Ivan Hernandez Dalas - Mechatronics

Science and Technology Centers focus on building sustained partnerships across universities, industry, and government and accelerating the use of new ideas and technologies for scientific discovery. | Sources: NSF, left to right: Indiana University, Bloomington; Michigan State University College of Engineering; Brian Scassellati and Kayla Matheus, Yale University The U.S. National Science Foundation yesterday said it is investing $90 million over five years to support three new Science and Technology Centers, or NSF STCs. The NSF will allocate $6 million annually for an initial five-year period to each of the three centers. After the first five years, the centers will have the opportunity to compete for up to five additional years of support. The foundation  said the centers will advance American leadership in science and technology, strengthen the nation’s STEM workforce, and accelerate innovation in a variety of fields, including AI and robotics. “Maintaining the United...

Carbon AI is trained on 150 million labeled plants, enabling farmers to start laser weeding any field or crop in minutes. | Credit: Carbon Robotics Carbon Robotics is bringing the era of foundation models to the farm. The company has replaced its collection of crop‑specific AI vision models with a single “large plant model” that understands plant structure across regions and species, allowing farmers to instantly tune Carbon’s laser weeder to their own definition of crops and weeds. Unlike traditional vision systems that require time‑consuming retraining whenever a new crop, weed, or geography is introduced, Carbon said its large plant model is pre‑trained on millions of images of baby plants collected worldwide and then personalized in the field. Using an iPad app, farmers can simply review thumbnails from their own fields and tag a small number as “crop” or “weed.” With the tool and the new foundation model, Carbon Robotics said farmers can customize their use of the its autonom...

Gatik automates regional transformation for a range of customers, including PepsiCo, Kroger, Tyson Foods, and Georgia-Pacific. | Source: Gatik Gatik AI Inc. yesterday said it has raised $200 million in Series D funding. The company said it plans to use the investment to accelerate driverless commercial freight across Fortune 50 retail, consumer packaged goods, and grocery supply chains. Mountain View, Calif.-based Gatik said its AI -first autonomous vehicle ( AV ) technology is purpose-built for use across highways and surface streets. Its autonomous trucks use dynamic routes to help customers respond to changing demand, distribution center activity, and pickup and drop-off needs across commercial networks. “This round, led by some of the world’s leading financial institutions, is a clear validation of Gatik’s commercial leadership in autonomous freight,” stated Gautam Narang, co-founder and CEO of Gatik. “We have built Gatik with real revenue, deep customer demand, and AI-driven a...

The Nion iToF sensor combines a global shutter, pixel-internal memory and a fast readout structure. | Source: IDS Imaging IDS Imaging Development Systems GmbH this week expanded its 3D sensor portfolio with Nion. The new product is an industrial time-of-flight, or ToF, camera that features 1.2-megapixel resolution and integrated depth processing. The Nion 3D camera is now available in series production. The company said the new camera provides high resolution and temporally stable depth information at 30 fps. It continues to work during rapid movements and under changing lighting conditions. IDS said Nion is suitable for applications where precise 3D data is required at real-world process speeds, such as logistics, automation, and robotics. “The Nion provides stable depth data even under variable lighting conditions,” said Patrick Schick, the product manager for 3D vision and imaging software at IDS. “This provides a solid foundation for automation processes that...

Bedrock is automating earth-moving equipment to improve site safety and fill skilled labor shortages. | Credit: Bedrock Robotics Bedrock Robotics Inc. has deployed fully autonomous, retrofitted heavy excavators onto active infrastructure projects in Texas and Nevada. These AI-driven heavy equipment projects directly address the construction industry’s severe labor shortages, safety hazards, and cost overruns. As the U.S. faces a looming labor crisis—with over 40% of the construction workforce expected to retire within five years—Bedrock said its technology comes at a pivotal moment for national infrastructure ambitions. Backed by $350 million in venture capital and led by former Waymo autonomy veterans, the startup’s plug-and-play retrofit system turns complex, high-risk earthwork into software-driven operations. The San Francisco-based company asserted that it is helping the physical economy transition from digital AI concepts to self-orchestrating machine fleets on live job si...

Deborah Lupton / Servers in a Landscape / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 By Emmet Cole Robots clean rivers and sort waste , monitor ecosystems , and inspect renewable-energy infrastructure . But even the greenest robot has an environmental footprint. If robotics is going to help build a more sustainable world, the robotics community has to answer some potentially awkward questions, starting with this one: How sustainable are robots themselves? Across a full lifecycle, from rare earth mineral extraction and manufacturing to operation and end-of-life, robots have an environmental impact. But the robotics community has, until now, lacked dedicated tools for calculating it. The Robotics Eco-Label project, led by Bram Vanderborght at Belgium’s Vrije Universiteit Brussel, is an attempt to address that gap with a lightweight, web-based Toolkit that provides roboticists with a way to quantify robot sustainability. Separating a robot’s core technologies into materials, energy sources, sensors...