The 2020 FIRST Robotics Regional Competitions are finally upon us! Are you ready? Check out our compilation of webcasts in the link below! Webcasts will be linked as they become available.

+ Regional Webcast List+ NASA FRC Awards List

The 2020 FIRST Robotics Competition kickoff marks the beginning of the design and build season for the FIRST Robotics Competition. Teams have the opportunity to meet at "local" Kickoffs to compare notes, get ideas, make friends, find mentoring teams, learn the game, pick up the Kit of Parts, and get geared up for the exciting competition season. The 2020 Kickoff took place on Saturday January 4th, 2020.

+Watch the Kickoff Archive+Watch the Field Tour Video

NASA is proud to announce the return of the "NASA RAP FRC Field Viewer" application. This Android application allows users to explore current and previous FIRST Robotics Competition Fields utilizing their Android devices. You can explore the field in VR using Google Cardboard or just the handset's screen and a virtual gamepad. Users can "fly" around the FRC field to view any angles of the field they want in VR to gain a better understanding of the FRC Field.

Scan the QR Code to access the Android App's Google Play Store Link!

Engineers attached NASA's Mars Helicopter, which will be the first aircraft to fly on another planet, to the belly of the Mars 2020 rover today in the High Bay 1 clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The twin-rotor, solar-powered helicopter was connected, along with the Mars Helicopter Delivery System, to a plate on the rover's belly that includes a cover to shield the helicopter from debris during entry, descent and landing. The helicopter will remain encapsulated after landing, deploying to the surface once a suitable area to conduct test flights is found at Jezero Crater, the rover's destination.

The Mars Helicopter is considered a high-risk, high-reward technology demonstration. If the small craft encounters difficulties, the science-gathering of the Mars 2020 mission won't be impacted. If the helicopter does take flight as designed, future Mars missions could enlist second-generation helicopters to add an aerial dimension to their explorations.

The highly anticipated moment that all the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) teams that submitted an application for a NASA FRC grant, has finally arrived! NASA's award selection is listed in the following link. If your FRC team submitted an application for a NASA FRC registration grant, please review the awards list to verify your award status.

+ NASA FRC Awards List

Watch NASA's Mars 2020 Rover being built at the Spacecraft Assembly Facility (SAF) cleanroom at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Engineers are building and testing NASA's next Mars Rover, Mars 2020, before it is shipped to its launch site, NASA's Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. Engineers are currently working on putting the rover together. There are live webchats Mon.-Thur. at 11:00am and 4:00pm PDT with additional moderated chats when special activities occur.

Follow the Robotics Alliance Project on Twitter! We use twitter to post about announcements, new features, and much more!

Follow @NASA_RAP on Twitter!

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NASA - Robotics Alliance Project

LANSING, MI -- Students from across Michigan will be heading to a robotics world championship.

A total of 18 high school teams from Michigan qualified for the 2020 VEX Robotics World Games in Louisville, Kentucky on April 22. The teams earned spots based on their performances at the state championships this week.

Those who qualified include teams from Grandville High School, Hudsonville High School, Caledonia High School, Carman-Ainsworth High School in Flint, Grand Traverse Academy, Harbor Beach High School and Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills.

The 2020 Michigan VEX Robotics State Championship featured 80 teams. About 1,500 teams are expected to compete in the world games.

A two-team alliance of Grandville High Schools Cataclyst Team and Hudsonville High Schools Q Team took home the top prize of Tournament Champions at the state competition.

That was a great moment," said Grandville High School senior Owen Green, a team captain for the Cataclyst team. "That was something since May I had the goal that I wanted to go and win the state championship.

"And weve been getting so close to winning other tournaments but havent been able to follow through. So finally when we got to states everything just kind of went the way we needed it to and our hard work and perseverance paid off.

Nine of the 18 teams from Michigan that qualified for the world competition come from Grandville. Doug Hepfer, a coach at Grandvilles robotics program, the RoboDawgs, said nine teams is the largest amount of teams going to the competition from a single school district.

Hepfer said there is a bunch of stuff going on in Grandville around this, and our teams tend to be fairly successful." The 22-year-old program recently got a bond to build an addition to the Robotics & Engineering Center to accommodate the increasing amount of students involved.

The state competition was held at Michigan State Universitys Jenison Field House.

Drew Kim, assistant to the dean for recruitment, scholarship and K-12 outreach in the MSU College of Engineering, said the university is happy to promote STEM education for high school students.

VEX introduces students to basic robot innovation, working together, troubleshooting and team fun," he said. "MSU is very proud to nurture these young engineers and designers for Michigans technology future.

Towers are placed around the playing field, where players get points by using their robots to pile the cubes onto the towers or by placing them in a goal. The opposing team can try to block the other teams movement of the cubes.

Luckily, we played with a really good Hudsonville tray bot as well and that allowed us to complement each other well, said Green, the Grandville student. And when it came down to the heavy defense we had in the finals we were able to cope with it a lot better than the other team could.

It will be Greens third time at the world championship.

I enjoy the challenge of trying to make something better out of something that already works well, and trying to kind of keep improving and then that drive just to do well, Green said.

Here is a full list of the winners of the 2020 MSU VEX High School State Championship:

Excellence Award: Cataclyst (Team 288A), Grandville High School

Tournament Champions: A two-team alliance of Cataclyst (Team 288A), Grandville High School and Q (Team 8031E) of Hudsonville High School

Innovate Award: VIRUS: Murphys Law (Team 3547Y), Technology First of Monroe

Create Award: Semi-Good (Team 98271B), Caledonia High School

Amaze Award: The A Team (Team 244D), Grandville Community Education

Build Award: Light Switch (Team 248A), Grandville Robotics

Design Award: MO Peeps (Team 1375D), Carman-Ainsworth High School, Flint

Think Award: Pi IS 3 (Team 7567C), Grand Traverse Academy

Judges Award: Pirates (Team 15017D), Harbor Beach High School

Robot Skills Champion: Just Act Natural (Team 244C), Grandville Community Education

Tournament Finalists: Just Act Natural (Team 244C), Grandville Community Education, and The A Team (Team 244D), Grandville Community Education

Tournament Semifinalists: Bring Back D.D. (Team 244B), Grandville Community Education; Light Switch (Team 248A), Grandville Robotics; Falcon (Team 98725B), Rochester Hills Christian School; and (Team 39A), Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills

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18 Michigan high school robotics teams headed to world championship - MLive.com

The medical and healthcare categories have been leading robotic innovation for decades. Look no further than Intuitive Surgical, whose da Vinci robot has been performing surgery since it received FDA clearance in the early 2000s. These days, the SRI spinoff is currently valued at more than $60 billion.

Theres a lot of money to be made for established companies and still areas to be explored for young startups, both on and off the operating table. The venture community has been betting big on companies developing everything from new surgical robots, assistive robots for medical facilities, robotic medical aid devices or otherwise.

Medical device and robotics startups raised roughly 600-700 rounds of venture capital in 2019, according to data from Pitchbook and Crunchbase, with most deals occurring at the early stage (over 25% of rounds occurred at the seed stage). With our 2020 Robotics+AI sessions event now just one week away, were diving back into another robotics sub-sector to see where robotics VCs are actually writing checks.

Just as we did with warehouse robotics last week and construction robotics the week before, we asked four leading VCs who are actively investing in medical and surgical robotics to share whats exciting them most and where they see opportunity in the sector:

Which trends are you most excited about in surgical/medical robotics from an investing perspective?

See the original post:

Where top VCs are investing in medical and surgical robotics - TechCrunch

Bullock Creek Team 3770, BlitzCreek is pictured during the 2020 FIRST Robotics Competition Kickoff at Bullock Creek High School with their World Record Pyramid. (Photo provided)

Bullock Creek Team 3770, BlitzCreek is pictured during the 2020 FIRST Robotics Competition Kickoff at Bullock Creek High School with their World Record Pyramid. (Photo provided)

Bullock Creek Team 3770, BlitzCreek is pictured during the 2020 FIRST Robotics Competition Kickoff at Bullock Creek High School with their World Record Pyramid. (Photo provided)

Bullock Creek Team 3770, BlitzCreek is pictured during the 2020 FIRST Robotics Competition Kickoff at Bullock Creek High School with their World Record Pyramid. (Photo provided)

FIRST Robotics, building robots and breaking world records

Hundreds of local high school students and mentors recently gathered at Bullock Creek High School and at the Carpenter Robotics Center for the 2020 FIRST Robotics Competition FRC international Kickoff broadcast event.

For this season, more than 100,000 high school students are participating in 35 countries worldwide.

After watching the broadcast, teams picked up their game manual and kit of parts and began strategizing and designing their robots. FRC Kickoff marks the beginning of the eight-week 'build season,' during which high school teams brainstorm, prototype, design, fabricate, and program their 140-pound robot for competition. Teams must build a unique, made-from-scratch robot each season.

As part of their 10-year team celebration, Bullock Creek's Team 3770 (Blitz Creek) also worked on breaking the Guinness World Record for tallest toilet paper pyramid, which was on display at Kickoff.

"We had an official height which is 16 feet, 3 and 5/8ths inches," said Maxton Herst, a senior on BlitzCreek. "That's almost two feet over what the current world record is."

Over 27,000 toilet paper rolls made up the pyramid, which took the team 16 hours to build.

BlitzCreek mentor Jamie Forbes said: "Robotics is a really cool program in the sense that it gives students not only the engineering background, but also the ability to put their hands and ideas into action. The team is very excited for the season. We have spent our build time tackling the game, which focuses on shooting and climbing in a Star Wars themed field."

The 2020 competition is called INFINITE RECHARGESM and is in alignment with the 'FIRST Rise' Star Wars theme for all FIRST programs. The challenge requires two alliances of three robots each to collect and score enough power cells into targets to be able to spin the color-coded control panel, which activates the Shield Generator. Near the end of the 2.5-minute match, robots climb on the Shield Generator Switch in the center of the field.

Students from Dow High's Team 2619 (The Charge) are among the teams designing and building their robots at the Carpenter Robotics Center.

"I like this year's game and am looking forward to see how much defense people play, along with seeing the different hanging designs for the Shield Generator Switch," said Robert Roe, a freshman on The Charge.

"Any game with climbing is going to be difficult," added David Watkins, a junior and assistant mechanical lead on The Charge. "The Switch swings around so it will definitely make it more interesting."

Many other local high school teams are also actively working on finishing their new robots, including Midland High's Team 5509 (Like a Boss), Midland Home School Team 5424 (Rogue Robots), Calvary Baptist Academy's Team 6753 (RoboKings), Freeland's Team 5166 (Fabricators), Hemlock's Team 5712 (Gray Matter) and Meridian's Team 5203 (Volatile Chaos Inhibitors).

FIRST stands for "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" and seeks to inspire the next generation of science and technology leaders. Students have the opportunity to discover, explore, and innovate in a competitive and exciting environment.

H.H. Dow High School will once again host a FIRST Robotics District Competition for high school teams on March 20-21. The event is free to the public and all are welcome. More information can be found online at http://www.first-glbr.org/ and https://www.firstinspires.org/

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FIRST Robotics, building robots and breaking world records - Midland Daily News

La Crescent, MN - (WXOW) - A Lego robotics team from La Crescent has earned top honors at the Minnesota state competition, earning a place at the World Festival event in April.

Students at Crucifixion Elementary finished among the top three state competitors after facing off with 66 other Minnesota teams. Their Lego robot performed at the highest levels, earning outstanding marks in strategy, innovation and core values.

They capped off their state accolades with winning a Champions award from the judges, based on their team dynamic and cooperation.

"Lego League competition may be really stressful at times," said Diana Van Atta, an eighth-grader on the team. "But in the end, it's worth it. You get to spend months with a team that you're really familiar with as well as good friends with," she added.

Now it's back to the practice table where the team works out problems and solutions, brainstorming until the next big event. It's coming up in April as the team gets ready for the trip to Detroit, host of the Lego League 2020 World Championship. The team for Crucifixion will be one of only 108 teams in attendance.

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Lego robotics team to take on the world - WXOW.com

Ready Robotics cofounders Kel Guerin (left) and Ben Gibbs

Ben Gibbs was working in Johns Hopkins Universitys office for licensing and commercialization of intellectual property when he teamed up with Ph.D. robotics researcher Kel Guerin on the technology that became Ready Robotics in 2016. Their idea: Software that could power industrial robots, with an easy-to-use dashboard, enabling even small- and mid-size manufacturers to get the productivity benefit of robotic arms.

Today, the Columbus, Ohio-based company said that it had raised $23 million, led by Canaan, to expand its robotic O/S. The startup counts major manufacturers like Stanley Black & Decker and Smith+Nephew as customers, as well as smaller shops that would not otherwise be able to automate. The new funding brings Ready Robotics total investment to $42 million at a valuation that Forbes estimates at $70 million, up from $32.5 million after its last round, according to venture-capital database PitchBook.

Factories are hungry for robotic automation, but there are only 32,000 robotics engineers employed in U.S. manufacturing today and there are not enough systems integrators, Gibbs, the companys 37-year-old CEO, told Forbes. Where we are at with robotic automation today is like making you write 10,000 lines of code before you can write an article in Word. These bottlenecks are a major problem for factories that are desperate to enable automation to remain competitive.

Readys operating system, called Forge O/S, allows workers without any robotics background or coding experience to easily program the robots their plant uses. Forge O/S can plug and play with the variety of robot manufacturers. That allows plants that have a mix of, say, Kuka and Universal Robots, for different jobs to operate them through one dashboard. Forge O/S is the first operating system that allows you to operate any robot from any brand, and it does that by fixing all the complex back-end work, says Guerin, 35. The system starts at a price around $10,000 a year, and goes up from there depending on complexity and the number of robots and factories integrated.

The entire market for robots as a service, including affiliated software, is less than $1 billion out of a total robotics market around $50 billion, according to ABI Research analyst Rian Whitton. But by 2030, he figures, it could grow to more than 30% of a $521 billion market. Its quite a nascent space, he says. The hardware manufacturers like Kuka and Fanuc have their own control platforms so they dont have interoperability. What Ready Robotics is trying to do is create a common platform so it doesnt matter what robots you are using, and anyone can use the platform not just an engineer from CalTech.

The idea for Ready Robotics grew out of Guerins Ph.D. research. I was preoccupied with the idea of usability, he says. Before he finished school, he approached Johns Hopkins tech transfer office, where he met Gibbs. The two decided to team up to create their own company. I was itching to get back out into the startup world, says Gibbs, who had previously founded a company that licensed technology developed by the U.S. Navy. As is common in university spinouts, Johns Hopkins owns a small stake in the business.

Gibbs and Guerin moved operations from Baltimore to Ohio after an investment by Drive Capital, a venture firm based in Columbus thats managed by former partners of Sequoia Capital, in 2018. Sixty percent of the factories in the United States are located in the Midwest, and they buy the vast majority of the robot arms, Gibbs says.

Later that year, Ready began speaking with tools giant Stanley Black & Decker, which has built a team to scour for high-tech startups and innovations to improve operations at its 122 factories worldwide. Sudhi Bangalore, Stanley Black & Deckers vice president of Industry 4.0, says that when he began looking at ways to scale cobots, or collaborative robots, he discovered that Ready Robotics was already doing a small project with one of the companys Oregon factories. We fast-tracked the paperwork to see how they could engage with us on a few sites, Bangalore says.

In mid-December, Bangalore gave Ready the okay to launch in its Ohio factory, which makes fastening systems, telling the startup it hoped to do so in a tight timetable of four weeks, including the Christmas holidays. I was quite skeptical about how they would pull everything together, Bangalore says. Thats where they proved me wrong. When the launch proved more difficult than expected due to the plants aging infrastructure, he says, Kel came over and started designing things.

Since then, Bangalore says, Stanley Black & Decker has expanded its partnership with Ready Robotics to other factories, including a power-tools plant in Greenfield, Indiana, and is considering rolling out further among its 60-or-so U.S. factories. But big companies like Stanley test products all the time, and as the emerging robots-as-a-service field heats up, a key question for that expansion will be whether Ready can scale up at a lower cost. We pay a premium for this interface they are building, Bangalore says. It looks like the industry is catching on. So how can they evolve their value proposition?

Gibbs and Guerin believe that the emergence of inexpensive robotics and the software with which to operate them would enable automation in factories where it previously had been too costly. A McKinsey studyfound that 88% of manufacturers and other companies in heavy industry have either increased their spending on robotic automation or plan to do so. Yet getting benefit out of spending on automation has not been easy: The same McKinsey study found that only 4% of those manufacturers showed significant bottom-line improvements.

There have been all these investments in computer vision and machine learning, yet you are not seeing it live up to the hype in the industrial setting out of a few use cases, says Canaans Rayfe Gaspar-Asaoka, who led the investment in Ready. What we learned is that the software programmability of the robots is just broken.

For Canaan, the deal follows an earlier investment in retail robotics firm Berkshire Grey, which raised a whopping $263 million from investors that include SoftBank and Khosla Ventures in January.

Other investors in the Ready Robotics deal include RRE Ventures, Eniac Ventures and Drive Capital.

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As Factories Struggle With How To Automate, Ready Robotics, Spun Out Of Johns Hopkins, Raises $23 Million For Robotic O/S - Forbes

We are witnessing a number of applications where the blockchain and artificial intelligence have come together to provide a significant increase in the efficiency and effectiveness of the processes. Some of the worth mentioning examples include cryptocurrencies, chatbots, or fledgling segment of voice-assisted technologies. As we set to ride another way of technology, one of the most promising areas where blockchain technology and artificial intelligence can come together to yield massive in the field of robotics.

As the name suggests, Robotics uses fully automatic or semi-automatic robots to carry out work processes. It is widely considered a very useful technique in order to up efficiency and replaces human intervention for more accurate results. The field of Robotics is challenging and in order to grow the segment, companies need to offer reliable solutions to the clients and customers.

There is a growing awareness in the robotics Industries that the use of blockchain and artificial intelligence can be of immense help. While artificial intelligence will make the processes more effective and error-free, blockchain technology will help to keep the data decentralized and free from any centralized control. By combining the decentralized feature of blockchain with artificial intelligence, the field of robotics can be benefited in a number of ways.

Performance and operating capabilities of Robots is the primary area where the benefits can be reaped enormously. The artificial intelligence features will multi-fold efficiency by automating processes, while data immutability offered by blockchain will make the process tamper-proof. Applying these technologies simultaneously to the robotics, the operating mechanism can be pre-set to achieve the desired objectives.

The significance of blockchain and artificial intelligence is more prominent in the case of Swarm Robotics. This is because both these innovations can be applied collectively in order to control a group of robots. Each and every robot in Swarm Robotics is controlled by AI and operates according to the pre-set principles. The collective behavior and response of the Robots can be significantly enhanced with the application of blockchain and artificial intelligence. This also has huge benefits on scalability as the scope of the operations can be enhanced significantly. We have already started witnessing the application of blockchain and artificial intelligence in Swarm robotics, specifically in the areas related to the medical, entertainment, and farming industry. Although concerns about the safety and security of the features have been expressed by a number of stakeholders working closely in the industry, there is hardly any negative view about the potential of applications to bring benefits to the industry. The blockchain is a credible measure to allay the concerns of the stakeholders about secrecy and privacy of the data. Using the secure cryptographic signatures and advanced technologies available in the blockchain space, safety and security concerns can be easily handled.

Its quite natural to have an integration of Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain Technology in order to make progress in the field of robotics. While artificial intelligence is going to power the Robots while staying at the forefront of this integration, Blockchain technology will play a more passive role by providing backup support in terms of safety and security of the data. Hence, when applied to the Robotics in an integrated manner, the technology can benefit the industry in a hugely positive manner.

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Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain to Impact Robotics Field - CoinNewsSpan

ABB Inc. Posted 02/28/2020

ABB, the world-leading supplier of industrial robots, and Silicon Valley AI start-up, Covariant, today announced a partnership to bring AI-enabled robotics solutions to market, starting with a fully autonomous warehouse order fulfilment solution.

The partnership brings together the two companies with a shared vision for robotics enabled by AI, where intelligent robots work alongside humans in dynamic environments, collectively learning and improving with every task completed.

Given the accelerated global growth experienced in the e-commerce sector, ABB identified a significant opportunity for AI-enabled robotics solutions across a broad range of applications including logistics, warehousing, and parcels and mail sorting. Global revenues in e-commerce are expected to increase by over 50 percent within the next five years, rising from 1.7 trillion Euros in 2019 to 2.6 trillion Euros in 2024, according to Statista.

The growing demand for e-commerce fulfilment services and the complex and labor-intensive nature of the process offers unique potential for intelligent automation. The market is growing at a steady pace (4-5% CAGR) and is expected to reach a value of 51.3 billion Euros by 2021, according to procurement intelligence firm Beroe Inc. Today, warehouse operations are labor intensive, and the industry struggles to find and retain employees for picking and packing. While robots are ideally suited to repetitive tasks, until now they lacked the intelligence to identify and handle tens of thousands of constantly changing products in a typical dynamic warehouse operation.

ABB launched a global competition in 2019 to assess 20 leading AI technology start-ups on their approach to solutions for 26 real-world picking, packing and sorting challenges. The aim was to understand if AI is mature enough to unlock the potential for robotics and automation in the segment. ABB also sought a technology partner with which to co-develop a robust AI solution capable of supporting autonomous materials handling, enabling its robots to handle items of infinite variety.

The Covariant Brain is a universal AI that allows robots to see, reason and act in the world around them, completing tasks too complex and varied for traditional programmed robots. Covariants software enables robots to engage in reinforcement learning: adapting to new tasks on their own through trial and error and therefore constantly broadening the range of objects they can pick.

Our partnership with Covariant is part of our strategy to expand into new growth sectors such as distribution and e-commerce and to leverage the scaling potential in these fields. It perfectly complements our offering and adds to our aim to be the number one choice in robotics solutions for our customers. Through the combination of artificial intelligence with our robots, we are opening an entire new field of opportunities and applications for a variety of industries, said Sami Atiya, President of ABBs Robotics and Discrete Automation business.

If you want to advance artificial intelligence, we now need to take it out of the laboratory and apply it to the real world. We are delighted to be able to work with ABB to create AI Robotics solutions for customers worldwide, benefitting from ABBs nearly five decades of domain knowledge and expertise in deploying automation systems into the most demanding industrial environments, said Peter Chen, Covariants chief executive and co-founder.

The first installation of the ABB and Covariant AI-enabled solution is already being deployed at Active Ants (part of the bpost group), a leading provider of e-commerce fulfilment services for web businesses in Utrecht in the Netherlands.

ABB (ABBN: SIX Swiss Ex) is a technology leader that is driving the digital transformation of industries. With a history of innovation spanning more than 130 years, ABB has four, customer-focused, globally leading businesses: Electrification, Industrial Automation, Motion, and Robotics & Discrete Automation, supported by the ABB Ability digital platform. ABBs Power Grids business will be divested to Hitachi in 2020. ABB operates in more than 100 countries with about 144,000 employees.

Covariant is building the Covariant Brain: universal AI that allows robots to see, reason and act on the world around them. Founded in 2017 by the worlds top AI researchers and roboticists from UC Berkeley and OpenAI, Covariant is bringing the latest artificial intelligence research breakthroughs to the biggest industry opportunities. The company is headquartered in Berkeley, CA.

The rest is here:

ABB and Covariant Partner... - Robotics Online

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Despite consumer interest in online grocery shopping, retained adoption is only about 5% because grocers aren't delivering a perfect operational experience and bringing fresh food inexpensively to customers doorsteps

If it seems like grocers are scrambling now to monetize online ordering and delivery, thats because theyre in a very tough spot.Grocers are reallystruggling in an $800 billion business, most are barely profitable and only about 3% of sales come from online orders. While theres definitely interest from consumers in online grocery shopping, retained adoption is hovering at a measly 5% because no grocer is delivering a perfect operational experience and bringing fresh food inexpensively to customers doorsteps.

The fact is, figuring out all of the mechanics of grocery ordering and delivery is still extremely difficult, and the technology has just not come far enough yet from the major tech players in this space, like Amazon and Instacart.

If we look back, when online grocery ordering really started to catch on, it was back in 2016, and Instacart became one of the go-to tech vendors grocers used to automate the whole process.But the economy of picking and delivering is challenging and quite expensive for grocers, so those costs got passed onto the consumer. For mid-market grocery shoppers, its just not feasible or affordable to go the online grocery route for weekly shopping, and while theyre quite interested in trying it, they just cant afford to do it regularly.

Grocers cant simply rip out Instacart and similar solutions and replace them with their own technology, pickers and drivers. For one, those jobs are union ones for grocers and arent simple or inexpensive for grocers to negotiate.

So grocers started exploring robotics to improve efficiency and control costs.Beyond therobotsrecently introduced to stores for taking inventory and cleaning up messes, grocers have started looking toautomationto fill online orders and speed up delivery.While this could potentially improve just the pick efficiency, grocers can only really begin to make money on this when they start getting around 4,000 online orders a week connected to the automated location, which could be challenging.

Additionally, robots cant pick 100% of all SKUs; grocers will still need manual picking for items like produce.Finally, robotics still does not address one of the biggest challenges grocers have in the ecommerce economic equation: delivery. So the reality is that robotics is really just a stopgap, or a partial solution to fixing the real economic issues of grocery ecommerce.

The true promise of ecommerce is that it should be cheaper and more convenient to get your products delivered right to your doorstep than at the brick-and-mortar store, with no fees.

Consumers patience begins to wear thin, and they continue to do their grocery trips in person or use curbside pickup, another compromise.The true promise of ecommerce is that it should be cheaper and more convenient to get your products delivered right to your doorstep than at the brick-and-mortar store, with no fees.

To accomplish this will require a direct-to-consumer technology company to come in and restructure the entire ecommerce framework within the constraints of a single small ecommerce warehouse inventory control to reduce substitutions, manual or automated pick to reduce costs, and last-mile logistics to doorstep with its own drivers.

Robotics and curbside pickup arent going to fulfill the promise of ecommerce for the grocery industry; theyre just temporary solutions in encouraging more online ordering with better efficiency.To truly deliver on the promise of grocery ecommerce is going to require a completely different infrastructure and new technology to get food from local and national suppliers to customers doorsteps, on time, fresh, and more cheaply than if they went to the store.

Pradeep Elankumaran is the co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Farmstead, a fast-growing, tech-first digital grocer. Read More

All same-day shoppers can now receive lower pricing on staples, free delivery

Companies offer independent grocers new ecommerce option

The startup touting its ability to eliminate the "brand tax" retailers pass on to consumers lasted 2 short years

Are you building the most efficient and reliable system?

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Why Robotics and Curbside Pickup Won't Save Grocers - Progressive Grocer

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New Life Christian Academy eight-grader Ben Gura sets up a test run of his team's robot Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2020, during the school's robotics team's practice.(Photo: Brian Wells/Times Herald)

Getting ready for practice, theNew Life Christian Academy robotics teams sat at a table around a pizza Tuesday.

It's the first year the Kimball Township school has offered the program, with a seventh grade team of four and eighth grade team of three.

Despite it being their first year, the eighth grade team is headedto theMichigan VEX IQ State Championship in Traverse City Feb. 28 to March 1.

Eighth-graderLuke Heinemann said his father teaches robotics at St. Clair County Community College, so robots havealways been on his radar. Math teacher Jack Hennesey brought up the idea of a club in November. Heinemann and fellow team members SamKeller andBen Gura jumped on it.

New Life Christian Academy's eight grade robotics team's robot lifts a box onto a 10-inch tower during a test run Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2020.(Photo: Brian Wells/Times Herald)

This year's game involves the movement and placement of cubes using a programmable robot. The teams must use their robot to lift the cubes and successfully place them atop platforms of various heights.

The team came together a little late in the season.

"We barely had a month to do it whereas the other teams had like six or more to start, so it's pretty cool that we made it to state with the little amount of time we had," Gura said, adding that he's learned a lot about coding through the process.

Hennesey said he used to teach at Yale Public Schools, and former colleagues there encouraged him to form a team. Hennesey also coaches cross country at the school, which wraps up in November.

This year, New Life Christian Academy started seventh and eighth grade robotics teams. The eighth grade team qualified for the state competition.(Photo: Brian Wells/Times Herald)

"So I said to (the students), 'you know what, I've got some time, what do you guys think?',"Hennesey said. "They just jumped on board."

But then comes the issue of cost.

"Believe it or not, this is about $1,200 worth of stuff," Hennesey said as the students worked with the robot on the practice space.

Then there's the cost of room and board and other expenses needed to travel.

"So grandparents and parents donated money to make it all possible," Hennesey said.

Hennesey said he plans to continue the team, and has an eye on a high school program when the current eighth graders are old enough. He's seen growth from both the seventh and eight grade teams. Sometimes when he chimes in to help, the students are already ahead of him.

"Most of my suggestions, to be truthful, they have said 'Mr. Hennessy, that doesn't work,'" he said.

The team also thanks God for their success.

"He's influenced us, He's given us this... we weren't coming into this expecting to win, not necessarily win, to get to a state level,"Heinemann said.

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Jeremy Ervin covers environment, education and more. Contact him at (810) 989-6276 or jervin@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter@ErvinJeremy.

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In first year, robotics team heads to Traverse City for state championship - The Times Herald

KEN GRABOWSKI, Associate Editor

Members of the Brethren High School Robotics team work on their robot to prepare for Saturday's competition in Traverse City. Teams from Brethren, Bear Lake and Manistee Catholic Central will be in action this weekend. (Ken Grabowski/News Advocate)

Members of the Brethren High School Robotics team work on their robot to prepare for Saturday's competition in Traverse City. Teams from Brethren, Bear Lake and Manistee Catholic Central will be in action this

Members of the Brethren High School Robotics team work on their robot to prepare for Saturday's competition in Traverse City. Teams from Brethren, Bear Lake and Manistee Catholic Central will be in action this weekend. (Ken Grabowski/News Advocate)

Members of the Brethren High School Robotics team work on their robot to prepare for Saturday's competition in Traverse City. Teams from Brethren, Bear Lake and Manistee Catholic Central will be in action this

Area Robotics teams ready for action this weekend

MANISTEE Over the course of the past several years, Robotics has been growing in popularity across Manistee County as four school districts now offer programs to their students.

This weekend three of those four schools will be sending competitors to events in Traverse City to test their Robotics skills against students from all over the state. Teams from Manistee Catholic Central elementary and Brethren and Bear Lake High Schools will be competing in tournaments.

For three elementary Robotics teams from Manistee Catholic Central, it will be the opportunity to compete in VEX IQ State competition from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday in Traverse City's Grand Traverse Resort. Coach Laura Cameron said this is only the second year that MCC has fielded a team and they are excited about having three teams in the state finals.

"Attending the State Competition is a first for our school and we are excited for this experience (this is only our second year with a Robotics Team at MCC)," said Cameron. "We are looking forward to creating new friendships and learning more about this wonderful program from other students around Michigan. Some of the teams that we will meet have been to State and also to Worlds. I wish the best to all the children that are participating at Traverse City this weekend and I'm excited to see the Best of Michigan competing for a seat at World competition."

Winners from this competition will move on to the VEXIQ World Championship later this spring.

On one of those Manistee Catholic Central teams is team 93673 Legends of Robots and is comprised of third graders Jocelyn Howes, Selena Kosla and Alexis Logan. They are in their first year of competing in Robotics and took first place at a competition in January.

Another MCC team that will be in the state finals is Team 61325A-Spirit Bot consisting of fourth graders Holly Brindle, Trinity Hurford and Cory Whitman. They had a double qualification at state through their coding skills during the Autonomous Skills Challenge and by taking second place in the teamwork challenge.

The third Manistee Catholic Central team that will be participating in the state finals this weekend is Team 93673 with third grade students Logan Harvey and Reid Kieszkowski. They qualified in their first experience at Robotics with a second place in Teamwork Challenge and in the Autonomous Skills Challenge.

Also on Saturday the Brethren Bobcat and Bear Lake Robotics teams will be in Traverse City taking part in the Robotics First competition.

Brethren coach Mitchell Knoll is feeling good about his team's chances, but adds there is some apprehension heading into a new game setup.

"We are feeling confident with our robot at this time because we have made it capable of completing each of the different tasks before us," said Knoll. "Some of the new features that we've used for the first time are mecanum wheels that give us better maneuverability, a ball shooting mechanism that allows us launch seven inch diameter balls across the field and a climbing mechanism that has multiple stages where the hook detaches."

Knoll said they made other adjusts they feel will make a positive impact.

"We also added more advanced coding where we can have the robot make decisions along with using a color sensor when to have to turn motors on and off," said Knoll. "Another feature that we are excited to run in a match is our six ball autonomous, which is where we have the robot shoot three balls, drive and pick up three more and shoot them on the same goal."

That is a 15 second period where everything is coded ahead of time and there is no human interaction, so being able to complete the complex set of actions is vital.

The team has worked hard according to Knoll and he feels it is ready to compete.

"There usually is a steep learning curve, so we are hoping to jump out to a quick start by having many things solved and practiced a head of time," he said. "We look forward to finally seeing how our robot matches up against other schools."

Brethren team members include Eric Grismore, Justin Kissling, Jacob Hofacker, Rhiannon Gillis, Markus Jacobs, Erica Feller, Jeff Goble, William Pasqualone, Hannah Fitzgerald, Dekota Slawinski, Justin Moore, Nevada Wheeler, Ashlynn Wardie, Maddax Fitzgerald, Kash Peck, William Rubin and Aidan Wenzel.

Bear Lake will also be at that competition and coaches John Prokes and Steve Gomez said the team has worked hard to prepare for it.

"As we get closer the kids are getting more excited, moving past the design and build phases and on to testing and prep for the event," said Prokes. "The robot is ready, the kids are excited to compete."

This year the team consists of Trevor Eisenlohr, Edward Fairchild, Tai Babinec, Marcus Langland, Abram Smith, Megan Gydesen, Tehran Freeman, Tracy Bryce and Fabian Aguilar.

Manistee High School coach Troy Nezki said his Robotics team is not going to Traverse City to compete, but are looking forward to their first competition next week.

"My entire team is either on the swim team or Science Olympiad who are competing this week, so we can't go," said Nezki. "We are going next week to St Joseph and the kids are excited as well as quite nervous about our first event."

Manistee's team includes Matthew Blevins, Luke Herberger, Mason Schaubroeck, Titus Lind, Roger Lind, Brandon Sullivan, Isaiz Tomey, Griffen Antal, Kylar Thomas, Dylan Johnson and Anderson Johns.

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Area Robotics teams ready for action this weekend - Manistee News Advocate