At today’s nestCON 1.2 Internet of Things conference, a company called Knightscope announced it is developing a new technology it calls “Autonomous Data Machines.” The machines are designed to collect massive amounts of real world data to provide organizations with real time information, behavioral analysis and user-defined alerts at any site they choose. The company
In the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s recent policy statement on automated vehicles, the group defined five different levels of automation — from “no automation” to “full self-driving automation.” Many of the autonomous advancements car manufacturers will introduce during the next several years will fall between those two extremes, yet they will still represent revolutionary
In yet another sign of how quickly 3-D printing is growing, Stratasys announced yesterday that it will acquire MakerBot in a stock-for-stock transaction initially valued at $403 million — not including performance-based incentives that could increase the total to more than $600 million (based on Wednesday’s stock price). It was just last week that we
Unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as unmanned aircraft systems to the U.S. Department of Defense and drones to most of the general public, are perhaps the most visible example of how far robotics has come in a relatively short period. Although primitive examples of UAS were used by the military as early as World War
Research published online this week in the latest edition of Advanced Materials could make possible a generation of miniaturized robots that until now have lacked sufficiently small and powerful batteries to operate. To create the grain-of-sand-sized lithium-ion microbatteries (shown above), researchers 3-D printed interlaced stacks of battery electrodes less than the width of a human hair, according
The South China Morning Post published an interesting article today on the burgeoning maker movement in Hong Kong. In it, author Charley Lanyon writes about HackJam, a weekly do-it-yourselfer meetup in Hong Kong that got its start two years ago when its founder noticed a dearth of communal workspaces compared to the West. It’s one signal
As VentureBeat and several other sites noted this week, Amazon.com recently added a new section focused on 3-D printers and their related supplies, joining Staples as a major retailer supporting the technology. So far, 3-D printers aren’t exactly splashed across the Amazon homepage under “The Perfect Gift For Dad” heading — instead they’re tucked away
The Work Foundation’s annual debate, held yesterday at its headquarters in London, examined a hot topic in the robotics industry: Will robots steal our jobs? It’s a topic that has been in the news frequently in recent months, and you can find a roundup of articles on both sides of the issue here. The British
At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday, a robotics and artificial intelligence start-up made a surprise appearance during the opening keynote. The San Francisco-based company, Anki, is backed by $50 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and Two Sigma. Like Bossa Nova Robotics, Seegrid and a host of hot robotics companies, it was
Today at InfoComm in Orlando, iRobot announced its latest entry into the nascent telepresence market, a collaboration with Cisco Systems targeted at business users. The robot, called the Ava 500, essentially mounts Cisco telepresence technology on a mobile base from iRobot. The base is an enhanced version of iRobot’s Ava robotics platform, and the display
