Your future school and home STEAM toy selection has compressed: odds are, it’ll be made by Sphero. Two of the biggest players in the educational electronics space are merging. Sphero has acquired Littlebits, with plans to possibly move into new product territories, the company announced this morning. Littlebits, founded in 2011, sells a number of …
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Starship Technologies launched a new service earlier this year to deliver food and groceries at two US universities using self-driving robots. It’s now planning on doing a whole lot more. The San Francisco-based startup announced Tuesday it will expand this service to 100 universities over the next two years, thanks to an infusion of $40 million in new funding. The …
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Postmates will be getting a permit to test its sidewalk delivery robots in San Francisco, according to a report. San Francisco Public Works will let the company that’s behind the food-delivery app run tests of the service, TechCrunch reported Wednesday. The San Francisco Public Works confirmed the permit has not yet been issued, but will be. Postmates had originally partnered …
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Next time you hear “Cleanup on aisle 5,” it could be a robot making that observation. AT&T is working on 5G autonomous robots for retail stores that would identify any out-of-stock, mispriced or misplaced products in a store, as well as finding store hazards. AT&T has partnered with Badger Technologies for the project, which was announced Tuesday. 5G, the next-generation mobile technology, …
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Take a five-minute walk behind Qualcomm’s main office in San Diego and you’ll find an unlikely kind of lab. The cavernous room, previously used for storing office furniture and boxes, has become the mobile chip giant’s testing ground for new wireless technologies, where it’s working on 5G in ways you may not be expecting. While 5G means super-high speeds on our …
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Sean Scott is almost poetic when describing his intense interest in sidewalks. “Each sidewalk is like a snowflake,” Scott, who’s soft-spoken with a friendly smile, told me with a bit of excitement in his eyes. “Because the textures are different, the way they’re laid out is different, what we see on the sidewalk is different.” Scott, vice president of the …
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Amazon’s newest helping hand is a 2-foot-tall orange robot. The Pegasus drive robot technology, which will join the ranks of Amazon’s Kiva robots, is already helping workers move individual packages at a sorting center in Denver, the company said Wednesday at its re:MARS AI conference in Las Vegas. Amazon plans to roll out the program at more sorting centers later this summer. The …
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When 5G arrives in force, it won’t just be for you. It’ll be for the robots, too. Or maybe more precisely, for you and the robots working together. That was the point of one of the demonstrations Thursday at Verizon’s 5G lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a knee-high humanoid robot trundled up and down several steps and along the length …
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At CES 2019 the biggest topic, almost by accident, was sex tech. That’s because the governing body of the event revoked its Innovation Award on realizing the company behind the winning robotics technology makes sex tech products. That company, Lora DiCarlo, makes a device that taps advanced microrobotics to give women hands-free orgasms. The company still made an appearance at a …
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Robotics company Anki will close its doors on Wednesday. The San Francisco-based maker of adorable mini-robots Vector and Cosmo will lay off its entire staff, according to Recode, which reported that CEO Boris Sofman made the announcement at an all-hands meeting on Monday. Nearly 200 employees will receive only a week of severance pay, the report noted. In the days …
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