Advanced Materials

BA System is an established French company with 200 employees and revenues in the region of 25m Euros. It provides AGVs and autonomous industrial trucks. Its autonomous vehicles can handle 0.5 to 14 tonnes.

Balyo is a French company providing autonomous industrial trucks for use in warehouses. Its key innovation is in its autonomous navigation technology: it has a laser-based systems that operates by teaching the environment to the robot.

Dispatch is a small CA based start-up that has raised $2m in seed money. It also develops autonomous last-mile delivery robots. Its original target market is university campuses where students have no cars.

Founded in 2014, Flashhold is now the best funded Chinese warehouse robotics company. It has raised more than $30m since early 2017. It is also an adaptation of the Kiva approach to the automation of the goods-to-person task.

Grey Orange is a well-funded Indian start-up focused on warehouse automation.It is one of the largest robotic companies in India. . It has developed square goods-to-person robots following the Kiva approach.

Kiva is the most successful example of an AGC company having achieved a sales price of $775 in 2012 to Amazon. This acquisition left a gap in the market that many similar companies are now seeking to fulfill.

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

University scientists have made wood into an electrical conductor by turning its surface into graphene.

IDTechEx is hosting a free webinar on Tuesday 15 August.

Boasting the conductivity, strength and flexibility we wished for, graphene was proposed as one of the most likely substitutes for silicon and other materials. Its launch into the market however is still slow. What is curbing graphene from industrial applications?