robotics
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Robot tutor Musio makes its retail debut in Japan
A cute, robotic language tutor called Musio, has made it from crowdfunding campaign to full-fledged product with a debut in stores this week in Japan. Priced at JPY 98,000 (about US $900), Musio is now sold online through SoftBank’s marketplace and Amazon Japan, and through a handful of brick-and-mortars stores. Read More
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A $150 million fund, The Engine, will back startups others find ‘too hard’
A fund and accelerator for advanced technology startups, The Engine, closed its debut fund at a robust $150 million this week, according to its president, CEO and managing partner, Katie Rae. Last year, TechCrunch reported that MIT was investing $25 million into The Engine, becoming the anchor LP for the fund. Read More
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SkyX drones are half-helicopter, half-plane and built to fly long distances
A Markham, Ontario startup called SkyX Ltd. emerged from stealth today to share with TechCrunch details about its unique industrial drone designs. The company’s SkyOne drones take off and land like a helicopter, but fly more like an airplane, with a range of more than 25 miles (40 km) per charge. For drone industry nerds, this means they have both VTOL and fixed-wing elements. Read More
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ffVC and NYU are mixing researchers with investors in the name of machine intelligence
The timing was perfect. Just as startups were settling into NYU and ffVC’s new brains-meet-money accelerator, “AI Nexus Lab,” Uber acquired Geometric Intelligence. In a stroke of luck, the startup that would become Uber’s AI lab happened to have been raised by NYU Tandon’s Data Future Labs. Uber’s interest in Geometric helped solidify New… Read More
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Apple Fellow Rich Page on ‘stealing jobs’ and Chowbotics’ salad-making robots
When we first wrote about Chowbotics, their salad-making robot stirred a bit of controversy. The company promises to bring nutritious dining options to offices that don’t have a big cafeteria and budget to employ full-time chefs. But their robot, Sally, threatens to put a number of people out of work. Chowbotics Executive Chairman Rich Page gives us his thoughts. Read More
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New tech can spot small faces in the crowd
Spotting faces in a scene is easy when the punims are nice and close to the camera. But what about group shots where the faces are tiny? That, I fear, robots have a harder time with. A new research project by Deva Ramanan, associate professor of robotics, and Peiyun Hu, a Ph.D. student in robotics at Carnegie Mellon, fixes that problem by assessing the context of images. Instead of just… Read More
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GE invests $2 million in Alchemist Accelerator to back industrial IoT startups
Alchemist Accelerator has raised $2 million from GE Digital to start a new program for industrial IoT startups. Stanford lecturer Timothy Chou, formerly President of Oracle On Demand, will chair Alchemist’s new IIoT accelerator along with GE Digital’s West Coast group. In the past, enterprise hardware and software startups were seen as capital intensive, with the challenge of… Read More
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Airobotics scores authorization to fly autonomous drones in Israel
A startup based in Petah Tikva, Israel, Airobotics, has scored the right to fly drones autonomously for business purposes in Israel. The Civil Aviation Authority of Israel (CAAI) was the first in the world to authorize commercial, fully unmanned drone flights in their nation’s airspace. Read More
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NASA is using a mixed reality space station to train astronauts
NASA has always embraced emerging technology for visualization, even if that tech was seemingly developed for frivolous entertainment. We recently covered its holographic Mars exhibit, and the many 3D resources that NASA makes available to developers and educators. Now, the US space agency has partnered with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine to create a mixed reality International Space… Read More
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Japanese authorities decry ongoing robot failures at Fukushima
Six years ago, a massive earthquake, consequent tsunami and nuclear crisis struck Japan. International organizations rushed to help the country’s devastated residents, and to figure out how to clean up Fukushima Daiichi, the wrecked nuclear power plant. Robots offered a ray of hope amid unfathomable loss. At least they did, until recently. As the Asahi Shimbun reported yesterday, members… Read More
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