Actuator

Dispatches from the conference room • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Actuator, Alphabet, Hardware, Iron Ox, Lidar, Robotics & AI, wing, XPRIZENo Comments

Greetings on a brisk New England morning. I’m finally here on my long threatened trip to Boston. I was planning to be here in early July ahead of our robotics event, but SARS-CoV-2 and its many variants had different ideas. I narrowly avoided another reschedule on my third time around with COVID, but now I’m in that brief (and ever narrowing) window of relative immunity. It’s like I’m Superman or something (probably shouldn’t have gone with one of the few DC superheroes without a mask). Given the fact that I haven’t been out since 2019, I may well have overbooked. Met with four startups yesterday afternoon after arriving at Logan, spent this morning meeting with a couple of VCs/accelerators and startups, and am currently writing to you from a MassRobotics conference room (shoutout to Joyce, who kindly reserved me a conference room to chat with some founders ahead of a panel and more meetings tonight). An aerial general view during a game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees on August 13, 2022 at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts. Image Credits:Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images Call it a fact-finding mission. Or maybe a temperature check. We’ve entered an interesting moment, where superpowered robotic VC investments are finally having to contend with the realities of market forces. For a moment there, the industry appeared relatively immune to the slowdown, but in spite of continued bullish feelings about automation at large, nothing here can appropriately be labeled “recession proof.” Anecdotally, we may have also entered the stage in which the key players in already well-represented categories such as logistics/fulfillment are already in place. That isn’t to say there isn’t room for key new players to enter the picture, but I suspect it’s a lot harder to get tens of millions in funding by telling investors that you’re an Amazon Robotics killer than it was at the beginning of the pandemic. At the moment, I’ve got a keen eye out for two things: First, the companies solving the extremely unsexy problems. There are still a lot of extremely bad — and impossible-to-staff — jobs out there that are ripe for automation. I spoke with a company that’s a great representation of that phenomenon, which I’ll dive into when I debrief my Boston trip in next week’s Actuator. Second, the key components of the broader robotics experience. I know a lot of well-funded companies are looking to create their full-stack solutions, but as these technologies grow in application, a ton of smaller industries are going to sprout up around that. If you’ve got a sufficiently adaptable piece of that puzzle, you’ve got a great — and perhaps overlooked — business on your hands. There’s value in well-placed myopia. Sometimes thinking small is the right business move. I realize and respect that a lot of folks enter the space with plans to change the world, but they think globally and act locally and all of that good stuff. Roughly 24 hours into this trip, and I’m realizing how much I missed landing in a place and talking to as many startups as possible. Glad I’m able to do this in Boston again, and hoping to be in more cities soon to see what companies are cooking and, perhaps, check the temperature of the industry from a much closer vantage point. Again, lots more on all of the above next week. Image Credits: Iron OX For now, two things are top of mind on this newsletter. One is fun. The other less so. We’ll start with the bad news first. Layoffs. Almost overnight, half the staff at Iron Ox is out of work. Even forgetting the extremely real and immediate human impact of such a move, it’s very disheartening for the industry. There are a lot of questions here. Is this a broader indictment of fully automated greenhouses? Is it something specific to Iron Ox? Perhaps the company’s solution was more proprietary and less adaptable to existing systems than a startup needs to be in the space. Either way, it’s hard not to walk away from this with the sense that such a well-funded firm is something of a bellwether for automation’s hard road ahead, as the space grapples with bigger macroeconomic issues. Chief legal officer Myra Pasek confirmed the layoffs this week with ZebethMedia. All told, they amount to just under half of Iron Ox’s staff, and appear to run across the organization. It’s a gutting of a company that is clearly doing some soul searching around which existing elements to capitalize on going forward. Says Pasek: We’ve decided to hyperfocus on our core competence of engineering and technology; as a result, we eliminated many roles that are not core to our renewed focus. However, the layoff was comprehensive and included positions throughout the organization — i.e., not limited to only certain departments. Reducing the Iron Ox team was a painful decision — one we did not take lightly. We are working with our board members and leaning into our extensive ecosystem throughout Silicon Valley to help employees find meaningful new work at mission-aligned companies. Iron Ox has always hired world-class talent, and I’m confident that the individuals we unfortunately had to cut this week will have many options open to them. As a matter of policy, we are not going to provide additional details or comment on specific personnel, and we ask that you respect their privacy at this sensitive time. This was precisely the caveat I was alluding to in last week’s newsletter when talking about climate robotics firms. Not everything is a surefire bet, but that shouldn’t distract founders from the fact that there’s a lot of good to be done and money to be made in this space. Image Credits: NimbRo The more pleasant news this week is around teleoperation. Our TC Sessions: Robotics pitch-off winner Touchlab made it to the semifinals, but ultimately, the XPrize Avatar trophy went to NimbRo, which hails from the Autonomous Intelligent

There’s still green in climate robots • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Actuator, AMP Robotics, Climate, Google, Hardware, labrador systems, Robotics & AINo Comments

Kicking things off with a big funding round for AMP Robotics this week for a couple of reasons, but when push comes to shove, it comes down to something really simple: There are a lot of great reasons to be bullish on automation and there are a lot of equally great reasons to be bullish on climate tech. If you can manage to position yourself right in the middle of that Venn diagram, you’re probably sitting pretty right now. There are caveats, of course. There are always caveats. A big, scary bear market is the most immediate. We’ve alluded to current and coming layoffs in recent editions of this newsletter, and the truth is that there are going to be a lot more before we’re on the other side of this. As bright as your category is long-term, no one exists outside these macro trends. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in the position of raising a round to keep the lights on at my startup as the headwinds grow stronger. The days of the nine-digit Series A seem to have mostly drawn to a close for the foreseeable future, and I’m accordingly hearing more reports of decreased headcounts. But if I had to choose a tech startup space to ride this out in, climate and automation would be at or near the top. To steal a paragraph from Connie’s recent interview with Chris Sacca: [Climate investing] is recession proof, even without the IRA. Everything we’re doing is providing a substitute good. That’s what almost feels unfair. You spend years building Twitter and you put it up in the app store and you hope somebody gives a damn. It could be a really well-designed product, but maybe no one cares, whereas everything we’re building right now, we actually know the demand for it. And if we deliver a better, cheaper, faster, cooler, easier-to-use, sexier product, then we’ll even grow the market. So I actually think this is some of the easiest investing we’ve done. From where I sit, “recession proof” seems a little hyperbolic in the near term, but climate disaster isn’t a thing of the future. We’re living with it — and have been for some time. There are going to be plenty of bandwagon jumpers and green washers in the interim, but if you’ve got good vision and better vetting, the right climate-focused technology might be as close to a sure thing as you’re going to get as an investor. Ditto for robotics and automation for reasons we’ve outlined plenty of times over the last couple of years. Find the right solution for the right problem, and you might one day be looking at your own $91 million Series C. I’m far from a technological utopianist, and my feelings on the future of climate change are a lot darker than I’m comfortable discussing here. It certainly doesn’t help to prep for all of this by reading a recent Greenpeace report that notes, “The plastics, packaging, and recycling industries have waged a decades-long misinformation campaign to perpetuate the myth that plastic is recyclable.” Image Credits: AMP Robotics It’s important to be pragmatic to a fault here. We don’t do ourselves any favors by sugarcoating the size and scope of the current crisis. Nor do we have much to gain by going full doomer. Somewhere between the two exists the possibilities of achievable solutions. None will fix the problem, but if we’re lucky, the right one could serve to mitigate things. Recycling robotics firm AMP’s latest raise follows a sizable $55 million Series B raised in January of last year. Congruent Ventures and Wellington Management led this massive $91 million round, which also features participation from Blue Earth Capital, Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, Tao Capital Partners, XN, Sequoia Capital, GV, Range Ventures, and Valor Equity Partners. “Advancements in robotics and automation are accelerating the transformation of traditional infrastructure, and AMP is seeking to reshape the waste and recycling industries,” said Wellington’s Michael DeLucia. “By bringing digital intelligence to the recycling industry, AMP can sort waste streams and extract additional value beyond what is otherwise possible.” All of this comes with the standard caveat that there are truly no surefire bets in this — or any — industry. There are still a million difficult to quantify factors, from timing to competition to sheer luck, which play a role in a product’s success. The more companies that enter a space, the more more failure we’ll ultimately see. Though, that’s kind of the deal with early stage investment — no one gets it right 100% of the time. But a few perfectly timed investments can make a career. The upshot of facing an impossibly large, seemingly insurmountable problem (if one can say such a thing) is that there’s still a ton of problems that need the right minds to tackle them. There are a million oversaturated categories in automation right now. Filtering out all of the aforementioned greenwashing, the same can’t be said for climate. It “almost feels unfair,” to steal a line from Sacca. Frankly, it’s also a space I’d love to see more of the bigger names operate in. Take Google, for example. The company had a big AI day here in NYC this week, showcasing some of its work in the category. Google has investments in both climate and automation, and it would be great to see these sorts of companies working to solve big problems with big ideas. Gaining advantages to move e-commerce to a same-day delivery model is all well and good, but ordering all of the sunscreen on Amazon isn’t going to do you much good in the face of true climate catastrophe. Image Credits: Google Google for Good did take centerstage at the event, however, with the company demonstrating how advances to ML are being used for the very important work of monitoring wildfires and floods. It’s also worth highlighting some of the company’s efforts in robotic learning. Code as Policies (CaP) is a newly announced

Dawn of the tentacle • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Actuator, robotics, Robotics & AINo Comments

Fair warning, it’s going to be a quick one from me today. I caught the thing again, roughly three months after the last time I caught the thing. They say, “third time’s the charm,” and I now recognize that they were referring to chest pain and a general light-headedness. Turns out it doesn’t get easier. Send soup. With that in mind, consider this week’s Actuator a bit more on the housecleaning side of things (don’t we have robots for that now?). It’s more of a smattering of links to interesting stories from the past week, along with some that no doubt fell through the cracks last week, during Disrupt. If this is your first Actuator, sorry. Trying hard not to be sick this time next week. Trend-wise (if a week of news can be referred to as such), I’m seeing a bit of a dip in robotic investment news, with university research rushing in to fill the vacuum. More than anything, the latter is most likely due, in part, to the school year being back in full force. Not that robotics researchers get the summer off, of course. Before the fun stuff, let’s discuss potential slowdowns. As investor Kelly Chen noted on our VC panel at Disrupt, “On the less rosy side, I think the layoffs are yet to come. In an economic downturn, the customers will be less willing to be experimental, so they’re thinking about cutting costs and then economics just becomes so much more important.” The list of “recession-proof” industries is short and doesn’t include robotics, despite being relatively unaffected by the drying out of VC funds. We’ve got a double-edged sword here. On one side, automation can help stave off some economic impacts at companies, if properly deployed. On the other, so much of the stuff we talk about here is so long-tail, it’s easy to see investors and others succumbing to very real short-term concerns. Image Credits: Berkshire Grey Obviously, none of this stuff should be painted with too broad a brush. There are so many different factors at play here. Berkshire Grey, which ran aground a stock dip following a 2021 SPAC deal, is an example of a company that recently “made some updates.” For its part, the firm is framing this as more of a correction than anything. BG won’t confirm how large those “updates” are, but they told ZebethMedia: We discussed on our Q2 earnings call that we’ve matured as a company, improved business operations, and know exactly where we need to focus and invest. We made some updates to our team back in August that were small but will help us focus on continuing to grow our business. That news arrives as the company signs an “equity purchase agreement” with Lincoln Park Capital, which it tells me it’s done for the sake of “some added financial flexibility.” Per a release on the latter bit of news: Under the terms and conditions of the Agreement, the Company has the right, but not the obligation, to sell up to $75 million of its shares of common stock to Lincoln Park over a 36-month period, subject to certain limitations. Any common stock that is sold to Lincoln Park will occur at a purchase price that is determined by prevailing market prices at the time of each sale with no upper limits to the price Lincoln Park may pay to purchase the common stock. The company tells me: These types of deals are common. The $75M commitment from Lincoln Capital allows us to access capital in an inexpensive, simple way that provides us with some added financial flexibility. Certainly the overall market for fulfillment robotics looks to be robust. Given the current level of saturation in the market, however, I’d say it’s safe to expect the category to continue to transform for the foreseeable future. Image Credits: Photo by Jared Wickerham/Argo AI One other element worth pointing out in all of this is the human impact of automation. It’s here and it’s not going away anytime soon, but we can ease the blow as a society. Only if we actually choose to do so, of course. A Reuters piece notes the timing of Walmart’s move to lay off nearly 1,500 workers in fulfillment center roles in Atlanta, Georgia, following the acquisition of robotics startup, Alert Innovation. It said the following of the move: We’re converting the fulfillment center on Fulton Parkway to support our growing WFS (Walmart Fulfillment Services) business. As part of the conversion, the facility’s infrastructure, operational resources, processes, staffing requirements and equipment are being adjusted to meet the building’s needs. I really need to stop leading with the bad news, right? I’m not sure tricking a kid into eating their broccoli is a good model for running a successful newsletter. I’ll get this stuff right eventually (and when I’m a bit less light-headed). Image Credits: IHMC (Strike a pose, Vogue) I’ve noted on these pages why I’m not yet 100% sold on humanoid robots (though I’m aware of some compelling arguments for them), but it’s always fun to watch different companies and laboratories take different approaches to the very real issues around real-world usage. The Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, in Pensacola, Florida, recently revealed a system it’s working on with Boardwalk Robotics (and an assist from Moog’s Integrated Smart Actuators) named Nadia. The system was named as an homage to gymnast Nadia Comăneci and is being developed with funding from the Office of Naval Research, which has been behind a number of interesting robotics projects. IHMC notes: The Nadia project, which has a three-year timeline, is intended to function in indoor environments where stairs, ladders, and debris would require a robot to have the same range of motion as a human, which can be particularly useful in firefighting, disaster response, and other scenarios that might be dangerous for humans. Image Credits: Yahav Avigal, Lars Berscheid, Tamim Asfour, Torsten Kröger, Ken Goldberg New(ish) breakthroughs in clothes-folding robots. The dual-armed system SpeedFolding

Battlefield bots • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Actuator, Hardware, MIT, Robotics & AI, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Greetings from the bowels of Moscone Center West. As I type this, Kevin Hart just exited the stage and Serena Williams is presiding over a packed house. No exaggeration: I attempted to make my way to grab a seat in the few rows up front allotted to the ZebethMedia staff, but I physically couldn’t get through the crowd. A solid one-two punch to kick off this Wednesday morning. I’ve had a little time to walk the halls here, mostly scouring for hardware and robotics firms, as is my wont. It’s always fun to see the sorts of microcosms that develop at events like this, identifying groupings that are indicative of broader current and future trends in the startup world. I’m happy to say for my own edification that robotics firms, in particular, were well represented. Not sure that’s something I would have felt comfortable asserting five or so years back. Coupled with all of the various ongoing market indicators, it truly feels like we’ve comfortably entered a new era for robotics and robotic investing. Yesterday I hosted what amounted to a two-hour marathon pitch-off, which involved 30 startups offering two-minute pitches. It was a bit exhausting, frankly, but I’m looking forward to unpacking some of those offerings in the coming weeks. One definitely warrants mention in this week’s Actuator, because I ended up speaking with the CEO and profiling the firm late last week—Touchlab. Image Credits: Touchlab Touchlab was the winner of our TC Sessions: Robotics event back in July, so this thing is long overdue. One bit that’s especially interesting to me is how the company’s outward focus has shifted in that short time. The Edinburg-based firm originally pitched us on its robotic skin. The applications are pretty clear there — effectively adding another layer of sensing to supplement existing vision systems and the like. That’s still the core of the startup’s play, but Touchlab has also begun to implement its own technology into a robotic system. It showcased an eldercare robot that is essentially an off-the-shelf TIAGo++ robot, outfitted with its sensor technology. Eldercare makes sense, as a highly pressure-sensitive sensor is required to interact with human patients — the elderly in particular. “We have a layer of software that translates the pressure of the skin to the suit. We’re also using haptic gloves,” co-founder and CEO Zaki Hussein told me. “Currently, our skin gathers a lot more data than we can currently transmit to the user over haptic interfaces. So there’s a little bit of a bottleneck. We can use the full potential of the best haptic interface of the day, but there is a point where the robot is feeling more than the user is able to.” The haptic sensations are translated into a wearable suit donned by a VR-wearing operator. I’m interested in exploring the state of teleoperation a bit more. There’s a weird sort of stigma around this technology in a category where everyone seems to be constantly chasing full autonomy. Image Credits: RIF Robotics RIF Robotics (pronounced “riff”), another one of the entries in the Battlefield 200, operates in a similar space. Specifically, it’s building systems designed to streamline the disinfecting of medical equipment in-hospital. Co-founder Kevin DeMarco tells ZebethMedia: The major challenges that the sterile processing industry is facing are a lack of experienced surgical technicians, instrument-level tracking, infection traceability and cost traceability. Medical device manufacturers are interested in knowing how their equipment is used and degrades in the field. Instrument-level data will also help them to decide where to send sales reps. Hospitals are interested in instrument-level data because it will help them operate more efficiently by improving instrument-level tracking and instrument inspection. Currently, most hospitals only track at the tray-level, but the industry wants to be able to track at the instrument level. Image Credits: Katakem I’m starting to sense a theme emerging here — one more healthcare robotics firm from my time at the Showcase stage. Kyle’s headline really says it all here: “Katakem is developing a robot to automate drug development.” The firm has developed what it deems a “robot chef,” designed to create chemical reactions. It tells ZebethMedia: The production of a chemical product is strictly regulated and standardized. [But] the development phase between discovery and production is still carried out manually and no significant data is extracted. Through data, we can help companies develop new life-saving drugs faster and, of course, this means higher revenues and better margins for them … Data [from OnePot] is reliable, clean and immediately usable. Image Credits: Jasper Montreal-based Jasper is taking a unique approach toward a market controlled by the likes of Seamless, DoorDash and Uber Eats. The firm’s play revolves around the deployment of a proprietary chain of automated ghost kitchens designed to dramatically speed up food delivery. The robotics aspect comes in through the kitchen, allowing for minimal or no staff for the food preparation process. “Having good meals at home is expensive or time consuming … Food delivery is highly inefficient — restaurants or ghost kitchens prepare meals worth a few dollars and then pay someone to ship them across town,” CEO Gunnar Froh told ZebethMedia. “While most customers aren’t aware of this, about half of their dollars are spent on platform fees and delivery costs. By running robotic kitchens in or next to residential high-rises, Jasper eliminates labor and delivery inefficiencies to offer residents freshly prepared gourmet meals at the cost of home cooking. Jasper meals are plated on porcelain, which allows its clients to cut up to a third of their household waste.” Swap Robotics at ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia A couple of robotics-focused firms made it onstage for the Battlefield pitch-offs as well. Swap has developed an electric mower specifically designed to cut vegetation around solar farms. “Right now, there are a couple of main challenges when cutting all of the vegetation in solar fields,” the company tells

The last mile • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in Actuator, Amazon, Foxglove, Robotics & AI, Starship, viam roboticsNo Comments

I don’t love devoting the first several paragraphs of this newsletter to Amazon every week, but no one is making waves — both good and bad — in the robotics space quite like the little mom-and-pop bookseller from Seattle, Washington. This is one of the bad weeks. It’s a story about what happens when your high-profile pilot doesn’t turn out as planned. Failure is always an option. It’s not a good option, and it’s certainly not the option anyone is hoping for, but to suggest it’s not an option is really just a fundamental misunderstanding of what the word “option” means. Life isn’t a motivational poster dressed up as a LinkedIn post — it’s life, and failure is sitting around like a teenager loitering in the 7-Eleven parking lot. It could be a blessing, it could be a curse, but it is never, under any circumstances, not an option. Last week, Amazon confirmed reports that it has scaled back real-world piloting for its last-mile delivery robot, Scout. The ~400-person team will mostly scatter to the wind. A few will remain with the (not entirely dead) project and still others will fill suitable roles inside the company. Amazon tells ZebethMedia: During our limited field test for Scout, we worked to create a unique delivery experience but learned through feedback that there were aspects of the program that weren’t meeting customers’ needs. As a result, we are ending our field tests and reorienting the program. We are working with employees during this transition, matching them to open roles that best fit their experience and skills. Image Credits: Amazon So, what to make of failure in this case? For starters, I’d point to the ups and downs (so to speak) of Amazon Prime Air. The drone project was hit with layoffs during a reorg of the project. However bearish you might (understandably) be about drone deliveries, it’s since made progress, taking baby steps with a smattering of real-world test pilots. Even so, it’s hard not to view the Scout situation as a potential bellwether for delivery robots in general. Amazon is uniquely positioned to make them work, as the world’s largest retailer, which has already found a fair bit of success in the robotics space — primarily through fulfillment automation. It also has more money than god. It would have been easy to continue pumping money into the project. Have you encountered a delivery robot in the wild? — Brian Heater (@bheater) October 12, 2022 There’s a good chance, however, that Scout was simply in the crosshairs of some corporate belt-tightening. Sure, Amazon is fine to toss a few billion here and there for acquisitions like iRobot, but newish CEO Andy Jassy is taking it upon himself to make some cuts to improve Amazon’s bottom line as it faces economic headwinds just like the rest of us. It’s being seen in different spots across the org, and all the robotic vision in the world couldn’t keep Scout from running into this specific obstacle. Starship delivery robots at UCLA campus on January 15, 2021. Image Credits: Starship/Copyright Don Liebig/ASUCLA This space continues to be an interesting one to watch. There’s plenty of VC being pumped into it, and there are a lot of reports around new partnerships. This week Starship announced a partnership with Grubhub that brings its delivery bot to a number of college campuses across the U.S. The list starts with University of Kentucky; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Wayne State University; Southern Methodist University; and Fairfield University, with eight or nine more schools being added by end of year. Starship CCO Ryan Tuohy tells ZebethMedia: We have just launched “Delivery by Starship” with Grubhub and we’re in multiple discussions with other partners to offer our world-leading robot delivery experience as a B2B delivery-as-a-service solution. Delivery by Starship integrates into retailers’ existing platforms to make food delivery more sustainable and efficient. Short of a crystal ball, it’s hard to know how all of this will shake out. There are so many moving parts, too many places, too much regulation to consider to accurately predict things five or 10 years down the road. I remain both curious and skeptical about the efficacy around these machines, including how they’ll deal with the ever present threat of things like stairs. Certainly some of these work fine when supervised by a human. And what of teleoperation? It’s become something of a dirty word in a category obsessed with autonomy. The money is certainly there, and vendors are more than happy to partner with these companies. At very least, it’s an indicator to customers and shareholders that you’re looking toward the future. In a world where Amazon has made same and next day delivery the default, more automation could help take some of the onus off humans to kill themselves for quotas. So where is delivery’s Amazon moment? And if Amazon can’t deliver it, who will? Image Credits: Viam Robotics I visited Viam Robotics’ offices last week. Two notes: It’s a big, cool space with a great view of Lincoln Center (this is, admittedly, the less relevant of the two points). The company just rolled out a better beta of its cloud-based robotics tools kit. There are a number of companies pushing to lower the barrier of entry for industrial robotics deployment. It’s exciting to see, though, in our conversation, CEO Eliot Horowitz pushed back on the notion that we’re ready for a low- or no-code solution right now. He told me: Dreamweaver was, in some ways, ahead of its time. If you look at Webflow or Squarespace, they’re kind of doing what Dreamweaver was doing, but Dreamweaver came out at a time when the backends weren’t ready for a product of its nature. It was really just a product ahead of its time. The e-commerce space wasn’t ready for no-code. I think robotics is in the same place. The benefit of a low-code solution, if it worked, would be great. I just think it’s