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Softbank-Backed Brain Corp. Expands Its Robot "Brain" Beyond Floor Cleaning To Autonomous Delivery
Brain Corp., a Softbank-backed firm that makes autonomous systems for robotic floor cleaners, said today that it was expanding into the robotic delivery space. As a first step, the San Diego-based company introduced a proof-of-concept delivery robot, powered by its software brain, called BrainOs, which is capable of towing carts in factories, warehouses and stores. It expects to launch commercially early next year.
Eugene Izhikevich, Brain's cofounder and CEO, told Forbes that the launch is of one of many types of robots that he hopes to enable with BrainOS with help from the company's venture capital funding, which now totals $125 million. "It is my dream to have hundreds of robots in a very short period of time," said Izhikevich, a 51-year-old computational neuroscientist, who worked in academia before starting the company. "Launching one per year may not satisfy my dream. I'm too impatient."
Brain gained attention late last year when Walmart agreed to roll out 360 floor-scrubbing robots enabled by the BrainOS operating system in its stores.
The market for commercial floor-cleaning equipment is large—estimated at roughly $5 billion a year globally—and macroeconomic forces favor the adoption of autonomous solutions. Last month, Forbes profiled startup Avidbots, based near Toronto, whose young immigrant founders have built commercial floor-cleaning robots from scratch and sold a few hundred of them to be deployed in airports and shopping centers.
Also at TechCrunch.
Previously: Walmart to Introduce Floor-Mopping Robots; Amazon Wants to Sell Alcohol at Cashierless Store
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday April 06 2019, @07:55AM (2 children)
Have you ever seen (from a short distance) or been inside a giant Amazon warehouse? I'm guessing "maybe" and "probably not". Mere mortals are kept far away from the machinery of capitalism, save for a chosen few. Those few are being supplemented or replaced by robots, and nearly every movement they make will be tracked.
Things will have to get pretty bad before people start taking note of these places and committing themselves to destroying them. A minimum amount of bread/circuses/UBI could prevent them from getting angry. Health care is optional because you can't commit arson when you're too sick to move.
Boss man wants to design hundreds of types of robots. Maybe he will make a good version of ED-209 to guard the perimeter of facilities.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 06 2019, @06:59PM
Remote-controlled drone?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 06 2019, @10:48PM
We could also just find more productive work for those people who would be affected most. My view on this has always been that the places with this sort of problem are developed world societies. They haven't been serious about addressing the employment/well being of the poor, or they wouldn't make people so expensive to employ.
Already have that in most of the world.
And you can consume more health care than your society can afford, no matter how wealthy it is. Something has to restrict how much health care one receives. And getting what you can afford is as good a measure as any.