AI

There's no doubt this past year has been a major watershed moment for the robotics industry. Warehouse and logistics have been a particular target for an automation push, as companies have worked to keep the lights on amidst stay at home orders and other labor shortages. MIT spinoff Pickle is o

Labor activists challenging Uber over what they allege are ‘robo-firings’ of drivers in Europe have trumpeted winning a default judgement in the Netherlands — where the Court of Amsterdam ordered the ride-hailing giant to reinstate six drivers who the litigants claim were unfairly

European Union lawmakers who are drawing up rules for applying artificial intelligence are considering fines of up to 4% of global annual turnover (or €20M, if greater) for a set of prohibited use-cases, according to a leaked draft of the AI regulation — reported earlier by Politico —

The snake robot has been something of an institution in the Carnegie Mellon robotics labs. Every time I visit the school, the biomimetic robot has seemingly learned a new trick. This week, the school announced it has added swimming to the list. Testing actually began last month in one of CMU's

One of the issues with deploying a machine learning application is that it tends to be expensive and highly compute intensive. Deeplite, a startup based in Montreal, wants to change that by providing a way to reduce the overall size of the model, allowing it to run on hardware with far fewer resour

HomeX, a home services platform for homeowners and service providers, has raised $90 million in a funding round led by New Mountain Capital. New Mountain Capital, a New York-based investment firm with more than $30 billion in assets under management, was the only institutional investor to put money

Artificial intelligence technology holds a huge amount of promise for enterprises — as a tool to process and understand their data more efficiently; as a way to leapfrog into new kinds of services and products; and as a critical stepping stone into whatever the future might hold for their bus

As artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, previously cutting-edge — but generic — AI models are becoming commonplace, such as Google Cloud's Vision AI or Amazon Rekognition. While effective in some use cases, these solutions do not suit industry-specific needs right out of the box.

Practically every film production these days needs some kind of visual effects work, but independent creators often lack the cash or expertise to get that top-shelf CG. Wonder Dynamics, founded by VFX engineer Nikola Todorovic and actor Tye Sheridan, aims to use AI to make some of these processes m

Indoor farming company AppHarvest this week announced that it has acquired Root AI. The deal is valued at around $60 million, with $10 million in cash and the reminder coming from AppHarvest stock. Root AI is a Boston-based robotics startup, with a mission fairly in line with that of its future par

Happy Robotics Week, to those who celebrate. I know a lot of us are unable to be with our loved ones this year, which means no robotics tree, robotics baskets full of robot eggs and green robot beer. Still, the National Robotics Week organization is putting on a bunch of virtual events across 50 st

Sophie Zhou Novati worked as a senior engineer at Facebook and then Nextdoor, where she struggled to hire great engineers for her team. Frustrated, she decided to try training engineers to meet her team's hiring standards by mentoring at a local coding bootcamp. After two and a half years of me

NASA’s SBIR program regularly doles out cash to promising small businesses and research programs, and the lists of awardees is always interesting to sift through. Here are a dozen companies and proposals from this batch that are especially compelling or suggest new directions for missions and

So, let me preempt this by saying that there are plenty of robotics verticals worth getting excited about. But at the moment, everyone sure seems focused on warehouse fulfillment. It's understandable, of course. Right now, it's Amazon versus the world, and the retail giant certainly has a l