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Iván Hernández Dalas: Formant partners with Holman on cloud robotics platform

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Formant, a developer of a leading cloud robotics platform, has partnered with Holman, a global automotive services company. This collaboration will combine Formant’s cloud robotics platform with Holman’s fleet and automotive expertise. Formant ’s expertise in cloud robotics shares a number of natural synergies with Holman’s suite of commercial automotive services, which includes fleet management and leasing, upfitting, and vocational vehicle equipment manufacturing. Formant said the commercial partnership with Holman will help fuel the growth and ongoing development of its robotics platform, which transforms how businesses manage their fleet while integrating physical automation. Formant told The Robot Report it is interested in looking beyond robots for its offerings, while Holman is interested in looking beyond traditional vehicles in its offering. “The trust placed in Formant by an industry leader like Holman validates our position in the market and our ability to serve enterp
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Iván Hernández Dalas: iRobot lays off another 105 employees

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One of the robotics industry’s household brands continues to struggle. iRobot , maker of the popular Roomba robot vacuum, is laying off another 105 employees as part of its restructuring plans. The number of employees being let go represents 16% of iRobot’s global workforce as of September 28, 2024. Since the start of 2024, iRobot has reduced its global workforce by nearly 50%. There are several reasons iRobot, which has sold more than 50 million robots worldwide, is struggling. One of the main reasons is the failed acquisition from Amazon , which was called off earlier in 2024. Amazon wanted to acquire iRobot for $1.7 billion, but the deal was ultimately called off because regulators said the deal would restrict competition. Amazon paid iRobot $94 million to terminate the deal. Competition is another major reason for iRobot’s current situation. In the last decade-plus, a host of strong competitors have popped up around the world with robot vacuums that are often cheaper than the Ro
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Stanford Robotics Center partners with Stanford HAI for AI research, policy

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From left: HAI Co-Director James Landay and Stanford Robotics Lab Director Oussama Khatib. | Source: Madeleine Wright The Stanford Robotics Center and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence last week launched a partnership to identify responsible uses for AI. The initiative will involve interdisciplinary research into how humanity can benefit from the latest technological advances and that those benefits are broadly shared, said the organizations. The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence ( HAI ) and Stanford Robotics Center ( SRC ) said they want to respond to rapid advances in AI and take the opportunity for AI to accelerate the field of robotics. Oussama Khatib, director of the SRC, and Fei-Fei Li, John Etchemendy, and James Landay, co-directors of HAI, will co-lead the project. The team aims to address the technical, societal, and economic challenges confronted in fields that use robotics including health and wellness, educa
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Iván Hernández Dalas: NVIDIA adds open AI and simulation tools for robot learning, humanoid development

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New Project GR00T workflows and AI world model tools are intended to help developers of robot dexterity, control, manipulation, and mobility. Source: NVIDIA NVIDIA Corp. today announced new artificial intelligence and simulation tools to accelerate development of robots including humanoids. Also at the Conference for Robotic Learning, Hugging Face Inc. and NVIDIA said they are combining their open-source AI and robotics efforts to accelerate research and development. The tools include the generally available NVIDIA Isaac Lab robot learning framework and six new robot learning workflows for the Project GR00T initiative to accelerate humanoid development. They also include new world-model development tools for video data curation and processing, including the NVIDIA Cosmos tokenizer and NVIDIA NeMo Curator for video processing. Hugging Face said its LeRobot open AI platform combined with NVIDIA AI , Omniverse and Isaac robotics technology will enable advances across industrie
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Pipedream Labs deploys underground robotic delivery system in Texas drive thru

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Pipedream’s shuttle robots run on unpowered rails through the company’s pipe system to deliver food. | Source: Pipedream Pipedream Labs Inc. announced the launch of its robotic food-delivery system at a leading quick-service restaurant, or QSR. The system delivers food orders from the kitchen to the customer in under 15 seconds, “transforming fast food into instant food,” it said. The Austin, Texas-based company uses underground robots to facilitate high-speed delivery for QSRs and other facilities. Pipedream said it is dedicated to revolutionizing logistics and creating seamless, hyper-efficient systems for the modern world. Canon Reeves, co-founder and chief technology officer of Pipedream, said autonomous delivery is inevitable, but it still has a long way to go before it becomes a reality. The restaurant industry is facing a long-term technical problem, as delivery robots need to seamlessly navigate sidewalks while sharing them with humans, he said. Pipedream has taken this
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Iván Hernández Dalas: From surge to sobriety: the state of robotics investment in 2024

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1X’s Eve robot. Over the last several years, the investment environment has been tough for robotics startups. Capital deployment has fallen and companies have closed as the general downturn in tech investment that started in 2022 hit the resource-intensive robotics particularly hard. We have tracked that decline — and identified green shoots of recovery — in our annual State of Robotics reports . This year, however, the picture has changed drastically. Betsy Mule and I were asked to speak about this changing environment at the RoboBusiness conference earlier this month, and as we near the year’s end we thought it would be worth sharing our findings with the wider community. One of the key drivers of growth in the robotics sector has been the falling costs and higher performance of the technology’s building blocks — things like computing power, sensors, motors, and batteries. At the same time, accelerating advances in AI have been a tailwind for the industry. These trends are sho
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Iván Hernández Dalas: RBR50 Spotlight: Ukrainian tractor company develops demining robot

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Organization: Gardarika Tres Country: Ukraine Website: https://efarm.pro/demining_ukraine/ Year Founded: 2014 Number of Employees: 11-20 Innovation Class: Application & Market Ukraine-based Gardarika Tres LLC is a manufacturer and distributor of agricultural equipment that focuses on precision farming systems and was founded in 2014. The company started an autonomous tractor navigation brand called Efarm.pro in 2023. At the end of January 2023, according to reports, about 250,000 sq. km (61.7 million sq. acres) of Ukrainian agricultural land had become minefields. These explosive devices must be cleared from the fields. However, there is a lack of trained personnel and appropriate equipment to do the job. Accelerating the demining process will provide an opportunity to quickly restore the country’s economy, industry, and agrarian entrepreneurship, and save people’s lives. The Efarm.pro brand developed an unmanned system to remove mines from fields. The system inclu
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