Prepping for AI, automating trucks, and summer robotic competitions | Robohub
Robotics funding going strong
May proved to be another strong month for robotics funding. According to The Robot Report, “13 companies were funded to the tune of $111 million. Four companies were acquired with two of the four reporting selling prices totaling $422 million.” Chinese company Midea offered a $5.2 billion bid for Kuka, to grow their robotics industry. For Kuka, stronger ties to Midea could help lift its revenues in China, one of the cornerstones of the company’s growth strategy. Kuka overall aims to roughly double its revenue to between €4 billion and €4.5 billion by 2020, compared with 2014. European Robotics is also performing well, with EU’s Horizon 2020 funding $179 million in robotics PPPs (Private Public Partnership).
Let’s not forget the highly anticipated purchase involving Boston Dynamics. Rumours swirled that Toyota was in the bidding, with the price of the deal fiercely under wraps despite the rumour of the ‘ink nearly dry’ … then recent news surfaced that not only was Toyota in discussions with Google for Boston Dynamics but also Schaft, a Japanese startup company that won the DARPA Robotics Challenge. So potentially a two-company sale on the horizon.
The media has also taken notice of this upward trend, with the Financial Times commenting that robotics and artificial intelligence are hot new markets for the financing boom, as more and more robotics move from labs into public spheres like hospitals, retail centres. Growth is also taking place in Asia with countries like Japan and China in the early stages of retooling its manufacturing sector, accounting for 69 percent of all robot spending.
Preparing for artificial intelligence
Speaking of AI investments, the race is on to create better enhanced virtual assistants. At Techcrunch Disrupt, the creators of Siri unveiled their latest AI virtual assistant technology, Viv. Tech giants Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, have all invested heavily in artificially intelligent assistants in recent years giving us a preview of what is to come. The technology is the new frontier with how we will use our devices and interact with the digital world.
The White House also recognises this shift happening in technology and announced a series of public workshops on artificial intelligence and the creation of an interagency working group that plans to examine benefits and risks posed by artificial intelligence. All events are livestreamed, with workshops hosting artificial intelligence experts from academia and industry in conversation with government officials interested in developing a forward-thinking and effective policy framework.
Like the term “robot” itself, artificial intelligence is hard to define (what is intelligence after all?). Robohub hosted a Roundtable examining the evolving nature of the language, deciding that ‘robot’ by definition is fluid, however, there is a tendency to overuse the term robot, which causes confusion in the public about robot capabilities. For example, bots in the media called ‘chatbots’. Most technologists would agree that these software bots are in fact not RObots.
To help sort out the confusion, The Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington created two animations offering an easy-to-digest explanation between ‘robots’ and ‘bots’. Watch below:
Self-driving trucks and Uber autonomous testing
The march towards autonomous vehicles continues, now with testing and research of self-driving trucks on highways. Start-up company Otto, led by 15 former Google employees, including eight engineers, think that automating trucks rather than passenger vehicles could be more palatable financially and to regulators. However, automating commercial driving is still controversial.
Uber showed off its first self-driving car, with its hybrid Ford Fusion hit the streets of Pittsburgh. In a blog post, Uber says that the development of its self-driving technology will mean “less congestion, more affordable and accessible transportation, and far fewer lives lost in car accidents.”
For more about robotics competitions, agricultural robotics, the latest in research and more — see the rest of the MAY DIGEST on Robohub.org
Author: Kassie Perlongo
Kassie is the Managing Editor at Robohub, where she helps coordinate the best editorial process and marketing promotional activities. Kassie is also a science communication student at UWE, Bristol. She has been involved in marketing, branding, and communications in higher education since 2010 and has worked at UC Davis Medical Centre, Sacramento State University, and more recently at University of Oxford
Originally published at robohub.org.
