Robotics

Indy Autonomous Challenge

Innovation

No matter which team places first at the upcoming Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), the real winner will be the open source architecture powering the cars. The autonomous racing event, which takes place this week, pits nine teams representing 21 universities against each other in high-stakes racing for a $1 million prize purse.”To our knowledge, all of the vehicles in the IAC are running ROS 2 and Autoware as the basis of their autonomy stack,” says Katherine Scott, Developer Advocate at Open Robotics, which oversees the Robotic Operating System (ROS), an open source architecture for robotics development. Autoware is the first all-in-one open source software for self-driving cars.Organized by Energy Systems Network and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the primary goal of the IAC is to advance technology that can speed the commercialization of fully autonomous vehicles and deployments of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Much like racing development often leads to innovations adapted for the street, the high speeds and incredible handling challenges of racing are ideal proving grounds for autonomous mobility. Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment Inc., one of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations, provided a grant to help Energy Systems Network develop the IAC and fund the $1 million IAC prize purse.

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But the unsung hero of the event is the open source architecture that’s made it possible, in relatively short order, for teams of university students to develop autonomous controls paradigms for performance race cars. “What we’re really excited about in the IAC — more so than just the high-speed vehicle autonomy — is the prospect of having an entire generation of engineers learning and using ROS,” says Scott. “Advanced technology doesn’t happen in a vacuum; students need a common language and set of tools to work together efficiently. When done right, open-source technology is accretive, and the advances in this year’s competition will likely make it into subsequent competitions and perhaps production vehicles.”The car used for the event, which is an incredible feat of racing engineering, is the Dallara-produced AV-21 that has been retrofitted with hardware and controls to enable automation. Since 2001, Dallara has been the sole supplier of the Indy Lights series.The performance race cars are equipped with custom sensing packages. Thanks to ROS and Autoware, the development process has focused on higher-level controls work.

“The combination of ROS 2 and Autoware have given the IAC student teams a firm starting point for building out vehicle autonomy. Rather than having to focus on building interfaces to the sensors and actuators of the vehicles, the students can focus on the more challenging control and planning tasks. For example, instead of spending their time building an interface to the vehicle’s LIDAR, the students can instead focus on using data from that LIDAR to keep the vehicle in its lane and avoid obstacles.”The competition takes place on October 23 and is open to fans via a registration page. More

Laevo Exoskeletons

Innovation

A Dutch exoskeleton company is launching an updated model of an innovative unpowered exoskeleton for workers. The new product from Laevo, called the Flex V3, is compelling for a couple of reasons, but the big one may be that it’s attempting to solve well-known problems that have kept exoskeletons, once vaunted as a breakthrough technology, a primarily niche product.The Laevo device is a passive, unobtrusive exoskeleton designed to alleviate strain and adapt to every posture. By leaning against the chest pad, the Laevo transfers force from the rest of the body to the thighs.In general, exoskeletons have stumbled from a business perspective. Powered and unpowered suits designed to augment human strength or reduce the strain associated with bending and lifting have been around since the early 2010s. One of the visions of robotic exoskeletons, which are marvels of biomechanics and engineering and were pioneered in robotics hubs like the Human Engineering Lab at UC Berkeley and companies like Ekso Bionics, was to replace wheelchairs for those with stroke or spinal cord injuries. But the market case for mobility applications has never quite worked, in large part due to the high price tag of robotic exoskeletons compared with the substantially lower price point of wheelchairs, a proven and resilient technology.More recently, exoskeletons have been marketed for work. Ekso Bionics, for example, debuted an upper-body exoskeleton at a Ford factory in 2018, and the technology has seen use in heavy industries and shipyards.

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That’s held out hope among developers of a commercial use case, and in that conception powered exoskeletons could be a bridge between a completely human workforce and the eventual arrival of the lights out, fully automated factory.Laevo, which sold a previous version of its unpowered exoskeleton for around $2500, is targeting different types of users, including those in non-industrial settings, such as logistics warehouses where workers move relatively small packages but are subject to repetitive stress strains. The lower price point of unpowered exoskeletons versus their robotic counterparts significantly lowers the threshold for adoption. Given that the logistics sector is increasingly coming under scrutiny in the U.S. for labor practices and working conditions, the timing could be right for a device designed to ease the physical strain.In the next months, Laevo will start rolling out the Laevo Flex in several markets across Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East and the U.S. The company says it already has about 2,500 units in the market. More

Masten

Innovation

Landing a spacecraft on the lunar surface is tricky. As any engineer can tell you, dust doesn’t help.A regolith, billions of grains of crushed rock are kicked up during a rocket-assisted landing, a huge impediment to creating reliable, reusable landers. Dust is also a notorious killer of robots, which is a critical issue for the future of space exploration and commercialization. Compounding the problem, commercial missions currently in the conceptual phase are more sophisticated than previous lunar missions, and the size of the lunar landers and the power of their engines has grown. That’s only going to make the problem of space dust, which can rip through the sheathing and clog engines and instruments, that much worse.One solution is to build landing pads on the moon, but that’s incredibly expensive ($120 million per pad, according to one estimate). An alternative may be to use a lander’s descent to create a landing pad in real-time.That’s just what a company called Masten Space Systems, which we’ve been tracking on ZDNet, is testing. The idea is to create near-instantaneous landing pads by injecting ceramic particles into rocket plumes to form a coating over lunar regolith as a lander descends on the lunar surface. It’s a bit like giving the lander a Midas touch — only a ceramic touch — and it could significantly reduce dust issues for future missions.The presto-landing pad concept is called the in-Flight Alumina Spray Technique (FAST), and the company has been testing it for several months with positive results.”Following our Phase 1 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts award, we’ve spent the last year studying and advancing the FAST concept in collaboration with Honeybee Robotics, Texas A&M University, and the University of Central Florida,” according to a recent company post. “And we just wrapped up our initial research, proving the solution is feasible in the lunar environment.”Masten has been busy thinking up innovative concepts to commercialize lunar travel. The company recently unveiled its GPS concept for the moon, and it’s working on ways to extract water using lander engines — ironically, a process that would intentionally displace significant volumes of regolith.

For the current test, Masten figured out the thickness required for the pads to work effectively.As an example, a large-scale Artemis human landing system would require alumina particles of approximately 0.5 millimeters diameter to pass through the engine without melting. The particles would impact the lunar surface at approximately 1,500 meters per second to create an initial base layer on the lunar surface that’s approximately 1 millimeter thick.After the base layer is deposited, alumina particles of approximately 0.024 millimeters in diameter would be required to heat up and liquify as they pass through the engine. These particles would impact the surface at approximately 650 meters per second and create additional layers that build up and strengthen the landing pad. The full deployment would take 10 seconds to release 186 kilograms of alumina at up to 30 meters above the lunar surface, creating a 6-meter diameter landing pad. The pad would then require 2.5 seconds to cool before the vehicle touches down for a safe landing.If that kind of calculation doesn’t make the engineering problem solver in you light up, it’s time for a vacation and a recharge. Space is once again home to some of the most creative engineering and applied chemistry in the world, thanks to the burgeoning commercial space sector. The solution is still a long way from implementation, but Masten has big plans for the moon and beyond. The company is also ambitiously turning its sights on Mars.”In Phase I, we advanced the technology readiness and laid the groundwork for future development. Our goal is to further mature the landing pad technology by testing it in a lunar environment in the next phase. Looking even further ahead, the FAST concept can be applied to other planetary bodies like Mars where loose regolith also poses risks to human and robotic missions.” More

Chula Vista PD

Privacy advocates are rightly concerned with the proliferation of drones in the hands of law enforcement. Can transparency help mollify concerns?That question is being put to the test in Southern California. The Chula Vista Police Department (CVPD), which has an active drone program, is teaming up with AirData UAV to transparency public drone flights. Mirroring the increased focus by police departments nationwide on effective public information campaigns, the hope for law enforcement officials is that easily accessible data, including flight and mission details, will help mollify a distrustful public.”Transparency and accountability are key components in the success of our drone program, which has been an invaluable tool in maintaining the safety of our officers and the public,” says Chief Roxana Kennedy, Chula Vista Police Department. “We pride ourselves on ensuring the public has access to our drone flight information in upholding the trust of our community.”The step toward transparency may not be enough for critics of local police departments’ increasingly sophisticated surveillance and tactical capabilities. For example, some police departments use tools like a Stingray, which mimics a cell tower to access metadata from unsuspecting cell users.Drones give police a particularly powerful tool for surveillance. According to the Brookings Institute:Drones provide what law enforcement likes to call “situational awareness”: a clear birds-eye perspective on potentially volatile situations that’s much less expensive and complex to operate than a manned helicopter. Law enforcement agencies have used this argument to justify flying drones over everything from alleged drug deals to homeless encampments to the recent protests against racist police violence. They’ve also used drone footage to make arrests: In Arizona in early July, police used drone video to justify arresting three Black Lives Matter protesters, who they say stopped traffic.The response in many cities has been tepid, and amid calls for regulation, more vocal advocates suggest outlawing police use of drones altogether.The first and most obvious course of action in regulating police use of drones is to ban the technology entirely, a proposal a number of lawmakers and activists are currently pushing in New York City. As police have rolled out drone programs, cities have received them warily. In 2013, police in Seattle were on the verge of launching a drone program but abandoned it under public pressure, a pattern that repeated itself the following year in Los Angeles. (Elsewhere, in Washington state police use of drones is widespread.)AirData believes the answer is greater transparency and trust. The company provides CVPD with a seamless and simple way to track and manage all of the flight data from their missions. It also helps the department with federal compliance, reporting, maintenance notifications, and logging are time-intensive tasks.

“We are excited to work closely with Chula Vista to provide full transparency of the police department flights to the community,” said Eran Steiner, Founder and CEO of AirData UAV. “AirData enables officers to focus on the community, while AirData performs the mundane and time-consuming work of flight data collection, federal compliance tracking, and crash prevention through tracking drone health. Chula Vista offers its residents an open AirData-driven web page, enabling the public to be well informed of drone-related law enforcement activity.”AirData is the largest online drone fleet data management and real-time flight streaming platform, serving over 210,000 users with 20 million flights uploaded to date, processing an average of 20,000 flights a day, with high-resolution data stored per each flight. Law enforcement presents a particularly lucrative market for drone fleet management given the proliferation of UAV technology in law enforcement and defense. More

FLIR
Fall is here (well, not here, I live in LA) and in some parts of the country that brings increased activity among large animals including deer, elk, and moose as they start migrating and searching for food ahead of winter. This is a cool thing to see, but it also sets up an ugly reality in densely populated areas where there’s lots of traffic.According to the 2020 State Farm annual study, nearly two million wildlife vehicle collisions (WVCs) occur every year in the United States alone, representing approximately five percent of all reported motor vehicle collisions.Thermal imaging solutions are one potential way to mitigate those collisions, which are often deadly. Thermal imaging cameras can see significantly farther than headlights to see large animals in various driving conditions. They detect and measure an entirely different wavelength of energy, known as long-wave infrared (LWIR) radiation, or heat energy, which radiates, absorbs, or is reflected by everything on earth. Therefore, detecting and classifying animals in daylight, total darkness, or blinding sun glare.Thermal cameras from companies like Teledyne FLIR are already offered on some vehicles as part of advanced warning systems. Because of their adeptness at detecting body heat, they’re seen as highly effective at giving advanced warning of some WVCs, which account for around 26,000 injuries to motorists each year. Tying in a thermal camera with an automatic braking system would be ideal given the speed at which animals often move into roadways.FLIR has been aggressive diversifying both within and beyond the consumer automotive space. Recently I wrote about FLIR’s acquisition of Endeavor Robotic Holdings, a military defense company specializing in ground robots, for a whopping $385 million. That acquisition came shortly after FLIR acquired aerial drone company Aeryon for $200 million, and just before the company announced it had made a strategic investment in DroneBase, a global drone operations company that provides businesses access to one of the largest Unmanned Aerial Surveillance (UAS) pilot networks.FLIR has also been active in traffic management systems worldwide. “FLIR traffic systems are currently installed in 75 countries, and with the addition of TrafiSense AI and TrafiCam AI, FLIR now offers a fully integrated solution that enables traffic engineers and city planners to apply AI-based learnings to continuously optimize traffic flow,” said Rickard Lindvall, General Manager, Solutions Business, FLIR Systems. “The integrated solution enables cities to improve urban roadway design to make cities safer and more livable.”

The company is quickly positioning its thermal imaging technology to become indispensable in several high stakes sensing environments.A recent FLIR thermal test vehicle recently demonstrated how adding a thermal sensor with a radar, a visible sensor, and a trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can improve animal detection and pedestrian detection from current automatic emergency braking systems. CNNs) are used to analyze images for certain characteristics and can be trained to detect and classify wildlife. Teledyne FLIR expanded their CNN to detect large animals in addition to its current capacity to detect pedestrians, vehicles, bikes, cars, and multiple other classes of road objects.   More

KEWAZO
Did you know there’s a $50 billion global scaffolding industry? Nearly all of it is put up manually.That makes scaffolding, the exterior structure used during building and maintenance, a prime target for automation. A company called Kewazo is finding success with a materials handling robot aimed at scaffolding installation called Liftbot. The company just closed $5 million in Series A funding and joins a growing pack of robotics developers taking aim at construction.”So many aspects of the construction industry stand to benefit immensely from robotic intelligence and RaaS offerings,” said Puneet Agarwal, partner at True Ventures, which participated in the round. “The Kewazo team has a strong track record and proven solution that addresses a significant need in a critical part of the industry. We’re excited to fund this team and help them expand to new verticals in construction and other markets.”Construction is a hot area for robotics development because it’s inefficient and hasn’t had a technology makeover in decades. The sector has not kept pace with innovation or productivity. As a result, there are massive inefficiencies in the industry. According to KPMG’s Global Construction Survey, just 25% of projects came within 10% of their original deadlines. When it comes to megaprojects, like large infrastructure projects, McKinsey found that 98% are delayed or over budget. 77% are more than 40% behind schedule.Robots, drones, and big data are considered key technology categories to address these inefficiencies. Companies like Rugged Robotics, which makes a line marking robot for the grid chalk lines used in every construction project, and Kewazo are keying in on this opportunity while wisely staying hyper focused on a particular need area. If automation in sectors like inspection and logistics serves as any guide, robots will find toeholds in the sector via extremely niche jobs that site managers see value in automating. Automation firms often stumble by developing robots for multiple use scenarios, which tends to increase price and complexity and raise the adoption threshold.Liftbot makes assembly more efficient by automating manual material transport. With minor adjustments, the technology can be applied to additional tasks such as insulation, painting and other on-site material transport. Data, of course, is behind much of the technology revolution in construction. Liftbot collects operational data and provides it to customers in the form of a data analytics platform. Those insights aid planning and improve profitability, and customers benefit from faster, more predictable projects. “Since our Seed-Investment in 2018, Kewazo has come a long way from prototype to the marketable and robust Liftbot system. Having True Ventures now leading the Series A round takes the company to the next level and we are proud to further support Kewazo’s international development”, states Matthias Guth, MIG Venture Partner and Kewazo Board member.

According to the company, the first batch of Liftbots has been successfully delivered to key customers in the EU markets. Prospective projects worldwide include scaffolding assembly at greenfield projects and maintenance jobs at construction sites, oil and gas refineries, power plants, and shipbuilding yards. More

Percepto
The alarming increase in the occurrence of wildfires isn’t going away. In fact, fire frequencies are projected to increase by approximately 27% globally by 2050. Areas such as North America, Northern Eurasia, and Australia are deemed to be most susceptible to wildfires, making finding effective methods to respond to them increasingly more important.Increasingly, fire departments across the globe have started to deploy first responder drones to ensure firefighter safety as well as enhance operational effectiveness when tackling a wide range of emergency sites including oil wells, high rises, and wildfires.In response to a recent forest fire that broke out in Athens, Defense Minister Nikolaos Panagiotopoulos said that the armed forces would strengthen their capabilities in fire prevention, deploying drones over other vulnerable sites across the country to obtain accurate data. Drone deployment in a fire emergency ensures the protection of personnel, gathers situational awareness speedily and accurately, and provides a cost-effective helicopter replacement and enables fast mapping for incident response and recovery.Having successfully helped Verizon secure the first BVLOS to fly drones into wildfires in the US through a landmark waiver, leading drone-in-a-box manufacturer Percepto is keen to raise awareness about the positive impact of quickly responding to natural disasters as a result of global warming through the deployment of drones. I caught up with Percepto CEO Dor Abuhasira to learn how.GN: How are drones being used to prevent wildfires?Dor Abuhasira: Drones can be used to prevent the occurrence of wildfires in a similar way they are used to prevent disaster at industrial sites. They can boost inspection frequency to inspect and monitor sensitive forest areas regularly, especially during times of year that wildfires are most likely to occur. As manual data reviews don’t catch all failures, drones can use AI powered solutions to collate data from all sources such as cameras, and SCADA systems. Drones can be operated remotely to help prevent a huge failure even in the midst of a pandemic or natural disaster with the ability to monitor facilities remotely. Autonomous drones ensure sites comply with local regulations, frequently monitoring refineries for gas leaks, and power plants for high water temperatures, reducing their environmental footprint. 

They respond to emergencies first, eliminating the need for first responders to go in blind to events, and providing engineers and technicians with the information they need to quickly perform repairs. By performing frequent, high-quality inspections, autonomous drones ensure faults are detected early on, preventing massive failures that can pose harm to employees and the environment. GN: Why is Percepto’s drone-in-a-box Sparrow ideally suited to fly in the most severe climate conditions?Dor Abuhasira: Percepto’s advanced autonomous drone solution is the first to pass Level 5 hurricane testing at a wind speed of up to 155mph, making it the most rugged drone-in-a-box system on the market. The industrial Percepto base allows their Sparrow drone to safely charge outdoors during the most extreme weather events. The drone itself is also highly ruggedized and can takeoff, fly and land in severe wind, rain, snow and heat.Percepto’s technology can assess their customers’ sites immediately after a storm, allowing customers like Florida Power and Light (FPL) to react immediately in the aftermath of a hurricane, assessing and fixing any damage without endangering their staff when the weather is still very challenging where the most residents per year experience outages in the state.”As soon as the storm passes, we can have this up…inspecting our plant and knowing immediately what sort of damage we have so we’re able to get our power back on that much sooner… for a utility to be able to see our infrastructure in areas where we can’t get to safely; to quickly fly over it and understand what our conditions are…the safety of our crews is paramount.” – Michael Dorr, lead pilot for Florida Power & Light’s Drone in a Box system.Last year, the FAA granted Skyward, a Verizon company, a temporary waiver that allowed company pilots to fly the Percepto Sparrow drone from their homes to inspect critical communications infrastructure near the Big Hollow wildfire in Washington. The waiver permitted operations 24 hours a day, with less than 3 miles of visibility, and no pilot or observer on site. This is the first time a Beyond the Visual Line Of Sight waiver was granted to allow pilots to control the drone from home. It was a landmark for the industry and a testament to the standard of the Percepto Sparrow. The Percepto drone was designed with the needs of an industrial site’ as the core, underlying principle. The drone is made of a composite carbon fiber, fiber-glass material, tailored to accommodate a wide range of temperatures. The extremely durable material is of the sort used in naval industries, able to withstand salt, water, dusk and direct sunlight. Our maintenance philosophy is centered around how industrial sites operate, i.e. maintenance equipment checks occuring every few weeks or months. This caters for the drone to stay unattended for a long time, on the site, ready to launch for emergency. High flight performance enables flying in strong winds with superior sealing and resilience to precipitation, dust, sand, coupled with a heavy, stable Percepto Base. This can open in one piece on an axis in a manner that avoids snow or dust falling into the pad from which the drone is launching (as opposed to the two-piece mechanisms opening sideways which most drone-in-a-box providers feature). The drone’s temperature can be monitored and controlled via air-conditioning within the weather station for further protection from the elements.GN: How will upcoming regulations significantly increase the adoption of drones?Dor Abuhasira: In June 2021, the FAA announced the new BVLOS Aviation Rulemaking Committee (ARC) – a large-scale collaboration between the drone industry and regulators, over 80 organizations including six drone manufacturers (of which Percepto is one).In the next 6 months, ARC will make their first round of recommendation to the FAA for a new BVLOS regulation, removing the current need for a drone pilot to monitor each drone that flies. Until now, the FAA has yet to fully enable commercial BVLOS flight.The new BVLOS regulation will change everything. Fully autonomous drone flights. No pilots. No human involvement. That means we will finally see drones implemented at scale as a network of robots providing various vital services for us. In the next few years, you should expect to see autonomous drones flying around delivering packages, inspecting power lines, solar farms, cell towers and bridges. The many applications enabled are demonstrated by the range of drone companies who work closest with the FAA. For Amazon, BVLOS regulation means fully autonomous consumer deliveries. For other drone delivery companies like Zipline, BVLOS regulation means fully autonomous delivery of vital medical supplies. And for industrial drones like Percepto’s, it means fully autonomous monitoring of the country’s most risky, complex facilities. On a larger scale, it offers companies responsible for our critical infrastructure the promise of employing a fleet of drones to manage and maintain all of their infrastructure from anywhere in the country. This new regulation will revolutionize industries and change lives when it comes into effect in the next few years. And in the meantime, the industry will continue to move forward within the existing regulatory framework. GN: How will the drone industry evolve over the next decade with regards to environmental issues?Dor Abuhasira: Companies traditionally thought of as not environmentally-friendly now have the tools to more carefully adhere to regulations, and prevent catastrophes, e.g. oil spills.Companies can completely change the way they approach safety and their environmental impact, working towards their ESG goals to enhance their reputation –  e.g. drones are used to monitor a power plant or solar farm.Preventing catastrophes creates significant impact to the bottom line, helps companies meet environmental and safety objectives and mitigates any reputational damage. More

Bedrock
As robots become more prevalent, demand for mechanical and computer engineers who work on autonomous systems is growing. In fact, it’s projected that the number of jobs in the field will grow 9% between 2016 and 2026, leading to a shortage of qualified engineers. That’s a real opportunity for new talent entering the workforce or for professionals looking to make a mid-career shift. Part of the allure is the broad applicability of automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence technologies to a variety of sectors that heretofore haven’t had much automation adoption. The chance to work on the leading edge of automation technologies and problem solve how they might be adapted to new use cases can be thrilling, particularly coming from IT and engineering fields that have now become more routinized after the profound shifts of previous decades.Knowing where to look is half the battle. We’ve compiled five industries where robots are taking over —and where roboticists and computer engineers will be in high demand in years to come.
Scythe
Commercial LandscapingThe way we tend lawns is surprisingly inefficient, to say nothing of environmentally unsound. A recent study from Sweden found that cutting grass for an hour with a gas-powered mower has about the same impact as a 100-mile car ride in terms of air pollution. Add to that, the sector has been beset with labor issues globally. In fact, the $105B commercial landscaping industry has seen labor shortages for at least the decade. The technology powering commercial landscaping, meanwhile, hasn’t been updated in years, as anyone who’s recently operated a noisy, smelly 2-strike weed whacker can attest.That’s opened the door for the robots, and there’s a lot of exciting activity around automation in commercial landscaping. A firm called Scythe Robotics, for example, has set out to provide the most advanced and sustainable autonomous technology for maintaining off-road environments safely, effectively, and responsibly, including in applications like commercial landscaping via an emissions-free autonomous mower. The company is getting a lot of early support and recently announced a 13.8M series A. FarmingBeset with labor problems, climate change, and growing pressure to act more economically sustainable, agriculture is embracing automation like few other industries. Writes journalist Katrina Miller in a thoughtful piece on the subject:Robots are already starting to take off in the food sector; they are picking strawberries, harvesting lettuce, pollinating flowers, and even milking cows. Because they work more efficiently, robots can perform eco-friendly tasks that would be uneconomical if they had to be done by hand, like manual weeding, which can reduce the need for spraying chemicals.

Commercial ag companies are also swooning at the power of data-driven automation, which has prompted agriculture to embrace robots, AI, and ML like few other industries. According to Robotics Automation News, the market size for robots in agriculture was $4,082.8 million in 2018 but could reach $16,640.4 million by 2026, a compound annual growth rate of 19.2 percent. North America generated a revenue of $ 1,469.8 million in 2018 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 18.9 percent.A $20 million federal effort known as the AgAID Institute is seeking to develop AI to tackle ag challenges like diminishing water. “It is essential to improve the robustness, efficiency and adaptability of food production,” Alan Fern, professor of computer science and the principal investigator representing OSU, which is participating in the program, told the OSU newsroom. “The institute aims to achieve this by identifying the best ways to integrate humans and AI/robotics technology.”Examples of companies developing and commercializing farm robots include Farmwise, which makes autonomous robots that utilize machine learning to provide farmers with a sustainable solution for cultivating. Bowery Farm is an indoor sustainable farm that nurtures and grows plants indoors with the use of AI to track and monitor plant growth. Iron Ox has a robotic growing solution to curtail greenhouse gasses and has secured more than $40 million in funding.ConstructionAccording to Allied Market Research, the construction robotics market is set to reach $7.88 billion globally by 2027. It would be difficult to list all the ways automation is coming for the construction industry, but some examples include drones that autonomously map spaces and deliver progress reports, heavy machinery that amplifies human power, and line chalking robots that mark out the footprint of buildings to ensure error-free projects. According to ABB Robotics, more than four out of five (81%) of the world’s construction companies say they are planning to introduce robots into their operations during the coming decade. The reasons include tight margins, which are driving efficiency, and persistent skills and labor shortages in an industry that’s subject like few others to the boom and bust cycles of the market.Construction robotics companies include DroneDeploy, Sarcos Robotics, and Rugged Robotics.MaritimeThe sea has always been a dangerous and exciting place to work, and maritime logistics, extractive industries, and science are critical to global commerce. According to Research and Markets, the global Autonomous ship and ocean surface market could see revenue of $3.48 billion by 2035, growing at a CAGR of 26.7%.Some emerging uses of robots in the maritime industry include in hazardous waste cleanup, hull cleaning and maintenance, infrastructure inspection and installation (especially in wind farms, which are embracing robotics technology), and ship inspections. Undersea robots have been used to kill invasive fish, navigate across oceans, and locate sunken treasure. One company making waves in ocean robotics is Bedrock.EducationIn China, hundreds of kindergarten classes are now using a small robot that tells stories and poses logic problems. According to Education Week, the robots are part of a big push in the country to be the world leader in the use of AI-powered technologies.Not a week goes by when I don’t see several launch announcements pertaining to STEAM-focused robots aimed at helping kids, students, and professionals in sectors like medicine learn interactively. Not surprising, then that the educational robot market is expected to grow from USD $1.3 billion in 2021 to $2.6 billion by 2026.Companies promoting the use of robots among students include Sphero, which makes a programmable robot ball, Modular Robotics, and RoboLink. More