Here's a video you will want to watch. "The Wolf" is really an ad showing how a hacker can enter a network through an unprotected printer (or robot). Christian Slater stars as the evil hacker. 

"There are hundreds of millions of business printers in the world and less than 2% are secure," said Vikrant Batra, Global Head of Marketing for Printing & Imaging, HP. "Everyone knows that a PC can be hacked, but not a printer." [Hence the need to inform about how easily a printer can be hacked and the consequences of that.]

Although not related to the recent WannaCry hack which held hundreds of thousands of companies ransom and downloaded millions of personal records before destroying billions more, HP, in this 7-minute very scary advertisement for securing inconsequential devices, dramatizes what can happen when we don't stay a step ahead of the threats that are out there waiting to happen.

As companies attempt to stream and analyze data from their Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and software, and from varied pieces of equipment and sensors throughout their facilities, opportunities such as the one described in the HP video will certainly happen.

One that comes to mind is FANUC's plan to network all its CNCs, robots and peripheral devices and sensors used in automation systems with the goal of optimizing up-time, maintenance schedules and manufacturing profitability. FANUC is collaborating with Cisco, Rockwell and Preferred Networks to craft a secure system which they've named FIELD. Let's hope it works.

Fortune Magazine recently reported about consumer products that spy on their users by companies attempting to learn new business models based on data:

What do a doll, a popular set of headphones, and a sex toy have in common? All three items allegedly spied on consumers, creating legal trouble for their manufacturers.

In the case of We-Vibe, which sells remote-control vibrators, the company agreed to pay $3.75 million in March to settle a class-action suit alleging that it used its app to secretly collect information about how customers used its products. The audio company Bose, meanwhile, is being sued for surreptitiously compiling data—including users’ music-listening histories—from headphones.

For consumers, such incidents can be unnerving. Almost any Internet-connected device—not just phones and computers—can collect data. It’s one thing to know that Google is tracking your queries, but quite another to know that mundane personal possessions may be surveilling you too.

So what’s driving the spate of spying? The development of ever-smaller microchips and wireless radios certainly makes it easy for companies. As the margins on consumer electronics grow ever thinner, you can’t blame companies for investigating new business models based on data, not just on devices.

Aargh!

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Andy Rubin, who developed the Android operating system at Google and then went on to lead Google through multiple acquisitions into robotics, has launched a new consumer products company. Anthony Levandowski, who, after many years with Google and their autonomous driving project, launched Otto which Uber acquired, was sued by Google, and just got fired by Uber.

People involved in robotics - from the multi-disciplined scientists turned entrepreneurs to all the specialists and other engineers involved in any aspect of the industry of making things robotic - are a relatively small community. Most people know (or know of) most of the others and get-togethers like ICRA, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, being held this week in Singapore, are an opportunity to meet new up-and-coming talent as they present their papers and product ideas and mingle with older, more established players. Two of those players made headline news this week: Rubin launching Essential and Levandowski getting fired.

Andy Rubin

Rubin came to Google in 2005 when they acquired Android and left in 2014 to found an incubator for hardware startups, Playgound Global. While at Google Rubin became a SVP of Mobile and Digital content including the open-source smartphone operating system Android and then started Google's robotics group through a series of acquisitions. Android can be found in more than 2 billion phones, TVs, cars and watches.

In 2007, Rubin was developing his own version of a smartphone at Google, also named Android, when Apple launched their iPhone, a much more capable and stylish device. Google's product was scrapped but their software was marketed to HTC and their phone became Google's first Android-based phone. The software was similar enough to Apple's that Steve Jobs was furious and, as reported in Fred Vogelstein's 'Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution,' called Rubin a "big, arrogant f--k" and "everything [he's doing] is a f--king rip-off of what we're doing." 

Jobs had trusted Google's cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Google's CEO Eric Schmidt who was on Apple's board. All three had been telling Jobs about Android, but they kept telling him it would be different from the iPhone. He believed them until he actually saw the phone and its software and how similar it was to the iPhone's, whereupon he insisted Google make a lot of changes and removed Schmidt from Apple's board. Rubin was miffed and had a sign on his office white board that said "STEVE JOBS STOLE MY LUNCH MONEY."

Quietly, stealthily, Rubin went about creating "a new kind of company using 21st century methods to build products for the way people want to live in the 21st century." That company is Essential and Essential just launched and is taking orders for it's new $699 phone and a still-stealthy home assistant to compete with Amazon's Echo and Google's Home devices.

Wired calls the new Essential Phone "the anti-iPhone." The first Phones will ship in June.

Anthony Levandowski

In 2004, Levandowski and a team from UC Berkeley built and entered an autonomous motorcycle into the DARPA Grand Challenge. In 2007 he joined Google to work with Sebastian Thrun on Google Street View. Outside of Google he started a mobile mapping company that experimented with LiDAR technology and another to build a self-driving LiDAR-using a Prius. Google acquired both companies including their IP.

In 2016 Levandowski left Google to found Otto, a company making self-driving kits to retrofit semi-trailer trucks. Just as the kit was launched, Uber acquired Otto and Levandowski became the head of Uber's driverless car operation in addition to continuing his work at Otto.

Quoting Wikipedia, 

According to a February 2017 lawsuit filed by Waymo, the autonomous vehicle research subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, Levandowski allegedly "downloaded 9.7 GB of Waymo’s highly confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation" before resigning to found Otto.

In March 2017, United States District Judge William Haskell Alsup, referred the case to federal prosecutors after Levandowski exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. In May 2017, Judge Alsup ordered Levandowski to refrain from working on Otto's LiDAR and required Uber to disclose its discussions on the technology. Levandowski was later fired by Uber for failing to cooperate in an internal investigation.

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May 2017 had two robotics-related companies get $9.5 billion in funding and 22 others raised $249 million. Acquisitions also continued to be substantial with Toyota Motor's $260 million acquisition of Bastian Solutions plus three others (where the amounts weren't disclosed).

Fundings

1. Didi Chuxing, the Uber of China, raised $5.5 billion in a round led by SoftBank with new investors Silver Lake Kraftwerk joining previous investors SoftBank, China Merchants Bank and Bank of Communications. According to TechCrunch, this latest round brings the total raised by DiDi to about $13 billion. Uber, by comparison, has raised $8.81 billion.
2. Nvidia Corp, a Santa Clara, CA-based speciality GPU maker, raised $4 billion (representing a 4.9% stake in the company) according to Bloomberg. Nvidia's newest chips are focused on providing power for deep learning for self-driving vehicles.
3. ClearMotion, a Woburn, MA automotive technology startup that’s building shock absorbers with robotic, software-driven adaptive actuators for car stability, has raised $100 million in a Series C round led by a group of JP Morgan clients and NEA, Qualcomm Ventures and more.
4. Echodyne, a Bellevue, WA developer of radar vision technology used in drones and self-driving cars, has raised $29 million in a Series B round led by New Enterprise Associates and joined by Bill Gates, Madrona Venture Group, and others.
5. DeepMap, a Silicon Valley mapping startup, raised $25 million in a round led by Accel and included GSR Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. 

   “Autonomous vehicles are tempting us with a radically new future. However, this level of autonomy requires a highly sophisticated mapping and localization infrastructure that can handle massive amounts of data. I’m very excited to work with the DeepMap team, who have the requisite expertise in mapping, vision, and large scale operations, as they build the core technology that will fuel the next generation of transportation,” said Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

6. Hesai Photonics Technology, a transplanted Silicon Valley-to-Shanghai sensor startup, raised $16 million in a Series A round led by Pagoda Investment with participation from Grains Valley Venture Capital, Jiangmen Venture Capital and LightHouse Capital Management. Hesai is developing a hybrid LiDAR device for self-driving cars. Hesai has already partnered with a number of autonomous driving technology and car companies including Baidu's Chinese electric vehicle start-up NIO and self-driving tech firm UiSee.
7. Abundant Robotics, a Menlo Park, CA-based automated fruit-picking tech developer, raised $10 million in venture funding. GV (Google Ventures) led the round, and was joined by BayWa AG and Tellus Partners. Existing partners Yamaha Motor Company, KPCB Edge, and Comet Labs also participated.
8. TriLumina Corp., an Albuquerque, NM-based developer of solid-state automotive LiDAR illumination for ADAS and autonomous driving, closed a $9 million equity and debt financing. Backers included new investors Kickstart Seed Fund and existing stakeholders Stage 1 Ventures, Cottonwood Technology Fund, DENSO Ventures and Sun Mountain Capital.
9. Bowery Farming, a NYC indoor vertical farm startup, raised $7.5 million (in February) in a seed round led by First Round Capital and including Box Group, Homebrew, Flybridge, Red Swan, RRE, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and Tom Colicchio – a restauranteur and judge on reality cooking show, Top Chef.
10. Taranis, an Israel-based precision agriculture intelligence platform raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. Finistere Ventures led the round, and was joined by Vertex Ventures. Existing investors Eshbol Investments, Mindset Ventures, OurCrowd, and Eyal Gura participated.
11. Ceres Imaging, the Oakland, CA aerial imagery and analytics company, raised a $5 million Series A round of funding led by Romulus Capital.
12. Stanley Robotics, a Paris-based automated valet parking service developer, raised $4 million in funding. Investors included Elaia Partners, Idinvest Partners and Ville de Demain. Stanley’s new parking robot is a mobile car-carrying lift that moves and tightly parks cars in outdoor locations.
13. AIRY3D Inc, a Canadian start-up in 3D computer vision, raised $3.5 million in a seed round co-led by CRCM Ventures and R7 Partners. Other investors include WI Harper Group, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners and several angel investors that are affiliates of TandemLaunch, the Montreal-based incubator that spun out AIRY3D.
14. SkyX Systems, a Canada-based unmanned aircraft system developer, raised around $3 million in funding from Kuang-Chi Group.
15. Catalia Health, a San Francisco-based patient care management company applying robotics to improve personal health, raised $2.5 million in funding. Khosla Ventures led the round.
16. vHive, an Israeli startup developing software to operate autonomous drone fleets, raised $2 million (in April) in an A round led by StageOne VC and several additional private investors.
17. Vivacity Labs, a London AI tech and sensor startup, raised $2 million from Tracsis, Downing Ventures and the London Co-Investment Fund and was also granted an additional $1.3 million from Innovate UK to create sensors with built-in machine learning to identify individual road users and manage traffic accordingly.
18. Bluewrist, a Canadian integrator of vision systems, raised around $1.5 million (in February) from Istuary Toronto Capital.
19. American Robotics, a Boston-based commercial farming drone system and analytics developer, raised $1.1 million in seed funding. Investors included Brain Robotics Capital.
20. Kubo, a Danish educational robot startup, raised around $1 million from the Danish Growth Fund. Kubo is an educational robot that helps kids learn coding, math, language and music in a screenless, tangible environment.
21. Zeals, a Japanese startup which produces interaction software for robots such as Palmi and Sota, has closed a $720k investment from Japanese adtech firm FreakOut Holdings.
22. Kitty Hawk, a San Francisco drone platform startup, raised $600k in seed money in March from The Flying Object VC.
23. Kraken Sonar, a Newfoundland marine tech startup, raised around $500k from RDC, a provincial Crown corporation responsible for improving Newfoundland and Labrador's research and development. The funding will be used to develop the ThunderFish program which will combine smart sonar, laser and optical sensors, advanced pressure tolerant battery and thruster technologies and cutting edge artificial intelligence algorithms integrated onboard a cost effective AUV capable of 20,000 foot depths.
24. Motörleaf, a Canadian ag sensor, communications and software startup, raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round (in March).

Acquisitions

1. Toyota Motor Corp paid $260 million to acquire Bastian Solutions, a U.S.-based materials handling systems integrator. Toyota is the world’s No. 1 forklift truck manufacturer in terms of global market share. With this acqisition Toyota is making a “full-scale entry” into the North American logistics technology sector and will also use Bastian’s systems to make its own global supply chain more efficient.
2. Ctrl.Me Robotics, a Hollywood, CA drone startup, was acquired by Snap, Inc. for "an amount less than $1 million." Ctrl Me developed a system for capturing movie-quality aerial video but was recently winding down its operations. Snap acquired its assets and technology as well as talent. Snap was already using one of Ctrl.me’s products: Spectacles, which captures video for Snap’s mobile app.
3. Applied Research Associates, Inc. (ARA), an employee-owned scientific research and engineering company, acquired Neya Systems LLC on April 28, 2017. Neya Systems LLC is known for their development of unmanned systems for defense, homeland security, and commercial users. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
4. Trimble has acquired Müller-Elektronik and all its subsidiary companies, for an undisclosed amount. Müller is a German manufacturer and integrator of farm implement controls, steering kits and precision farming solutions. The transaction is expected to close in the Q3 2017. Financial terms were not disclosed. Müller was key in the development of the ISOBUS communication protocol found in most tractors and towed implements, which allows one terminal to control several implements and machines, regardless of manufacturer. 

IPOs

1. Gamma 2 Robotics, a security robot maker, launched a $6 million private offering to accredited investors.
2. Aquabotix, a Fall River, MA-headquartered company, raised $5.5 million from their IPO of UUV (ASX:UUV) on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). Aquabotix manufactures commercial and industrial underwater drone/camera systems and has shipped over 350 units worldwide.

Failures

1. FarmLink LLC
2. EZ Robotics (CN

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In 2015, after much research, I wrote about China having 194 robot companies and used screen shots of The Robot Report's Global Map to show where they were and a chart to show their makeup. We've just concluded another research project and have added hundreds of new Chinese companies to the database and global map.

Why is China so focused on robots?

China installed 90,000 robots in 2016, 1/3 of the world's total and a 30% increase over 2015. Why?

Simply said, China has three drivers helping them move toward country-wide adoption of robotics: scale, growth momentum, and money. Startup companies can achieve scale quickly because the domestic market is so large. Further, companies are under pressure to automate thereby causing double-digit demand for industrial robots (according to the International Federation of Robotics). Third, the government is strongly behind the move.

Made in China 2025 and 5-Year Plans

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for “a robot revolution” and initiated the "Made in China 2025" program. More than 1,000 firms and a new robotics association, CRIA (Chinese Robotics Industry Alliance) have emerged (or begun to transition) into robotics to take advantage of the program, according to a 2016 report by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. By contrast, according to the same report, the sector was virtually non-existent a decade ago.

Under “Made in China 2025,” and the five-year robot plan launched last April, Beijing is focusing on automating key sectors of the economy including car manufacturing, electronics, home appliances, logistics, and food production. At the same time, the government wants to increase the share of in-country-produced robots to more than 50% by 2020; up from 31% last year.

Robot makers, and companies that automate, are both eligible for subsidies, low-interest loans, tax waivers, rent-free land and other incentives. One such program lured back Chinese engineers working overseas; another oversaw billions of dollars poured into technology parks dedicated to robotics production and related businesses; another encouraged local governments to help regional companies deploy robots in their production processes; and despite its ongoing crackdown on capital outflows, green lights have been given to Chinese companies acquiring Western robotics technology companies.

Many of those acquisitions were reported by The Robot Report during 2016 and are reflected (with little red flags) in the chart reporting the top 15 acquisitions of robotic-related companies:

1. Midea, a Chinese consumer products manufacturer, acquired KUKA, one of the Big 4 global robot manufacturers
2. The Kion Group, a predominately Chinese-funded warehousing systems and equipment conglomerate, acquired Dematic, a large European AGV and material handling systems company
3. KraussMaffei, a big German industrial robots integrator, was acquired by ChemChina
4. Paslin, a US-based industrial robot integrator, was acquired by Zhejiang Wanfeng Technology, a Chinese industrial robot integrator

China has set goals to be able to make 150,000 industrial robots in 2020; 260,000 in 2025; and 400,000 by 2030. If achieved, the plan should help generate $88 billion over the next decade. China's stated goal in both their 5-year plan and Made in China 2025 program is to overtake Germany, Japan, and the United States in terms of manufacturing sophistication by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. To make that happen, the government needs Chinese manufacturers to adopt robots by the millions. It also wants Chinese companies to start producing more of those robots.​

Analysts and Critics

Various research reports are predicting that more than 250,000 industrial pick and place, painting and welding robots will be purchased and deployed in China by 2019. That figure represents more than the total global sales of all types of industrial robots in 2014!

Research firms predicting dramatic growth for the domestic Chinese robotics industry are also predicting very low-cost devices. Their reports are contradicted by academics, roboticists and others who point out that there are so many new robot manufacturing companies in China that none will be able to manufacture many thousand robots per year and thus benefit from scale. Further, many of the components that comprise a robot are intricate and costly, e.g., speed reducers, servo motors and control panels. Consequently these are purchased from Nabtesco, Harmonic Drive, Sumitomo and other Japanese, German and US companies. Although a few of the startups are attempting to make reduction gears and other similar devices, the lack of these component manufacturers in China may put a cap on how low costs can go and on how much can be done in-country for the time being.

“We aim to increase the market share of homegrown servomotors, speed reducers and control panels in China to over 30 percent by 2018 or 2019,” said Qu Xianming, an expert with the National Manufacturing Strategy Advisory Committee, which advises the government on plans to upgrade the manufacturing sector. "By then, these indigenous components could be of high enough quality to be exported to foreign countries," Qu said in an interview with China Daily. "Once the target is met, it will lay down a strong foundation for Chinese parts makers to expand their presence."

Regardless, China, with governmental directives and incentives, has become both the world’s biggest buyer of robots and also is growing a very large in-country industry to make and sell robots of all types.

The Robot Report now has over 500 Chinese companies in its online directories and on its Global Map

The Robot Report and its research team have been able to identify over 500 companies that make or are directly involved in making robots in China. The CRIA (China Robot Industry Alliance), and other sources, proffer the number to be closer to 800. The Robot Report is limited by our own research capabilities, language translation limitations, and scarcity of information about robotics companies and their websites and contact people in China. 

These companies are combined with other global companies - now totaling over 5,300 - in our online directories and plotted on our global map so that you can research by area. You can explore online and filter in a variety of ways.

Use Google's directional and +/- markers to navigate, enlarge, and hone in on a geographical area of interest (or double click near where you want to enlarge). Click on one of the colored markers to get a pop-up window with the name, type, focus, location and a link to the company's website.

[NOTE: the map shows a single entry for the company headquarters regardless how many branches, subsidiaries and factory locations that company might have, consequently international companies with factories and service centers in China won't appear. Further note that The Robot Report's database doesn’t contain companies that just use robots; it focuses on those involved in making robots.]

The Filter pull-down menu lets you choose any one of the seven major categories:

1. Industrial robot makers
2. Service robots used by corporations and governments
3. Service robots for personal and private use
4. Integrators
5. Robotics-related start-up companies
6. Universities and research labs with special emphasis on robotics
7. Ancillary businesses providing engineering, software, components, sensors and other products and services to the industry.

In the chart below, 500 Chinese companies are tabulated by their business type and area of focus. Please note that your help would be greatly appreciated by adding to the map and making it as accurate and up-to-date as possible. Please send robotics-related companies that we have missed (or are new) to info@therobotreport.com.

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In a long-awaited transaction, The New York Times Dealbook announced that SoftBank was buying Boston Dynamics from Alphabet (Google). Also included in the deal is the Japanese startup Schaft. Acquisition details were not disclosed.

Both Boston Dynamics and Schaft were acquired by Google when Andy Rubin was developing Google's robot group through a series of acquisitions. Both companies have continued to develop innovative mobile robots. And both have been on Google's for sale list.

Boston Dynamics, a DARPA and DoD-funded 25 year old company, designed two and four-legged robots for the military. Videos of BD’s robots WildCat, Big Dog, Cheetah, SpotMini (shown above getting into an elevator) and Handle, have been YouTube hits for years. Handle, BD's most recent, is a two-wheeled, four-legged hybrid robot that can stand, walk, hop, run and roll at up to 9 MPH.

Schaft, a Japanese startup/participant in the DARPA Robotic Challenge, recently unveiled a two-legged robot that climbed stairs, can carry 125 pounds of payload, move in tight spaces and keep its balance throughout.

SoftBank, through another acquisition (of French Aldabaran, the maker of the Nao and Romeo robots), and in a joint venture with Foxconn and Alibaba, has developed and marketed thousands of Pepper robots. Pepper is a cute, humanoid, mobile robot being marketed and used as a guide and sales assistant. The addition of Boston Dynamics and Schaft to the SoftBank stable add talent and technology to their growing robotics efforts, particularly the Tokyo-based Schaft.

“Today, there are many issues we still cannot solve by ourselves with human capabilities. Smart robotics are going to be a key driver of the next stage of the information revolution,” said Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive of SoftBank.

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Uber, the global ride-sharing transportation company, facing angry drivers, worried investors, the death of the CEO's mother, and a host of sexual harrassment claims and firings, has named two replacements to recover from the recent firing of Anthony Levandowski who headed their Advanced Technologies Group, their OTTO trucking unit, and their self-driving team. Levandowski was fired May 30th.

Eric Meyhofer

Meyhofer, who before coming to Uber was co-founder of Carnegie Robotics and a CMU robotics professor, was also part of the group that came to Uber from CMU (see below). He has now been named to head Uber's Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) self-driving group and will report directly to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

The ATG group is charged with developing the self-driving technologies of mapping, perception, safety, data collection and learning, and self-driving for cars and trucks.

Sensors that determine distances are integral to the process. Elon Musk said recently that LiDAR isn't needed because cameras, sensors, software and high-speed GPUs can do the same tricks at a fraction of the cost. Levandowski favored LiDARs, particularly newly developed solid state LiDAR technologies.

Anthony Levandowski

Levandowski, the previous head of the ATG, joined Google to work with Sebastian Thrun on Google Street View, started a mobile mapping company that experimented with LiDAR technology and another to build a self-driving LiDAR-using car (a Prius). Google acquired both companies including their IP. In 2016 Levandowski left Google to found Otto, a company making self-driving kits to retrofit semi-trailer trucks. Just as the kit was launched, Uber acquired Otto and Levandowski became the head of Uber's driverless car operation in addition to continuing his work at Otto.

The Levandowski case, which caused Uber to fire him, revolves around the intellectual property and particularly the LiDAR-related technologies that Google's and Uber's self-driving plans revolve around. Getting the cost of perception down to a reasonable level has been part of the bigger challenge of self-driving technology and LiDAR technology is integral to that plan.

Google's Waymo self-driving unit is implying in their suit that in return for bringing Google's IP to Uber, Uber gave Levandowski $250 million in stock grants. Uber has called Waymo's claims baseless and an attempt to slow down a competitor.

Waymo also claims that Uber has a history of "stealing" technology and includes the time in 2015 when Uber hired away 50+ of the Carnegie Mellon University robotics team - a move that cost Uber a reported $5 billion and created havoc at CMU and the National Robotics Engineering Centre (NREC) which lost 1/3 of their staff to Uber. The move was preceded by establishing a strategic partnership with CMU to work together on self-driving technologies. Four months later, Uber hired the 50.

The Daily Mail headlines said:

Carnegie Mellon left decimated after Uber poaches 40 top-rated robotic researchers to help them develop self-driving cars

• Carnegie Mellon 'in crisis' after mass defection of scientists to Uber 
• Uber hope their fleet of taxis will not require drivers in the future
• Used $5 billion from investors to poach at least 40 from the National Robotics Engineering Center
• Uber took six principal investigators and 34 engineers 

Brian Zajac

Zajac has been on Uber’s self-driving team since 2015 after stints with Shell and the U.S. Army. Now he becomes the new chief of hardware development and reports to Meyhofer.

David Morris, writing for Fortune, wrote: 

"Zajac will now bear a great deal of responsibility for cracking the driverless car problem, which Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has described as “existential” to the company. Uber loses huge amounts of money, and many observers think eliminating the cost of drivers is its only realistic path to profitability.”

Bottom line:

Uber has research teams in Silicon Valley, Toronto and Pittsburgh all working to perfect Level 5 autonomous driving capabilities before any of their competitors are able to duplicate the process. Google, Baidu, Yandex, Didi Chuxing, a few of the Tier 1 component makers, and many others including all the major car companies are racing forward with the same intentions. Levandowski's firing caused a big gap in Uber's self-driving project management and fear amongst their investors. Uber hopes that these two changes, Meyhofer as overall head and Zajac as hardware chief, will quell the fears that Uber is losing their momentum.

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Conferences and trade shows, held in interesting locations around the world, can be entertaining, informative and an opportunity to explore new places, meet new people and renew acquaintances. Three recent examples: Xponential, the mostly defense-related unmanned land, sea and air show, held in Dallas; Innorobo, focused on service robotics, in Paris; and ICRA, the IEEE's premier robotics conference, in Singapore.

ICRA

The 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the IEEE's principle forum for robotics researchers to present their work, was held this year at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel and Convention Center in Singapore. ICRA continues to have the highest number of cited research papers in the robotics field of all the various global conferences (including IROS).

The photo above is of dancers using LEDs at the banquet; the two scenes to the right are of the pool and hotel. For those of you that haven't been to Singapore and seen the Sands, you've missed a great architectural and design phenomena... a roof-top pool spanning three 55-story towers is an engineering feat not to miss!

In an IEEE/Spectrum review of that portion of the conference that was biomedical-related, a swallowable capsule robot capable of needle aspiration, guided by magnets, and an autonomous snake-like colonoscopy robot were two of the hits. Another reviewer found the rehab exoskeletons, haptic interfaces, modular robot components and many of the ROS-enabled solutions of merit. Overall, almost 3,000 robotics researchers attended ICRA 2017 and most found many things of interest (including Singapore and the Marina Sands Hotel).

Xponential - all things unmanned

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems Internation, AUVSI, annual trade show and conference, Xponential, held this year in Dallas, Texas, showed the changing nature of the industry and offered suggestions (guesses) as to where they were going. 170,000 visitors attended while 100 speakers and over 650 exhibitors put on this correographed show of military weaponry, defense and security systems and equipment, and commercial unmanned air, land and sea systems.

Click image to enlarge.

AUVSI's membership fees are discounted for members of the military and first responders and the exhibitor list continues to favor military/defense-related companies, but most of those companies now have a growing commercial component.

Autonomous vehicles have always been the constituency of AUVSI but with all the money flowing into autonomous car startups, and the talent search to corral people to make this new industry happen, a small portion of this Xponential show was devoted to the prospect of that future (see chart above).

The folks at The National Robotics Education Foundation (NREF) produced a gallery of over 300 interesting photos from Xponential. They also produced a special set of pictures of UAS engines from the show. Unmanned vehicles used by the military, for search and rescue, in support of agriculture and mining, for infrastructure inspection, and in a variety of other circumstances must stay aloft for long periods, hence the interest in engines that can support that amount of air time.

Innorobo

I visited Innorobo. It is a necessary show in a rapidly changing arena. Over 7,000 visitors perused an eclectic group of 170 startups, integrators, component manufacturers and service robot providers exhibiting a wide range of products and services at a site on the outskirts of Paris. Over the 3-day show, 50 speakers explored topics from robotics-related AI to philosophical discussions about law and ethics to the latest innovations in personal and professional service robotics.

Innorobo started as a show to promote France's robotics industry (there are 225+ French companies in The Robot Report's Directories and on our Global Map). Held in Lyon, the show grew to its present size through the hard work and willpower of a small group of inventive women entrepreneurs. It grew and relocated to Paris where it's been for the last two years. As the focus expanded from promoting in-country robotics to displaying global innovations in robotics of the startup companies, research labs and service robot companies beginning to make inroads aroud the world - the show has become a valuable mainstay for the European press, investors, business executives, students, and roboticists alike.

Events, Directories and The Robot Report's Global Map

From time to time it becomes relevant to toot the horn of the free resources available on The Robot Report. Our events calendar, directory of companies and educational institutions involved in the robotics industry, and the global map for job seekers and researchers alike are free and always updated.

There are still 28 robotics-related events remaining in 2017. Check them out:

• Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics, June 25-28, London, UK
• Autonomous Systems World, June 26-27, Berlin, Germany
• Conf on Flexible Automation & Intelligent Manufacturing (FAIM), June 27-30, Modena, Italy
• Automation and Robotics Conference, June 28-29, San Diego, CA
• Industrial Automation Shenzhen (IAS), June 28-30, Shenzhen, China
• Forbes AgTech Forum, June 28-29, Salinas, CA
• RoboUniverse Seoul, June 28-30, Seoul, Korea
• Intl Symposium on Automation & Robotics in Construction (ISARC), June 28-July 1, Taipei, Taiwan
• China Intl Robot Show (CIROS), July 5-8, Shanghai, China
• Toward Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS), July 19-21, Guildford, UK
• RoboCup, July 25-31, Nagoya, Japan
• World Robotic Conference, August 23-27, Beijing, China
• Farm Progress Show, August 29-31, Decatur, IL
• InterDrone, September 6-8, Las Vegas, NV
• European Conf on Mobile Robotics, September 6-8, Paris, France
• Conf on Field and Service Robotics, September 12-15, Zurich, Switzerland
• RobotWorld, September 13-16, Seoul, Korea
• IEEE AFRICON 2017 and Robotics and AI, September 18-20, Cape Town, South Africa
• ROSCon, September 21-22, Vancouver, Canada
• IEEE Intl Conf on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September 24-28, Vancouver, BC, Canada
• RoboBusiness, September 27-28, Santa Clara, CA
• Drone World Expo, October 3-4, San Jose, CA
• China Industrial Automation and Robotics Show, November 7-11, Shanghai, China
• AgriTechnica, November 12-18, Hanover, Germany
• Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2017), November 13-15, Mountain View, CA
• Collaborative Robots & Advanced Vision Conf, November 15-16, San Jose, CA
• Asian Robotics Exhibition AREX, November 23-24, Singapore
• iREX 2017, November 29-December 2, Tokyo, Japan

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DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is researching autonomous co-piloting so they can fly without a human pilot on board. The robotic system — called the Common Aircraft Retrofit for Novel Autonomous Control (CARNAC) (not to be confused with the old Johnny Carson Carnac routine) — has the potential to reduce costs, enable new missions, and improve performance.

Unmanned aircraft are generally built from scratch with robotic systems integrated from the earliest design stages. Existing aircraft require extensive modification to add robotic systems. 

RE2, the CMU spin-off located in Pittsburgh, makes mobile manipulators for defense and space. They just received an SBIR loan backed by a US Air Force development contract to develop a retrofit kit that would provide a robotic piloting solution for legacy aircraft.

“Our team is excited to incorporate the Company’s robotic manipulation expertise with proven technologies in applique systems, vision processing algorithms, and decision making to create a customized application that will allow a wide variety of existing aircraft to be outfitted with a robotic pilot,” stated Jorgen Pedersen, president and CEO of RE2 Robotics. “By creating a drop-in robotic pilot, we have the ability to insert autonomy into and expand the capabilities of not only traditionally manned air vehicles, but ground and underwater vehicles as well. This application will open up a whole new market for our mobile robotic manipulator systems.”

Aurora Flight Sciences, a Manassas, VA developer of advanced unmanned systems and aerospace vehicles, is working on another similar DARPA project, Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS), is designed as a drop-in avionics and mechanics package that can be quickly and cheaply fitted to a wide variety of fixed and rotor aircraft, from a Cessna to a B-52. Once installed, ALIAS is able to analyze the aircraft and adapt itself to the job of second-pilot.

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Kalanick is still on Uber's board. He owns a majority of the voting shares. Some are already comparing this situation to Steve Jobs' ouster from Apple. It's possible, Kalanick could someday return in a blaze of glory. But for now, he is out and Uber is searching for a new CEO.

There is a reason this story is getting so much attention: it is news that has real ramifications throughout Silicon Valley and the rest of the startup world. The import was captured in a series of posts by Erin Griffith at Fortune which I've liberally excerpted.

Erin Griffith wrote: 

Uber is the largest, most valuable, most global, most disruptive, most quintessential Silicon Valley success story of this era. What happens to this company affects the entire tech industry - the companies, the investors, the culture, the regulations, the employees.

• Regulations - Uber's swashbuckling approach to the law and the ouster of its CEO bolsters the case of any regulator looking to crack down on disruptive Silicon Valley startups. And not just in the specific areas Uber ran afoul of the law - labor, transportation - but in any startup that operates in a legal gray area
• Employees - Startups need experienced executives to provide adult supervision to help them transition from fledgling disrupters into legit businesses. Now these executives are probably looking at former Target CMO Jeff Jones' six month stint as Uber President and viewing the jump to startup-land as career suicide.
• Investors - This era of founder-friendly venture investing - driven by Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and The Social Network -- means founders get board control and can't be forced to step aside when the job outgrows them. (Instead they "hire a Sheryl Sandberg" to deal with all the management stuff.) Now investors are likely rethinking that trend. In Uber's case, Benchmark, First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital, Menlo Ventures, and Fidelity Investments consolidated their power -- voting rights worth a combined 40% -- and demanded Kalanick resign.
• Businesses - Everyone said Uber was too big, too well-funded, too valuable, too dominant to face a comeuppance. How wrong that was. It's led plenty of the media to rethink their assumptions that tech's dominant power players are invulnerable.
• Culture - For Uber, "flying in the face of convention was an asset, but ultimately a horrible liability." Growth at any cost, Kalanick's mantra, is causing others to reevaluate the serious risks associated with it.

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Robots have been around for 50 years welding, painting, handling and performing herculean tasks in harsh environments. But in the last 10 years, service robots have emerged and are performing all sorts of lesser but equally valuable tasks. Consider MiR, MakeBlock, Grey Orange and Ocado and the inroads they are making into their respective industries.

Each of the four companies profiled below are not unique nor even original - they all have many competitors including American ones and most integrate technologies from multiple vendors. All four are indicative, however, of the growth of robotics in new business arenas, and all are particularly adept at marketing and business skills to grow their version of their technology into viable businesses. Also, these four companies show the global nature of that growth. 

Ocado Technology (UK)
Online grocery retailer

Ocado is quietly transforming retail groceries into online stores by overhauling warehouse and distribution center technologies and adding software, AI and communication. They are using AI for prediction, advanced monitoring and realtime optimization. They have thousands of warehouse robots all communicating to management software and cloud storage. They create dynamic websites and apps for their client merchants. And all are streaming data for analytics software to learn from and improve the system.

Ocado's UK online grocery operation had close to 600,000 online customers in 2016 with gross sales of $1.8 billion and a range of products covering over 50,000 SKUs. The average order size was $138.50. Ocado claims 95% on time deliveries with 99% order accuracy.

Ocado also powers the online operations of Morrisons, the 4th largest grocery chain in the UK.

The Ocado company has three warehouses that make grocery deliveries. They use robots, automated conveyor belts, shuttles, and cranes to pick and carry food items at high-speed to the delivery vans. The robots, although designed by Ocado and built in the UK by Tharsus, are similar to the Swisslog system. They move on top of "the hive" and then reach down to grab items below and then race the items to conveyers which shoot them to a packing station.

The company's largest warehouses, located outside Birmingham and London, process over 1.3 million items a day, and they are planning a new 563,000 square foot facility which will begin construction in 2018 and go online in 2019.

Business Insider, earlier this year, did a feature story on Ocado - with lots of pictures - thoroughly describing their operations.

Ocado, which develops most of their technology inhouse, as they continue to add and patent new IP, is likely to be in good position to benefit from the continuing channel (macro) shift to online.

MakeBlock (Shenzhen Maker Works Technology) (CN)
DIY robotics construction and STEM education platform

MakeBlock is a leading DIY robotics construction and STEM education platform for makers, hobbyists, STEM learners, and educators. Their kits provide a building block platform of over 500 mechanical parts and electronic modules, graphical programming software, and online and offline courses and tutorials. 

MakeBlock has more than 1 million users worldwide with 2016 revenues of $17.5 million. They began production and sales in 2013 and now have customers in 140 countries and products being used by educators in 20,000 different schools worldwide. Last year they introduced three new products including Airblock, a DIY drone which raised nearly $900,000 and thousands of kit orders in a Kickstarter campaign in November.

Makeblock is a textbook case of how startups benefit from incubaters and mentoring. Cyril Ebersweiler, who founded HAX Shenzhen, recalls helping MakeBlock:

It was five years and 220 startups ago when we met with Jasen [Wang] at the local hackerspace in Shenzhen and was impressed by his drive and skills in experimenting. His first product was straightforward and we spent time on defining what would make the cut in the box and in what form, while of course the design for manufacturing could go underway.

Back then we were launching our first Kickstarter campaigns (now we've done 80+) and had a lot on our plate to figure out. We traveled to San Francisco to prepare the ground for Jasen (his first time in the USA) and launched MakeBlocks first campaign -- successfully, $185k which, back then, was pretty good.

Here is a shot of him at our first ever Demo Day.

MakeBlock was also part of the inaugural 'Growth Stage' program we run in San Francisco. That program is all about sales and marketing, which for the startup, means getting a good handle on direct and indirect sales channels, offline and online.

Throughout the years we've been in close contact with MakeBlock and it has become an iconic way of running hardware startups for us: a discrete way of rising to the top, with minimal amounts of capital and a maximal amount of revenue. With multiple product lines, 300 employees and a pre-IPO round [$30 million in March], we might be observing a much bigger hit in education, supported by a reliable way of making business.

Grey Orange Robotics (SG)
AI-powered goods-to-person systems

Grey Orange is a multinational company that designs, manufactures and deploys advanced robotics systems for automation at warehouses, distribution and fulfillment centers and markets their products in Asia and India.

The Grey Orange system handles automated inventory storage (put-away) and picking (using human pickers) and utilizes mobile robots that bring shelves to picking stations very similarly to the Kiva/Amazon system. The software adapts in real-time to changing inventory profiles and order fulfillment patterns, resulting in higher throughput, productivity and accuracy. Additional products include (1) a high-speed sensor-laden linear sorter for package handling and routing; (2) a pick-put-to-light system which helps operators by directing picking, put-away and sorting processes; and (3) a vision-based system for static dimensioning, weighing and scanning.

Headquartered in Singapore, Grey Orange Robotics' goods-to-person system and products only slightly vary from the original Kiva Systems product line which Amazon acquired and improved upon and uses in many of their fulfillment centers. At last report, Amazon had over 45,000 of the Kiva robots at work in their warehouses. No similar information exists for Grey Orange.

A Grey Orange press release said that they recently installed 80 of their robots at a Japanese furniture manufacturer's distribution center. Their website adds that Flipkart, Jabong.com, Pepperfry.com, Aramex, Myntra.com, Kerry Logistics, Ninja Van, DTDC, GoJavas, ekart logistics, Nitori and Delhivery are key customers in the EU, Middle East, India and Asia. 

Looking at their global map of deployed systems and support centers, the most prominent omission is the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

MiR (Mobile Industrial Robots) (DK)
Mobile transport robots

MiR is a Danish startup with a connection to one of Denmark's most successful startups: Universal Robots. Thomas Visti, MiR's co-founder and CEO was UR's VP of Marketing and some of MiR investors were also UR investors.

Further, because MiR's product line is non-competitive and complementary to UR's, and also because Visti was instrumental in developing UR's global network of distributor/integrators, that same network has helped MiR jump start their global sales and reach.

To further gain exposure, MiR is participating in 17 trade shows and training sessions in the US, Turkey, Sweden, Norway and throughout the EU during the remaining months of 2017.

MiR produces a line of autonomous mobile robots that move materials from point to point inside facilities (warehouses, offices, labs, factories, etc.). They can be mounted with top modules of bins, racks, conveyors or even a co-bot.

Their two versions of vehicles can handles loads of 440 or 1,100 pounds respectively and can be outfitted with a towing hook (approximately 25% of orders thus far have opted for the hook), shelving or even a robotic arm. The systems also come with mapping and fleet management software.

MiR is on track to produce over 600 mobile robots in 2017, up from 200 in 2016.

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June, 2017 saw two robotics-related companies get $50 million each and 17 others raised $248 million for a monthly total of $348 million. Acquisitions also continued to be substantial with SoftBank's acquisition of Google's robotic properties Boston Dynamics and Schaft plus two others acquisitions.

Fundings

• Drive.ai raised $50 million in a Series B funding round, led by New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) with participation from GGV Capital and existing investors including Northern Light Venture Capital. Andrew Ng who led AI projects at Baidu and Google (and is husband to Drive.ai’s co-founder and president Carol Reiley) joined the board of directors and said: 

  "The cutting-edge of autonomous driving has shifted squarely to deep learning. Even traditional autonomous driving teams have 'sprinkled on' some deep learning, but Drive.ai is at the forefront of leveraging deep learning to build a truly modern autonomous driving software stack.

• Aera Technology, renamed from FusionOps, a Silicon Valley software and AI provider, raised $50 million from New Enterprise Associates. Aera seems to be the first RPA to actuate in the physical world. Merck uses Aera to predict demand, determine product routing and interact with warehouse management systems to enact what’s needed.

  "The leap from transactional automation to cognitive automation is imminent and it will forever transform the way we work," says Frederic Laluyaux, President and CEO of Aera. "At Aera, we deliver the technology that enables the Self-Driving Enterprise: a cognitive operating system that connects you with your business and autonomously orchestrates your operations."

• Swift Navigation, the San Francisco tech firm building centimeter-accurate GPS technology to power a world of autonomous vehicles, raised $34 million in a Series B financing round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from existing investors Eclipse and First Round Capital. Swift provides solutions to over 2,000 customers-including autonomous vehicles, precision agriculture, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), robotics, maritime, transportation/logistics and outdoor industrial applications. By moving GPS positioning from custom hardware to a flexible software-based receiver, Swift Navigation delivers Real Time Kinematics (RTK) GPS (100 times more accurate than traditional GPS) at a fraction of the cost ($2k) of alternative RTK systems.
• AeroFarms raised over $34 million of a $40 million Series D. The New Jersey-based indoor vertical farming startup has raised over $130 million since 2014 and now has 9 operating indoor farms. AeroFarms grows leafy greens using aeroponics –- growing them in a misting environment without soil using LED lights, and growth algorithms. The round brings AeroFarms’ total fundraising to over $130 million since 2014 including a $40 million note from Goldman Sachs and Prudential.
• Seven Dreamers Labs, a Tokyo startup commercializing the Laundroid robot, raised $22.8 million KKR’s co-founders Henry Kravis and George Roberts, Chinese conglomerate Fosun International, and others. Laundroid is being developed with Panasonic and Daiwa House.
• Bowery Farming, which raised $7.5 million earlier this year, raised an additional $20 million from General Catalyst, GGV Capital and GV (formerly Google Ventures). Bowery’s first indoor farm in Kearny, NJ, uses proprietary computer software, LED lighting and robotics to grow leafy greens without pesticides and with 95% less water than traditional agriculture.
• Drone Racing League raised $20 million in a Series B investmhttp://www.cognata.com/ent round led by Sky, Liberty Media and Lux Capital and new investors Allianz and World Wrestling Entertainment plus existing investors Hearst Ventures, RSE Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and Courtside Ventures.
• Momentum Machines, the SF-based startup developing a hamburger-making robot, raised $18.4 million in an equity offering of $21.8 million, from existing investors Lemnos Labs, GV, K5 Ventures and Khosla Ventures. The company has been working on its first retail location since at least June of last year. There is still no scheduled opening date for the flagship, though it's expected to be located in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood.
• AEye, a startup developing a solid state LiDAR and other vision systems for self-driving cars, raised $16 million in a Series A round led by  Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Airbus Ventures, Intel Capital, Tyche Partners and others.

  Said Luis Dussan, CEO of AEye. “The biggest bottleneck to the rollout of robotic vision solutions has been the industry’s inability to deliver a world-class perception layer. Quick, accurate, intelligent interpretation of the environment that leverages and extends the human experience is the Holy Grail, and that’s exactly what AEye intends to deliver.”

• Snips,  an NYC voice recognition AI startup, raised $13 million in a Series A round led by MAIF Avenir with PSIM Fund managed by Bpifrance, as well as previous investor Eniac Ventures and K-Fund 1 and Korelya Capital, joining the round.  Snip makes an on-device system that parses and understands better than Amazon's Alexa.
• Misty Robotics, a spin-out from Orbotix/Sphero, raised $11.5 million in Series A funding from Venrock, Foundry Group and others. Ian Bernstein, former Sphero co-founder and CTO, will be taking the role of Head of Product and is joined by five other autonomous robotics division team members. Misty Robotics will use its new capital to build out the team and accelerate product development. Sphero and Misty Robotics will have a close partnership and have signed co-marketing and co-development agreements.
• Superflex, a spin-off from SRI, has raised $10.2 million in equity financing from 10 unnamed investors. Superflex is developing a powered suit designed for individuals experiencing mobility difficulties and working in challenging environments to support the wearer’s torso, hips and legs.
• Nongtian Guanjia (FarmFriend), a Chinese drone/ag industry software startup, raised $7.36 million led by Gobi Partners and existing investors GGV Capital, Shunwei Capital, the Zhen Fund and Yunqi Partners.
• Carmera, a NYC-based auto tech startup, unstealthed this week with $6.4M in funding led by Matrix Partners. The two-year-old company has been quietly collecting data for its 3D mapping solution, partnering with delivery fleets to install its sensor and data collection platform.
• Cognata, an Israeli deep learning simulation startup, raised $5 million from Emerge, Maniv Mobility, and Airbus Ventures. Cognata recently launched a self-driving vehicle road-testing simulation package

  “Every autonomous vehicle developer faces the same challenge—it is really hard to generate the numerous edge cases and the wide variety of real-world environments. Our simulation platform rapidly pumps out large volumes of rich training data to fuel these algorithms,” said Cognata’s Danny Atsmon

• SoftWear Automation, the GA Tech and DARPA sponsored startup developing sewing robots for apparel manufacturing, raised $4.5 million in a Series A round from CTW Venture Partners.
• Knightscope, a startup developing robotic security technologies, raised $3 million from Konica Minolta. The capital is to be invested in Knightscope’s current Reg A+ “mini-IPO” offering of Series M Preferred Stock.
• Multi Tower Co, a Danish medical device startup, raised around $1.12 million through a network of private and public investors most notable of which were Syddansk Innovation, Rikkesege Invest, M. Blæsbjerg Holding and Dahl Gruppen Holding. The Multi Tower Robot used to lift and move hospital patients, is developed through Blue Ocean Robotics’ partnership program, RoBi-X, in a public-private partnership (PPP) between University Hospital Køge, Multi Tower Company and Blue Ocean Robotics.
• Optimus Ride, a MIT spinoff developing self-driving tech, raised $1.1 million in financing from an undisclosed investor.

Acquisitions

• SoftBank acquired Boston Dynamics and Schaft from Google Alphabet for an undisclosed amount.
  • Boston Dynamics, a DARPA and DoD-funded 25 year old company, designs two and four-legged robots for the military. Videos of BD’s robots WildCat, Big Dog, Cheetah and most recently Handle, continue to be YouTube hits. Handle is a two-wheeled, four-legged hybrid robot that can stand, walk, run and roll at up to 9 MPH.
  • Schaft, a Japanese participant in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, recently unveiled an updated version of a two-legged robot that climbed stairs, can carry 125 pounds of payload, move in tight spaces and keep its balance throughout. 
• IPG Photonics, a laser component manufacturer/integrator of welding and laser-cutting systems, including robotic ones, acquired Innovative Laser Technologies, a Minnesota laser systems maker, for $40 million. 
• Motivo Engineering, an engineering product developer, has acquired Robodondo, an ag tech integrator focused on food processing, for an undisclosed amount.

IPOs

• None. Nada. Zip.

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China’s second-biggest e-commerce company, JD.com (Alibaba is first), is testing mobile robots to make deliveries to its customers and imagining a future of a fully unmanned logistics system. Story idea and images courtesy of RoboticsToday.com.au.

On the last day of a two-week-long shopping bonanza that recorded sales of around $13 billion, some deliveries were made using mobile robots designed by JD. It’s the first time that the company has used delivery robots in the field. The bots delivered packages to multiple Beijing university campuses such as Tsinghua University and Renmin University. 

JD has been testing delivery robots since November last year. At that time, the cost of a single robot was almost $88,000.

They have been working on lowering the cost and increasing the capabilities since then. The white, four-wheeled UGVs can carry five packages at once and travel 13 miles on a charge. They can climb up a 25° incline and find the shortest route from warehouse to destination.

Once it reaches its destination, the robot sends a text message to notify the recipient of the delivery. Users can accept the delivery through face-recognition technology or by using a code.

The UGVs now cost $7,300 per robotic unit which JD figures can reduce delivery costs from less than $1 for a human delivery to about 20 cents for a robot delivery.

JD is also testing the world’s largest drone-delivery network, including flying drones carrying products weighing as much as 2,000 pounds.

“Our logistics systems can be unmanned and 100% automated in 5 to 8 years,” said Liu Qiangdong, JD’s chairman.

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In the race to develop self-driving technology, Chinese Internet giant Baidu unveiled its 50+ partners in an open source development program, revised its timeline for introducing autonomous driving capabilities on open city roads, described the Project Apollo consortium and its goals, and declared Apollo to be the ‘Android of the autonomous driving industry.’

At a developer's conference last week in Beijing, Baidu described its plans and timetable for its self-driving car technology. It will start driving testing in restricted environments immediately before gradually introducing fully autonomous driving capabilities on highways and open city roads by 2020. Baidu's goal is to get those vehicles on the roads in China, the world's biggest auto market, with the hope that the same technology, embedded in exported Chinese vehicles, can then conquer the United States. To do so, Baidu has compiled a list of cooperative partners, a consortium of 50+ public and private entities, and named it Apollo, after NASA's massive Apollo moon-landing program. 

Project Apollo

The program is making its autonomous car software open source in the same way that Google released its Android operating system for smartphones. By encouraging companies to build upon the system and share their results, it hopes to overtake rivals such as Google/Waymo, Tencent, Alibaba and others researching self-driving technology. 

MIT Technology Review provided a description of the open source Apollo project:

The Apollo platform consists of a core software stack, a number of cloud services, and self-driving vehicle hardware such as GPS, cameras, lidar, and radar.

The software currently available to outside developers is relatively simple: it can record the behavior of a car being driven by a person and then play that back in autonomous mode. This November, the company plans to release perception capabilities that will allow Apollo cars to identify objects in their vicinity. This will be followed by planning and localization capabilities, and a driver interface.

The cloud services being developed by Baidu include mapping services, a simulation platform, a security framework, and Baidu’s DuerOS voice-interface technology.

Members of the project include Chinese automakers Chery, Dongfeng Motor, Foton, Nio, Yiqi and FAW Group. Tier 1 members include Continental, Bosch, Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft and Velodyne. Other partners include Chinese universities, governmental agencies, Autonomous Stuff, TomTom, Grab and Ford. The full list of members can be seen here.

Quoting from Bloomberg News regarding the business aspect of Project Apollo:

China has set a goal for 10 to 20 percent of vehicles to be highly autonomous by 2025, and for 10 percent of cars to be fully self-driving in 2030. Didi Chuxing, the ride-sharing app that beat Uber in China, is working on its own product, as are several local automakers. It’s too early to tell which will ultimately succeed though Baidu’s partnership approach is sound, said Marie Sun, an analyst with Morningstar Investment Service.

“This type of technology needs cooperation between software and hardware from auto-manufacturers so it’s not just Baidu that can lead this,” she said. If Baidu spins off the car unit, “in the longer term, Baidu should maintain a major shareholder position so they can lead the growth of the business.”

Baidu and Apollo have a significant advantage over Google's Waymo: Baidu has a presence in the United States, whereas Alphabet has none in China because Google closed down its search site in 2010 rather than give in to China's internet censorship.

Strategic Issue

According to the Financial Times, "autonomous vehicles pose an existential threat [to global car manufacturers]. Instead of owning cars, consumers in the driverless age will simply summon a robotic transportation service to their door. One venture capitalist says auto executives have come to him saying they know they are “screwed”, but just want to know when it will happen." 

This desperation has prompted a string of big acquisitions and joint ventures amongst competing providers including those in China. Citing just a few:

• Last year GM paid $1bn for Cruise, a self-driving car start-up.
• Uber paid $680m for Otto, an autonomous trucking company that was less than a year old.
• In March Intel spent $15bn to buy Israel’s Mobileye, which makes self-driving sensors and software.
• Baidu acquired Raven Tech, an Amazon Echo competitor; 8i, an augmented reality hologram startup; Kitt, a conversational language engine; and XPerception, a vision systems developer.
• Tencent invested in mapping provider Here and acquired 5% of Tesla.
• Alibaba announced that it is partnering with Chinese Big 4 carmaker SAIC in their self-driving effort.

China Network

Baidu’s research team in Silicon Valley is pivotal to their goals. Baidu was one of the first of the Chinese companies to set up in Silicon Valley, initially to tap into SV's talent pool. Today it is the center of a "China network" of almost three dozen firms, through investments, acquisitions and partnerships. 

Baidu is rapidly moving forward from the SV center: 

• It formed a self-driving car sub-unit in April which now employs more than 100 researchers and engineers. 
• It partnered with chipmaker Nvidia.
• It acquired vision systems startup XPerception.
• It has begun testing its autonomous vehicles in China and California. 

Regarding XPerception, Gartner research analyst Michael Ramsey said in a CNBC interview:

"XPerception has expertise in processing and identifying images, an important part of the sensing for autonomous vehicles. The purchase may help push Baidu closer to the leaders, but it is just one piece."

XPerception is just one of many Baidu puzzle pieces intended to bring talent and intellectual property to the Apollo project. It acquired Raven Tech and Kitt AI to gain conversational transaction processing. It acquired 8i, an augmented reality hologram startup, to add AR -- which many expect to be crucial in future cars -- to the project. And it suggested that the acquisition spree will continue as needed.

Bottom Line

Regardless whether Baidu wins the race, it is important to note the strategic planning involved. China is automating their auto industry to be able to offer the quality and reliability found in American, Japanese and European carmakers and do so by 2025. Then China has set a goal for 10 to 20 percent of vehicles to be highly autonomous by 2025, and for 10 percent of cars to be fully self-driving in 2030 and Baidu wants to provide the technology to get those vehicles on the roads in China with the hope that the same technology, embedded in exported Chinese vehicles, can then conquer the United States. It seems well poised to do so.

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Two reputable research resources are reporting that the robotics industry is growing more rapidly than expected. BCG (Boston Consulting Group) is conservatively projecting that the market will reach $87 billion by 2025; Tractica, incorporating the robotic and AI elements of the emerging self-driving industry, is forecasting the market will reach $237 billion by 2022.

Both research firms acknowledge that yesterday’s robots -- which were blind, big, dangerous and difficult to program and maintain -- are being replaced and supplemented with newer, more capable ones. Today's new - and future robots will - have voice and language recognition, access to super-fast communications, data and libraries of algorithms, learning capability, mobility, portability and dexterity. These new precision robots can sort and fill prescriptions, pick and pack warehouse orders, sort, inspect, process and handle fruits and vegetables, plus a myriad of other industrial and non-industrial tasks, most faster than humans, yet all the while working safely along side them.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Gaining Robotic Advantage, June 2017, 13 pages, free

BCG suggests that business executives be aware of ways robots are changing the global business landscape and think and act now. They see robotics-fueled changes coming in retail, logistics, transportation healthcare, food processing, mining and agriculture.

BCG cites the following drivers:

• Private investment in the robotic space has continued to amaze with exponential year-over-year funding curves and sensational billion dollar acquisitions.
• Prices continue to fall on robots, sensors, CPUs and communications while capabilities continue to increase.
• Robot programming is being transformed by easier interfaces, GUIs and ROS.
• The prospect of a self-driving vehicles industry disrupting transportation is propelling a talent grab and strategic acquisitions by competing international players with deep pockets.
• 40% of robotic startups have been in the consumer sector and will soon augment humans in high-touch fields such as health and elder care.

 BCG also cites the following example as an example of paying close attention to gain advantage:

"Amazon gained a first-mover advantage in 2012 when it bought Kiva Systems, which makes robots for warehouses. Once a Kiva customer, Amazon acquired the robot maker to improve the productivity and margins of its network of warehouses and fulfillment centers. The move helped Amazon maintain its low costs and expand its rapid delivery capabilities. It took five years for a Kiva alternative to hit the market. By then, Amazon had a jump on its rivals and had developed an experienced robotics team, giving the company a sustainable edge.”

Tractica

Robotics Market Forecast - June 2017, 26 pages, $4,200
Drones for Commercial Applications - June 2017, 196 pages, $4,200
AI for Automotive Applications - May 2017, 63 pages, $4,200
Consumer Robotics - May 2017, 130 pages, $4,200

The key story is that industrial robotics, the traditional pillar of the robotics market, dominated by Japanese and European robotics manufacturers, has given way to non-industrial robot categories like personal assistant robots, UAVs, and autonomous vehicles, with the epicenter shifting toward Silicon Valley, which is now becoming a hotbed for artificial intelligence (AI), a set of technologies that are, in turn, driving a lot of the most significant advancements in robotics. Consequently, Tractica forecasts that the global robotics market will grow rapidly between 2016 and 2022, with revenue from unit sales of industrial and non-industrial robots rising from $31 billion in 2016 to $237.3 billion by 2022.  The market intelligence firm anticipates that most of this growth will be driven by non-industrial robots.

Tractica is headquartered in Boulder and analyzes global market trends and applications for robotics and related automation technologies within consumer, enterprise, and industrial marketplaces and related industries.

General Research Reports

• Global autonomous mobile robots market, June 2017, 95 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  TechNavio forecasts that the global autonomous mobile robots market will grow at a CAGR of more than 14% through 2021.
• Global underwater exploration robots, June 2017, 70 pages, TechNavio, $3,500
  TechNavio forecasts that the global underwater exploration robots market will grow at a CAGR of 13.92 % during the period 2017-2021.
• Household vacuum cleaners market, March 2017, 134 pages, Global Market Insights, $4,500
  Global Market Insights forecasts that household vacuum cleaners market size will surpass $17.5 billion by 2024 and global shipments are estimated to exceed 130 million units by 2024, albeit at a low 3.0% CAGR. Robotic vacuums show a slightly higher growth CAGR.
• Global unmanned surface vehicle market, June 2017, Value Market Research, $3,950
  Value Market Research analyzed drivers (security and mapping) versus restraints such as AUVs and ROVs and made their forecasts for the period 2017-2023.
• Innovations in Robotics, Sensor Platforms, Block Chain, and Artificial Intelligence for Homeland Security, May 2017, Frost & Sullivan, $6,950
  This Frost & Sullivan report covers recent developments such as co-bots for surveillance applications, airborne sensor platforms for border security, blockchain tech, AI as first responder, and tech for detecting nuclear threats.
• Top technologies in advanced manufacturing and automation, April 2017, Frost & Sullivan, $4,950
  This Frost & Sullivan report focuses on exoskeletons, metal and nano 3D printing, co-bots and agile robots - all of which are in the top 10 technologies covered.
• Mobile robotics market, December 2016, 110 pages, Zion Market Research, $4,199
  Global mobile robotics market will reach $18.8 billion by end of 2021, growing at a CAGR of slightly above 13.0% between 2017 and 2021.
• Unmanned surface vehicle (USV) market, May 2017, MarketsandMarkets, $5,650
  MarketsandMarkets forecasts the unmanned surface vehicle (USV) market to grow from $470.1 Million in 2017 to $938.5 Million by 2022, at a CAGR of 14.83%.
• Military/Civil UAS markets, May 2017, 608 pages, Teal Group
  The Teal Group's 2016 world military market study estimates that UAV production will soar from current worldwide UAV production of $2.8 billion annually in 2016 to $9.4 billion in 2025, a 15.4% CAGR and that civil UAS production will soar from $2.6 billion worldwide in 2016 to $10.9 billion in 2025, a 15.4% CAGR.

Agricultural Research Reports

• Global agricultural robots market, May 2017, 70 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts the global agricultural robots market will grow steadily at a CAGR of close to 18% through 2021.
• Agriculture robots market, June 2017, TMR Research, $3,716
  Robots are poised to replace agricultural hands. They can pluck fruits, sow and reap crops, and milk cows. They carry out the tasks much faster and with a great degree of accuracy. This coupled with mandates on higher minimum pay being levied in most countries, have spelt good news for the global market for agriculture robots.Agricultural Robots, December 2016, 225 pages, Tractica, $4,200
• Forecasts that shipments of agricultural robots will increase from 32,000 units in 2016 to 594,000 units annually in 2024 and that the market is expected to reach $74.1 billion in annual revenue by 2024. Report, done in conjunction with The Robot Report, profiles over 165 companies involved in developing robotics for the industry.

Bottom Line

The disparity between the projections of these research reports is wide but the CAGRs are mostly all double digit. It is easy to conclude as BCG did - that the robotics industry is growing faster than expected

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SoftBank’s Pepper humanoid robot operation (a joint venture with Foxconn, Alibaba and SoftBank) has incurred a big $274 million loss while Asia more than doubled the amount of funding for tech startups thus far in 2017. No one ever said VC funding was for the faint of heart.

The Ups

According to PwC and CB Insights, venture capital investments in Asia in the first six months of 2017 totaled $28.8 billion. VC investments in North America for the same period totaled $18.4 billion.

CB Insights reports that 45% of all dollars invested in tech in 2017 went to Asian firms. 

Largest deals in Asia so far this year included Didi Chuxing raising $5.5 billion, One97 Communications ($1.4 billion), GO-JEK ($1.2 billion), Bytedance ($1 billion) and Ele.me ($1 billion).

Largest deals in North America in the quarter included San Francisco-based Lyft – which raised $600 million, Outcome Health ($500 million), Group Nine Media ($485 million), Houzz ($400 million), and Guardant Health ($360 million).

The number of deals around the world, as shown in the chart above, remains heavily in the West. Almost every day the news reports another fund being set up to invest in one area of tech or another. For example, Toyota Motor Corp today announced a $100 million fund (Toyota AI Ventures) for AI and robotics startups and have already made some initial investments. The first three are for a maker of cameras that monitor drivers and roads, a creator of autonomous car-mapping algorithms, and a developer of robotic companions for the elderly.

The Downs

Nikkei Asian Review reports on SoftBank Robotics’ $274 million loss which they attribute to the Pepper humanoid robot joint venture with Alibaba and Foxconn. The subsidiary was established in 2014 and began consumer sales of Pepper in June 2015 and business sales that October.

"Although the company does not release earnings, it recorded sales of 2.2 billion yen and a net loss of 11.7 billion yen in fiscal 2015, according to Tokyo Shoko Research. That is markedly worse than the 2.3 billion yen net loss from fiscal 2014. 'Pepper is unprofitable because of its relatively low price for a humanoid robot, costing just 198,000 yen ($1,750), which cannot cover development costs.'"

A SoftBank PR statement said that they will increase corporate sales and improve earnings through related businesses such as apps and content and that sales are good.

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The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) cites that between 2010 and 2016, 136,748 robots were shipped to the US —the most in any seven-year period in the US robotics industry. At the same time, US manufacturing employment increased by 894,000 and the unemployment rate fell from 9.8% to 4.7%.

Yet manufacturers, robotics associations, ethicists and media pundits are still fighting the robotics and jobs issue. Brett Brune, Editor in Chief of Smart Manufacturing magazine, argues that "the hand-wringing around robotics and jobs in the US really needs to stop." 

Manufacturers around the world, including in China, are busy figuring out how quickly to acquire robots. In Mexico, automation is thriving. So much so that the country is now the sixth-biggest auto producer globally. At the same time, the number of manufacturing workers is starting to swell.

A record-high 5.15 million Mexicans worked in manufacturing as of May, nearly a quarter of all workers registered with the country’s social security institute. Around 202,000 Mexicans joined the ranks of manufacturing workers during the first five months of this year alone.

California, which abuts Mexico, has America's largest Hispanic population (14.4 million in 2011), and has had a continuous supply of migrant farm workers since before statehood, has been an agricultural mainstay in the US for close to 100 years and currently produces about 60% of the nation's fresh produce. But as the state's minimum wage approaches $15 and competition from the growing Mexican manufacturing economy mounts, farm managers are having to cope with a workforce that has dropped and immigration policies that threaten to depress the labor supply further.

Since the late 1990s, the number of agricultural workers who move around the US working seasonal farming jobs fell by 60%. According to a study done by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (UC Berkeley), half of that labor transformation appears to be due to changes in the demographic makeup of the workforce while government and institutional changes in the market impacted the remaining 50%.

"This reduction in the number of migrant farmworkers increases the risk that fruits and vegetables will not be harvested before they spoil. To avoid this problem, farmers will switch crops, automate planting and harvesting, or take other actions to reduce the need for seasonal agricultural workers. Only a major change in our immigration and guest worker policies is likely to increase migration within the country and postpone automation."

Interestingly, the trend line for documented workers, although going steadily down, outnumbers undocumented workers as governmental and economic changes in the US and Mexico make immigration less attractive plus demographic changes make farm workers less willing to migrate.

The case for robotics in the ag industry has never been stronger as agricultural migration rates within the United States plummet. Recent research reports suggest that growth in ag technology will be exponential but not necessarily in across-the-board robotics; rather, it will first attack three areas: (1) converting farms to become connected digital systems through the use of precision ag methods, (2) then, with sensor-laden ground-based and airborne drones, planes and satellites gathering and accumulating data, analyzing that data to produce actionable prescriptions, and (3) provide equipment that can vary its procedures (seeding, thinning, weeding, spraying, etc.) based on the actionable prescriptions from #2, and automate post-harvest processing (sorting, inspecting, handling, packaging, boxing, etc.). 

Resources and references

• Story idea from Robotiq weekly What's New blog
• Article: Where did all the migrant farm workers go?
• Article: With farm labor getting scarcer, big U.S. farms are preparing to turn to robots
• Article: What’s slowing the use of robots in the ag industry?
• Research report: Global agricultural robots market, May 2017, 70 pages, TechNavio
• Research report: Agriculture robots market, June 2017, TMR Research
• Research report: Agricultural Robots, December 2016, 225 pages, Tractica

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After much uproar, media attention, and political pressure, Pres. Trump intervened and enabled all the teams headed to Washington, DC for the F.I.R.S.T Global Robotics Championship whose visas had been held up or denied to get their visas - some as late as two days before the event. Although the Afghan team got all the press, the team from Gambia was also denied when they first applied.

The three-day event which started Sunday evening in Washington, DC with opening ceremonies, has teams from 157 countries (including the Afghanistan and Gambia teams) — and some multinational teams representing continents. FIRST has organized competitions for many years but this is the first year it is hosting an international competition.

FIRST Global founder Dean Kamen, the inventor who created the Segway, said: “The competition’s objective is not just to teach children to build robots and explore careers in science, technology, engineering and math; it drives home the lesson of the importance of cooperation — across languages, cultures and borders. FIRST Global is getting them [teams from around the world] at a young age to learn how to communicate with each other, cooperate with each other and recognize that we’re all going to succeed together or we’re all going down together.” 

One of the distinctive features of the competition is the teaming up of individual teams into cooperative groups of three which helped team members mingle, chat and take selfies with fellow roboticists from around the world. 

Ivanka Trump met with the Afghan girls team and also the all-girl teams from Jordan, Brunei, Vanuatu and the U.S as she visited the event. She Tweeted: "It is a game everyone can play and where everyone can turn pro!"

The Washington Post described another set of problems that got resolved in an unusual way regarding the team from Iran:

Because of sanctions, FIRST Global was unable to ship a robotics kit to Iran, where a group of teenagers awaited the parts to build a robot. That might have spelled the end of the team’s shot of going to the world championships. But the organization introduced the Iranian team to a group of teenage robotics enthusiasts at George C. Marshall High School in Falls Church, Va., calling themselves Team Gryphon. The team in Iran sketched out blueprints on the computer and sent the designs to their counterparts across the ocean and then corresponded over Skype.

Sunday, the team flew the Iranian flag at their station next to the flag of Team Gryphon — a black flag with a purple silhouette of the gryphon — as a sign of their unlikely partnership.

For Mohammadreza Karami, the team’s mentor, it was an inspiring example of cooperation. “It’s possible to solve all of the world’s problems if we put aside our politics and focus on peace,” Karami said.

Kirsten Springer, a 16-year-old rising junior at Marshall High, said she didn’t want the Iranian team to be locked out of the competition just because of the sanctions. “Everybody should be able to compete … and to learn and to use that experience for other aspects of their life,” she said.

Now that all the teams are present and the competition has begun, we wish them all the best, hope they have a lot of fun, particularly hope they meet and befriend a lot of fellow robot enthusiasts, and thank them all for participating and their team mentors and supporters for helping make this all happen.

Share some of the photos, banter and fun by browsing @F1RSTglobal on Twitter.

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Singapore Technologies Engineering Ltd (ST Engineering) has acquired Pittsburgh, PA-based robotics firm Aethon Inc through Vision Technologies Land Systems, Inc. (VTLS), and its wholly-owned subsidiary, VT Robotics, Inc, for $36 million.

The acquisition will be carried out by way of a merger with VT Robotics, a special newly incorporated entity established for the transaction. The merger will see Aethon as the surviving entity that will operate as a subsidiary of VTLS, and will be part of the the ST Group’s Land Systems sector. Aethon’s leadership team and employees will remain in place and the company will continue to operate out of its Pittsburgh, PA location.

ST Engineering, S63 on the Singapore Stock Exchange, is a Singapore-based integrated defense and engineering group focused in aerospace, electronics, and land, sea and air unmanned systems for the battlefield. It employs over 21,000 people and has annual revenues of around $5 billion.

“We evaluated the autonomous mobile robotics market thoroughly. Our evaluation led us to conclude that Aethon was the best company in this space having the right technology along with proven success in the commercialization and installation of autonomous mobile robots. We look forward to working with the Pittsburgh, PA team to grow the company,” says Khee Loon Foo, General Manager, Kinetics Advanced Robotics of ST Kinetics.

Aethon provides intralogistics in manufacturing and hospital environments by delivering goods and supplies using its TUG autonomous mobile robots. TUGs are self-driving autonomous robots capable of hauling or towing up to 1,400 lbs as it dynamically and safely navigates around people and the corridors of client facilities.

“This acquisition is a terrific event for our company, employees and our customers since it provides Aethon with the resources and corporate backing to grow and develop new innovative robotic technology and more aggressively pursue new markets. We will now be able to expand our development capabilities to enhance our current technology and bring exciting logistics solutions to new vertical and global markets,” says Aldo Zini, CEO of Aethon.

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Recent events demonstrate the growing presence of indoor mobile robots: (1) Savioke’s hotel butler robot won the 2017 IERA inventors award; (2) Knightscope’s security robot mistook a reflecting pond for a solid floor and dove in face-first to the delight of Twitterdom and the media; and (3) the sale of robotic hospital delivery provider Aethon to a Singaporean conglomerate.

Are we beginning to enter an era of multi-functional robots? Certainly that is the vision of each of the vendors listed below. They see their robots greet, assist and run errands during business hours and then, after hours, prowl and tally inventory and fixed assets, and all the while - 24/7 - check for anomalies and things suspicious. SuperRobot? Or one of the many new mobile service robots that offer each of these services as separate tasks? For example, Savioke, the hotel butler robot, is now using their Relay robots with FedEx in the warehousing and logistics sector.

The indoor robot marketplace

Travis Deyle, CEO of Silicon Valley startup Cobalt Robotics which is developing indoor robots for security purposes, in an article in IEEE/Spectrum, posited that commercial spaces are the next big marketplace for robotics and that there’s a massive, untapped market in each of the commercial spaces shown in his chart below:

“Commercial spaces could serve as a great stepping stone on the path toward general-purpose home robots by driving scale, volume, and capabilities. So… while billions are being spent on R&D for autonomous vehicles, indoor robots for commercial and public spaces reap the technology and cost benefits on sensors, computing, machine learning, and open-source software.”

Although the chart above focuses on the many applications within the commercial space, there is also much activity in various forms of indoor material handling using mobile robots in warehouses and distribution centers. The list of companies in that marketplace is quite large and will be detailed in a future article.

Hospital mobile robot firm sells to Singaporean conglomerate

ST Engineering acquired Pittsburgh, PA-based hospital robotics firm Aethon for $36 million. Aethon provides intralogistics in hospital environments by delivering goods and supplies using its TUG autonomous mobile robots. ST Engineering's strategic reasoning for the acquisition can be understood by this statement about the purchase:

“We evaluated the autonomous mobile robotics market thoroughly. Our evaluation led us to conclude that Aethon was the best company in this space having the right technology along with proven success in the commercialization and installation of autonomous mobile robots,” said Khee Loon Foo, General Manager, Kinetics Advanced Robotics of ST Kinetics.

Hotel robot wins 2017 IERA Inventors Award

The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (IEEE/RAS) jointly sponsor an annual IERA (Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Robotics and Automation) Award which this year was presented to the Relay butler robot made by Savioke, a Silicon Valley startup.

Savioke's Relay robot makes deliveries all on its own in hotels, hospitals or logistics centers. Thanks to artificial intelligence and sensor technology, the robot can move safely through public spaces and navigate around people and obstacles dynamically.

The robots, which have already completed over 100,000 deliveries, can be seen in selected hotels in California and New York, Asia and the Middle East.

Indoor Robot Companies

Listed below are a few of the companies in the emerging mobile robot indoor commercial marketplaces described in Deyle's chart above. The list is not comprehensive but intended to give you an overview of who those new companies are, how far along they are, and how global they are.

Indoor Security Robots:

Recent research reports covering the security robots marketplace forecast that the market will reach $2.4 billion by 2022 at a CAGR of 9% from now til then. These forecasts include indoor and outdoor robots. 

• Knightscope is a Silicon Valley security robot startup with robots in shopping malls, exhibition halls, parking lots and office complexes. It was Knightscope's robot that took the face dive in the Washington, DC pond. [Graphic of Knightscope robot from Twitter.]
• Cobalt Robotics, also a Silicon Valley security robotics startup, but, as described by co-founder Travis Deyle, "Security is just one entrée to the whole emerging world of indoor robotics."
• Gamma Two Robotics, a Colorado patrol robot maker, whose new Ramsee mobile robots have sensors for heat, toxic gas, motion detection and acoustic listening.
• NxT Robotics is a San Diego mobile robot startup offering both an indoor (Iris) and outdoor (Scorpion) security patrol solution.
• SMP Robotics is a San Francisco maker of mobile security robots for outdoor and indoor facilities.
• Anbot (Hunan Wanwei Intelligent Robot Technology Co.) is a Chinese security robot with a robot very similar looking to Knightscope's. It can be seen prowling airport and museum public spaces in China.
• Robot Security Systems is a Netherlands-based startup indoor mobile security robot provider.
• China Security & Surveillance Technology also offers both indoor and outdoor security mobile robots.

Indoor Guides, Assistants, Greeters, Food Handlers and Gofor Robots:

This list could be much larger - particularly the gofor robots in the material handling field - but has been limited to those startups delivering product or with working prototypes focused on one or all of the commercial indoor market sectors. 

• MetraLabs is a German provider of fully autonomous mobile inventory, public space guide and retail robots for stores, malls and museums.
• PAL Robotics is a Spanish maker of humanoid robots used as guides, entertainers, information providers and presenters - in multiple languages.
• Pangolin Robot is a Chinese maker of restaurant server/waiter/busing robots and which also has a line of greeting and delivery robots.
• Simbe Robotics is a San Francisco provider of a retail space inventory robot auditing shelves for out-of-stock items, low stock items, misplaced items, and pricing errors. Simbe's Tally robot can perform during normal store hours alongside shoppers and employees or autonomously after hours.
• Bossa Nova Robotics is a Pittsburgh developer of a store robot that scans products on the shelves, makes store maps and helps employees keep track of where items are located.
• BlueBotics is a Swiss provider of mobile robots, robotic platforms and products for mobile guides, marketing assistants and industrial cleaning.
• Pepper, the mobile emotion-detecting robot jointly produced by Foxconn, Alibaba and SoftBank, is serving as the first point of contact in coffee stores, banks, corporate offices and other public spaces.
• Yujin Robot is a Korean consumer products maker with a line of hotel and restaurant delivery robots.
• Fellow Robots is a Silicon Valley developer of the NAVii robot which is used as a greeter but also maps and performs inventory scans. 

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China has recently announced their long-term goal to become #1 in A.I. by 2030. They plan to grow their A.I. industry to over $22 billion by 2020, $59 billion by 2025 and $150 billion by 2030. They did this same type of long-term strategic planning for robotics - to make it an in-country industry and to transform the country from a low-cost labor source to a high-tech manufacturing resource... and it’s working.

China's Artificial Intelligence Manifesto

With this major strategic long-term push into A.I., China is looking to rival U.S. market leaders such as Alphabet/Google, Apple, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft. China is keen not to be left behind in a technology that is increasingly pivotal -- from online commerce to self-driving vehicles to energy to consumer products. China aims to catch up by solving issues including a lack of high-end computer chips, software that writes software, and trained personnel. Beijing will play a big role in policy support and regulation as well as providing and funding research, incentives and tax credits.

“The local and central government are supporting this AI effort,” said Rui Yong, chief technology officer at PC maker Lenovo Group. “They see this trend coming and they want to invest more.”

Many cited the defeat of the world's top Go players from China and South Korea by the Google-owned A.I. company DeepMind and their AlphaGo game-playing software as the event that caused China's State Council to enact and launch its A.I. plan which it announced on July 20th. The NY Times called it "a sort of Sputnik moment for China."

Included in the announcement:

China will be investing heavily to ensure its companies, government and military leap to the front of the pack in a technology many think will one day form the basis of computing.

The plan covers almost every field: from using the technology  for voice recognition to dispatching robots for deep-sea and Arctic exploration, as well as using AI in military security. The Council said the country must “firmly grasp this new stage of AI development.”

China said it plans to build “special-force” AI robots for ocean and Arctic exploration, use the technology for gathering evidence and reading court documents, and also use machines for “emotional interaction functions.”

In the final stage, by 2030, China will “become the world’s premier artificial intelligence innovation center,” which in turn will “foster a new national leadership and establish the key fundamentals for an economic great power.”

Chinese Investments in A.I.

The DoD regularly warns that Chinese money has been flowing into American A.I. companies — some of the same companies it says are likely to help the United States military develop future weapons systems. The NY Times cites the following example:

When the United States Air Force wanted help making military robots more perceptive, it turned to a Boston-based artificial intelligence start-up called Neurala. But when Neurala needed money, it got little response from the American military.

So Neurala turned to China, landing an undisclosed sum from an investment firm backed by a state-run Chinese company.

Chinese firms have become significant investors in American start-ups working on cutting-edge technologies with potential military applications. The start-ups include companies that make rocket engines for spacecraft, sensors for autonomous navy ships, and printers that make flexible screens that could be used in fighter-plane cockpits. Many of the Chinese firms are owned by state-owned companies or have connections to Chinese leaders.

Chinese venture firms have offices in Silicon Valley, Boston and other areas where A.I. startups are happening and many Chinese companies -- such as Baidu -- have American-based research centers to take advantage of local talent. 

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) which reviews U.S. acquisitions by foreign entities for national security risks, appears to be blind to all of this.

China's Robot Manifesto Has Been Quite Successful

Chinese President Xi Jinping initiated “a robot revolution” and launched the "Made in China 2025" program. More than 1,000 firms and a new robotics association, CRIA (Chinese Robotics Industry Alliance) have emerged (or begun to transition) into robotics to take advantage of the program. By contrast, the sector was virtually non-existent a decade ago.

Under “Made in China 2025,” and the five-year robot plan launched last April, Beijing is focusing on automating key sectors of the economy including car manufacturing, electronics, home appliances, logistics, and food production. At the same time, the government wants to increase the share of in-country-produced robots to more than 50% by 2020; up from 31% last year and to be able to make 150,000 industrial robots in 2020; 260,000 in 2025; and 400,000 by 2030. China's stated goal in both their 5-year plan and Made in China 2025 program is to overtake Germany, Japan, and the United States in terms of manufacturing sophistication by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. To make that happen, the government needs Chinese manufacturers to adopt robots by the millions. It also wants Chinese companies to start producing more of those robots and has encouraged strategic acquisitions.

Four of the top 15 acquisitions in 2016 were of robotic-related companies by Chinese acquirers:

1. Midea, a Chinese consumer products manufacturer, acquired KUKA, one of the Big 4 global robot manufacturers
2. The Kion Group, a predominately Chinese-funded warehousing systems and equipment conglomerate, acquired Dematic, a large European AGV and material handling systems company
3. KraussMaffei, a big German industrial robots integrator, was acquired by ChemChina
4. Paslin, a US-based industrial robot integrator, was acquired by Zhejiang Wanfeng Technology, a Chinese industrial robot integrator

The Robot Report wrote an extensive review of robot growth in China and recapped 500 of them by type and sub-category. For fundings and acquisitions in 2017, read the following monthly posts on the subject:

• June 2017 fundings, acquisitions and IPOs
• May 2017 fundings, acquisitions, IPOs and failures
• April 2017 fundings, acquisitions, IPOs and failures
• March 2017 fundings, acquisitions, IPOs and failures
• February 2017 fundings, acquisitions and IPOs
• January 2017 fundings, acquisitions, IPOs and failures

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