Robotics

Lotus Robotics is a warehouse mobile robotics company established in 2014. it currently has 36 employees and $8m in investment.

Marathon Technologies is an Australian mobile robotics company. In 2011, they landed a contract to supply the military with moving targets for training. They recently teamed up with Domino's to develop an autonomous pizza delivery vehicle.

It develops mobile robots for last-mile food delivery. It is still in its early prototyping stage (e.g., current models require a human chaperone to remotely monitor progress especially in crowded areas).

Mobile Industrial Robots, (MiR) is a Danish mobile robotics start-up. It has around 30 employees and has raised some $1.4m in 2016. It has a range of autonomous mobile robots, mostly aimed at the low payload level end of the market

Omron acquired Adept Technologies for $200m in Sept 2015. Prior to this, Adept was a public company specialized in robotics. The Adept mobile robot has infrastructure-free navigation.

Ottomotors is a division of Clearpath Robotics, a Canadian robotics company with $45m in funding. Ottomotors also offer autonomous driverless warehouse robots.

RoboCV is a Russian start-up focused on mobile robotics for the warehouse/logistics industry. It seeks to convert existing forklifts into fully autonomous ones using existing senor technologies and proprietary algorithms

This small electrically powered robot with six wheels is designed for 'last mile (2-3 miles)' delivery. 50 such robots have been built to date and the robots have operated in 16 countries.

Swisslog is an automation specialist. It has installed automated materials transport and automated drug management systems in over 3000 hospitals worldwide.

: Symbotic is majority owned by C&S Wholesale Grocers, the largest grocery supply company in the US. For the past seven years C&S has been the test bed for the development of Symbotic's line of products.

TwinWheel is a privately funded French company with 12 people. It has developed an autonomous last mile delivery robot that can travel at 30km/hr and carry a 40Kg

RE2 received $1.3 Million for their technology and services to develop "Field deployable, bimanual mobile manipulator system for research on haptics-enabled dexterous manipulation."

The world's first underwater vehicle designed specifically to collect both biological and chemical samples from the ocean water column successfully completed sea trials.

Attached to garments, the robots generate shape-changing clothing and kinetic pattern designs—creating a new, dynamic fashion.

Artificial skin with post-human sensing capabilities, and a better understanding of skin tissue, could pave the way for robots that can feel, smart-transplants and even cyborgs.

Researchers have developed a robotic eel that swims through contaminated water to find the source of the pollution.

Mobile robotics in material handling and logistics will become a $75bn market by 2027. It will then more than double by 2038. These staggering headline figures mask turbulent transformative change underneath: some technologies will rise and transform the fortunes of industries, fuelling growth rates far outpacing recent trends, whilst others will face with decay and obsolescence. We are at the beginning of the beginning of a transformative change, and the time to plan is now.

Researchers have developed a new type of user-interactive electronic skin, with a colour change perceptible to the human eye, and achieved with a much-reduced level of strain. Their results could have applications in robotics, prosthetics and wearable technology.

An international group of researchers developed a technique that results in more accurate 3D scanning for reconstructing complex objects than what currently exists. The innovative method combines robotics and water.

Water droplets float in a hot pan because of the so-called Leidenfrost effect. Physicists have discovered a variation: the so-called Elastic Leidenfrost effect.