Hardware

Backbone launches an Android version of its mobile gaming controller • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in HardwareNo Comments

We tend to write fondly about Backbone’s mobile gaming controller around these parts, but the recommendation has always come with one asterisk: to date, it’s really been meant mostly for iPhones. You could use a cable to make it work with other devices — but Android users, for example, haven’t been able to just pop their phone into the controller’s stretchy grips and start playing. That’ll change soon. This week the company is starting to roll outs its Android-focused model, swapping out USB-C in place of the Lightning connectivity of the iPhone build. The Android version will go for the same $99 as its iPhone equivalent — and while shipping times might shift as orders roll in, the company currently says orders placed now will arrive by Christmas. If you were hoping for an Android-version of Backbone’s Playstation Edition — the Sony-approved build that comes in white rather than black, swaps the A/B/X/Y buttons for the PS5’s triangle/X/square/circle glyphs, and adds a PS logo on the back — it doesn’t seem to be an option so far. The company is also rolling out an Android-friendly version of the controller’s companion app, which acts as an access hub for your Backbone-friendly games, voice chat with friends, and allows you to record gameplay clips by tapping that orange button on the controller.

Boston Dynamics sues Ghost Robotics over robot dog patent infringements • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in boston dynamics, ghost robotics, Government & Policy, Hardware, military, patent litigation, Robotics & AINo Comments

If you know anything about Ghost Robotics, it’s likely one of two things: 1) They make robot dogs. 2) Sniper rifles can be mounted to those robots. A majority of the Philadelphia firm’s press coverage has revolved around these facts, along with some coverage of its systems being used to patrol the U.S. border. That last bit was enough to grab the attention of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who tweeted: It’s shameful how both parties fight tooth + nail to defend their ability to pump endless public money into militarization. From tanks in police depts to corrupt military contracts, funding this violence is bipartisan + non-controversial, yet healthcare + housing isn’t. It’s BS. Ghost has thus far not demonstrated any manner of ethical qualms when it comes to its work with military and law enforcement — but it’s the company’s product design that could ultimately get it in hot water. Boston Dynamics filed a suit in the Delaware court system on November 11, alleging Ghost of infringing on multiple patents. “Boston Dynamics’ early success with the Spot robot did not go unnoticed by competitors in the robotics industry, including Ghost Robotics,” the suit notes. It goes on to call out two specific models, Vision 60 and Spirit 40, both “dog”-style quadrupeds. While Boston Dynamics tells ZebethMedia it doesn’t comment on pending legislation (understandable), it adds: Innovation is the lifeblood of Boston Dynamics, and our roboticists have successfully filed approximately 500 patents and patent applications worldwide. We welcome competition in the emerging mobile robotics market, but we expect all companies to respect intellectual property rights, and we will take action when those rights are violated. The suit notes that Boston Dynamics sent Ghost a letter on July 20, asking the company to review its patents. This was followed by multiple cease and desist letters. The filing then goes on to offer a fairly comprehensive catalog of alleged infringements. While Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot has been deployed by law enforcement agencies like the NYPD, the company has been vocal in its opposition to weaponizing robots. Last month, it joined Agility, ANYbotics, Clearpath Robotics and Open Robotics in penning an open letter condemning the practice. It noted, in part: We believe that adding weapons to robots that are remotely or autonomously operated, widely available to the public, and capable of navigating to previously inaccessible locations where people live and work, raises new risks of harm and serious ethical issues. Weaponized applications of these newly-capable robots will also harm public trust in the technology in ways that damage the tremendous benefits they will bring to society. Contracts with agencies have — of course — played a major role in the growth of robotics firms, including Boston Dynamics, which relied on DARPA as a major source of funding in its early days (though deals were sunset when the company was acquired by Google). Any firm willing to build the machinery for autonomous warfare stands to make a lot of money, assuming they’re not sidelined by ethical misgivings. Ghost gained prominence late last year when images emerged from a trade show featuring one of its robots with a SWORD Defense Systems Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle (SPUR) mounted to its back. The firm’s then-CEO Jiren Parikh told me at the time: We don’t make the payloads. Are we going to promote and advertise any of these weapon systems? Probably not. That’s a tough one to answer. Because we’re selling to the military, we don’t know what they do with them. We’re not going to dictate to our government customers how they use the robots. We do draw the line on where they’re sold. We only sell to U.S. and allied governments. We don’t even sell our robots to enterprise customers in adversarial markets. We get lots of inquiries about our robots in Russia and China. We don’t ship there, even for our enterprise customers. The suit asks the court to award unspecified damages for the alleged infringements. We’ve reached out to Ghost Robotics about Boston Dynamics’ filing and will update the story accordingly as we hear back.

Attabotics raises another $71M to grow its vertical robotic warehouse solution • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in attabotics, Hardware, Robotics & AI, warehouse, warehouse roboticsNo Comments

“Amazon remains the best member of our business development team,” Attabotics founder and CEO Scott Gravelle says with a hint of snark, “as companies go look for alternatives and look for ways to stay competitive. Amazon has been setting customer expectation in North America for years. They’re the benchmark.” It’s a familiar story for anyone in the fulfillment space. Amazon’s success in warehouse robotics has effectively created its own industry. Many have followed in the company’s footsteps with Kiva-style robots, but Calgary-based Attabotics believes it has built out a new paradigm for the category. The company builds densely packed vertical storage structures that utilize robots and AI to find and fetch items. The company says it’s able to accomplish this in 15% of the standard warehouse space by building up. One of the major appeals of such a cost-saving system is that you can bring it to more densely packed urban environments. That means, among other things, bringing fulfillment centers closer to customers. The strategy has helped the firm drum up a good amount of funding since its 2015 founding. This week it announced a $71.7 million Series C led by Export Development Canada and featuring Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board. That brings its total funding up to $165.1 million. It’s a less than ideal time to be out there looking for funding, but Gravelle tells ZebethMedia that time was of the essence. “We’re not at the stage where we could have [waited],” he explains. Gravelle adds, “We’ve got some great traction with some great customers. We signed a deal with the DoD. So now it’s time to go from making stuff work to growing the business and deploying it and executing it.” In September, the firm announced Attabot 2022, the first commercialized version of its technology, which began rolling out to select customers a month prior. Per the company: Attabot 2022 is equipped with a flexible payload to accommodate larger bins up to 16” tall at 100lb – an increase of 25% from Attabotics’ previous robot release. Its ultra-lean, modular design translates into 60% fewer parts than the previous beta model and allows for further flexibility and forward compatibility. The company is continuing to grow its headcount — albeit cautiously — as it looks to fill 30 positions and expand beyond its engineering core. Attabotics’ current headcount is around 300.

Pickle picks up $26M for its truck unloading robots • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Hardware, Pickle, Pickle Robot Company, robotics, Robotics & AI, truck, warehouseNo Comments

Fulfillment has arguably been the hottest robotics category over the past two years, as companies have looked to stay competitive with Amazon, even amid ongoing labor shortages. Still, one of the most important links in the chain remains one of the least addressed. Truck unloading isn’t a particularly easy problem to solve, but Pickle Robot Company is single-mindedly focused on it. When I paid a trip to the company’s offices on my trip to Boston last week, Pickle pointed out precisely how large of a problem this has become. Warehouse jobs are tough enough to fill these days, but unloading pallets and trucks bring their own spate of issues, including repetitive heavy lifting and wildly fluctuating temperatures. Imagine stepping foot inside a shipping container that’s been sitting in direct sunlight all day. Traditional heavy equipment like forklifts come with their own issues. The company describes their offering thusly, “Pickle is founded by a cast of MIT alumni. We are teaching off-the-shelf robot arms how to pick up boxes and play Tetris.” The company notes that it has “unload[ed] tens-of-thousands of packages per month at customer sites,” primarily in Southern California. The work thus far has been part of a pilot with United Exchange Corporation, which has deployed the system in a distribution center. Today Pickle is announcing a $26 million Series A raise led by Ranpak, JS Capital, Schusterman Family Investments, Soros Capital and Catapult Ventures. Image Credits: Pickle Robot Company “Customer interest in Pickle unload systems has been incredibly strong, and now that we have our initial unload systems out of the lab and into customer operations we have a clear path to broad commercialization,” said founder and CEO AJ Meyer. “The early customer deployments, financing and leadership additions set the stage for us to accelerate customer acquisition and build the company infrastructure we need to deliver more systems to more customers in the coming months.” That last bit is especially important. As you’re most likely aware, now is not a great time to be raising — even in a booming category like warehouse automation. But given the size and breadth of Pickle’s testing, putting funding off in hopes of better economic conditions isn’t necessarily an option when you’ve got product to deliver. And besides, Pickle’s not the only game in town either, figuratively or literally. Boston Dynamics notably chose truck unlocking as the focus for its second commercialized robot, Stretch. Unlike that solution, however, Pickle’s is tethered. Agility has also explored truck unloading for its Digit robot. Even with that added competition, we’re talking about a huge total addressable market, with room for more than one player.

Supported iPhones in the US and Canada can now contact emergency services via satellite • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Apple, Apps, Emergency SOS, Hardware, iOS, iPhone, satelliteNo Comments

Months after it was announced at an event in September, Emergency SOS via satellite, Apple’s service for the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro that uses satellite to route emergency calls, launched today. Supported iPhones in the U.S. and Canada updated with the latest iOS 16 can send an SOS even when they’re off the grid, no dish required, thanks to an upgraded wireless chipset and Apple’s partnership with satellite service provider Globalstar. Emergency SOS via satellite will expand to France, Germany, Ireland and the U.K. next month, Apple announced this morning. As my colleague Devin Coldewey noted in his coverage of Emergency SOS earlier this year, the service differs from the satellite-based data and text connectivity offered by Lynk and T-Mobile and Starlink. While those rely on cell towers strong enough to reach and receive a satellite signal, Emergency SOS — via Globalstar — uses bands that normally require a special antenna. It’s a costly venture. Apple recently pledged $450 million through its Advanced Manufacturing Fund toward expanding the infrastructure powering Emergency SOS, including the satellite network and ground stations. A part of the funding went toward installing custom-built antennas designed to receive signals transmitted by Globalstar’s satellite constellation. Testing Emergency SOS via satellite on an autumnal day in Prospect Park. One presumes that Apple intends to eventually recoup its investment. But for now, Emergency SOS is fee-free. Existing iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro owners won’t have to pay for at least two years from today, while new iPhone owners will receive free service for two years from when they activate their phones. On a drizzly Friday morning in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, I — along with other reporters — had a chance to give Emergency SOS a test drive ahead of the launch. Apple spokespeople arranged for us to place calls to 911 using the service, albeit calls that weren’t actually routed to first responders. So how’s the experience? Pretty smooth, I must say. Emergency SOS can be activated either by dialing an emergency number or automatically through Siri or the crash detection feature on the newer iPhone and Apple Watch models and fall detection on the Apple Watch. (In non-emergencies, Emergency SOS can also be used to send your location to friends and family via the Find My app.) After dialing 911, once Emergency SOS detects that cell and Wi-Fi service is unavailable, a prompt appears to launch Emergency SOS via satellite. Image Credits: Apple While active, Emergency SOS prompts you to select one of several types of emergencies — e.g. illness, crime, physical injury — and provide details about the emergency, such as whether you’re struggling to breathe or have medication handy. If you’ve set up emergency contacts, you can choose to notify them along with emergency responders. At this stage, Emergency SOS will instruct you to point your phone at the nearest satellite, showing an animation that indicates when you’ve locked on to the signal. If you’re not in a position to do so — say, unconscious or incapacitated — Emergency SOS will, where cellular and Wi-Fi aren’t available, attempt a satellite connection even if there isn’t a clear view. In my tests, Emergency SOS reliably found a signal through the thick tree branches in Prospect Park. The time to lock on varied from just a few seconds to as long as 10, though Apple says that lock-on success will depend on a number of factors, including the weather and obstructions in the way of the antenna. Like most satellite-based services, Emergency SOS doesn’t work indoors. Image Credits: Apple Apple also notes in a support page that mountains, steep hills and canyons can block Emergency SOS via satellite’s connection. But Prospect Park is devoid of these, so I wasn’t able to truly put Emergency SOS through its paces. Alas. Post-connection, Emergency SOS texts the answers to the aforementioned questions along with your phone’s battery life, location (including elevation) and — if you’ve entered it beforehand — basic medical information to either a public safety answering point (the local call center where emergency calls usually end up) or an Apple-operated emergency relay center. Which party receives the satellite-bound texts depends on whether the nearest public safety answering point supports text to 911. If it doesn’t, staffers in the emergency relay center will communicate the info to an emergency responder via voice, acting as intermediaries. Follow-up Emergency SOS texting happens in iMessage, where responders can ask about your specific location and current status. A notification shows the sending progress of each message; send times can range from a few seconds to up to around a minute for weaker signals. Image Credits: Apple It’s worth noting that Emergency SOS via satellite, as it currently exists, has a number of limitations. It’s only available in English, Spanish and French in Canada and the U.S., as mentioned — excluding Guam and American Samoa. It might not work in places above 62° latitude, such as northern parts of Canada and Alaska. And international travelers who purchased iPhones in mainland China, Hong Kong or Macao can’t use it. But it’s safe to assume we’ll see Emergency SOS via satellite evolve in the coming months to years, particularly if it someday gains a premium component — or Apple Watch support.

Induction cooking heats up with a $20M cash injection for Impulse • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Climate, funding round, Hardware, impulse, lux capital, StartupsNo Comments

All electric, everywhere, all of the time; that’s one of the many climate mantras. Induction stovetops take a lot of power, however — they can pull 40 amps at 240 volts. That’s the same as an at-home Level 2 EV charger. Needless to say, a lot of older houses aren’t wired to plug in a Tesla in your kitchen, which means it could get expensive to upgrade to an induction range. Impulse to the rescue — the company’s stoves include a battery solution, which means that it doesn’t pull the full 40 amps when it’s operating, and you could find yourself cooking with induction without having to upgrade your panel. Clever! “I’d been thinking about how to supercharge home appliances for a while and the deeper I dug into the space, the clearer it became that there was a larger story bringing together whole-home electrification and added energy storage in alignment with new policy tailwinds and distributed energy resource incentives,” said Sam D’Amico, CEO at Impulse. “Integrating batteries not only unlocks really impressive performance improvements, it also removes a lot of common barriers around power or panel limitations with installing induction stoves while also adding energy storage to the grid.” The company today announced its official launch, and a $20 million Series A funding round led by Lux Capital, and joined by Fifth Wall, Lachy Groom and Construct Capital. This brings their total funding to $25 million (Lux Capital, Construct and Lachy Groom formerly led the company’s $5 million seed round in 2021). “There is an undeniable directional arrow of progress towards the electrification of everything, which will enable new appliances and applications to be created,” commented Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital, who led the most recent funding round, in an email to ZebethMedia. “What Impulse is building is not only meaningful but a moral imperative, changing the architecture of our daily lives by decreasing our reliance on natural gas and carbon. We’re proud to back the Impulse team and help bring their vision to life.” Originally, the company set out to use batteries to create the perfect electric pizza oven, but as the company explored the market, it realized there were additional opportunities. As the company puts it: What started as a cool idea to make pizza became a mission to reframe the home appliance industry. Impulse realized early on that there was an opportunity to leverage all the amazing tailwinds from the electric vehicle and renewables space (including the policy tailwinds of the Inflation Reduction Act) to launch compelling products. The company identified induction cooking as something that already had a pretty compelling story, and figured out some foundational ways to make cooking using induction tech significantly better. Impulse’s futuristic-looking induction stovetops may bring some interesting new features to a kitchen near you. Image Credits: Impulse. “We’re very aware of the difficulty of building a hardware business, especially given the present economic climate. We credibly believe that this [round of financing] gets us through the major checkpoints required to ship our first hardware product, at the level where we can take orders from paying customers,” says D’Amico. “That paves the way for us to launch preorders in the next year with a credible, realistic delivery date that is not out of line with expectations for high-end home appliances.” The company is positioning itself squarely in the challenge around residential and light industrial decarbonization. “This is going to push us in a fairly fundamental direction — ending fossil fuel use ‘at the edge’ means we have to make everything electric,” D’Amico says as he outlines his vision. “Moving storage to the edge in lieu of fossil fuels enables us to do this without having to rely on extremely difficult changes to the built environment, and without having to massively scale up power distribution infrastructure to deal with new peak loads.” The big play from Impulse is that battery prices are declining, while the act of installing batteries are continuing to be non-trivial in the built environment. A lot of kitchens do have 220V connections, however, and that’s where Impulse is seeing an opportunity. “A key realization is that the spots where we install home appliances are typically wired for electricity and often for 220V connections in newer homes,” comments D’Amico. “At minimum this means we can electrify that previously gas appliance, and moving forward towards newer properties it also means that storage can be put to use for the home as well.”

How the FirstBuild product co-creation studio is changing how new things are made • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 13, 2022Posted in consumer electronics, EC Hardware, EC venture capital, firstbuild, Gadgets, HardwareNo Comments

Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and small-batch production for the win If you are running R&D at a large appliance manufacturer, you have a challenge. You typically make products in enormous quantities at pretty slim margins. In order to recoup your development, tooling and launch marketing costs, you need to create and sell a huge number of products. To ensure that that’s possible, you’d probably end up doing a bunch of user and market research to ascertain that you have the highest chance of success with your products. That makes sense, but the very business model itself means that it’s hard to do something truly risky, which in turn means that mainstream manufacturers rarely come up with anything genuinely innovative. If there was a mushroom fruiting appliance, would a lot more people regularly be growing mushrooms at home? There was only one way to find out: to build one and to try and sell it. That’s where FirstBuild comes in. If you’re a small appliances nerd, you may have seen its Opal nugget ice maker, the studio’s first big breakthrough; the Mella mushroom fruiting chamber; its indoor pizza oven; or the Arden indoor smoker. I spoke with André Zdanow, president at FirstBuild, to figure out where these ideas came from and how the studio is working to try to replicate those successes. “The most famous example is probably the Opal nugget ice maker. At first, it wasn’t actually a product at all — it was a technology being worked on in the refrigeration division of GE Appliances,” Zdanow said, explaining that it turned out to be a head-scratcher. They wanted to put the “nugget ice” into a fridge but weren’t able to figure out exactly what the market size would be for such a thing. “It’s actually really complicated to put the technology into a refrigerator. In other words, it was really a great idea that engineers had been toying around with for years, but in the context of the focus and economics of a multibillion-dollar company, it wasn’t something that they could focus on.” The Opal nugget ice maker was FirstBuild’s first commercial success. Image Credits: FirstBuild In a parallel universe, that tech would never have seen the light of day, but instead, the engineers came to FirstBuild and wondered what would happen if they put the tech in a separate appliance, rather than into a full-size refrigerator. “We see lots of people go to the store and buy this type of ice. They call it Sonic ice or hospital ice. We decided to develop a prototype and see if people want it to be just an ice maker,” Zdanow explained. That was the genesis of the FirstBuild lab’s success. “It started with crude concepts that looked like an ice maker but had nugget ice in it. From there, it progressed through industrial design and ultimately to a $2.7 million crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter back in 2015.”

Amazon eyes devices group as it undertakes broad cost cutting • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in Alexa, Amazon, devices, echo, Gadgets, HardwareNo Comments

The Echo business has always looked like Amazon playing the long game from the outside. Above all, the company’s home consumer hardware is a convenient vessel for getting Alexa into millions of homes. But when a corporation is doing some serious belt tightening amid broader economic headwinds, no divisions are safe from cost cutting — certainly not one that is reportedly operating at a $5 billion a year revenue loss. The Wall Street Journal this week noted that Amazon’s devices group could be the latest to get hit with cuts as the company braces for further macroeconomic disruption. The paper notes that “Amazon’s leadership is closely evaluating its Alexa business, according to some of the people,” citing internal documents. Many of the cutbacks thus far have been focused on longer-tail products. Devices is a mature division for the company, however, encompassing a wide range of Echo home devices, Fire tablets and Kindles, among others. Amazon offered ZebethMedia a fairly boilerplate response to the report, while noting that the normal performance review is certainly being impacted by the overall financial climate. “We remain excited about the future of our larger businesses, as well as newer initiatives like Prime Video, Alexa, Grocery, Kuiper, Zoox, and Healthcare,” the company writes. “Our senior leadership team regularly reviews our investment outlook and financial performance, including as part of our annual operating plan review, which occurs in the fall each year. As part of this year’s review, we’re of course taking into account the current macro-environment and considering opportunities to optimize costs.” A second comment, meanwhile, highlights Alexa’s overall successes: Alexa started as an idea on a whiteboard. In less than a decade, it’s turned into an AI service that millions of customers interact with billions of times each week in different languages and cultures around the world. Even in the last year, Alexa interactions have increased by more than 30%. We’re as optimistic about Alexa’s future today as we’ve ever been, and it remains an important business and area of investment for Amazon. Andy Jassy has been tasked with cutting costs across the firm — not an enviable task in any economy. In his 2021 shareholder letter, the CEO took a trip down memory lane, beginning with the first Kindle in 2007, while highlighting the ups and down of the category, including a little insight into the life (and death) of Fire phone, noting, “The phone was unsuccessful, and though we determined we were probably too late to this party and directed these resources elsewhere, we hired some fantastic long-term builders and learned valuable lessons from this failure that have served us well in devices like Echo and FireTV.” Jassy also highlighted the division’s evolving future, writing: Our goal is for Alexa to be the world’s most helpful and resourceful personal assistant, who makes people’s lives meaningfully easier and better. We have a lot more inventing and iterating to go, but customers continue to indicate that we’re on the right path. We have several other devices at varying stages of evolution (e.g. Ring and Blink provide the leading digital home security solutions, Astro is a brand new home robot that we just launched in late 2021), but it’s safe to say that every one of our devices, whether you’re talking about Kindle, FireTV, Alexa/Echo, Ring, Blink, or Astro is an invention-in-process with a lot more coming that will keep improving customers’ lives.

Facing economic headwinds, Amazon consolidates robotic projects • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in Amazon, amazon robotics, Hardware, Rivian, robotics, Robotics & AINo Comments

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 —

Why digital sourcing platform Fictiv stays in China when others are leaving • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in HardwareNo Comments

As many businesses shift supply chains out of China in response to the uncertainties of geopolitical tensions and Beijing’s “zero COVID” policy, Fictiv is solidifying its outpost in the country. San Francisco-based Fictiv runs a platform that aims to simplify the hardware sourcing process and connects hardware firms to suppliers around the world. When it comes to procuring high-end parts for products like medical equipment, surgical devices, and even rockets, there probably isn’t a better place than China. That’s why Fictiv set up an office there to be closer to its network of suppliers. Within five years, it has grown the team to 60 people in the southern industrial hub of Guangzhou. Despite challenges around COVID restrictions and geopolitics, “the China manufacturing base is not going away,” said Fictiv’s founder and CEO Dave Evans in an interview with ZebethMedia. “Thirty years ago, Shenzhen was a fishing village, and now it’s the center of the world for manufacturing. It’s going to take a while for other third ecosystems to really catch up,” he said, adding that Apple and its contract manufacturer Foxconn have offered a strong playbook for a generation of factory owners in the country. Digital sourcing proves especially useful in COVID times. The conventional way, according to Evans, is a manual process that relies on face-to-face encounters: In China, you will need to find a shifu — a skilled craftsman in Chinese — who will sit back, sip some tea, and then slowly tell you from his 30 years of experience in molding to change this and that on your 3D drawing. Fictiv is using AI to replace that arbitrary human interaction by letting product developers run simulations on 3D designs and get a quote and estimated time on manufacturing. Despite its focus on digitization, Fictiv stresses the importance of on-the-ground teams in its sourcing destinations. Evans used to travel to China every quarter or so but hasn’t been since the COVID outbreak, which has ushered in strict inbound travel restrictions. Huaqiangbei, the world’s largest electronic trading market located in the heart of Shenzhen, used to attract floods of foreign hardware makers. Now foreigners are a rare sight. “Because it’s so hard to access China in the last years, the value we have in combining software, technology and all the AI that we built with boots on the ground right next to our manufacturing partners has built a really compelling offering for all customers because they can’t fly to China,” said the CEO. While China remains an integral part to Fictiv, the company is also diversifying. “When the next big major thing happens, how is your business going to shift? And that’s what I would tell all the founders who are thinking about this — are you building a truly resilient supply chain?” Evans asked. That’s in part why Fictiv recently opened an office in India, which “is very strong and getting stronger by the month” thanks to “a large population, relatively low costs, and the increasing talent there.” The firm has built a global network of 250 vetted manufacturing partners, a third of which are in China, where production capacity is often larger. The rest of its suppliers are from India and the U.S. To date, Fictiv has produced some 20 million parts for thousands of customers. It runs a team of just over 300 employees around the world. An OS for product developers Nine years after its launch, Fictiv is carving out a new business line. The company’s selling point has been to enable early-stage product development, that is, the long-tail volume that Foxconn would find too small. Rather than contracting factories to make tens of thousands of units, it works with companies trying to get from 10 to 1,000. The company’s new service is a work collaboration platform for everyone involved in the lifecycle of product development. Unlike its sourcing platform, which has its profit margin built into the manufacturing model, the service charges an annual membership fee. Using the software, the engineer can upload a product design with specifications on the material used and etc. Then the supply chain specialist may come in to estimate the lead time and target price, followed by the quality control person who makes further comments. Finally, the manager will approve the pricing before the buyer goes ahead to purchase it. The idea is to capture the conversation and quality control process of product development in an integrated platform rather than having them scattered across emails and spreadsheets, which is how communication used to happen. “For engineers who have a team, it’s almost like a 3x improvement [on productivity] because of all the tasks that you’re eliminating. For design firms or people that are managing many clients, [the software] helps them organize a lot of their workflows, and that gives them an easier way of filling and tracking all the different projects that are going on,” Evans noted.