My Podcast With The Robot Report

Welcome to Episode 14 of The Robot Report Podcast, which brings conversations with robotics innovators straight to you. Join us every Wednesday for discussions with leading roboticists, innovative robotics companies, and other key members of the robotics community. Listeners can subscribe to The Robot Report Podcast on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify, Google Play and YouTube. Please subscribe to the podcast … Read More

Contact Tracing, Machines, And Civil Liberties

Already five regions within New York State have reopened for business, ushering in a new reality of “test, isolate, and trace.” The United States estimates it will hire close to 300,000 people to become contact tracers, identifying potential spreaders of the virus. Governor Cuomo has appointed former New York City … Read More

The DARPA SubT Challenge: A Robot Triathlon

One of the biggest urban legends growing up in New York City were rumors about alligators living in the sewers. This myth even inspired a popular children’s book called “The Great Escape: Or, The Sewer Story,” with illustrations of reptiles crawling out of apartment toilets. To this day, city dwellers … Read More

Summer Travel Diary: Reopening Cold Cases With Robotic Data Discoveries

Traveling to six countries in eighteen days, I journeyed with the goal delving deeper into the roots of my family before World War II. As a child of refugees, my parents’ narrative is missing huge gaps of information. Still, more than seventy-eight years since the disappearance of my Grandmother and … Read More

ProMat Preview: It’s Time To Cut The Cord

Last week’s breaking news story on The Robot Report was unfortunately the demise of Helen Greiner’s company, CyPhy Works (d/b/a Aria Insights). The high-flying startup raised close to $40 million since its creation in 2008, making it the second business founded by an iRobot alum that has shuttered within five months. While it … Read More

Executing Better By Listening To Public Discontent

In the wake of the closure of Apple’s autonomous car division (Project Titan) this week, one questions if Steve Jobs’ axiom still holds true. “Some people say, ‘Give the customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before … Read More

WAZE For Drones: Expanding The National Airspace

Sitting in New York City, looking up at the clear June skies, I wonder if I am staring at an endangered phenomena. According to many in the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) industry, skylines across the country soon will be filled with flying cars, quadcopter deliveries, emergency drones, and other robo-flyers. … Read More

The Legal Dilemma Of Intelligent Machines

Walking into XPONENTIAL 2018, I was dumbfounded by the keynote speech by Professor Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina. To paraphrase, ‘In the future, we will no longer need two pilots, planes will have just one captain and a dog. The dog will be there to bite the … Read More

Disaster Recovery Robots Working Overtime

Since Labor Day, North America has been hit with an unprecedented wave of natural disasters, from forest fires still raging in California to multiple catastrophic hurricanes in the Atlantic to an earthquake shattering one of the world’s most populated cities. If there is one silver lining from these events, it … Read More

Reprogramming Nature Into Swarms Of Cyborgs

Summer is not without its annoyances — mosquitos, wasps, and ants, to name a few. As the cool breeze of September pushes us back to work, labs across the country are reconvening tackling nature’s hardest problems. Sometimes forces that seem diametrically opposed come together in beautiful ways, like robotics infused … Read More