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Bob Macintosh worked at Kuka for 12 years. Now semi-retired and writing because he has things to say.
IndustrialPrime Day deals on Echos and Ring cameras are fine, but let's not confuse consumer gadgets with the serious robotics work happening in warehouses.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 25 Jun · 3 min
IndustrialBig names at the World Economic Forum in Dalian are bullish on China's AI-driven economy. Bob's been around long enough to know bullish doesn't always mean built.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 25 Jun · 4 min
New research out of arXiv shows mobile robots getting genuinely useful semantic maps of their environments. Bob Macintosh has been waiting for this for about twenty years.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 25 Jun · 4 min
ObsGraph and RAVEN tackle the same old problem of robot spatial memory from different angles. Bob's seen a lot of attempts at this. These ones are interesting.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 25 Jun · 4 min
Bob Macintosh went looking for robotics news and ended up staring at Kindle deals. It happens. Here's what's actually worth your attention this week.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 24 Jun · 4 min
The layoff headlines are real, but new hiring data suggests engineers are holding their ground better than almost anyone else in tech.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 24 Jun · 4 min
Qualcomm's acquisition of Modular signals a serious push into data center AI, and it's worth paying attention to what that means for the edge computing stack powering modern warehouses.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 24 Jun · 3 min
Oracle's workforce dropped by 21,000 in 12 months, with the company citing AI as a factor. Bob Macintosh has seen this story before, and he's got questions.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 23 Jun · 3 min
The SpaceX share slide isn't my usual beat, but when a company that size starts rattling, the ripple effects reach further than most people think.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 22 Jun · 3 min
Project Kilby will eventually push out 2.67 gigawatts of natural-gas power for what could be one of the biggest data centers in the US. The AI infrastructure buildout isn't slowing down.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 22 Jun · 4 min
Paris hosted a parade of AI heavyweights last week. Some of it was interesting. Some of it was the usual conference fog.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 20 Jun · 4 min
Everyone's framing this as a Nvidia rivalry story. Bob thinks that's the wrong lens entirely.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 20 Jun · 4 min
Bob Macintosh just wants to type a sentence without a chatbot offering to finish it for him.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 20 Jun · 3 min
A pair of recent robotics papers tackle something most automation engineers quietly wrestle with: what should a robot do when it's not sure?
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 19 Jun · 4 min
Everyone's talking about phone addiction and attention spans. Bob thinks the real automation story is somewhere else entirely.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 19 Jun · 4 min
Two new papers out of arXiv suggest the gap between lab scores and real-world deployment is bigger than most people admit. Bob Macintosh is not surprised.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 19 Jun · 4 min
The FCC just removed a narrow category of toy drones from its Covered List. It's a small move, but it tells you something about where the regulatory wind is blowing.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 18 Jun · 4 min
A batch of arXiv preprints on simulation environments, 3D scene understanding, and robot memory systems suggests the gap between training robots in sim and deploying them in the real world is finally getting smaller.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 18 Jun · 4 min
Apple wants to put cameras in your earbuds by 2027. Bob Macintosh isn't sure who this is actually for.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 18 Jun · 3 min
The HPE AI Factory expansion announced at HPE Discover isn't just a server upgrade. It's a signal that agentic AI is moving out of the lab and into production environments.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 18 Jun · 4 min
A pair of fresh arXiv papers tackle the unglamorous problem of navigating urban pavements. Bob Macintosh thinks the research community is finally asking the right questions.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 18 Jun · 4 min
Three new papers on LiDAR-inertial navigation caught my eye this week, and if you run autonomous vehicles in large facilities, you should probably pay attention.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 18 Jun · 4 min
A French startup backed by Eric Schmidt just unveiled a headless, legless humanoid. Bob Macintosh thinks they might be onto something.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 17 Jun · 4 min
A leaked price tag has everyone excited about Slate's bare-bones pickup. Bob's been around long enough to know that cheap and competitive aren't always the same thing.
Robert "Bob" Macintosh · 17 Jun · 3 min
