Robotics

Internal combustion engine (ICE) automobiles have a big advantage over EVs in one crucial area: Refueling occurs quickly, getting cars back on the road in a matter of minutes. But a new push for modular EV batteries could provide a solution, particularly in urban areas.
A company called Ample has developed Modular Battery Swapping technology that it claims can deliver a full charge in under 10 minutes, significantly faster than traditional charging and nearly on par with ICE gas-ups. The technology is EV agnostic and designed to be deployed quickly in metropolitan areas.
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“Our system is designed for rapid deployment, making it possible to equip an entire metropolitan area with a ubiquitous network in a matter of weeks, while delivering energy at a cost as cheap as gasoline,” Ample’s CoFounders Khaled Hassounah and John de Souza write in a recent announcement. “Ample has the additional benefit of being able to capture wind and solar power when it’s available, and then dispense that energy to EVs when needed.”
Ample is keying in on a major weakness of the current charging paradigm. Currently, it’s not profitable to operate a charging infrastructure without government subsidies. Metro fleets that have high-utilization are also poorly suited to long charge times.  
Ample’s solution is an autonomous battery swapping station. A car pulls in and the station removes depleted batteries and replaces them with recharged ones. The old batteries are recharged for reuse by another vehicle. Ample’s batteries are designed to work like Lego’s, meaning they can be used for vehicles and battery banks of varying sizes.
Of course, for the scheme to work the company will need ample buy-in from fleet owners. Ample is targeting regional municipal partners to start.
“We are starting with electrifying fleets which will accelerate the deployment of a wide-scale network that can support consumers too. Ample is currently being deployed regionally in the Bay Area, where we are actively working with a wide range of ride-sharing, last-mile delivery, and municipal fleet partners,” write Hassounah and Souza. More

A new anti-drone kit billed as the Swiss Army Knife of drone defenses just debuted from French company CERBAIR. The drone detection and mitigation tool—the business end of which is a hip-fired electromagnetic rifle—is emblematic of a growing urgency to develop security tools for guarding against rogue drone attacks.
The prevalence and growing sophistication of drones has created a serious obstacle for law enforcement. Commercially available drones can be used to threaten government officials and carry out attacks during public gatherings and events. A joint multi-agency threat assessment issued prior to then-incoming President Biden’s inauguration listed drones as a potential threat. Violent non-state actors have already been known to use drones in combat. 
“Although these drones are about the size of a watermelon and may have a range of only a few miles, they still pose a risk,” writes Thomas Braun in his paper Miniature Menace in the journal Wild Blue Yonder. “In the hands of a [violent non-state actor], these small, inexpensive consumer drones are modified into “killer bees” capable of creating significant damage and terrorizing civilian and military populations.”
The terrorist organization ISIL established a drone division, says Braun, citing one example, and cartel groups in Central and South America have deployed drone technology for various purposes. With a growing recognition of the threat of white supremacy and right wing militias around the world, security forces are on guard against drone attacks–a militarized right wing group in the Ukraine has stockpiled drones and other weapons, for example.
All of which points to the need for effective drone countermeasures. Not surprisingly, a number of technologies for detecting, identifying, tracking, and disabling drones have come to market in the past few years. Radio frequency analyzers effectively detect radio waves sent between drones and their controllers and some units with multiple dispersed antennas can triangulate signal origin location. Acoustic sensors, such as those from Squarehead Technologies, work well in short-range scenarios where there isn’t a lot of background noise, and optical sensors, including infrared and thermal sensors, as well as visual spectrum cameras, are commonly deployed to track drones. In line with other aircraft detection, radar is also frequently used to track drones.
Things start to get exotic when it comes to disabling drones. Devices include RF jammers to disrupt the signal between the drone and the controller, GPS spoofers to confuse a drone about its location, net guns, lasers, and even birds trained to disable drones in flight.
The CERBAIR kit includes a backpack and vest with a detection module, a command and control tablet and an electromagnetic effector. According to the company, drone detection is processed by omnidirectional analysis of radio frequency spectrum. Once the alert has been given (both visual and audio), the azimuthal location of the rogue drone and its pilot are tracked using a directional antenna.

Because the kit tracks a rogue drone’s location, the electromagnetic gun can be used beyond line of sight.
Of course, the arms race is bound to work both ways. As more police and security forces utilize drones for surveillance, the prevalence of anti-drone technology may become an increasing liability. For the time being, CERBAIR’s kit is being used, among others, by special forces that protect heads of state. More

Fulfillment is the side of ecommerce we don’t often see, but it’s one of the industries that was booming before the pandemic and is now positively exploding. Case in point, the U.S. may need to add a whopping 1 billion square feet of warehouse space by 2025 to keep up with online demand.
That’s good news for developers of automation solutions for the logistics sector like Locus Robotics, which makes autonomous mobile robots (AMR) for fulfillment warehouses. The company just announced $150 million in Series E funding bringing its overall valuation to $1billion. Locus will use the funding to accelerate product innovation and global expansion as warehouses continue to face ongoing labor shortages, exploding e-comm volumes, and ever-greater demand for speed and reliability in their technology deployments. A Locus spokesman told me the company expects that over a million warehouse robots will be installed over the next four years while the number of warehouses using them will grow ten‐fold.
“This new round of funding marks an important inflection point for Locus Robotics,” said Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics. “Warehouses facing ongoing labor shortages and exploding volumes, are looking for flexible, intelligent automation to improve productivity and grow their operations. Locus is uniquely positioned to drive digital transformation in this enormous global market.”
What’s striking about this unicorn story is that Locus is still a relatively small player in the wild west space of mobile robots. Locus’s various warehouse robots, which operate collaboratively with human workers to improve piece-handling productivity, serves around 40 customers and 80 warehouses around the world. Locus’s Series E was led by Tiger Global Management and BOND, big players in technology investing, and builds on support from existing investors including Scale Venture Partners and Prologis Ventures, the venture capital arm of Prologis.
“The logistics industry is facing huge challenges as it struggles to cope with rapid increases in demand, and at the same time severe labor shortages,” said Ash Sharma, Managing Director at Interact Analysis, a market research firm covering the intelligent automation sector. “Warehouses are massively under-penetrated today, but increasingly operators are seeing the huge benefits that warehouse robotics such as the Locus solution can bring. As a result, we expect that over a million warehouse robots will be installed over the next four years and the number of warehouses using them will grow ten-fold.”
One Locus competitor, Fetch Robotics, led by robotics pioneer and Willow Garage alum Melonee Wise, has raised nearly $100M.
“The competitive pressures for excellence in logistics have never been greater,” Wise said in 2019. “Our autonomous mobile robots and cloud platform enables our customers to meet their customers’ demands while meeting their own financial objectives.”

The two companies are now competing for market share in a global commerce paradigm that’s been completely redefined by digital and a consumer base that demands fast fulfillment. More

Flying cars got another step closer to reality when a prominent player in the space pledged to create an Urban Air Mobility network over California’s largest city by 2024. Archer, which is designing and developing electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft that can carry passengers for 60 miles at speeds of up to 150 mph while producing minimal noise, is partnering with the City of Los Angeles on the project.
The testbed is well-chosen. Southern California has severe mobility challenges, including consistently gridlocked traffic, under-utilized or poorly developed mass transit, and a seemingly inability to make solutions like high speed rail a reality. Those conditions have left a wide open space for a technology class that in just the past couple years has leapfrogged out of science fiction to become a promising alternative to terrestrial intracity travel.
“In identifying our first city partnership, it was critical to have a shared vision when it comes to how people will move around more seamlessly and with less impact on the environment around them,” says Brett Adcock, co-Founder and co-CEO of Archer. “Working with Urban Movement Labs will be invaluable as we collectively advance our programs ahead of our first customer flights in 2024.”
Morgan Stanley estimates sustainable air mobility will be a $1.5 trillion by 2040. As I wrote last month, Archer and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) recently entered into a supply chain agreement to enable Archer to benefit from access to FCA’s low-cost supply logistics, as well as advanced composite material know-how and engineering experience. That access is critical in Archer’s bid to manufacture high-volume, composite, electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
Archer bills its platform as a way to move people throughout cities in a fast, safe, sustainable, and cost-effective manner by utilizing air space that currently sits empty. Recent advances in battery technology have given rise to fully electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that developers say can be made much quieter than conventional aircraft.
But local governments have been caught off guard before by innovative transportation companies, and it’s certain that Urban Air Mobility will be the subject of intense debate as stakeholders lay out cases for and against. Early partnerships with cities eager for transportation solutions, such as the one Archer has formed with Los Angeles, could be an important component in a larger adoption strategy and a critical proof-of-concept testbed. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has been bullish on flying cars, rolling out the Urban Air Mobility Partnership initiative late last year to make Los Angeles the unmistakable leader on Urban Air Mobility.
From a business standpoint, Archer has daisy-chained a string of important successes, including the FCA supply chain agreement, a recently announced merger with Atlas Crest Investment Corporation, and a whopping $1bn commercial order from United Airlines. Those moves have put Archer, a company few outside the sector have heard of, in a surprisingly central position to shape urban transportation. According to its press materials, Archer believes its current valuation is a whopping $3.8 billion.

As part of the Los Angeles project, the City of Los Angeles and Urban Movement Labs, a collaboration between local government in LA and mobility innovators, plan to develop the design and access of what are known as “vertiports,” the network of physical locations where people can go to fly on an urban air mobility aircraft.
“Our vision is to improve mobility, reduce congestion, create employment, and promote healthier communities through public and private sector collaboration,” says Lilly Shoup, Executive Director of Urban Movement Labs. “Working with companies like Archer which are at the forefront of technological innovation in the emerging UAM space delivers a unique opportunity to take the perspective of our programs beyond just the two dimensions of roads and railways, and into the skies.” More

AI can do a lot of things extremely well. One thing that it can do just okay — which, frankly, is still quite extraordinary — is write college term papers.
That’s the finding from EduRef, a resource for students and educators, which ran an experiment to determine if a deep learning language prediction model known as GPT-3 could get passing marks in an anonymized trial.

“We hired a panel of professors to create a writing prompt, gave it to a group of recent grads and undergraduate-level writers, and fed it to GPT-3 and had the panel grade the anonymous submissions and complete a follow up survey for thoughts about the writers,” according to an EduRef post. The results were a surprising demonstration of the natural-language prowess of AI.
The specific AI — GPT-3, for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 — was released in June 2020 by OpenAI, a research business co-founded by Elon Musk. It was developed to create content with a human language structure better than any of its predecessors. Natural language processing has been developing swiftly in the past couple years, enabling computers to generate text that feels, in many cases, contextually appropriate and passably organic. However, the hurdles for advanced natural language processing are enormous. According to a 2019 paper by the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, machines fundamentally lack commonsense reasoning — the ability to understand what they’re writing. That finding is based on a critical reevaluation of standard tests to determine commonsense reasoning in machines, such as the Winograd Schema Challenge.
Which makes the results of the EduRef experiment that much more striking. The writing prompts were given in a variety of subjects, including U.S. History, Research Methods (Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy), Creative Writing, and Law. GPT-3 managed to score a “C” average across four subjects from professors, failing only one assignment. The AI scored the highest grades in U.S. History and Law writing prompts, earning a B- in both assignments. GPT-3 scored a “C” in a research paper on Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy, scoring better than one human writer.
Overall, the instructor evaluations suggested that writing produced by GPT-3 was able to mimic human writing in areas of grammar, syntax, and word frequency, although the papers felt somewhat technical. As you might expect, the time it took the AI to complete the assignments was dramatically less than that required by human participants. The average time between assignment and completion for humans was 3 days, while the average time between assignment and completion for GPT-3 was between 3 and 20 minutes. 
“Even without being augmented by human interference, GPT-3’s assignments received more or less the same feedback as the human writers,” according to EduRef. “While 49.2% of comments on GPT-3’s work were related to grammar and syntax, 26.2% were about focus and details. Voice and organization were also mentioned, but only 12.3% and 10.8% of the time, respectively. Similarly, our human writers received comments in nearly identical proportions. Almost 50% of comments on the human papers were related to grammar and syntax, with 25.4% related to focus and details. Just over 13% of comments were about the humans’ use of voice, while 10.4% were related to organization.”

Aside from potentially troubling implications for educators, what this points to is a dawning inflection point for natural language processing, heretofore a decidedly human characteristic. More

Farming is a tough business. Global food demand is surging, with as many as 10 billion mouths to feed by 2050. At the same time, environmental challenges and labor limitations have made the future uncertain for agricultural managers.
A new company called Future Acres proposed to enable farmers to do more with less through the power of robots. The company, helmed by CEO Suma Reddy, who previously served as COO and co-founder at Farmself and has held multiple roles and lead companies focused on the agtech space, has created an autonomous, electric agricultural robotic harvest companion named Carry to help farmers gather hand-picked crops faster and with less physical demand.
Automation has been playing an increasingly large role in agriculture, and agricultural robots are widely expected to play a critical role in food production going forward. The transition to automation in agriculture has prompted a race between new developers like Future Acres and legacy companies with deep roots in agriculture. Automation technologies from companies like John Deere, for example, are helping farmers to produce more with less and create more successful crops, all while having a smaller impact on the land and environment. John Deere is employing AI and machine learning in its equipment to identify and enable needed actions at a scope and speed beyond human capacity, automating farming actions through smart robotics to enable consistent and precise actions at large scale, and providing precise, geospatial intelligence generated with machine technology and coupled with cloud-stored data to enable sustainable farming. 
COVID-19 has only accelerated the need for automation. Farm income is expected to fall 12% to $79.4 billion in 2021, according to the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute, with production costs only climbing. The U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts total production expenses to increase by $8.6 billion (2.5 percent) compared to 2020 – reaching $353.7 billion in 2021 due to a higher spend on feed, fertilizer and labor. Optimization and reducing cost are paramount for the industry to recover from the challenges of the pandemic — and that’s exactly automation’s selling point.
“The agricultural industry is facing a seemingly never-ending list of challenges on both a financial- and sustainability-level,” says Future Acres CEO Reddy. “Our vision with Carry was to develop a tool and system that could help alleviate these stressors and move the industry forward by providing a helpful operational solution capable of supporting workers, while also reducing costs. Carry is the future of harvesting and will make an immediate impact on the lives of those in the field each and every day.” 
The company’s robot, Carry, uses artificial intelligence, automation and electric power, to transport up to 500 pounds of crops during harvest. Via computer-vision-powered autonomy or through remote control operation, Carry autonomously follows farmworkers for a whole day’s work thanks to a 7-10 hour battery range or 6-10 miles traversed terrain navigation.   It works on all terrain and in all inclement weather conditions, increasing production efficiency by up to 30% and paying for itself in only 80 days, according to the company. Its machine learning and computer vision capabilities also allow the machine to avoid obstacles like trees and people. Much like shelf-scanning robots do for retail environments, Carry also collects data that can be used to make important farm management decisions.
Future Acres will roll out Carry to small- and medium-sized farms throughout the United States. It is backed by lead investors Wavemaker Partners, a global Venture Capital fund with $400M AUM and Wavemaker Labs, a robotics and automation-focused venture studio. It’s currently raising $3M in seed capital via equity crowdfunding site SeedInvest. More

The pandemic has accelerated the spread of autonomous checkout as developers rush to take advantage of a market need. In 2021, expect even some local stores to begin adopting the technology, which forgoes the cashier and checkout process entirely in favor of a seamless grab-and-go shopping experience.
The latest example comes in the form of 20 autonomous convenience stores rolling out in Q1 of this year. The news is a result of AiFi, a company creating frictionless autonomous shopping experiences powered by AI, partnering with Wundermart, a company that creates unmanned, data-driven retail marketplaces.
“The pandemic has caused everything in our lives to shift, including how we shop. This shift made innovation a requirement, which is why we are pleased to partner with Wundermart to make its unmanned marketplaces entirely contactless,” says Steve Gu, co-founder and CEO of AiFi. “Our computer vision technology enhances Wundermart’s convenient in-store experience and enables shoppers to continue on with their everyday lives in a safe and efficient manner.”
The AiFi-Wundermart partnership is part of a growing number of autonomous checkout models sprouting up in various corners of the globe. I’ve previously written about Standard, which is bringing autonomous checkout to college campuses with an emphasis on retrofitting existing retail concepts. There have also been novel checkout technologies that utilize an AI-powered shopping cart to clock which items customers are nabbing. Caper, creators of one such cart, recently expanded its product line of autonomous retail technology with something called Caper Counter, a cashierless countertop designed for mini marts under ten thousand feet. The technology provides autonomous checkout to keep customers and employees safe and minimize human interaction while shopping, and, crucially, it’s completely plug-and-play, meaning it’s not difficult to deploy in existing spaces.
Renewed emphasis on sanitation during COVID-19 lockdowns, which comes from both consumers and workers, has hastened development and adoption of contactless checkout options. Data from a consumer research firm called Shekel, for example, shows that 87% of consumers want touchless checkout options. 
AiFi’s solution is attractive in that it relies on a camera-only approach, making it cost-effective to implement and speedy to deploy in existing retail environments. As part of the partnership, Wundermart will implement AiFi’s OASIS to track automatic shop replenishments from suppliers, which will enhance performance and data integrity. Customers will have the choice to scan their store app or credit card at a kiosk before or after shopping. As customers grab items, there’s no need for additional scanning.
“AiFi’s technology helps us create a delightful, convenient and safe shopping experience for our shoppers. They can simply scan in, select what items they want to purchase, and walk out,” says Laurens de Kleine, co-founder of Wundermart. “The system will also be used to improve accuracy of automated restocking, one of the many functions in our total solution for autonomous retail. AiFi has pioneered and become the global leader in computer vision technology. This partnership will bring us closer to our mission to transform the future of retail.” 

The system also comes with the upshot of creating a rich stream of insights germane to consumer behavior and item performance. Those insights can help brick-and-mortar retailers compete with data-driven digital retailers more effectively. More

Can automation technologies help end dangerous inconsistencies in how surgeries are performed? Advances in robotics offer a glimpse at what the future of medicine will look like, but ensuring surgeons are adequately trained and distributed globally is a more pressing goal, and one for which AI and machine vision are well-suited.

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That’s the ambition of a company called Theator, which has amassed a vast video dataset of surgical procedures to help standardize surgery and break through the limitations of an aging apprenticeship model of training.
You don’t have to look hard to find inequality in global healthcare, but surgery is an area particularly ripe with inconsistencies. For example, Black children in the U.S. are three times as likely as white children to die within a month of surgery. Globally, an estimated 5 billion people can’t access surgical care, a majority of the earth’s population. Among those who can access surgical procedures, wait times before procedures are implemented can vary as much as 35%, according to one study.
One of the problems is that surgeons are trained much the way skilled craftsmen have been for generations: in intensive apprenticeships via hands-on education. But the shortcomings of that system are profound. Relying on one-on-one training to effect knowledge transfer means techniques and procedures tend to be taught inconsistently and without the benefit of a survey of best practices. Surgeons, likewise, tend to be poorly distributed. Further, knowledge tends to be siloed within subspecialties, with little opportunity for crossover education.
Video has emerged as a key training tool to address some of these disparities, and the newer possibility of AI-based video analysis has added a layer of utility to training regiments increasingly based in studying video.
“Intraoperative video footage, and by extension video-based analyses, is at the core of surgical innovation,” explains Dr. Tamir Wolf, CEO and Co-founder of Theator. “Surgeons, medical systems, and forward-thinking professional societies have all come to realize its potential value in enhancing surgical care and patient safety.” 
Theator’s AI-powered platform is based on smart annotation and video analytics technology, which extracts and annotates key moments from surgical procedures, enabling surgeons to review operations and glean detailed insights. By identifying the most pivotal surgical steps, events, milestones, and ultimately decisions, Theator’s technology streamlines the pre-operative preparation and post-operative review and assessment process, significantly increasing surgeons’ performance, efficiency, and productivity.

“Thanks to support from our new and existing investors, Theator is leveraging routine video capture and AI-based analyses of surgical data to build a surgical future where best practices are more widely understood, and surgical decision-making is democratized,” explains Wolf.
Theator recently closed a $15.5M Series A round to scale its commercial operations and partnerships with U.S. providers, grow its R&D team, and cement its status as a provider of AI-powered Surgical Intelligence solutions. Theator has raised a total of $18.5 million to date.
Among its assets, Theator has amassed one of the largest surgical video datasets in the world: more than 400,000 minutes of curated surgical video encompassing over 80,000 intraoperative moments. Using its platform, Theator translates this video data into actionable feedback which surgeons can use to enhance performance.
While the idea of robot-assisted telesurgery has growing potential, in the shorter term greater access to surgery will be a result of more consistent spread of surgical knowledge. In that pursuit, tools like video and AI are emerging as particularly promising. More