Let’s work together | TechCrunch

There are around of four duck boats lined up directly across the street from this cafe. Boston has the ability to remind you where you are, in case you get hit on the head and suddenly forget what city you are in. This is a much more truncated visit than last time. Chances are, as you read this, TechCrunch Early Stage Boston is underway.

I spent a bit of time on both sides of the event to meet some of the people I didn’t get to see last time. I have a few universities, research institutes, and startups on the list. I’ll take pretty much any excuse to go back to Boston and Pittsburgh these days (let me know if there’s a good one for the latter in the coming months).

Oh, and I recently decided to drop by Detroit at the end of next month, so if there’s anything I definitely need to check out, please let me know (accepting that our definitions of “definitely” can vary wildly).

heading to MassRobotics shortly after a recent Zoom call with Tom Ryden, the organization’s CEO. I wanted to talk about interoperability from my recent trip to ProMat. It’s something I’ve unfortunately not yet managed to highlight in a meaningful way in Actuator, so we’ll make up for it today.

As discussed the other week, along with autonomous mobile manipulation, cross-platform interoperability is a great holy grail for the industry. As companies increasingly move towards fully self-contained warehouses, you are no doubt quickly realizing that the goal cannot be achieved by relying on just one company.

Will the day come when robotics companies offer true end-to-end solutions? Maybe? Getting there would take a lot of time and a lot of money, either through internal R&D or acquisition (probably both). From what I’ve seen, most ARM firms in the space are largely focused on their current target market (which is admittedly massive), rather than rushing into additional market segments. Amazon is certainly pushing it, but economic adjustments aside, a lot of good things are going to be done by all non-Amazon companies.

For the foreseeable future, more automation means working with more robots from more companies. That presents the very real problem of interoperability. Put in the simplest language, you don’t want to suddenly find yourself with the task of managing a warehouse of robots that don’t know how to work together.

There are many companies working on fleet management software, which we have talked about in the past and will no doubt be talking about again soon. This week, however, I’m interested in something I’ve written about a lot in my consumer electronics hat, but very rarely in my robotics hat (it’s in the shape of R2-D2. I got it on discount after Halloween). So we’re going to start with the Q&A, then more VC survey results, job listings, and then back to your regularly scheduled roundup.

Q&A with Tom Ryden

TC: Why did MassRobotics take on this problem?

TR: We assumed this a couple of years ago when we were talking to a lot of AMR’s manufacturers and customers. It was clear that there is not going to be a solution. There will not be one AMR that does it all. We were starting to see things like AMR and robotic floor cleaners and we heard major customers say, “This is a problem. We have all these platforms. Somehow we have to handle them all in a better way. They are all independent and do not speak to each other.

So we looked around and we didn’t see anything. [We asked if] we could help and create a very simple, very low elevation standard. It is really a data exchange standard. Here’s a common way of relaying information from each AMR and then we can have other companies develop software packages that show all the different platforms and give you statistics about the systems and how they’re performing.

We launched it about a year and a half ago. It’s a pretty simple standard. We are working now on the next vision. That will add complexity. What we didn’t do in the first one is task management or “tasking”. There was no ability for third party software to break in and control any of the robots. Part of that is because none of the AMR vendors wanted that. They all have their own traffic management systems. Everyone believes that their traffic management systems do what’s best for their systems and are optimized for their systems. I don’t disagree. Now we’re trying to work out a way that there will be some ability to manage different platforms without interfering with their established addresses.

Are you creating both the standard and the software?

No. We are trying to provide software as an example only. Sometimes it’s helpful to get some sample code on how you would implement this. Our standard is more guidelines. By adopting the standard, you can interoperate with other systems that are operating in the same area as you.

What does it mean for them to communicate? I guess it’s not robot to robot?

They don’t do it from robot to robot. They are just sending out a transmission for anyone who wants to read it. We have a standard communications protocol, so anyone with the ability to collect that data can do so.

So I’m managing a warehouse and now I have something that allows everyone to spawn on the same map.

Correct. And you can see how all the different providers are operating in one system. The people who are developing the third-party software get a lot of different information about the robot. They can show how things work in your warehouse and collect different things that are useful for the warehouse operator to understand.

CV survey

going back to the recent robotics VC surveyHere is this week’s question:

TC: How is the investment in robotics different from previous years? What role have the pandemic, the slowdown in the economy and the recent banking crisis had on your investments?

Kelly Chen, DCVC: The past few years have been a series of changing concerns and opportunities. Following major hardware supply chain woes, startups are learning how to eliminate single points of weakness (i.e., product shipping bottlenecks). This involves design and cost sacrifices in the short term, but will set up robotics startups for solid and robust scalability in the long term.

A slowing economy typically means corporate clients are less willing to make large capital investments to solve their employment problems in the short to medium term, but robotics startups are increasingly pushing for a recurring pricing model (robotics as service) or a price-by-selection model. , allowing customers to pay with a smaller lump sum and OPEX over time.

As for the banking crisis, robotics startups often insure risky debt and equipment, so we’re pleased to see new banks step up to provide these types of services to the startup community.

Rohit Sharma, True Companies: I think the exuberance of 2021 and 2022 has given way to more rational exchanges between investors and founders. There is a renewed focus on the customer rather than growth or pure technology, and there is an element of excitement about how rapidly developing techniques in the domain of machine learning and AI could play a role in delivering more effective robots. . On the customer interaction front, there’s a little more focus on the value you offer them and how quickly that value will make a difference to customer operations.

Kira Noodleman, Bee Partners: COVID-19 has urgently shown us a glimpse of a more robotic, automated and resilient future of work that extends throughout the supply chain and beyond the mission critical. While this trend started in manufacturing, it has now moved much further into areas like healthcare, research and development, agriculture, waste management, and many more.

Our current volatile economy has caused investors to demand lighter hardware solutions, often based on software, that take less risk given the greater agility of such solutions. What seems new in automation today is the speed and flexibility with which you can configure a system to work. And there’s a growing acceptance in the industry that if it’s too expensive to automate, it may as well not be possible (because technically anything can be automated). Globally, changes in recent years have added pressure on the US to step up its game.

The average robot per 10,000 workers globally is 141 (source: IFR). In the US, we’re at 244 (above average), but there are six countries ahead of us – China just passed us (350) and No. 1 Korea (1000!) – clearly they’re a giant of the making. However, the US has the largest GDP in the world, and this feels unacceptable.

More next week!

News

Here’s an extremely healthy round for Noah Medical. The Bay Area-based firm announced this week a $150 Series B Led by Prosperity7 Ventures and with Tiger Global, along with Hillhouse, Sequoia China, ShangBay Capital, UpHonest Capital, Sunmed Capital, Lyfe Capital, 1955 Capital and AME Cloud. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that it was an oversubscribed round.

But robots are expensive, and medical robots are very expensive. Noah’s flagship product is the Galaxy System, which is used to more accurately locate nodules for lung biopsies.

“We are a mission-driven startup and we appreciate the support of our investors to enable us to scale and meet the future of medical robotics,” founder and CEO Jian Zhang said in a statement. “Next-generation robotics platforms like the Galaxy System are filling the procedural gaps to provide superior clinical values ​​to better serve clients’ needs. We are excited to welcome these investors to the team and look forward to growing and serving more patients and physicians.”

No doubt the funding was aided by the fact that the system received FDA approval last month. It has also started human trials at Macquarie University Hospital in Sydney, Australia.

Search and rescue is a great application for autonomous robotic systems. Legged robots are becoming more sophisticated and better at navigating uneven terrain, but there are still a number of scenarios that present problems. a team in CMU is tackling oneassuming the balance capacity of these systems in narrow spaces.

In the lab, that means teaching a robot dog how to walk on a balance beam. The solution? Mount a large frill on the dog’s back.

The MCU says:

Manchester said it was easy to modify an existing control framework to account for RWAs because the hardware doesn’t change the robot’s mass distribution, nor does it have the joint constraints of a tail or spine. Without needing to take such constraints into account, the hardware can be modeled as a gyrostat (an idealized model of a spacecraft) and integrated into a standard model predictive control algorithm.

Jobs

And finally, some job offers. here is a form to enter next week’s Actuator.

Robotics jobs for humans:

bear robotics (57 performances)

brain corporation (12 papers)

Formic (12 papers)

Kewazo (8 roles)

Vecna ​​Robotics (3 roles)

Subscribe to the Actuator. Come on, he works with me on this.