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Iván Hernández Dalas: Weave Robotics launches Isaac, its first mobile humanoid robot

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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...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: With new funding, Monumental plans to bring its construction robots to the U.S.

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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...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Undergrads’ weed-killing robot wins top prize

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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...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: TerraFirma raises $115M to build robotic infrastructure for construction

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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...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Xpanner rolls out X1 Panel Lift for automated solar panel installation

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The X1 Panel Lift kit is added to existing equipment for solar panel installation. Source: Xpanner Xpanner Global yesterday released its X1 Panel Lift system, which is designed to address the skilled labor constraint facing the solar industry. The platform, which was previously deployed for solar pile-driving applications, has now been expanded to automated panel lifting and replacement with excavators. Utility-scale solar projects depend on large crews to manually carry, position, and place heavy panels across thousands of module locations, said Xpanner. It said X1 Panel Lift can take on this repetitive material handling, freeing installation crews to spend their time on the higher-value work of aligning, fastening, and quality-checking each panel. “Solar installation has long been held back by its dependence on large skilled crews and complex equipment setups,” stated Henri Lee, co-founder and CEO of Xpanner. “Our solution changes that equation entirely, and now handles not just ...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Lockheed Martin taps Machina’s robots for mission-critical missile parts

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Machina has been awarded a qualification contract from Lockheed Martin in support of the JASSM program. | Credit: Machina Labs Advanced manufacturing and robotics pioneer Machina Labs has secured a landmark qualification contract from Lockheed Martin to support the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, or JASSM, program, marking the first time a component built using the company’s robotic “RoboForming” technology has advanced to qualification for a U.S. defense missile system. “The defense industrial base is under pressure to scale faster than legacy manufacturing allows,” said Edward Mehr, co-founder and CEO of Machina. “Missile programs are not constrained by design. They are constrained by production. Machina’s factory is built to address that constraint, forming and assembling complex metal structures directly from digital design with dramatically shorter lead times.” Mehr was on a recent episode of The Robot Report podcast , where he explained the growth and ...
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Iván Hernández Dalas: Agility outlines six recommendations for U.S. humanoid robot policies

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In recent years, humanoid robots have been slowly making their way out of the lab and into real industrial environments, doing real labor. Agility Robotics, a humanoid developer that has helped to lead this change, believes it’s inevitable that humanoids will be helping fill in labor gaps. But, will the U.S. be leading the charge? In a recent video, Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility, said the U.S. needs a focused policy framework that can strengthen and accelerate what’s already working for the industry. She outlines six pillars she claimed will create a healthy regulatory environment for the humanoid market and the people they will operate around. 1. Close the gap on internationally sourced components Johnson’s first recommendation centers around the key components that humanoid robot developers need for commercial deployments. Currently, developers must source certain components internationally. “This is not a matter of preference, but of current limitations in Ame...
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