Hi everyone!
We had a blast at Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston this week, hot on the heels of AUVSI in San Diego beforehand. The conference was absolutely packed and full of wicked smart roboticists. Keynotes were delivered from leaders at Amazon Robotics, Disney Research, Agility Robotics, Teradyne and more. There are so many incredible things happening in robotics right now.
The conference is organized by the great folks at The Robot Report (who kindly covered our seed funding announcement last year). Given the Boston setting, MassRobotics was also very involved and had a number of their associated companies presenting.
I was excited to finally visit MassRobotics and meet members of the community there. They have a new hardware-focused startup accelerator for robotics companies, offering up to $100k in non-dilutive funding. If you're thinking of starting a robotics company, I would definitely look into it. The ecosystem there is absolutely thriving, and they have really strong links to industry and academia.
In the run up to the conference, we were invited to give a talk on how organizations can effectively manage their robotics data and where the industry is headed.
This was a great opportunity to discuss how AI is starting to accelerate robotics data analysis and the advent of robotics foundation models. Tons of people came by and filled the room, and even stuck around to speak to me afterwards. I had some particularly interesting conversations about hallucinations, and the safety concerns around using giant LLM-style black boxes in robotics.
We also had a booth on the expo floor where we showed off new features in Roboto that we're releasing soon. The reception was so energizing - people were really excited about how much time they'd save working with data in their robot logs. See below for a picture of our booth just before the floodgates opened!
See you next time!
Benji
