Robotics

Written by

Greg Nichols, Contributor

Greg Nichols
Contributor

Greg Nichols covers robotics, AI, and AR/VR for ZDNet. A full-time journalist and author, he writes about tech, travel, crime, and the economy for global media outlets and reports from across the U.

Full Bio

Pixabay
Artificial intelligence and privacy don’t always work hand in hand. But when it comes to one sector, commercial driving, AI vision seems to be drastically reducing one of the most astounding examples of employee surveillance today.

Literally, someone is always watching: That’s the state of affairs in the commercial driving sector, where many advanced camera-based safety systems like video telematics and ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) live stream 24-hour views into the vehicle. The predictable result is that professional drivers often have an unwelcome sense that someone is always watching. Is it any wonder the sector is facing massive worker shortages?”From a privacy perspective, recording everything a driver does and allowing drop-ins can leave drivers feeling spied-on at work,” says Yoav Banin, Chief Product Officer at Nauto, which is utilizing assistance technology to reduce monitoring and put the power in the hands of the employee. “Drivers may then resist using the technology, not get the full safety benefits from it, or even look for a job elsewhere.”As with most employer-led surveillance, the intentions are mostly good. In 2020, 3,142 people were killed in the U.S. in motor vehicle collisions involving distracted drivers. That translates into more than 60 Americans dying every week. We also know that the pandemic is associated with a significant increase in roadway fatalities and unsafe driving behavior. By monitoring drivers (or making them aware that they can be monitored at any time), fleet operators are hoping to cut down those numbers.But the solution is stomach-churning, and this is a story that goes way beyond tracking. Employer surveillance is a hot button issue, whether in the office, remote work, or on the road and often, it’s enabled by technology. But can technologies also help overcome the need for invasive employer practices?Also: The 5 best surveillance drones: Next-level inspection UAVsAI vision, which is transforming automation sectors like robotics and autonomous and assistive driving, is one example of just that. With driver shortages and continuing supply chain woes, the idea is that a shift to a driver-centric approach that gives drivers accurate information with enough time to react allows them to improve their performance and avoid collisions on their own. It’s also proving to be far more agreeable in terms of professional driver adoption and operational success. And it seems to be effective: these systems have the potential to prevent 62% of total traffic deaths and about 60% of total traffic injuries, according to the NSC.”Stories about the driver shortage are all over the news right now, but the truth is, that shortage has been growing for years, and I don’t anticipate it going away anytime soon,” Banin tells me. “Drivers have a choice about where to work, and fleets need a way to attract and keep top-performing drivers. Fleets using a safety solution that respects driver privacy and that considers context are in a much better position to recruit and retain the best drivers than fleets recording drivers all the time or dropping in on them unannounced.”In a tight labor market, employees can increasingly leverage their options to reduce what they feel is undue monitoring. Nauto is an excellent example — the company is betting that empowering employees rather than spying on them is the real secret to safety, and it’s seeing customer feedback to that effect. Nauto does that via AI technology, giving drivers accurate real-time alerts that rapidly reduce risky driving behavior and help prevent collisions. “That helps fleets quickly improve safety,” says Banin. “We have customers who have seen distracted driving drop 80% within weeks, with minimal management intervention. Customers see collision reductions of up to 80%, and many start seeing a positive return on investment within months.”That’s a lesson that employers in several sectors should take to heart: Engaging and informing employees is not only more effective, it’s likely necessary as competition for workers escalates.  More

Written by

Greg Nichols, Contributor

Greg Nichols
Contributor

Greg Nichols covers robotics, AI, and AR/VR for ZDNet. A full-time journalist and author, he writes about tech, travel, crime, and the economy for global media outlets and reports from across the U.

Full Bio

Buildots
A company that uses construction workers as roving cameramen to analyze progress on the job site has secured $60 million in Series C funding. Buildots, whose growth is tracking a broader technological turn in the practically neolithic construction sector, will use the cash to expand its product offering in a bid to be the management suite of choice for construction oversight.Construction accounts for 13% of the world’s GDP, but while other traditional industries, like manufacturing, have increased productivity over the years, productivity has remained almost stagnant in the building sector. According to the European Commission, construction productivity has only increased by 1% in the past two decades. And with operational profitability often being only 5%, there is little room for error. That’s led to a boom in technology development in the space aimed at increasing efficiency. We’ve covered scaffolding robots, which are aiming to disrupt a $50 billion global scaffolding business, aerial construction drones, cyborg-adjacent robotic suits, and various kinds of data capture devices and schemes. All of it is aiming to overcome the frankly strange fact that productivity in construction has actually fallen in half since the 1960s. The sector has not kept pace with innovation, and as I’ve written, the diesel-powered hydraulic machines you’ll find on most construction sites today remain essentially unchanged from those rolling around 100 years ago. Enter Buildots, which uses AI and computer vision to help construction managers stay on top of job progress and identify delays and overruns. It all starts with what’s essentially a GoPro mounted to the hardhats construction workers wear. The cameras capture job sites while the company’s AI logs progress and is designed to spot errors as soon as they happen, eliminating costly backtracking when mistakes are uncovered later.The company made an early splash with the booming construction sector, which has been aided by a severe housing crunch, and now it’s expanding its suite of management tools.”This funding round is fueling an essential expansion to our product offering, which in the process moves us closer to our vision of connected construction,” said Roy Danon, co-founder and CEO of Buildots. “Facilitating better decision-making for construction teams is a key step in moving the entire industry towards greater collaboration and efficiency.”There’s a parallel story playing out across industries like logistics, manufacturing, and biotech. Machine vision, which can analyze footage captured from inexpensive cameras, has unlocked a powerful tool for real-time quality control and regulation. This is symptomatic of a broader demand for extraordinary new levels of efficiency as the key driver of competitiveness.”Traditional markets like construction are increasing their embrace of digital transformation,” said Natalie Refuah, General Partner at Viola Growth, who will also be joining Buildots’ Board of Directors. “With top-notch technology and a superb team, Buildots offers immense potential in terms of efficiency and profitability. We are excited for their continued success capitalizing on this market.” More

Written by

Greg Nichols, Contributor

Greg Nichols
Contributor

Greg Nichols covers robotics, AI, and AR/VR for ZDNet. A full-time journalist and author, he writes about tech, travel, crime, and the economy for global media outlets and reports from across the U.

Full Bio

Motional
Uber Eats is turning to autonomous vehicles in a major market. Along with AV partner Motional, the third-party delivery platform will be launching a new autonomous delivery experience in Santa Monica, California.Deliveries will be conducted in Motional’s IONIQ 5 vehicles, which are capable of operating autonomously. Participating restaurants bring packaged orders to the curb and place them inside a locking compartment. Once the car arrives at its destination the customer is notified and retrieves the order from the car. Uber Eats and Motional have been working on the various customer touchpoints for months with an eye toward a seamless rollout.”At Uber, we’re always looking for ways to use new technology to help consumers go anywhere and get anything,” said Noah Zych, Global GM for Uber’s Autonomous Mobility and Delivery business. “We’re thrilled to begin piloting with Motional in California and are eager to see how their promising autonomous technology will begin to change how people and goods move throughout the world for the better.”

Conspicuous in the new testbed is the absence of drivers. Uber and its drivers have long had a tense relationship. Autonomous vehicle technology seems primed to enable Uber to move forward without those drivers before long.The partnership is relatively new, which makes the rollout all the more impressive. Motional and Uber announced their partnership in December of last year. This is the first on-road autonomous vehicle (AV) pilot on the Uber Eats network, which makes it an important milestone for the technology in general. Uber Eats controls an estimated 24% of the food delivery market, making its adoption of any new technology highly influential.Motional’s vehicles have been piloted in passenger conveyance but the move to food delivery represents a pivot. The Motional IONIQ 5 vehicles used in the service have been adapted to enable autonomous deliveries. The new service will allow Motional and Uber to study consumer response and technology integration. Uber clearly has long-term designs on AVs across its platform.

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Written by

Greg Nichols, Contributor

Greg Nichols
Contributor

Greg Nichols covers robotics, AI, and AR/VR for ZDNet. A full-time journalist and author, he writes about tech, travel, crime, and the economy for global media outlets and reports from across the U.

Full Bio

Motional
Uber Eats is turning to autonomous vehicles in a major market. Along with AV partner Motional, the third-party delivery platform will be launching a new autonomous delivery experience in Santa Monica, California.Deliveries will be conducted in Motional’s IONIQ 5 vehicles, which are capable of operating autonomously. Participating restaurants bring packaged orders to the curb and place them inside a locking compartment. Once the car arrives at its destination the customer is notified and retrieves the order from the car. Uber Eats and Motional have been working on the various customer touchpoints for months with an eye toward a seamless rollout.

“At Uber, we’re always looking for ways to use new technology to help consumers go anywhere and get anything,” said Noah Zych, Global GM for Uber’s Autonomous Mobility and Delivery business. “We’re thrilled to begin piloting with Motional in California and are eager to see how their promising autonomous technology will begin to change how people and goods move throughout the world for the better.”Conspicuous in the new testbed is the absence of drivers. Uber and its drivers have long had a tense relationship. Autonomous vehicle technology seems primed to enable Uber to move forward without those drivers before long.The partnership is relatively new, which makes the rollout all the more impressive. Motional and Uber announced their partnership in December of last year. This is the first on-road autonomous vehicle (AV) pilot on the Uber Eats network, which makes it an important milestone for the technology in general. Uber Eats controls an estimated 24% of the food delivery market, making its adoption of any new technology highly influential.Motional’s vehicles have been piloted in passenger conveyance but the move to food delivery represents a pivot. The Motional IONIQ 5 vehicles used in the service have been adapted to enable autonomous deliveries. The new service will allow Motional and Uber to study consumer response and technology integration. Uber clearly has long-term designs on AVs across its platform.

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Written by

Greg Nichols, Contributor

Greg Nichols
Contributor

Greg Nichols covers robotics, AI, and AR/VR for ZDNet. A full-time journalist and author, he writes about tech, travel, crime, and the economy for global media outlets and reports from across the U.

Full Bio

Flytrex
You might think you should look down toward the water to spot a sub. If you’re in North Carolina, you’d be better off looking up. That terrible joke is brought to you by a drone delivery services company called Flytrex, which just announced a partnership with Jersey Mike’s Subs.I’ve been a fan of Flytrex since the company delivered a beer by drone way back in 2015. Since then, the Israeli drone delivery enterprise has expanded its business-to-consumer model, although growth has been largely constrained by the need for special waivers from the FAA to fly beyond the visual line of sight. That, in turn, has led to a patchwork of testbeds but no single dominant player in the commercial drone delivery game.

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Flytrex’s main U.S. testbed is in North Carolina, where the company has expanded its drone delivery presence over the past couple of years. Flytrex has been making deliveries in suburban Holly Springs thanks to FAA waivers that are part of the UAS Integration Pilot Program (IPP), which is designed to bring state, local, and tribal governments together with drone operators and manufacturers to accelerate safe commercial drone integration. The program is being seen within the sector as something of a springboard for drone manufacturers. The partnership with Jersey Mike’s Subs brings some national chain clout to the effort. Customers in the service area can now order subs to front and backyards, with a flight time of just five minutes. That short delivery time, in part, is due to the limitations of the delivery service area, which the FAA mandates. Flytrex is offering its delivery service in cooperation with longtime partner Causey Aviation Unmanned under a waiver that allows a delivery radius of one nautical mile. If that seems slim, it nonetheless accounts for thousands of homes, making it a notable proving ground, both on the technological and consumer adoption sides.  “We’re excited to team up with Jersey Mike’s to deliver subs throughout the skies of North Carolina and look forward to expanding our partnership everywhere they deliver their delicious food,” said Yariv Bash, CEO and co-founder of Flytrex. “Drone delivery is accelerating quicker than anyone could have anticipated, and we are thrilled to be at the forefront of that movement – using our technology to ensure retailers and restaurants can stay ahead of the ultrafast delivery curve.”Flytrex recently launched another pilot in Granbury, Texas, near Dallas-Fort Worth, though it’s been in North Carolina since September 2020. The choice of location is significant given the state’s ‘First in Flight’ bona fides. The company now reaches about 10,000 homes across North Carolina and Texas.  More

Written by

Greg Nichols, Contributor

Greg Nichols
Contributor

Greg Nichols covers robotics, AI, and AR/VR for ZDNet. A full-time journalist and author, he writes about tech, travel, crime, and the economy for global media outlets and reports from across the U.

Full Bio

Qualcomm RB6 Robotics Platform
Qualcomm
Qualcomm is taking a big dive into robotics. At its 5G Summit event, the company announced a new robotics platform that serves as an off-the-shelf developer kit for creating autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and drones, utilizing 5G and edge AI for next-gen autonomy.In practical terms, this could set off huge changes in the expanding AMR market and the upstart enterprise drone market. Currently, the space is dominated by a handful of robotics firms that build AMRs or drone-in-a-box solutions and lease them on an as-a-service model. A robust developer’s kit and underlying robotics architecture from Qualcomm could open up the playing field, leading to more customer-specific customization and enterprise in-house robotics development. 

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“Building on the successful growth and traction of Qualcomm Technologies’ leading robotics solutions, our expanded roadmap of solutions will help bring enhanced AI and 5G technologies to support smarter, safer, and more advanced innovations across robotics, drones, and intelligent machines,”said Dev Singh, Senior Director of Business Development and Head of Autonomous Robotics, Drones and Intelligent Machines at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. Qualcomm is using the 5G rollout as its entry point into robotics. Because of the speed and bandwidth 5G affords, it will have major implications for autonomous systems. One of the current constraints of real-world autonomy is that on-board data-processing power is expensive — and coordination across multiple autonomous platforms is highly dependent on high speed networks. Cloud-based solutions bridge the gap, but network issues have throttled development and deployment. 

The arrival of 5G is expected to initiate a new phase of autonomous systems development, including enterprise drones. After years of slow movement, the FAA is signaling broader acceptance of commercial drone use, setting the table for the industry to take off in a big way. Qualcomm has taken note, and its RB6 platform makes it a new, powerful player in the robotics market. The expansible platform brings edge AI and video processing capabilities (essential for navigation and machine vision) through the Qualcomm AI Engine, with support for 70–200 Trillion-Operations-Per-Second (TOPS). The integration of 5G and AI makes the platform ideal for developers in industrial use cases across sectors like government service applications, logistics, healthcare, retail, warehousing, agriculture, construction, and utilities. These are all expected growth areas for robotics.In addition to the robotics platform, Qualcomm also unveiled a reference design of an AMR called RB5 AMR, which is a small wheeled robot designed to deliver packages and handle materials. More

Written by

Greg Nichols, Contributor

Greg Nichols
Contributor

Greg Nichols covers robotics, AI, and AR/VR for ZDNet. A full-time journalist and author, he writes about tech, travel, crime, and the economy for global media outlets and reports from across the U.

Full Bio

Agility Robotics
One of my favorite robots of the last few years is named Cassie. Little more than a pair of bipedal robotic legs, the robot was designed as a robust R&D tool for ground mobility applications. It’s a cool robot, and it’s a great illustration of a company developing baseline technology readymade for useful iteration.That approach has now netted Agility Robotics, maker of Cassie and, more recently, of commercial robots designed to work alongside people in logistics and warehouse environments, an impressive $150M Series B, which it will use to implement human-robot collaboration in logistics warehouses. The humanoid robots are capable of carrying out a number of potential warehouse tasks previously done by humans and can be deployed flexibly in various environments.

Innovation

“Unprecedented consumer and corporate demand have created an extraordinary need for robots to support people in the workplace,” explained Damion Shelton, CEO of Agility Robotics. “With this investment, Agility can ramp up the delivery of robots to fill roles where there’s an unmet need.”Very notably, this round had participation from Amazon as part of the company’s recently announced $1B Industrial Innovation Fund. Agility is one of the first five recipients of the fund, a milestone investment for a 7-year old company out of rural Oregon started by two Robotics Ph.Ds from Carnegie Mellon.”The purpose of the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund is to support emerging technologies through direct investments, designed to spur invention and solve for the world’s toughest problems across customer fulfillment operations, logistics, and supply chain solutions,” said Katherine Chen, Head of Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund. “Agility’s approach to designing robotics for a blended workforce is truly unique and can have a significant ripple effect for a wide range of industries, and we hope others follow suit to accelerate innovation in this way.”Agility has evolved quickly to focus on true commercial robots that work collaboratively and side-by-side with people in a familiar and non-threatening way. Their robots can easily walk, climb stairs, navigate unstructured environments, carry packages, stack goods, and work indoors or out, all of which are skills that were elusive within robotics development even a short time ago. The company’s robots are now deployed in the factories and warehouses of top U.S. logistics companies, as well as Ford Motor Co. and some of the country’s most elite research institutions, including Ohio and Michigan.The capital raise underscores the continued reliance on automation to drive efficiency, even as the economy grows more turbulent. Faced with a tight labor market and supply chain woes, logistics operations are increasingly relying on automation to fill key gaps, shifting reliance slowly away from human workers.Agility’s most advanced robot will be deployed at customers’ sites later this year. The Series B was led by led by DCVC and Playground Global. More

Written by

Greg Nichols, Contributor

Greg Nichols
Contributor

Greg Nichols covers robotics, AI, and AR/VR for ZDNet. A full-time journalist and author, he writes about tech, travel, crime, and the economy for global media outlets and reports from across the U.

Full Bio

Chipotle
Some of the most interesting tech development is happening in an unusual space: Fast food. From burger-flipping robots to drone delivery and Amazon-level logistics, the face of fast food is changing quickly. The latest proof? Chipotle has announced a new venture fund called Cultivate Next, which will make early-stage investments into strategically aligned companies.

Innovation

Why does a quick-serve chain need a venture fund? I put the question to Chipotle CTO Curt Garner.”Cultivate Next aims to support seed to Series B stage companies that can accelerate our strategic priorities such as running great restaurants,” says Garner, “amplifying technology and innovation, further advancing our Food With Integrity mission, and expanding access and convenience for our consumers.”The subtext is that competition is fierce in fast food, and it pays to be in on the ground floor of technological innovation — a lesson the sector might well have gleaned from Amazon’s ambitious takeover of Kiva Robotics, which was a big key in unlocking Amazon’s logistical competitive advantage.”Cultivate Next allows us to meet consumer and employee preferences that have evolved over the last two years,” says Garner. “We have an aggressive goal of achieving 7,000 restaurants, and technology is the key to accelerating these growth plans.”Also: Are ghost kitchens here to stay?Chipotle is already making headway, teaming up with companies like Miso Robotics on a tortilla chip-making robot, which Chipotle is piloting at select locations. The chain is also testing RFID technology for backend management, which is critical to maintaining quality in a high throughput kitchen. “Chipotle is testing radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology to enhance its traceability program and inventory management systems,” says Garner. “Ingredients arrive at Chipotle restaurants affixed with RFID enabled case labels and are scanned by RFID readers. Our RFID program is designed to allow the company to act on food safety and quality concerns swiftly, efficiently, and precisely.”The new venture fund will have an initial size of $50 million and will be financed solely by Chipotle. As funds go, it’s not the biggest, but this is surely a sign of growing competition and white-hot development in an industry largely aided by pandemic-influenced consumer trends but also reeling from an extremely competitive labor market and rising wages. In that regard, it’s a bellwether and sign of lively development in fast food tech.”We are looking to support a wide range of forward-thinking ventures, including those focused on farming, supply chain, employee experience, and advanced robotics.” More