Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

Coherence Guard is designed to enable service robots to behave appropriately around people, says Palm Garden AI. Source: aivora studio AI, via Adobe Stock As so-called general-purpose robots and humanoids continue to evolve, so is the software stack to enable them to conduct useful tasks around people. Palm Garden AI is developing Coherence Guard, which it described as a “platform-agnostic relational decision layer for human-facing robots.” “The aim is not to replace perception, motion planning, reinforcement learning, or existing robot control stacks,” said Joachim Scheuerer, CEO of Palm Garden AI. “Rather, it functions as an additional pre-action evaluation layer: Before a robot executes an action, the layer can evaluate whether the action is relationally coherent in a real human environment.” “This includes signals such as timing, proximity, boundary requests, emotional tone, trust preservation, respectful withdrawal, and the difference be...

The Robot Report Podcast · Transforming Solar Construction Through Robotics with Deise Yumi Asami In Episode 253 of The Robot Report Podcast, Deise Yumi Asami shares how her AI-enabled robotics startup, Maximo, is making solar panel installation faster, safer, and more efficient. She talks about how robotics, AI vision, and smart field deployment are helping reshape the future of renewable energy infrastructure. Yumi Asami also shares her experiences with starting a new company from the ground up while being incubated within parent company The AES Corp. Learn how a large organization can encourage and celebrate innovation and how AES organized its innovation group. Deise Yumi Asami, founder of Maximo. Deise Yumi Asami is the founder of Maximo at AES. Drawing on her engineering background, she led the development and incubation of Maximo, an AI-enabled robotic platform transforming utility-scale solar construction by automating the installation of solar modules using AI -base...

Weave Robotics plans to begin Isaac 1 deliveries this fall. | Credit: Weave Robotics Weave Robotics has introduced Isaac 1, a wheeled home humanoid designed to take on everyday chores such as folding laundry, tidying rooms, making beds, and putting away toys. The San Francisco-based startup is launching Isaac 1 as a consumer robot priced at $7,999, or $449 per month. The robot is meant to look approachable rather than intimidating, with a cartoon-like face and a body wrapped in soft fabric. Its friendly exterior is paired with a wheeled base, two arms, and two-finger parallel grippers designed for common household manipulation tasks. Issac 1 is intentionally designed to be non-intimidating and friendly. | Credit: Weave Robotics Isaac 1 can adjust from 3 ft. (0.9 m) tall to 5 ft. 9 in. (1.7 m), giving it enough range to pick items up from the floor, work at counter height, and place objects on higher shelves. It also features autonomous navigation , allowing it to move from room t...

Monumental designs, machines, and maintains robots that lay bricks at construction sites. | Source: Monumental Monumental, an Amsterdam-based provider of construction robotics and software, this week raised $32 million in Series B funding. The company said it plans to use the financing to expand to the U.S. this year and to enable its robots to do more things. “The funding will help to grow our world-class team of hardware and software engineers, launch the company in the U.S. this year, scale the number of robots it can deploy across Europe, and expand the range of construction tasks the robots can handle beyond bricklaying,” Salar al Khafaji, co-founder and CEO of Monumenal, told The Robot Report . Monumental acts as a subcontractor during construction work. Contractors pay the company for finished walls rather than for robots. This, Monumental said, removes the financial and technical risk of owning and operating equipment. “Our goal isn’t to replace peop...

Andrew James (from left), Neil Morrison, Natalia Kurz and Michael Neiss work on a prototype of their weed-killing robot ahead of The Farm Robotics Challenge, which they won on May 21. By Holly Hartigan A team of Cornell undergraduates beat 95 other teams to take the grand prize at The Farm Robotics Challenge with their invention: an autonomous robot that kills weeds with electricity. Their robot can travel through a vineyard or orchard without a human operator, zapping weeds with a small amount of electricity, saving labor and energy and preventing crop loss, without the use of herbicides. Led by Andrew James, an agricultural sciences major in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), the team of agricultural specialists and engineers studied the existing electrical weeding technology, developed their own low-energy system and built a working prototype over the course of four intense months. Natalia Kurz, a biological engineering major in CALS, said the project require...

TerraFirma’s semi-autonomous excavator at work. | Source: TerraFirma TerraFirma this week raised $115 million in Series A funding. The startup said the investment will enable it to expand its engineering, manufacturing, operations, and construction teams, as well as to continue developing its semi-autonomous heavy equipment. “Construction is the foundation everything else is built on, and it’s been going backward for 50 years,” said Noah Schochet, co-founder and CEO of TerraFirma. “America built the transcontinental railroad, the interstate highway system, and the Hoover Dam. There’s no reason we can’t build at that scale again, and there’s no first-principles reason construction can’t become 10x faster, cheaper, and safer. TerraFirma exists to help America build again and then take that capacity into the cosmos.” Kleiner Perkins led the round. It also included participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, BANNER VC, Saga Ventures, Trust Ventures, Defi...