Amazon's Smart Home Push Is Not Industrial Automation, and We Should Stop Pretending It Is

Prime 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

Amazon Drops $13 Billion More on India AI Infrastructure as Jassy Bets Big on Fast Commerce

Amazon's CEO made his first India trip and left behind a $13 billion AI commitment and an aggressive quick-commerce expansion. The numbers are real. The execution is the hard part.

James Chen · 25 Jun · 6 min

Robot Arms That Teach Themselves: Seven New Papers Push Imitation Learning Forward

A wave of arXiv preprints this week tackles one of manipulation's oldest problems: how do you get a robot to learn from imperfect, incomplete, or just plain missing data?

James Chen · 25 Jun · 5 min

Separate research teams have published fault-tolerant control frameworks for legged robots this week, and the approaches are different enough to be worth comparing.

James Chen · 25 Jun · 5 min

A burst of new research tackles one of robotics' oldest hardware headaches: how do you give a robot a reliable sense of touch without the sensors that keep breaking?

James Chen · 25 Jun · 6 min

Big 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

Automation is accelerating through apparel supply chains just as labor conditions are already deteriorating. That combination should worry more people than it does.

Mark Kowalski · 24 Jun · 5 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

Valve finally has pricing for its cube-shaped console, and the number is higher than most people expected. Here's what's going on.

Sarah Williams · 23 Jun · 4 min

The sources provided for this article are about Prime Day smartwatch deals. That has nothing to do with industrial automation. Here's why we're not running a fabricated piece.

James Chen · 23 Jun · 1 min

Meta is going down-market with its first own-brand smart glasses, cutting out Ray-Ban. For industrial automation, the more interesting question is whether any of this matters on the factory floor.

James Chen · 23 Jun · 4 min

The sources provided for this piece contain no robotics or automation news. Here's why that matters, and what we're doing about it.

James Chen · 23 Jun · 2 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

A senior portfolio manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investments says the AI spending boom is picking up speed, not plateauing, and that tech's rally has at least two more quarters of runway.

James Chen · 22 Jun · 6 min

A pair of new open-source trackers from SDU-VelKoTek use hybrid stochastic-deterministic methods to keep tabs on multiple moving targets, even when detectors are weak and occlusions are messy.

James Chen · 21 Jun · 6 min

Flow-based robot policies are powerful but produce latency that breaks real-time control. Three research teams just published different fixes, and the approaches are more distinct than the headlines suggest.

James Chen · 20 Jun · 5 min

A pair of arXiv papers tackle one of industrial robotics' nastiest unsolved problems: how do you get a robot to obey safety specifications when the world refuses to cooperate?

James Chen · 20 Jun · 8 min

The SpaceX debut is being called a 'distribution event' for private markets. For industrial automation companies still waiting on patient capital, the timing matters.

James Chen · 20 Jun · 5 min

Jeremy Grantham is comparing AI to the dot-com crash. He's not entirely wrong, but the coverage is missing the part that matters most for industrial automation.

James Chen · 19 Jun · 6 min