Image Credits: MIT

“What this paper shows, for the first time, is that the mere presence of an RFID-tagged item in the environment makes it much easier for you to achieve other tasks in a more efficient manner,” senior author Fadel Adib says in a release. “We were able to do this because we added multimodal reasoning to the system — FuseBot can reason about both vision and RF to understand a pile of items.”

Image Credits: Boston Dynamics

And finally, Velodyne this week announced a multi-year deal that will bring its lidar system to Boston Dynamics’ robots. The

Welp. Three straight weeks of work travel amid a seemingly endless pandemic finally caught up with me. Forgive me, as I’m writing this under the influence of green tea and antivirals, so thank you in advance to the regularly Herculean efforts of our copy editor, David. Apparently the old adage of things happening in Vegas staying in Vegas doesn’t extend to viral loads.

After managing to stave off COVID for the past couple of years, it’s fitting that I get to write about our fulfillment panel through the brain fog, as a strong case can be made that the category has benefited from pandemic-fueled automation more than any other.

It also comes a week after I devoted a chunk of this column to Amazon’s robotics play, which had an accelerating effect on the category years before the pandemic. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be speaking with Amazon’s VP Global Robotics, Fulfillment, Joseph Quinlivan, at our upcoming robotics event, as well as United States Labor Secretary Marty Walsh — on separate panels, mind.

The pair may well have diverging perspectives when it comes to the future of human labor, but one thing they’ll no doubt agree on is the fact that an automated future is inevitable. It’s happening right now, in warehouses across the world, and here in the U.S., three companies are helping lead that charge. I’m happy to report that we managed to get them all on a single panel at next month’s event.

On July 21, Locus Robotics CEO Rick Faulk, Fetch founder/Zebra Technologies VP Melonee Wise and Berkshire Grey SVP Jessica Moran will discuss how the category has evolved over the past several years, what the future looks like for fulfillment and how third-party robotics companies can help retail get a leg up against the big A.

With Agility Robotics and Boston Dynamics also appearing at the event, it’s a subject that’s going to be pervasive throughout, but this conversation will be ground zero. Best of all, the all-day event is completely free. Register for tickets here.

Oh, and we just opened up our pitch-off for the event. If you’ve got an early-stage startup and want to share some (virtual) stage time with the biggest names in the industry, opportunities like this don’t come around very often. We’ve also got an absolutely killer trio of judges I’m excited to tell you about in the coming weeks. The rules are as follows:

• Be an early-stage startup.
• Have at least a minimally viable product.
• Focus on tech connected to various aspect of robotics: AI, agtech, manufacturing, logistics, medical device, food tech, transportation, data processing, material science, SaaS, more.
• Be incorporated anywhere (recording will take place virtually).

The deadline to apply is July 7, if you think you’ve got what it takes.

A couple of stragglers (i.e. news stories from after I turned in my newsletter draft last Wednesday night) from re:Mars this week. First is this cool little startup out of Los Angeles I spoke to a …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/30/warehouse-wars/