Daily Archives: June 21, 2017

Hardware startup Misty Robotics has a daunting task ahead of it. The Boulder-based company is working on a robot aimed at mainstream consumers for employment in the home and office. But Misty certainly has a solid foundation, as a spinoff of robotic toy maker Sphero, coupled with an $11.5 million Series A led by Venrock and Foundry Group.

The new company employs about half a dozen former Sphero ex-pats, including co-founder Ian Bernstein, who will be Mistys Head of Product. Bernstein and team have been working on the seeds of Mistys first product under the Sphero banner for roughly a year and a half, ultimately opting to spin it off into a new company, given its vastly different and decidedly more ambitious goals.

At some point it just made sense for Sphero to focus on connected play, Bernstein tells TechCrunch. And it would make sense to spin off a company so we can raise more money and go bigger and faster on this idea of an autonomous robotic being in the home and office.

Founded as Orbotix in 2010, Sphero has seen rapid growth in the past several years as its transformed itself from a niche maker of a smartphone-controlled robotic ball into a full-fledged Disney co-conspirator. The company rocketed to success when its first product became the basis of the remote-controlled BB-8, a wildly successful Star Wars tie-in. Since then, the partnership has produced newCars and Spider-Man toys.

But Mistys offering is something else entirely. The company isnt ready to reveal much in the way of details at this early stage, except to say that its planting the seeds for more mainstream devices. Its understandable, of course, that its fairly modest in its projections. Countless companies have tried to bring consumer robotics to the home, but have largely failed through some combination of half-baked technologies and impossible-to-meet consumer expectations.

For a robot to succeed in the home, it has to be affordable, capable and serve some task that people either cant or simply dont want to perform. Only iRobots Roomba has come close. The product has found success, but even so, its one-note functionality feels underwhelming compared to the expectations science-fiction has been feeding us for decades. But products like it and Amazons Echo are slowly opening the door to more technology in the home. Though Misty tells me it believes a truly mainstream consumer robot is still several years away.

We dont believe its time for a mainstream robot, says CEO Tim Enwall, who also founded Google-owned home automation company Revolv. We dont believe there [is currently] a market for it. What we do believe is that there will be a robot in everyones home and office and there is a progression to that process. And that progression, like every other technology weve ever adopted as humans, doesnt start with a mainstream market. It starts with an innovator market.

Mistys first several products will be targeted at the hobbyist/maker market something more akin to where desktop 3D printing and drones have been for the past decade. From there, however, it hopes to build toward something more substantial, both through acceptance among early adopters and a fine-tuning of the multi-purpose robots functionality. But, adds Enwall, even the first-generation of product will embody the principles required for putting a robot in everyones home and office. Its just that this first version will be targeted at innovators.

The company has released the above promotional image, which highlights an early prototype. At the very least, it appears to point to something more biologically influenced that the Roombas hockey puck shape. Whether it takes the form of a humanoid robot, an animal or something else entirely, remains to be seen.

Though Mistys Sphero experience does point to a company that understands the value of imbuing a product with personality. Weve learned a lot, says Bernstein. From the progression of starting to add personality in Sphero 2.0, to the Disney deal, [weve learned] the power of creating a robot thatsmore of a character.

Mistys first product is set to hit the market next year.

Read more from the original source:

Sphero spinoff Misty Robotics gets $11.5 million to create a mainstream robot for the home - TechCrunch

The agenda for TC Sessions: Robotics just keeps getting more irresistible. We are happy to announce that Rod Brooks, co-founder of Rethink Robotics and iRobot, will join us on stage at TechCrunchs first ever robotics show, July 17 at MITs Kresge auditorium.

Brooks is a former director of MITs CSAIL program as well as an author and prognosticator on the future of robots. At TechCrunch Disrupt NY in May, Brooks expressed contrarian views about the imminence of driverless cars, the capabilities of artificial intelligence, and rules of engagement for robots at war. We are looking forward to taking that conversation further and learning more about Rethink Robotics progress delivering their collaborative robots, Baxter and Sawyer, to work alongside humans in factory settings.

Were also excited to announce two additional workshops for the event. Both will present attendees opportunities to get the inside track from leaders in the robotics field. The DARPA workshop will focus on the agencies aim and how to work with DARPA. It will be led by Dr. William Regli, Acting Director of the Defense Sciences Office. In the MIT CSAIL workshop attendees will get a look at some of the best projects inside MITs robotics lab.

These workshops join the agenda that also includes a workshop on educating future roboticists featuring educators from Olin College, Kettering University and Udacity.

General admission tickets are currently available, but seating in MITs Kresge Auditorium is limited. We hope to see you there.

DARPA The mission of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is to prevent and create strategic surprise by developing breakthrough technologies for national security. The agencys project-oriented approach to science and engineering, however, is different both in approach and execution from other U.S. governmental funding agencies. In this workshop, DARPA leadership will discuss the Agencys vision and goals, provide overviews of each of the organizations technical offices, in addition to an explanation of the mechanics of working with DARPA. The objective of the workshop is to elicit help in fomenting institutional evolution in Americas broader science and technology ecosystem that is needed to better and more rapidly respond to future challenges.

MIT CSAIL MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is tasked with researching activities around the bleeding edge of technology. Attendees of this workshop will get an insiders look at some of the hottest projects being developed in CSAILs labs and engineering bays. Robert Katzschmann will present Soft Robotics and the teams creative approach to allowing robots to manipulate objects. Claudia Perez DArpinos presentation will demonstrate how robots can learn from a single demo and Andrew Spielberg will explain a novel process to create and fabricate robots.

Building Roboticists David Barrett, a professor of mechanical engineering at Olin College, Ryan Keenan, curriculum lead for Udacity, and Dr. Robert McMahan, President of Kettering University will lead a workshop discussing their views on the best way to train the next generation of roboticists. Each of these educators leads vastly different programs, but the aim is universal: to train the next generation of globally competitive engineers. Its important that these students learn through hands-on experience how to not only write code, but deploy code in a viable manner that results in a sustainable product.

Read the original post:

TC Sessions: Robotics to feature talks from Rod Brooks, DARPA and ... - TechCrunch

Every tech and toy company, from Apple to Hasbro, has an educational coding offering these days. Sonys Koov kit has been kicking around Japan for a while now, and should be pretty familiar to anyone whos spent time with Legos educational initiatives its a set of blocks, sensors, motors and actuators that pair with a mobile app. Now Sony is ready to bring the kit to the U.S. albeit in a pretty measured way.

The company is the latest tech giant to use a crowdfunding platform to test the waters. In this case, Sony will essentially be using Indiegogo to gauge customer interest and hopefully gain some insight into the U.S. market as it works to shape the product for a new region. On the face of it, its a bit of an odd move from a company with global reach that has never been afraid to launch into a new category with guns blazing.

Sony certainly has the resources to do so here, but for one thing, the market is still a little shaky. There are plenty of different kits aimed at teaching kids to code and build robots. Apple recently partnered with a handful of hardware makersto help teach its Swift programming language to youngsters, and Legos new Boost line joins a number of others already produced by the company. And then there are the dozens of startups fighting for a piece of the pie. How much of that pie there actually is to go around is still a pretty open question.

Koov is also the first hardware product out of Sonys Global Education wing, a department a company rep told me is almost like a startup within Sony, which implies a certain sense of autonomy and probably goes a ways toward explaining the cautious approach. It really wants to get its first product right, and its certainly put a lot of thought into the hardware and software side of things.

The kits currency is little, brightly colored translucent blocks. The company likens them to three-dimensional pixels, which is an attempt to make the transition between the mobile app and the real world product easier to understand. Kids can use the app to build 23 different pre-determined designs or Robot Recipes with the 302 block Advanced Kit. Of course, the sky is the limit if they think outside the box.

To appease those who blaze their own paths, theres Robot Recipe Sharing, an online database of custom robots built by users. Uploads are vetted by the company for obvious reasons, given the products targeted 8 to 14 year old age range. Sony was super-psyched to show me one of the user-built robots created by a Japanese customer that was essentially a version of the companys hippo that plays custom MIDIs of J-Pop songs. At the moment, its really just show and tell, and Sony doesnt really have a good method for letting users create their own sharable robot building plans. Thats apparently in the works. All part of the aforementioned feedback process, I guess.

There are a few other roadblocks, as well. Price is the biggest red flag. Legos new Boost set starts at $160, while Koovs suggested retail price is $359 for the Starter Kit and $499 for Advanced. Thats a lot of money for a brand thats entirely untested in this space. Maybe the price will come down as the company scales up, though again, this is Sony were talking about here its not exactly a startup with limited supply chain access.

Then theres the matter of the name. I was actually sorry I asked about that one. Apparently an executive came up with the bright idea to name the system Koov, for reasons that arent worth paraphrasing, so Im going to paste the explanation here in its entirety, because its really something:

The logo imagery for KOOV calls to mind the 1s and 0s of binary code, or alternatively, I/O, the computer terminology for digital input/output. The logo is also inspired by the < and > symbols used in mathematics. In addition, the K and V that bookend the kits name stand for key and value, important concepts in the realm of computer science. But whereas key and value ordinarily form a unique, unambiguous pair as applied in computer science, they are connected by OO -representing the infinity symbol () -in the logo for KOOV. This is meant to suggest the infinite combinations possible with KOOV, limited only by the imagination. In a multitude of ways, KOOVs logo is symbolic of its blocks that are a product of the digital age, and that are therefore infinite in potential.

The other issue is one thats pretty prevalent among these devices. The coding and robotics skills that Koov teaches are pretty abstract. Unlike Apple, whose programs use the coding language used by iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, Sony developed its own language for the toy. Its built around the Scratch educational programming language, but the end goal here seems to more of building up that initial interest in coding, rather than developing concrete coding skills. Sonys kit mostly teaches kids to code for Sonys kit.

The same goes for the hardware, which is powered by a micro-controller based on Arduino. The potential for open-source learning is there, but in its current state, Sony seems to have the system pretty locked down. Perhaps thats the kind of thing the company will work toward, with the proper feedback through its Indiegogo campaign. At the moment, however, there doesnt seem to be a heck of a lot distinguishing Koov from a million other coding toys.

See more here:

Sony soft-launches an educational robotics coding kit on Indiegogo ... - TechCrunch

Forbes

Lily Robotics Auctions Off Assets, But Many Customers Are Still Waiting For Refunds Forbes Lily Robotics, a much-hyped San Francisco drone startup that crashed and burned last January, this week successfully auctioned off the remaining bits and pieces of the company for $750,000. The assets were split between two parties: an entity called LR ...

See the article here:

Lily Robotics Auctions Off Assets, But Many Customers Are Still Waiting For Refunds - Forbes

With crazy experiments, mystical creatures and robots on view, Bagley Hall at Northeastern State University has an unusual week ahead of it.

Students from the Cherokee County area are currently participating in NSU's Robotics Academy of Critical Engagement. The RACE academies offer kids of all ages an opportunity to explore and discover robotics, science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics - collectively known as STEAM.

There were a few academies students could choose from this week, one being "Wacky Science" for 4- and 5-year-olds. On the second day of Wacky Science, students have already used chemical reactions to create concoctions like silly putty, slime, artificial snow and more.

"I try to do chemical reactions that they would understand," said Karissa Pierson, junior at NSU. "So when we made lava lamps, I talked about the different densities between oil and water and how the food coloring stayed in the oil."

A byproduct of the Wacky Science experiments is a messy classroom, but Pierson said that's all part of the learning.

"I think it's very important for them to get messy and to actually be doing it themselves, so they will remember it and be interested," she said. "Because if we just read about chemical reactions or something, they definitely would not want to do it or remember it."

While the tiny scientists conduct their experiments throughout the week, witches and wizards will continue with their jobs, capturing mystical creatures. The Fantastical Mechanical Beasts class, for ages 6-8, offers students a chance to explore the world of Harry Potter. Not only have they been tasked with catching magical animals, they've also been challenged to create their own.

Teacher Dave Fuller said the children will have to design their creatures, draw them, and by the end of the week will have produced them via a 3D printer.

"We're kind of combining the movie ["Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"] with the robotics program," he said. "Their beast has to be one that doesn't currently exist. They have to think how big it is, what color it is and what its weaknesses might be."

Most of the kids' ideas for their mystical beasts involve a mixture of several animals. One idea suggested Tuesday included a "Gryffindor Hodgepodge," which is cross between a tiger and a dragon. Another one was "gorilla gator," a combination of the two.

Not far from the witches and wizards, a group of young engineers will work throughout the week to build their own robots in the VEX VRC Robotics Academy.

"They're creating claw robots that will be able to complete the objective of the game, which is to lift cones onto different stands and things," said Shelby O'Neal, NSU student. "So they're working on their robots for the new In the Zone competition."

The VEX Robotics Competition is the largest one of its kind, each year creating an engineering challenge - presented in the form of a game - for students around the world to accomplish. The kids at NSU's RACE academies will look to complete the challenge on Friday.

"I think kids in general are more technologically advanced than we were when were younger, so it's a great way to kind of keep their brains moving throughout the summer," said O'Neal.

While some kids in the class admit that building a robot form the ground up can be challenging, 10-year-old John Ryan said it "really just takes a long time."

"It's pretty easy, if you ask me," he said. "After we build it, we can add on things like spikes for the wheels, extra claws, extra wheels -- pretty much anything."

Ryan said that he enjoyed the camp so much last year, his parents signed him up again for 2017.

"Getting to know other people from Tahlequah" was an another perk he liked about the class.

Check it out

For more information on NSU's Robotics Academy of Critical Engagement, call 918-444-3739.

More:

Students make creative messes at robotics academies - Tahlequah Daily Press