Pollen Robotics turned heads at last year’s CES . After all, a humanoid robot will do that on the show floor (even if it’s only half of one). The French startup is back for this year’s show (insofar as anyone is really back for the show), with some key updates […]
Categories robotics
You don’t need Qoobo in your life. Nobody needs Qoobo, exactly. In fact, first reactions tend to range from befuddlement to bemusement. The robotic cat pillow doesn’t make a ton of sense on the face of it – in part because Qoobo has no face. The handful of time I’ve […]
Earlier this month, Hyundai acquired a controlling stake in Boston Dynamics that valued the company at $1.1 billion. What’s most interesting about the news isn’t the acquisition itself (it does, after all, find Boston Dynamics switching hands for the third time in seven years), but rather what the company’s evolution […]
As businesses around the world look to automate production lines and supply chains, companies making the robots are attracting great investor interest. The latest to get funded is Flexiv, which closed a Series B round north of $100 million from investors including China’s on-demand services giant Meituan, TechCrunch learned. Other […]
The idea of satellites and other spacecraft being able to refuel, repair or even add new capabilities while in orbit has generally seemed like a “nice in theory” one, but as leaders from Maxar, Astroscale and Orbit Fab explained at TC Sessions: Space, 2021 will be the year that theory […]
A lot can change in a year. Especially this year. For Boston Dynamics, the past 12 months have brought a number of radical changes traditionally not seen at 30-year-old businesses of its size. It’s a list that includes the first new CEO in the company’s history, wide availability of its […]
Hyundai takes a controlling stake in an iconic robotics company, Twitter acquires a screen-sharing startup and we round up some security-themed gift ideas. This is your Daily Crunch for December 11, 2020. The big story: Hyundai acquires 80% stake in Boston Robotics Boston Robotics is behind a number of impressive […]
A new robot created by researchers at Northwestern University looks and behaves like a tiny aquatic animal, and could serve a variety of functions, including moving things place to place, catalyzing chemical reactions, delivering therapeutics and much more. This new soft robot honestly looks a heck of a lot like […]
Sometimes it’s just not worth it to try to top Mother Nature. Such seems to have been the judgment by engineers at the University of Washington, who, deploring the absence of chemical sensors as fine as a moth’s antennas, opted to repurpose moth biology rather than invent new human technology. […]
Residents of Shenzhen will see truly driverless cars on the road starting Thursday. AutoX, a four-year-old startup backed by Alibaba, MediaTek and Shanghai Motors, is deploying a fleet of 25 unmanned vehicles in downtown Shenzhen, marking the first time any autonomous driving car in China tests without safety drivers or […]