Nic Radford on developing underwater robots; Celebrating 100 episodes

This week, the entire The Robot Report editorial staff is on the show to discuss the highlights of the 2024 RBR50 Innovation Awards that were announced earlier this week. Host Steve Crowe discusses the awards with Mike Oitzman, Eugene Demaitre, and Brianna Wessling. You can view all of the award winners and the writeups of their 2024 winning innovation on The Robot Report website: https://www.therobotreport.com/rbr50-2024/ All of this year's winners will be honored at the inaugural RBR50 Gala at the 2024 Robotics Summit and Expo, in Boston, on May 1. There's still time to register: https://www.roboticssummit.com/ Plus, you'll be able to see many of the innovations live at the RBR50 pavilion on the expo floor. Congrats to all of this years honorees.

Our featured guest on the show this week is Jamie Lee, Managing Partner at Tamarack Global. Tamarack Global emerged on our radar last month as one of the investors who participated in the recent series B funding round for Figure AI.  After meeting Jamie Lee for research for those news stories, we invited Jamie to come onto the podcast and share his investment thesis and the reasons why they are so bullish about humanoids, Figure AI, and especially Figure CEO and founder Brett Adcock. The heart of Tamarack's investment philosophy centers around investing in strong leaders who hire strong teams and build solutions for very large markets. But you'll also learn about Jamie's pragmatic philosophy for evaluating proposals and some of the danger signals that he looks for when evaluating a potential investment. Tamarack Global: https://www.tamarackglobal.com/ The Robot Report: https://www.therobotreport.com/

In this episode, cohosts Mike Oitzman and Gene Demaitre recap their attendance at the NVIDIA GTC24 event in San Jose CA, and Gene's recent trip to Denmark to attend the R24 robotics event. You'll get to hear about takeaways from the sessions that they attended, the vendor demos and robotics solutions that were at these recent shows. NVIDIA keynote story: https://www.therobotreport.com/nvidia-announces-new-robotics-products-at-gtc-2024/ R24 recap story: https://www.therobotreport.com/odense-robotics-culture-of-collaboration-can-overcome-economic-challenges-says-ceo/

This week host Steve Crowe reviews what he saw and learned while attending MODEX in Atlanta GA earlier in the week. Steve highlights the new products and new features for the many automation providers at the show. He also shares some side conversations and checks the pulse of the warehousing and material handling industry. Don't miss this episode if you weren't able to attend the show yourself.

Nag Murty, CEO and cofounder of Electric Sheep, and Michael Laskey, CTO of Electric Sheep join the show this week to discuss how Electric Sheep is disrupting the commercial landscaping industry with autonomous mobile robots and a unique business model. The company is leveraging AI to enable autonomous mowers to cut the grass while simplifying the deployment process in the field. Electric Sheep is also vertically integrating the market segment through the acquisition of commercial landscaping businesses, then training the field workforce and integrating the autonomous mowers in the daily workflow for the field teams while learning and adapting the product.

Eric Adamson, CEO and co-founder of Tortuga, joins us in this episode to discuss agricultural robotics. Tortuga is one of the agtech companies leading the charge to transform greenhouse farming with their autonomous harvesting robots. Eric discusses the difficulties and successes of developing robots for use in greenhouses, shedding light on the processes involved in harvesting strawberries, grapes, and tomatoes. This episode offers an intriguing look into how technology and agriculture are influencing the future of food production, from overcoming design limits to investigating creative alternatives. We also catch up on the news of the week, including the announcement of $675M in a Series B investment round taken by humanoid developer Figure.

On the show this week, we have a conversation with Thomas Tang, CEO and co-founder of Anyware Robotics. Anyware Robotics is launching an autonomous trailer unloading solution, that will make its debut at MODEX 2024. We also catch up with Matt Wicks, Sr Director and robotics automation business leader with Zebra Technology. Matt is responsible for the Fetch Robotics products at Zebra, and brings us up to speed on the AMR portfolio.

On the show today, we interview Dr Aaron Ames, Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering and Control and Dynamical Systems at CalTech. Dr Ames is also a cofounder and Chief Scientist of 3Laws - a company, providing safety-critical controls architecture for robotics companies. We talk about the last decade of development for bipedal locomotion and the recent evolution of humanoid robots since Dr Ames has been researching and investigating this interesting research area since his postdoc days. You'll also learn about the core technology that's driving robotic safety algorithms and why 3Laws came together to deliver a solution for any robotic system. You can learn more about 3Law on the web at:3lawsrobotics.io

In this week's episode of the podcast, co-hosts Mike Oitzman and Gene Demaitre discuss the current state of Zipline with Keenan Wyrobek, who is the Chief Technology Officer and also one of the firm's co-founders. Additionally, we learn some more details on the design of the new ZIP delivery "Droid" from the chief droid engineer, Stephen Killian. Gene attended the Manifest, logistics tradeshow in Las Vegas earlier this week, and gives us an update on what he saw at the show.

In this episode, co-hosts Steve Crowe, Mike Oitzman and Gene Demaitre discuss the recent news about the termination of the proposed acquisition of iRobot by Amazon. As a result of the terminated deal, iRobot CEO and cofounder Colin Angle is stepping down from his role as CEO, and the company has laid off 31% of its employees. The companies signed the proposed acquisition agreement on Aug. 4, 2022, and the Seattle-based e-commerce giant would have acquired the Bedford, Mass.-based robotic vacuum vendor for up to $1.7 billion in cash. That amount was lowered to $1.42 billion after iRobot acquired new debt, and it laid off 10% of its staff, or about 140 employees. We discuss potential reasons why the deal failed, and what might be next for iRobot. You can read the complete news story about this on The Robot Report at www.therobotreport.com If you like the show, please like and subscribe and share this with another colleague who might be interested.