Brian Heater

Way back in the before times of 2018, Ayanna Howard joined us onstage at our Robotics event to discuss human-robotic interactions, along with UC Santa Cruz’s Leila Takayama and Veo Robotics’ Patrick Sobalvarro. Plenty has changed since then — both for Howard and, you know, just in the...

Last summer, Hayward-based Abundant Robotics abruptly closed up shop. Plenty of startups fail, a phenomenon that certainly applies in the notoriously difficult world of robotics. But the pandemic has proven a boon for robotics funding, particularly in fields like agriculture, where employees continue to have difficulty filling roles,...

Last November, Apple announced the launch of Self Service Repair — a surprising addition for a company that has notoriously lacked such capabilities. Those changes didn’t happen in a vacuum, of course. The president and Congress have both been pushing to open the so-called right to repair. There...

It’s a familiar problem to anyone following the category. Investors and companies are largely on the same page when it comes to robotics and automation — such technologies are going to be mandatory for staying competitive in the future. They’re also broadly seen as the key to addressing...

Global smartphone shipments had already begun to shrink ahead of 2020, though two years of a pandemic and the resulting supply chain and chip constraints certainly didn’t help the overall figures. According to a pair of reports from Counterpoint Research and IDC, however, the market finally experienced growth...

Apple just dropped a bunch of new OS betas, bringing a pair of long-awaited features. IOS Beta 15.4 delivers the ability to unlock your phone with Face ID while wearing a mask (really upper-Face ID, if we’re going to be pendantic about it), while versions beta 15.4 of...

It’s hard to know where to start this week. Any temporary slowdown we might have experienced over the holidays has been wiped away. Once again, we find ourselves knee deep in robotics news, like the trash compactor scene in A New Hope — only without the closing walls,...

Intel this week highlighted plans to build two chip manufacturing facilities outside of Columbus, Ohio. The announcement is still early stages, involving the eventual allotment of $20 billion to construct the factories designed to tackle the ongoing global chip shortage – or at least address potential future issues. The...

I’ve met with Misty’s founders a number of times over the years, often in hotel suites at CES where the company was showing off their humanoid robot’s latest capability. The firm started life in mid-2017, as a spinoff of Sphero, which was dealing with its own growing pains...

Jibo may have breathed its last robotic breaths back in 2019, but researchers at MIT believe the social robot may have been onto something. Sure, the world wasn’t ready for a pricey social robot a few years back, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some positives to take...