common in aquatic systems,” said Hernandez. “They show up in multiple groups of organisms, fish, cephalopods, and even aquatic insects. And there are variations often on each of these discs in terms of the morphology of these discs, and what elements these discs have.”

Hernandez was able to draw on her biology background to design suction-cup grippers that would work particularly well on sperm whales that are constantly moving through the water. This means the suction cup would have to withstand changing pressures and forces. They can stay on a whale’s uneven skin even when it’s moving. 

“In the early days, when we first started this project, the question was, ‘Would the soft robots even survive in the deep sea?’” said Gruber. 

An overview of Project CETI’s mission. | Source: Project CETI

How suction cup shape changes performance

“We often think of suction cups as round, singular material elements, and in biology, that’s not usually the case,” noted Hernandez. “Sometimes these suction disks are sort of elongated or slightly different shaped, and oftentimes they have this sealing rim that helps them keep the suction engaged on rough surfaces.”

Hernandez said the CETI team started off with a standard, circular suction cup. Initially, the researchers tried out multiple materials and combinations of stiff backings and soft rims. Drawing on her biology experience, Hernandez began to experiment with more elongated, ellipse shapes. 

“I often saw [elongated grippers] when I was in museums looking at biological specimens or in the literature, so I wanted to look at an ellipse-shaped cup,” Hernandez said. “So I ended up designing one that was a medium-sized ellipse, and then a thinner ellipse as well. Another general design that I saw was more of this teardrop shape, so smaller at one end and wider at the base.” 

Hernadez said the team also looked at peanut-shaped grippers. In trying these different shapes, she looked for one that would provide increased resistance over the more traditional circular suction cups. 

“We tested [the grippers] on different surfaces of different roughness and different compliance,” recalled Hernandez. “We ended up finding that compared to the standard circle, and variations of ellipses, this medium-sized ellipse performed better under shear conditions.” 

She said the teardrop-shaped gripper also performed well in lab testing. These shapes performed better because, unlike a circle, they don’t have a uniform stiffness throughout the cup, allowing them to bend with the whale as it moves. 

“Now, I’ve modified [the suction cups] a bit to fit our tag that we currently have,” Hernandez said. “So, I have some versions of those cups that are ready to be deployed on the tags.”

Project CETI uses drones to monitor sperm whale movements and to place the tags on the whales. | Source: Project CETI

Project CETI continues iterating

The Project CETI team is actively deploying its tags using a number of methods, including having biologists press them onto whales using long poles, a method called pole tagging, and using drones to press the tags onto the whales. 

Once they’re on the whale, they stay on for anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Once they fall off, the CETI team has a mechanism that allows them to track the tags down and pull all of the gathered data off of them. CETI isn’t interested in making tags that can stay on the whales long-term, because sperm whales can travel long distances in just a few days, and it could hinder their ability to track the tags down once they fall off. 

The CETI team said it plans to continue iterating on the suction grippers and trying new ways to gently get crucial data from sperm whales. It’s even looking into tags that would be able to slightly crawl to different positions on the whale to gather information about what the whale is eating, Gruber said. The team is also interested in exploring tags that could recharge themselves. 

“We’re always continuing to make things more and more gentle, more and more innovative,” said Gruber. “And putting that theme forward of how can we be almost invisible in this project.”

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Version 1.0 of the EELS robot during field testing in Alberta, Canada, in September 2023. | Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In a collaboration that was 17 years in the making, Carnegie Mellon University, or CMU, researchers worked with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to create an autonomous snake-like robot. The Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor, or EELS, is a self-propelled robot. NASA scientists said they hope to use EELS to search for signs of life in the ocean beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s Enceladus moon.

EELS was developed at NASA’s JPL with collaboration from Carnegie Mellon, Arizona State University, and the University of California, San Diego. Howie Choset, CMU’s Kavčić-Moura Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computer Science, Matt Travers, a senior systems scientist at the school’s Robotics Institute (RI), and Andrew Orekhov, a project scientist in the RI, contributed to the project. 

The resulting robot can navigate extreme terrains, including ice, sand, rocks, cliff walls, deep craters, underground lava tubes, and glaciers. The CMU team developed the controllers for the robot. In addition, an early prototype used modules developed by HEBI Robotics, a university spinout that Choset founded in 2014. 

“Enceladus is essentially covered with water,” Choset told The Robot Report. “But it’s underneath the rock that forms the moon. In the South Pole, the rock and ice are about 2 km [1.2 mi.] thick, and there are geysers that spit the water out from the underground ocean into space. So, there’s a belief that if you fly a spacecraft to Enceladus, land, and then get into the geysers, you may be able to swim in this extraterrestrial ocean.” 

EELS snake robot built for space applications

“So, we’ve been working on snake robots for a very long time,” Choset said. “And what’s nice about snake robots in general, is they can use their many joints and their slender physique to thread through tightly packed volumes and get to locations that people in machinery otherwise can’t access.”

This makes snake robots good for many applications, including search and rescue, he said. In this case, EELS will use these capabilities to wriggle into cracks in Enceladus’ layer of ice. EELS stands out from other snake robots because of its “wheels.” These wheels look more like corkscrews than traditional wheels, said Choset. 

“When those corkscrews rotate, they kind of penetrate the ice a little bit, but also gives the mechanism the ability to roll forward,” he explained. “So the robot has the ability to propel itself, not only with the snake-like motion but also these corkscrew wheels that allow it to traverse icy surfaces really quickly.” 

Choset said these wheels will help the robot to better move across ice until it can find a crack or geyser hole to crawl into.

“The autonomy that we developed is the robot’s ability to get into a tight space, and then use the constraints of that tight space to propel itself forward,” he said. 

But that’s only half of the battle. Once the EELS robot has found its way into one of these holes, it has to be able to swim through Enceladus’ ocean to search for potential signs of life. Choset’s team already had experience building swimming snake robots. 

“We built a variety of snake robots, but the one we most recently built was a swimming one called HUMRS, which stands for ‘Hardened Underwater Modular Robot Snake,'” Choset said. The CMU team was able to apply what it learned while developing HUMRS to this project with NASA JPL. 

Connections bring the right people on board

Choset’s long-held connections within the industry brought him onto the EELS project, along with his expertise in designing snake-like robots. 

“I went to Caltech as a graduate student, and JPL was part of Caltech,” he said. “So, whenever there’s an opportunity to work with JPL, the Jet Propulsion Lab, I jump on it, because it reminds me of my young graduate student days.” 

It wasn’t just the chance to work with JPL that brought Choset on board, however. He was recruited by Rohan Thakkar, a researcher who worked in Choset’s group 17 years ago as a high school student. 

“I think it’s important for people to realize that it’s not just a bunch of engineers getting together to build some mechanism as if they’re reading from a recipe or a cookbook,” Choset said. “Engineering is very important, but I want people to recognize the engineers behind the engineering.”

Choset said that personal connections, like the one between him and his CMU students, are what keeps the industry running. 

Editor’s note: HEBI Robots will exhibit at Booth 448-12 at the Robotics Summit & Expo, which will be on May 1 and 2 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Registration is now open.

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Cruise is restarting operations in Phoenix, but not in San Francisco where the company is based. | Source: Cruise

After a bumpy end to 2023, Cruise, the self-driving unit of GM, is restarting manual driving in Phoenix. Cruise says the goal is to eventually resume driverless operations, but humans will be doing all of the driving for now. Restarting in manual mode is an important step, the company says. 

Interestingly, Cruise is restarting manual operations in Phoenix, not in its hometown of San Francisco, where the company has been based since it was founded in 2013. Cruise has long had its sights set on deploying its driverless robotaxis in San Francisco. It has said the city’s difficult driving conditions will prepare its autonomous driving system for any other city. When it first began public operations, it started in San Francisco. 

In October 2023, however, California revoked the company’s California permits, claiming Cruise withheld footage in an October 2 incident. Cruise disputes that it withheld footage or information from the DMV, but it paused all of its operations nationwide to reestablish trust with the public.

Since then, the city of San Francisco has filed a lawsuit against the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the organization responsible for regulating autonomous vehicles in the state, to drastically reduce the number of robotaxis on the city’s roads. 

Now, the company says it’s starting manual operations to create maps and gather road information. This work is done using human-driven vehicles without autonomous systems engaged. Cruise says this is a critical step for validating its self-driving systems as it works towards returning to its driverless mission, and that this information will help it decide where it will ultimately resume driverless operations. This leaves it unclear if or when Cruise’s robotaxis will return to San Francisco. 

How Cruise prepared for restarting public operations

Cruise says over the past several weeks it has communicated with officials, first responders, and community leaders in cities it previously operated in. The company says it’s committed to deploying its technology safely, and it has implemented the following measures to do so:

• The company established new leadership and engaged more closely with GM advisors to support safety, legal, regulatory, and communications functions. Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan, co-founders of Cruise, resigned as CEO and chief product officer, respectively, in November. 
• Cruise hired a chief safety officer, Steve Kenner, to guide improved safety processes and procedures throughout the organization. 
• The company established a cross-disciplinary regulatory team to guide engagement with regulators regarding incident reporting. 
• Finally, Cruise reviewed and strengthened key internal safety governance processes to incorporate more robust cross-functional review and leadership accountability. 

In addition to these measures, Cruise says it is working to establish systems and processes for ensuring safe operations across the company. This includes reforming and updating its incident response and crisis management protocols, renewing internal training and reinforcing safety culture systems, reevaluating and reestablishing its safety targets for supervised and driverless operations, and engaging with first responders to facilitate ongoing training in the areas it operates in. 

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Road to driverless operations

Cruise’s autonomous vehicle (AV) stack learns from information gathered through driving. The tech learns from every intersection, construction zone, and road sign it encounters, and applies that knowledge to other environments and scenarios. 

Cruise continued testing in simulated environments and closed courses over the past few months, and now the company is focusing on building semantic maps and gathering road information. This will help it meet elevated safety and performance targets and prepare it for driverless operations in the future. 

Before driverless operations can start, Cruise says it needs to identify high-fidelity location data for read features and map information like speed limits, stop signs, traffic lights, lane paint, right-turn-only lanes, and more. This data will help Cruise’s AVs understand where they are and the location of certain road features. 

Once this stage is done, Cruise will validate its AV’s end-to-end performance against its safety and AV performance requirements through supervised autonomous driving on public roads. During this phase, Cruise vehicles will drive themselves with a safety driver behind the wheel to take over if needed. Cruise says it will move to driverless operations once this phase is completed. 

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Here are the top 10 most popular stories on The Robot Report this past month. Subscribe to The Robot Report Newsletter or listen to The Robot Report Podcast to stay updated on the latest technology developments.

10. Robotics Engineering Career Fair to connect candidates, employers at Robotics Summit

The career fair will draw from the general robotics and artificial intelligence community, as well as from attendees at the Robotics Summit & Expo. Past co-located career fairs have drawn more than 800 candidates, and MassRobotics said it expects even more people at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center this year. Read More

9. SMC adds grippers for cobots from Universal Robots

SMC recently introduced a series of electric grippers designed to be used with collaborative robot arms from Universal Robots. Available in basic and longitudinal types, SMC said the LEHR series can be adapted to different industrial environments like narrow spaces. Read More

8. Anyware Robotics announces new add-on for Pixmo unloading robots

Anyware Robotics announced in March 2024 an add-on for its Pixmo robot for truck and container unloading. The patent-pending accessory includes a vertical lift with a conveyor belt that is attached to Pixmo between the robot and the boxes to be unloaded. Read More

7. Accenture invests in humanoid maker Sanctuary AI in March 2024

In its Technology Vision 2024 report, Accenture said 95% of the executives it surveyed agreed that “making technology more human will massively expand the opportunities of every industry.” Well, Accenture put its money where its mouth is. Accenture Ventures announced a strategic investment in Sanctuary AI, one of the companies developing humanoid robots. Read More

6. Cambrian Robotics obtains seed funding to provide vision for complex tasks

Machine vision startup Cambrian Robotics Ltd. has raised $3.5 million in seed+ funding. The company said it plans to use the investment to continue developing its AI platform to enable robot arms “to surpass human capabilities in complex vision-based tasks across a variety of industries.” Read More

5. Mobile Industrial Robots launches MiR1200 autonomous pallet jack

Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are among the systems benefitting from the latest advances in AI. Mobile Industrial Robots at LogiMAT in March 2024 launched the MiR1200 Pallet Jack, which it said uses 3D vision and AI to identify pallets for pickup and delivery “with unprecedented precision.” Read More

4. Reshape Automation aims to reduce barriers of robotics adoption

Companies in North America bought 31,159 robots in 2023. That’s a 30% decrease from 2022. And that’s not sitting well with robotics industry veteran Juan Aparicio. After working at Siemens for a decade and stops at Ready Robotics and Rapid Robotics, Aparicio hopes his new startup Reshape Automation can chip away at this problem. Read More

3. Mercedes-Benz testing Apollo humanoid

Apptronik announced that leading automotive brand Mercedes-Benz is testing its Apollo humanoid robot. As part of the agreement, Apptronik and Mercedes-Benz will collaborate on identifying applications for Apollo in automotive settings. Read More

2. NVIDIA announces new robotics products at GTC 2024

The NVIDIA GTC 2024 keynote kicked off like a rock concert in San Jose, Calif. More than 15,000 attendees filled the SAP Arena in anticipation of CEO Jensen Huang’s annual presentation of the latest product news from NVIDIA. He discussed the new Blackwell platform, improvements in simulation and AI, and all the humanoid robot developers using the company’s technology. Read More

1. Schneider Electric unveils new Lexium cobots at MODEX 2024

In Atlanta, Schneider Electric announced the release of two new collaborative robots: the Lexium RL 3 and RL 12, as well as the Lexium RL 18 model coming later this year. From single-axis machines to high-performance, multi-axis cobots, the Lexium line enables high-speed motion and control of up to 130 axes from one processor, said the company. It added that this enables precise positioning to help solve manufacturer production, flexibility, and sustainability challenges. Read More

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RightHand Robotics Inc. has hit the ground running in 2024. Earlier this year, it released RightPick 4, an upgraded version of its piece-picking system that can handle items up to 25% larger and 50% heavier than RightPick 3.

The Charlestown, Mass.-based company worked closely with integration partner Vanderlande on many of the new features in RightPick 4. The companies’ close partnership is key to both successful deployments and future technology development, according to David Schwebel, head of sales and strategic business development at RightHand, and Jake Heldenberg, North American head of solution design for warehousing at Vanderlande.

The Robot Report caught up with Schwebel, Heldenberg, and Paul Eyre, RightHand’s director of channel sales, at MODEX last week. They shared insights on industry trends, RightPick’s latest capabilities, and more.

End users approach robotics differently this year

So, how has the show been for you?

Schwebel: This is probably the best-attended MODEX ever, and it’s actually even better than ProMAT last year.

What we’re hearing is that we’ve gone past moments of inspiration and education. We’re in the engagement phase. Quite often, the people that are coming by are saying, “I already trust what I see. I’ve seen the Vanderlande SIR system. I wanted to see the new features and things that you’re doing at RightHand. Now how can I engage further?”

We’re seeing great experiences and great collaborations. So, now it’s all about taking their information, understanding their workflows, and finding the right individuals to bring it across to you.

They sold more than 44,000 rooms in Atlanta this year, which was about 25% larger than it was at MODEX two years ago. And with all that, they’re expecting more than 50,000 to 56,000 people to walk through the halls. 

Eyre: I’m just coming up for air to be honest, which is great. What I’m seeing in my conversations is that customers are now expressing a level of trust in the technology. They’re moving from exploration into engagement with the technology, and they really want to start adopting the technology.

I think they’re also starting to get into the technology, so they can maybe instruct their integrators that “These are the types of technologies we’d like to use and we’d like you to adopt.” So, now they’re becoming far more educated and involved in the decision-making process rather than leaving that to integration partners.

And that’s great for us because they come to us, and we’re able to generate leads and give them to our integrators first. I’ve had conversation after conversation with end users saying, “OK, it’s time to do this. Now show me where this has been installed previously. Show me how I can employ these technologies effectively in my solution.”

Schwebel: We’re often hearing that customers held back on investments over the past three years, and they’re finally at a place where they have to refresh their existing environments.

So, between the availability of the capital, the interest, and the engagement, we’re experiencing trust with the product. They see it’s de-risked. They see going through the integrator environment is absolutely the right thing to do. And they’re replicating what they did about seven to 10 years ago. So, we’re in that great crux of “It’s time to engage and engage fast.”

While Vanderlande doesn’t have a booth, how has it been being all over the show?

Heldenberg: The funny thing is, I’ve actually had more engagement this year without a booth. A lot of times, you bring in your current customers or customers you’re already working with.

Walking the show has been really interesting. The questions I’m getting are more specific, and people are saying, “Hey, I’m ready to invest.”

Last year, it was very exploratory. People came here trying to figure out all these new technologies, what’s going to benefit them. And now, each time I run into a customer it’s like, “Hey, we’re ready. We need to move.”

So it has been a very interesting change and shift for me also, just being able to walk and see all the new technologies. If we had a booth, I wouldn’t have a lot of time to walk around. I’ve been able to go take a look at all the different new technologies — some more exciting than others, to be pretty blunt about it. 

What has been some of the more exciting stuff?

Heldenberg: We’ve seen autonomous crane robots, or ACRs, come along, and the AMR [autonomous mobile robot] technology has come up. I see that when it comes to flexibility.

ACR isn’t going to wow you [throughput-wise] yet against a shuttle system. But on a low-capacity system, [it offers] flexibility and the lack of a single point of failure. I see that is really the next technology that’s going to take off as far as ASRS [automated storage and retrieval systems] goes. That’s what I’ve been most impressed by. In years past, you’d see it, and it’d still look a little clunky, there were still stability issues. All of that is getting resolved.

Item-picking issues we saw last year are already getting resolved. So this year, even with RightHand, the new gripper is a lot better and a lot more advanced. All these new technologies that have sprung up over the past five years are becoming more stable and more robust. And for me, I see nothing but opportunity, especially for the customers.

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What potential customers are looking for

When these customers approach you, what kinds of metrics are they really interested in hitting?

Eyre: For me, it’s throughput, throughput, throughput when it comes to robotics. They’re interested in whether the technology available today can match or exceed the performance of a human. I’m not saying that’s always the case, but the technology is improving to a level where it’s coming up to those levels of matching human performance. 

This makes things very, very interesting for them, because it addresses the issues of labor availability and retention, which are causing a lot of heartburn. It’s becoming acute in a lot of geographies.

Heldenberg: Five years ago, the technology and vision systems were not quite where they needed to be. Like 50% of SKUs were inaccessible. But now, that we’ve seen more things, especially when it comes to small boxes or odd-shaped items, can be picked successfully.

The system can prove it can be consistent over a 16-hour shift. So, the business case is clearly there. A robot doesn’t take a break. It doesn’t need to go to the bathroom.

So what we’re seeing as a level of investment now is people saying, “I want to buy one or two or three of these bots. Let’s put them in and have stations that are prepped and ready because once we prove it on those first few booths, I want them into half of the stations.” So performance is important, but it’s also performance that’s sustained through an entire shift.

Eyre: The range has increased substantially. Picking a large range reliably really lends itself to an increase in autonomy. That means a lack of intervention or reduction of human intervention to resolve exceptions within the robot station is increasing and improving substantially year over year.

You need very, very few humans to support a fleet of robots. So autonomy is something that you have to have KPIs [key performance indicators] for earlier on, and something they’re measuring is the level of human intervention or autonomy.

RightHand shows off RightPick 4 at MODEX

What are some of the improvements in RightPick 4, and has RightHand Robotics gotten a lot of interest in it?

Schwebel: So, effectively through collaboration through both our system integrators coming into our roadmap and some work that we did with Staples, we packaged that all together into a full released product.

This newly released platform allows us to handle items that are 50% heavier, so up to 3 kg or 7.2 lb. without a problem. The range of items that we’re able to handle [has grown]. Now, we’re able to do polybags and apparel. This allows us to handle more than 70% of all the different types of items available in omni-retail and e-commerce.

We’re able to expand the size and range of the setup. The new type of cameras that we have allow us to have a greater environment space to work in. So, if I wanted to have more open borders at the same site at the same time, we could. It’s more frictionless for the system integrators. It literally is an idea where you can have it arrive on-site and four hours later, it’s installed.

We asked Vanderlande to join our booth, where we want to show a consistent workflow loop among multiple stations for its customers, from multipack detection to suction-cup swapping, as well as industrial cameras and spacing. We’re hardening our technologies to make them frictionless for customers.

Can you give some insights about RightPick 4 from the integrator side of things?

Heldenberg: So, as far as RightPick 4, we’re excited about it, that’s what I can say. One of the greatest things about working with RightHand in particular is that when we come to RightHand with a challenge, they really step up.

We have fashion customers, and ultimately they were challenging us and saying, “Hey, we need to automate more. We need to figure out how we can improve productivity, we have labor challenges, and we can’t hire enough people, especially during peak season.’

And so we challenged RightHand point-blank and said, “Hey, this is a challenge for us, and we haven’t found anyone who can really successfully complete the task of automating fashion item picking.”

We also came back with bisected totes, and RightHand immediately began working on the problem. We’re looking at unique ways to pair item picking with new technologies and adaptive sequences. For ASRS, software must be able to split orders, sending some to manual stations.

Ultimately, RightHand stepped up to the plate, and you can see a lot of innovation in RightPick 4 and also in the software and vision system improvements across the board. So now we are much more comfortable going into these fashion customers.

With RightPick 4 and a lot of the innovation, we appreciate it because we know it comes from the challenges that we and many others bring to RightHand. And that’s where I saw RightPick 4 is a great example of all of those challenges culminating together into a good solution.

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In the past year, advances in artificial intelligence dominated the news cycle. OpenAI’s Generate Pre-trained Transformer, or GPT 3.5, gained 100 million users in just two months. And while researchers and developers are already using generative AI to enable robots to learn challenging manipulation tasks more quickly, it’s not yet clear how this technology breakthrough will be applied to robotics at scale.

At the 2024 Robotics Summit & Expo, which will be at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center on May 1 and 2, a panel will discuss the application of large language models (LLMs) and text-generation applications to robotics. The speakers will also explore how generative AI can benefit robotics design, model training, simulation, control, human-machine interaction, and more.

Generative AI experts to speak

The Robotics Summit & Expo panel will include the following generative AI experts:

• Sandra Skaff is senior alliances and ecosystem manager at NVIDIA. There, she leads robotics ecosystem development and works with cross-functional teams to support partners and customers in developing their products using NVIDIA’s Isaac platform. Before this role, Skaff was the global lead of academic research engagements including the NVAIL program, where she was responsible for setting strategy and managing engagements with top research labs in the areas of AI, robotics, and data science.
• Juan Aparicio is the co-founder and CEO of Reshape Automation. He is a robotics and automation enthusiast on a mission to scale and democratize access to robotics technology in manufacturing and beyond. During his career, Aparicio has brought together the worlds of industrial automation, robotics, and AI with his work featured in The New York Times, MIT Tech Review, Wired, Forbes, The Robot Report, and other media outlets. Before founding Reshape Automation, Aparicio worked at various robotics companies, including Rapid Robotics, Ready Robotics, and Siemens.
• Russ Tedrake is the Toyota Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, the director of the Center for Robotics at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), and the leader of Team MIT’s entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. He is also vice president of Robotics Research at the Toyota Research Institute. Tedrake is the recipient of the 2021 Jamieson Teaching Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the MIT Jerome Saltzer Award for undergraduate teaching, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in Mathematics, and the 2012 Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Award. He was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow.

More than 5k developers to gather at Robotics Summit

Since 2018, the Robotics Summit & Expo has become the world’s leading robotics development event. This year, it will feature keynotes from Agility Robotics, Amazon, Disney, Medtronic, and Teradyne and more than 5,000 attendees from across the robotics ecosystem.

The summit also offers numerous technical sessions and networking opportunities to give attendees opportunities to lean how to develop the next generation of commercial robots. You can view the complete Robotics Summit agenda here. Speakers are still being added.

In addition, the Robotics Summit & Expo will showcase more than 200 exhibitors, as well as a women in robotics breakfast, a career fair, an engineering theater, a startup showcases, and more!

New to the event is the RBR50 Robotics Innovation Awards Gala. The event will include the chance to hear from the Robot of the Year, Startup of the Year, and Application of the Year winners. A limited number of tickets is available to summit attendees.

The Robotics Summit & Expo will be co-located with DeviceTalks Boston, the premier industry event for medical technology professionals. DeviceTalks attracts engineering and business professionals from a broad range of healthcare and medical technology backgrounds.

It will also be co-located with the Digital Transformation Forum, an inaugural event designed to help manufacturers engage with industry leaders, technology experts, and peers who are navigating the complexities of digital transformation. Participants will gain insights into strategies, emerging technologies, and best practices.

Registration is now open for the 2024 Robotics Summit & Expo. Register by March 8 to take advantage of early-bird pricing.

For information about sponsorship and exhibition opportunities, download the prospectus or contact Colleen Sepich at csepich[AT]wtwhmedia.com.

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The Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA is designed to provide cost and energy-efficient compute. | Source: AMD

As robots and sensors proliferate, the need for robust compute has increased. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. yesterday announced its AMD Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family. The company said the latest addition to its portfolio of field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, and adaptive systems on chips, or SoCs, delivers cost and power-efficient performance for a wide range of I/O-intensive applications at the edge.

“For over 25 years, the Spartan FPGA family has helped power some of humanity’s finest achievements, from lifesaving automated defibrillators to the CERN particle accelerator advancing the boundaries of human knowledge,” stated Kirk Saban, corporate vice president of the Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group at AMD.

“Building on proven 16-nm technology, the Spartan UltraScale+ family’s enhanced security and features, common design tools, and long product lifecycles further strengthen our market-leading FPGA portfolio and underscore our commitment to delivering cost-optimized products for customers,” he added.

AMD claimed that its Spartan UltraScale+ devices offer a high I/O to logic cell ratio in FPGAs with built-in 28 nm and lower process technology. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said they consume as much as 30% less total power than its previous generation. The FPGAs also include the most robust set of security features in the cost-optimized portfolio, it asserted. 

AMD optimizes Spartan UltraScale+ for the edge

The high I/O counts and flexible interfaces of the new Spartan UltraScale+ FPGAs enable them to efficiently interface with multiple devices or systems, said AMD. The company said this will help address “the explosion of sensors and connected devices” such as robots. 

“Spartan UltraScale+ is primarily targeted for robot actuators, joint control, and camera sensors,” Rob Bauer, senior manager of cost-optimized silicon marketing at AMD, told The Robot Report. “IoT [Internet of Things] devices are growing 2.3X from 2022 to 2028, according to the FPGA Market Global Forecast. There’s a need for supply chain stability and longevity.”

“The high programmable I/O count enables interfacing with a very wide range of sensors, and that in combination with programmable logic allows sensor processing and control in a low-latency, deterministic, and real-time manner,” he explained. “Programmable I/O is made up of a combination of 3.3V HDIO, HPIO, and the new high-performance XP5IO capable of supporting 3.2G MIPI D-PHY.”

The FPGAs offer up to 572 I/Os and voltage support up to 3.3V. It enables any-to-any connectivity for edge connectivity for edge sensing and control applications.

AMD said its devices feature the “proven” 16nm fabric and support for a wide array of packaging, starting as small as 10x10mm. These provide high I/O density in an compact footprint. 

In addition, the company said its portfolio provides the scalability to start with cost-optimized FPGAs and continue through to midrange and high-end products. It estimated that the Spartan UltraScale+ reduces power consumption by 30% in comparison with its 28 nm Artix 7 family by using 16 nm FinFET technology and hardened connectivity. 

“Generational power improvement is up to 30%. This is already significant, as there could be multiple such devices used in a robot today that can be upgraded with lower-power, newer-generation devices,” Bauer said. “Additionally, as these devices are then expected to enable the nervous system of the robot by interfacing and putting out data between the sensors and the controller, which can now be done at a better overall power efficiency up to 60%.”

These devices are the first AMD UltraScale+ FPGAs with a hardened LPDDR5 memory controller and PCIe Gen4 x8 support, providing both power efficiency and future-ready capabilities for customers, said AMD. 

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Spartan UltraScale+ includes several security features

AMD said its new devices’ security features include:

• IP protection: Support for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) with NIST-approved algorithms offers state-of-the-art IP protection against evolving cyberattacks and threats. A physical unclonable function provides each device with a unique fingerprint for added security.
• Tampering prevention: PPK/SPK key support helps manage obsolete or compromised security keys, while differential power analysis helps protect against side-channel attacks. The devices contain a permanent tamper penalty to further protect against misuse.
• Uptime maximization: Enhanced single-event upset performance helps fast and secure configuration with increased reliability for customers, said AMD.

“We have many features in addition to PQC to enable secure authentication in post-quantum age,” Bauer said. “Spartan UltraScale+ devices are able to meet many of the requirements listed in IEC 62443, as it offers a long list of security features such as PUF, hardware root of trust, true random-number generator, AES-GCM-256, eFUSE, soft error mitigation, security monitor, DPA counter measures, temperature and voltage monitoring, tamper logging, JTAG monitoring, and more.”

Robotics and generative AI are contributing to chipset demand, according to Omdia, which estimated that the global market for dedicated SoCs could reach $866 million by 2028.

AMD said its entire portfolio of FPGAs and adaptive SoCs is supported by the AMD Vivado Design Suite and Vitis Unified Software Platform. This allows hardware and software designers to use “a single design cockpit from design to verification” to maximize the productivity benefits of these tools, it said.

The Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA sampling and evaluation kits will be available in the first half of 2025, according to AMD. Documentation is available now, and tools support started with AMD Vivado Design Suite in the fourth quarter of 2024.

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Waymo can now deploy robotaxis in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin. | Source: Waymo

Waymo can now operate its robotaxis in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Peninsula, and on San Francisco highways. California’s Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) on Friday approved Waymo’s request to expand and now allows them to charge riders in these areas.

“Waymo may begin fared driverless passenger service operations in the specified areas of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Peninsula, effective today,” the ruling by the commission’s Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division said.

The new service area in the Bay area will stretch from San Francisco to 22 cities on the Peninsula. Waymo can also operate in a large part of LA, the country’s second most populous city, effective immediately. The CPUC’s latest approval allows Waymo to deploy its robotaxis on local roads and freeways. The vehicles can travel at speeds of up to 65 mph and Waymo has no cap on the size of its fleet.

Waymo said it will take a conservative approach to its rollout in these areas. There was no timetable set for when these new driverless services will start.

Waymo takes conservative approach to robotaxi expansion

While Waymo has had its final permit for San Francisco operations since August 2023, it has reserved its services for only those who have been approved off a waitlist. According to the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ (DMV) disengagement report, Waymo operates 438 robotaxis, for testing and commercial operations, in the state. The company told the San Francisco Chronicle that it’s commercial fleet in San Francisco numbers 250 robotaxis.

The company’s more conservative approach contrasts with Cruise, the self-driving unit of GM. Cruise and Waymo both received their final permits at the same time, but they’ve had different experiences since. Cruise has 510 robotaxis deployed throughout the state, according to the California DMV.

Months after Cruise earned its final permit, the company had its California permits revoked after California officials said Cruise withheld footage of the October 2 incident that shows Cruise’s robotaxi attempting to pull over while the pedestrian was under the vehicle.

Since then, the city of San Francisco has filed lawsuit against the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the organization responsible for regulating autonomous vehicles in the state, to drastically reduce the number of robotaxis on the city’s roads.

Lawmakers within the state area, including in San Mateo County and Los Angeles, are also pushing a bill that would give localities more control over robotaxi deployments. Waymo said it will take a conservative approach to its rollout in LA.

Waymo’s 2024 starts with bumpy roads

In February 2024, a driverless Waymo robotaxi and a bicyclist were involved in an incident in San Francisco. The crash happened around 3 P.M., and the cyclist was able to leave the scene on their own after the crash, according to Waymo.

The company, and many other AV developers, take special care in training their systems to ensure their vehicles can safely drive alongside bicyclists. The company gave insight into their cyclist-specific training in a blog post in 2021.

Waymo says it works with cyclist groups, like the California Bicycle Coalition and Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition, to gather feedback on what they expect from drivers. This gives the company insights to adjust its testing and validation procedures to better provide safety for cyclists.

The company says that its sensor suite, which sees 360º around the vehicle and can identify objects up to three football fields away, helps the vehicle detect bicyclists in most situations. Waymo’s system uses all of this information and the experience it has built up over time through real-world driving and simulations, to understand what’s happening around it, and anticipate what might happen next.

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Black History Month is a time to consider efforts to increase diversity in robotics. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock

If you ask people to imagine what a roboticist might look like, they will probably describe similar faces. Historically, the industry has been overwhelmingly white and male, an image that can make it seem impenetrable to individuals who fall outside of those groups.

Despite its rapid growth, the robotics industry still has a diversity problem, particularly when it comes to race. In 2018, 12.7% of the U.S. population identified as Black or African American, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Despite this, only 4.2% of bachelor’s degrees, 4.8% of master’s degrees, and 4.2% of Ph.D. degrees in engineering were awarded to black scholars. 

The first step to solving this gap in representation is to simply acknowledge that a problem exists, according to Carlotta A. Berry, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and founder of the Rose Building Undergraduate Diversity program. She is also a co-founder and the undergraduate academic lead of Black in Robotics, a nonprofit organization that hopes to help the industry solve these issues.

This year, as Black History Month comes to a close, we want to highlight the ways racial diversity contributes to a better robotics industry. In addition, we want to discuss how the industry can better foster talent from Black communities. 

Diverse teams are better teams

Berry and Kenechukwu Mbanisi, an assistant professor of robotics and researcher at Olin College, agreed that more diverse teams are better teams. A team whose members have the exact same background and experiences is a team full of blind spots, they stated. 

“Thinking about the value of diversity in teams, in a sense, it’s thinking about how to get the best ideas. The most effective ideas are the most well thought through, and that’s the most well-rounded,” said Mbanisi. “People are always drawing on their personal experience and how they develop or create things.”  

“I think [diversity] provides you with a new perspective on some things,” Berry said. “What Black in Robotics does, as well as things like the Algorithmic Justice League, Black in AI, Black Women in AI, is we help people to see a new vision for their creations. Not only the way that they create, but also to think about the impact that your creations have on people.”

How to cure blind spots and bias in AI

These “blind spots” in designing and deploying robots can come in many different forms. It can include biases in AI algorithms or a lack of understanding about what different groups are looking for from robotics.

“For example, I’m giving a talk on bias in AI, which feeds into bias in robotics, because artificial intelligence is basically how you create the brain or the controller for a robot,” noted Berry. “So, if there’s bias in AI, and you’re using that type of AI in a robot, you have to immediately start thinking about things.”

“Like OK, if I put this AI on my robot, is it going to recognize brown and black skin? If it has voice recognition, is it going to recognize female voices or the voices of people with accents?” she said. “Looking at things from all these different perspectives gives you a rich view of what you do and how you want it to impact your community.” 

Mbanisi said: “All teams should seek to be as robust and efficient as they can be, and you can achieve that through diversity. You don’t have blindspots, particularly in the context of where your technology will be impacting people.”

From a practical standpoint, both Berry and Mbanisi said that diversity will only help a company’s bottom line in the long run. More ideas and more perspectives can result in robots that work in more contexts. 

“So if it comes down to a bottom line, and if a company’s about their bottom dollar, then having people in your industry that help you create a better product and a more accessible product is a benefit to you,” said Berry.

Why community is key for diversity

The work of diversifying the community isn’t done once more Black engineers make it through the door. Because so few Black engineers are at work in robotics, those within the industry may struggle to find peers they can lean on. 

“My sense is that representation matters. And what I mean is how you experience your first engineering class in college could be impacted by who’s teaching that class and who your classmates are in that class,” said Mbanisi. “If you’re the only Black student in the class, that sends a message that maybe you’re are in the wrong place or the message that maybe you don’t fit.” 

“If all of your teachers or instructors or professors are non-Black, then you can’t really see yourself in that place of accomplishment and knowledge, so representation matters,” he added. “And that doesn’t mean that people cannot thrive without having those role models, it just means that it makes it easier for more people to thrive with role models.” 

This need for representation informed Berry’s decision to work as a professor after earning her degrees.

“I wanted to pick a career where I can not only be an engineer, but I can also work on diversifying engineering and diversifying STEM,” she said. “You just don’t see a lot of female students, black and brown students, or engineers or roboticists for that matter. And so, while in engineering school, I knew that I would probably eventually want to become an engineering professor. In that role, I can have a larger impact on my community by showing a different face to engineering and a different face to robotics.”

Increasing representation a complex challenge

Mbanisi and Berry acknowledged that the lack of representation within the industry isn’t a simple problem to solve. 

“[Representation] is often difficult to achieve, because it’s sort of a chicken-and-egg problem, where you need more people to persevere through so that you have more people to be able to have as role models,” Mbanisi said.

Berry says it’s important for young people in the industry to be realistic about what it looks like now, and to seek out others who can support them in roles where they might not encounter many other Black people. 

“Find a mentor. Go to the community. Find someone you trust,” Berry said. “And all mentors don’t necessarily have to be the same race or same gender or maybe not even the same discipline necessarily. Have multiple mentors in your life.”

Diversity comes in many different forms

Mbanisi highlighted the different forms that diversity can take. As a Nigerian roboticist, he was often the only person from the entire continent of Africa in his classes or professional roles. Robotics companies should consider hiring talented individuals from places outside of the U.S. to get more perspectives on their products, he said.

Mbanisi highlighted Zipline as an example of how this kind of diversity can be utilized for a better result. 

“Zipline develops drones that are primarily used for package delivery,” he said. “They have been very successful in applying that last-mile delivery of critical supplies, specifically medical supplies in some countries in Africa. And to achieve that, they had to work very closely with partners on the ground.”

While the robotics field has grown more diverse in recent years, there is still room for improvement, said Berry. 

“I do think progress is slow, unfortunately. We’d love for it to be a little faster,” she observed. “But there are some people who get it, and understand that multidisciplinary and diverse teams work better together to come up with better solutions and processes.”

Some organizations exist to help Black roboticists find opportunities within the industry. Black in Robotics focuses on bringing Black researchers, industry professionals, and students together and advocating for more diversity. It provides a speaker’s bureau for organizations interested in adding more diversity to their events, and a reading list of research from Black researchers. 

Similar organizations exist for more specialized communities to come together. Mbanisi is a coordinator for the Pan-African Robotics Competition, which has offered $20,000 in scholarships and included over 30 participating countries. 

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CMU pipe-repair robots crawl into natural gas pipelines and coat them. | Source: Carnegie Mellon University

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute are creating robots that can map and repair natural gas pipelines. The team is led by Howie Choset, the Kavčić-Moura professor of computer science at CMU, who plans to commercialize the robot later this year. 

The CMU team’s modular robots crawl inside natural gas pipelines to map the lines, detect decrepit or leaking pipes, and repair them by applying a resin coating along its inner wall. Underground pipelines carry natural gas to 75 million homes and more than 5 million commercial customers in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE). 

This gas is carried through a network of 1.2 million miles of distribution main lines and 900,000 miles of service lines. These pipes are expensive and difficult to repair. They’re too small for humans to fit into, and some are so old that they’ve never been mapped. If left unattended, however, the pipes will continue to decay. 

“We’re going to see pipes bursting more often, we’ll start talking about lines going down more and more often, because we’re not going to be proactive in addressing our pipe infrastructure,” Choset told The Robot Report. 

“The pipe networks in the United States are decaying, and we have to replace or repair them,” he said. “We don’t even know where the pipes are or the status of these pipes, so the very first step is just mapping where the pipes are.” 

Challenges come with work in tight spaces

Choset’s team at CMU Robotics Institute has specialized in snake robots in the past. This is what put it on the radar of the DoE, which is sponsoring the project through the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and its Rapid Encapsulation of Pipelines Avoiding Intensive Replacement program. 

“People reached out to us because of our work with snake robots, but because pipes are relatively well-structured environments, we were able to make robots that were specific to the pipe environment,” Choset said. 

Instead of building a snake robot, Choset and his team decided to create a crawling robot. 

“We built some pipe-crawling robots, and we certainly are not the first to build pipe-crawling robots,” Choset said. “But what makes ours different from others is that they’re very strong. They can carry a heavy weight. They have the potential, and I stress that word ‘potential,’ to do some kind of repair. The current capability that we’re very proud of is mapping, that’s the first critical step.”

The CMU team’s robot sits on a pair of 2-in. wheels and has a third wheel atop the module. The robot has three wheels because both the pipe-repair resin and the batteries that power the robot can be heavy, so it needs to have enough traction to pull up to 60 lb. of payload.

The robot can inspect about nine miles of pipe in eight hours and can repair about 1.8 miles of pipe in the same amount of time.

To build these robots, the CMU team couldn’t use typical sensors, like lidar and radar, so they developed a high-resolution optical sensor that would work in tight spaces. Choset said he’s currently seeking a patent for these sensors.  

“The mere physics of how those sensors work don’t lend themselves nicely to being in a tight space,” Choset said. “We figured out how to create lidars and vision systems that work in tight spaces.”

The sensors the team built ended up being a lot more accurate than they predicted, according to Choset. The team has had promising results with its tests. 

“Not only are we trying to create a geometric map of the pipe that says, ‘Here’s a tube, there’s a tube, here’s how the tubes connect to the maze,’ so to speak,” Choset said. “We’re also texture mapping what the interior of the pipe looks like onto these maps that we’re creating.” 

How the robots repair pipes

While important, mapping is only part of these crawling robots’ capabilities. The CMU team has equipped them with a module that has a spinning nozzle. This nozzle applies resin as a continuous bead that spirals along the pipe wall as the robot inches along. 

“Our partners worked with the University of Illinois to develop a resin type of goo or Vaseline-type substance, that you carry with the robot and you deploy it at sites where the pipe is in disarray,” noted Choset. “The goo hardens, and then essentially you have a new pipe inside a pipe.”

Despite the team’s success with this aspect of the project, it has been derailed because the DoE is no longer sponsoring the repair aspect of the work, Choset said. According to him, a change in program management at the DoE has left things uncertain, although its still an important aspect of the work for him. 

“What I’m doing is scraping together whatever leftover resources I can find it continue this project,” Choset said. “Not to say it’s my pipe dream, because that would be kind of funny, but this is an important problem. The reality is in 50 years, we’re not going to have pipes.” 

In addition, the team is collecting data that it plans to use to build a machine-learning algorithm to be able to assess damage on its own. 

“Right now, [the robots] collect visual data, and someone looks at it. What we want to do is help automate that process by cataloging known types of damage, cracks, and rusts, and have the robot automatically flag where they are,” said Choset. “The problem is, with most machine learning algorithms, you need data to train the approach, and we don’t have that data.” 

“The data we’re collecting to create these maps is going to serve as the basis for, essentially, higher-level artificial intelligence,” he said. “So not only do we have a pipe network, we have, potentially, a time-varying pipe network. And then we have one where an artificial intelligence can help the inspector look for problems while they’re still small.” 

Modularity is a key aspect of CMU system 

The Carnegie Mellon team made modularity a priority when building its crawling robot. The drive train, the wheels, the center package, the resin, and the power source can be swapped out if needed. 

“Modularity allows us to build customized solutions. In other words, we’ll never be able to figure out what the perfect robot is,” said Choset. “But maybe if we figure out the components, we can arrange and rearrange them, so that we can have that right robot.” 

“But there’s an even better reason why you want modularity, and that’s because it expedites development,” he added. “So instead of developing a new system every time, you just develop a module.”  

“What we’re modulating will allow the technician to say, ‘You know, I kind of like this, but if this part we’re a little different, it’d be better,’” Choset said. “And we’re going to close the loop with the user and the designer and make what I think would be an optimal solution.” 

The CMU team plans to continue developing different models of its robot. Choset said he hopes to bring the technology behind the robot to market later this year with a company he calls JP Robotics. 

“I’m interested in robots in general; I like applications for robots in confined spaces, so that’s search and rescue, medicine, inspection of nuclear plans, and now this,” said Choset. “So, to me, they all fall together quite nicely. And then just being able to maneuver, sense, and predict what happens in these tight spaces, I just find it to be a very interesting problem.” 

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Yesterday, a driverless Waymo robotaxi and a bicyclist were involved in an incident in San Francisco. The crash happened around 3 P.M., and the cyclist was able to leave the scene on their own after the crash, according to a statement from Waymo.

Waymo’s entire statement about the incident is below: 

How Waymo handles cyclists on the road

Bicyclists present unique challenges for both autonomous vehicles and human drivers. They’re much smaller and more agile than other cars but can move much faster than pedestrians. According to the CDC, nearly 1,000 bicyclists die and over 130,000 are injured in crashes in the U.S. every year. 

Waymo, and many other AV developers, take special care in training their systems to ensure their vehicles can safely drive alongside bicyclists. The company gave insight into their cyclist-specific training in a blog post in 2021. 

Waymo works with cyclist groups, like the California Bicycle Coalition and Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition, to gather feedback on what they expect from drivers. This gives the company insights to adjust its testing and validation procedures to better provide safety for cyclists. 

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The company says that its sensor suite, which sees 360º around the vehicle and can identify objects up to three football fields away, helps the vehicle detect bicyclists in most situations. Waymo’s system uses all of this information and the experience it has built up over time through real-world driving and simulations, to understand what’s happening around it, and anticipate what might happen next. 

The Waymo Driver then uses all of this information, about what’s happening and what might happen, to plan the best action to take. Waymo says it runs extensive testing at its closed-loop tracks and in simulations to help its autonomous driver prepare for even the most extreme scenarios. 

Waymo also paid particular attention to how its drivers drop off and pick up passengers. “Dooring”, an issue where cyclists are hit by a vehicle door opening, is a common issue in San Francisco. According to research conducted by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (PDF), between 2012 and 2015 there were 203 collisions due to dooring in the city. Waymo says its driver accounts for bike lanes when it picks up and drops off passengers. 

AVs hit rocky roads in San Francisco

It’s been a difficult few months for the autonomous vehicle industry. In October 2023, Cruise, GM’s self driving unit and Waymo’s competitor, had its California permits revoked after California officials said Cruise withheld footage of the October 2 incident that shows Cruise’s robotaxi attempting to pull over while the pedestrian was under the vehicle. This maneuver dragged the woman for around 20 feet at a speed of 7 MPH before stopping. Cruise disputes that it withheld footage or information from the DMV, but it paused all of its operations nationwide to reestablish trust with the public.

Since then, the city of San Francisco has filed a lawsuit against the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the organization responsible for regulating autonomous vehicles in the state, to drastically reduce the number of robotaxis on the city’s roads. 

The lawsuit centers around the CPUC’s decision in August 2023 to grant both Cruise and Waymo their final permits in the state. These permits allowed the companies to charge for rides, expand the hours of operation and service area, and add as many robotaxis to their fleets as they wanted. The lawsuit is asking the CPUC to reconsider its decision and whether it was compliant with the law, according to The Washington Post.

This lawsuit has the most potential impact on Waymo, as Cruise has already lost its permits. While Waymo hasn’t caused as many high-profile incidents as Cruise, San Francisco officials still have concerns about letting the company have full reign in the city.

The post Driverless Waymo AV collides with bicyclist in SF accident appeared first on The Robot Report.