Transcriptic is opening up its application programming interface today, so that scientists can control experiments in the company’s robot-run lab.
The startup, backed by Google Ventures, Founders Fund, and Mark Cuban, among others, hopes to completely reinvent how biological research is done.
Founder Max Hodak says he came up for the idea for his robotic lab while conducting mundane basic lab research at Duke University. “You’d spend all day long at the bench and waiting on the incubator to grow cells,” he said.
Researchers from the University of Illinois have produced a new generation of muscle-powered biological robots, or “bio-bots,” that can be stimulated to walk using electrical impulses. These robots not only represent a significant advancement in the field of soft biorobotics, but they may also eventually have uses in a variety of applications including drug screening and delivery systems. The study has been published in PNAS.
Savioke, a robotics startup out of Sunnyvale led by the former CEO of the now-defunct but influential Willow Garage robotics startup, is announcing a seed round of funding today, $2 million from Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Google Ventures, Morado Venture Partners and other individual investors. It is planning to use the money to develop and build its first robot, an as-yet unnamed piece of hardware that will be focused on the services industry.
The Atlas humanoid robot, unveiled last year by Boston Dynamics, a company later acquired by Google, is a marvel. It can clamber over rubble and operate power tools. But these abilities don’t come cheap. Atlas has a price tag well above a million dollars, and it consumes around 15 kilowatts of electricity when in operation, meaning hefty power bills for its owner and limiting its practicality. “That’s enough to power a small city block,” says Alexander Kernbaum, research engineer at the nonprofit research agency SRI International. To be truly practical, he says, Atlas “needs to be many times more efficient.”
By automating tasks, we are liberating human imagination and the human spirit. The more we unlock the secrets of technology, the more we find ourselves.
Ever since 1962, when the first industrial robot was installed on an assembly line at a General Motors plant in New Jersey, machines have been replacing human workers. In the decades that came after, just about every industry became automated to a greater or lesser extent.
Aethon grew its customer base in 2013 with 21 sites going live on their Intralogistics™ platform which automates and manages the internal supply chain logistics of hospitals. The continued growth in the adoption of Aethon’s robotic technology has clearly made the company a market leader in robotics.
The Fuelmatics Automatic Refueling System is a robot helper that enables drivers to precisely fill up their tanks without leaving their seat.
It seems highly plausible that robotic technology could soon be pervading many aspects of our lives — including filling up a car with gas, it seems. The Fuelmatics Automatic Refueling System is a robot helper that enables drivers to precisely fill up their tanks without leaving their seat.
According to Melonee Wise, the manual laborer of the future has only one arm and stands just three feet, two inches tall. Such are the vital statistics of UBR1, a $35,000 mobile robot unveiled today by Wise’s startup company Unbounded Robotics.
Wise, the company’s CEO and cofounder, says her business will at first sell the robot to researchers in academia and industry, who currently must either pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get hold of a similar robot or build one themselves. But the UBR1 has also been designed to be capable and safe enough to help out in real workplaces such as warehouses and factories.
Surgical robots allow surgeons to perform a variety of less invasive operations because their miniaturized instruments can work through small incisions in the body and are more dexterous than traditional laparoscopic tools (see “The Slow Rise of the Robot Surgeon”). The result is that patients leave the operating room with a smaller surgical wound with the promise of faster recovery and less scarring.
