Brian Heater
One undeniable trend from this year’s Modex conference: suddenly everyone is into truck unloading. The past couple of years have gone from a few select companies to seemingly everyone in and around warehouse robotics looking to tackle the problem. Most solutions are some variation on a basic theme: a...
Agility’s Digit wasn’t the only humanoid holding court at Modex in Atlanta this week. On the opposite end of the Georgia World Congress Center, Reflex Robotics, a younger and smaller startup, was drawing its own crowd. The booth was centered on a single demo running throughout the week. Passersby...
Wander the Modex floor long enough and you’ll stumble on some wearable robotics. The category has nowhere near the presence of AMRs (autonomous mobile robots) or storage and retrieval systems, but exosuits are increasing in acceptance for their ability to eliminate the repetitive stress that comes with lifting and...
Perhaps a few years from now, the halls of the Georgia World Congress Center will be peppered with humanoid robots the week of Modex. In 2024, however, Digit stands alone at the supply chain show. It’s a testament to Agility’s healthy head start over competitors like Figure, Tesla, 1X...
Hey. Sorry to call you out of the blue. No, no, nothing serious. I’m fine. I wanted to apologize for freaking you out last time. I wasn’t myself. But I’ve changed. Honestly, I don’t even know who I was back then. It was all very new. I’ve been working...
In the beginning of 2021, Alphabet shuttered Loon. It was a familiar story within the annals of Google X history: an ambitious moonshot with tremendous upside that sputtered out prior to gaining any sort of meaningful traction after nearly a decade.
“Despite Loon’s extraordinary technical progress,” X explains with a...
Mindfulness and meditation apps have tremendous potential in the world of extended reality. The full immersion created by headsets like the Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro offer great potential to kickstart such practices, which are notoriously difficult to both begin and maintain.
As such, partnership between leading meditation app...
In an e-mail exchange, Babylon Micro-Farms CEO Alexander Olesson tells me “we’ll have these in every school and apartment one day.” It’s a nice vision, and really the level of belief/commitment required to run a startup – particularly in a field as oft-fraught at vertical farming. With a price...
Amazon generate a lot of trash. Precisely how much is a matter of some debate. In 2021, the company says it used 214 million or so pounds of single-use plastic in its packaging. Nonprofit ocean conservation firm Oceana, on the other hand, put that figure at approximately ~700 million...
There was nothing else like Digit on the ProMat floor last year. The manufacturing supply chain event has gradually morphed into a tech show in recent years. Many of the biggest names in the space were present, showcasing autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), bin picking arms and automated storage and...