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amazon robotics

Scene Report: Boston • ZebethMedia

What surprised me most on returning to Boston* for the first time since the onset of the pandemic was just how clustered things are. I’m not a great scheduler and I don’t know the city’s geography particularly well, but after two days spent meeting with more than a dozen startups, it slowly dawned on me that I was mostly operating within a five- to ten-block radius a stone’s throw from MIT (and, for that matter, Harvard). I’d given myself a little breathing room between meetings and site visits on Friday and was able to walk to all my meetings (the unseasonably warm weather didn’t hurt) — passing several of the spots I’d visited for conversations two days prior. Much like Pittsburgh, Boston has a tight-knit startup community. As companies get bigger, they’ll move to places like Waltham and Bedford on the outskirts, but they’ll remain part of this community nonetheless. There are several reasons I can see, as an outsider with only passing familiarity: It’s less sprawling than a place like the Bay Area/Silicon Valley or New York. The startups are often the outgrowth of universities (MIT, Harvard, Northeastern, BU), and there’s a built-in camaraderie there. Most people have worked at iRobot at some point. That last one’s diversifying a bit. Big corporations like Amazon (which may soon absorb iRobot) and Google have moved in as well. But the fact remains that most people aren’t ready to launch a startup right out of college, and these sorts of bigger corporations can be a good place to establish yourself and get a lay of the land. (Though universities are now doing an increasingly good job providing startup resources and accelerating companies after graduation.) Much like my own industry, everyone sort of knows everyone else, whether personally or by reputation. The longer you stay in a relatively insular industry, the more you’ll find yourself working with the same people time and again, so definitely try not to be an asshole (good advice generally, but doubly so when there can be clear and immediate consequences). You’re going to cross paths with the same people over and over. Life is funny like that. *I had drinks with a friend on Friday who helpfully noted that not every local is thrilled at the idea of using Boston, Cambridge, Somerville and the like interchangeably. So I’m going to just have to ask forgiveness rather than permission as I attempt to get this newsletter out in a timely fashion. I understand the importance of regional distinctions, as someone who has spent the majority of his life living in both the San Francisco Bay Area and two New York City boroughs, but for the sake of expediency in a very long newsletter, let’s assume all mentions of Boston are a reference to the city’s greater metropolitan area. World’s widest cable stayed bridge crossing the Charles River. Completed 2002. Image Credits: Getty Images / John Coletti This struck me the first time ZebethMedia did a small dinner ahead of our first Robotics event. Everyone knew everyone else. And most of them had been through the ranks of iRobot at one point or another. It’s not quite the Willow Garage story, but it’s another very clear case of a hub with a lot of important spokes. It also points to — as numerous people rightfully reminded me over the past week — the fact that we’re still very much in the early days of robotics. It feels like a small community because it is one, in a lot of ways. That’s exciting. I’ve spent much of my life feeling like I was a bit lately to different parties, but robotics feels new and fresh because it is. Some folks point to the home-brewed computer revolution that pulled in Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as a helpful way to contextualize where we are on the timeline. Others (like Tye Brady below) point significantly further back. I don’t think there’s a direct analog, but I do believe that 15 or 20 years from now, people will fondly remember this as a golden age for robotic discovery. The energy is palpable when you visit these sites. Much of Silicon Valley has spent the last decade trying to reengineer the same handful of tired apps over and over again (that’s not to say it’s all bad, but there’s a kind of stasis that comes with maturity). Here, however, you can talk to a million people chasing down real-world problems. The speed and excitement at which many of these breakthroughs occur can be head spinning. Of course, it’s important to remember that they’re standing on the backs of decades of research. Practically every technical founder has some university professor they’ll happily tell you is one of the great unsung heroes of robotics and AI. This, I think, is a big part of the reason why many robotics firms have set up a kind of miniature museum near the building’s entrance. It serves to show how far you’ve come, while providing a tangible connection to where you came from. Many of the products found on these shelves are a jumble of hastily soldered wires and 3D-printed parts. They’re the results of the excitement that drives people to build things with their hands in an effort to prove out whiteboarded theses. You want to bottle that jolt of electricity you get from the first time a scrappy bit of hardware works as intended and mete it out in those times when businesses become a hard slog and you lose sight of that original vision. Image Credits: Rise Robotics I should add here that pivoting doesn’t necessarily qualify as losing sight. It’s extremely common in robotics. You set out to solve a specific problem and find yourself suddenly deeply immersed in another thing entirely. A prime example of that from last week is the team at Rise Robotics, which started life as an exosuit company and is now making massive actuators for heavy machinery. Perhaps the most

Facing economic headwinds, Amazon consolidates robotic projects • ZebethMedia

Westborough, Massachusetts is a quiet town of 22,000, 40 minutes by car southeast of Boston. BOS27 is among the town’s newer residents. The 350,000-square-foot Amazon facility opened its doors a little over a year ago. It’s a hulking, gray addition to the tree-filled scenery. Inside is a state of the art facility that — along with a space on the opposite side of Boston in North Reading, Massachusetts — forms the beating heart of the company’s lofty robotics ambitions. In the decade since the company acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million in cash, it’s grown itself into one of the world’s leading robotics firms. Ask any founder in the warehouse robotics space, and they’ll quickly credit the company as the driving force in the space. “We look at Amazon, probably as the best marketing arm in the robotics business today,” Locus Robotics CEO Rick Faulk said at our robotics event in July. “They have set SLAs that everyone has to match. And we look at them as being a great part of our marketing team.” Amazon has set package delivery expectations at once-seemingly-impossible next or same day, and an entire industry has grown up around it, in hopes of keeping smaller firms competitive with the retail giant. Image Credits: Brian Heater What strikes you as soon as you walk through the doors at BOS27 is how much the space resembles one of the company’s many fulfillment centers. It’s cavernous and buzzing with robots and their human counterparts. The space, which was built to accommodate a business that had grown too large for just the North Reading location, is where the company develops, tests and builds its robotic systems. (Another space has recently opened in Belgium, as well, courtesy of Amazon’s September acquisition of Cloostermans.) This week, the company opened its doors to a handful of press members, including ZebethMedia. The “Delivering the Future” event was, by any measure, a PR push. It was an opportunity to show off the company’s shiny new production facility and a chance to present a kind of unified front for Amazon Robotics, a category that now encapsulates every element of the Amazon retail experience from the moment a consumer hits “buy now.” Image Credits: Amazon A couple of guided tours around the floor showcased the company’s growing army of wheeled robots built atop the Kiva platform, including the ubiquitous blue Hercules (the fourth-gen version of the product), and the mini conveyor belt sporting Pegasus and Xanthus, which is, for most intents and purposes, a lightweight version of the latter. Newer on the scene is Proteus, which arrives in a nearly neon green (“Seahawks green” as one executive joked today), with a small LED face and full autonomy — meaning it can safely operate outside the structured confines developed for the older models. Image Credits: Amazon Amazon also showed off a trio of robotic arms, which follow a similar evolutionary trajectory as their wheeled counterparts. There’s Robin, which debuted around 18 months ago and is now installed in 1,000 warehouses across the world. Its successor Cardinal adds a level of efficiency to the system, as it tightly packs boxes to send across the fulfillment center. A third, Sparrow, debuted at today’s event. As with its predecessors, Sparrow is effectively a souped-up version of a Fanuc off-the-shelf industrial robotic arm. The system is still in very limited pilots, including a facility in Texas and behind a safety cage at BOS27. What sets it apart from standard Fanuc arm deployments, however, is two-fold. First is the suction cup gripper, which utilizes pneumatics to pick up a wide range of different objects. The real secret sauce is the software of course. Amazon says the AI, coupled with a range of different hardware sensors, allows the system to identify around 65% of the inventory offered through the retailer. It’s a mindboggling figure. The system uses things like bar codes, size and shape to identify individual objects. Image Credits: Amazon Robin and Cardinal deal exclusively in boxes — of which Amazon has around 15 basic models. Sparrow has the far more complex task of picking up the products themselves. Beyond identification, this introduces its own spate of different challenges. If you’ve ever purchased anything from the company, you know how wildly these things fluctuate in size, shape and material. Hypotheticallym the same arm is picking up a bowling bowl and a bag of cotton swabs. That’s where the suction cup system comes in, offering a far greater range of picks than a rigid robotic hand. All told, the company has deployed more than 520,000 robotic drives since Amazon Robotics’ 2012 founding. It says that more than 75% of products ordered through its site come into contact with one of its robotic systems at some point in the process. Image Credits: Amazon Last-mile was the other of focus of today’s event. That starts with the 1,000 Rivian EVs the company has begun deploying to meet holiday demand. “Customers across the U.S. will begin to see custom electric delivery vehicles from Rivian delivering their Amazon packages, with the electric vehicles hitting the road in Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, Nashville, Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle and St. Louis, among other cities,” the company noted in July. “This rollout is just the beginning of what is expected to be thousands of Amazon’s custom electric delivery vehicles in more than 100 cities by the end of this year — and 100,000 by 2030.” Image Credits: Amazon Somewhat surprisingly, Amazon is still very bullish on the future of drone deliveries. “A demonstrated, targeted level of safety that is validated by regulators and a magnitude safer than driving to the store,” Prime Air VP David Carbon said during a keynote. “Delivering 500 million packages by drone annually by the end of this decade. Servicing millions of customers, operating in highly populated, suburban areas such as Seattle, Boston and Atlanta. Flying in an uncontrolled space autonomously.” Image Credits: Amazon But while a rendering of its MK30 drone —

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