Amazon will acquire iRobot, provider of cleaning robots for the home. Amazon will acquire iRobot for $61 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $1.7 billion, including iRobot’s net debt. Completion of the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval by iRobot’s shareholders and regulatory approvals. On completion, Colin Angle will remain as CEO of iRobot.

Cloud infrastructure services continued to be in high demand in Q2 2022. Worldwide spending increased 33% year on year to US$62.3 billion, driven by a range of factors, including demand for data analytics and machine learning, data center consolidation, application migration, cloud-native development and service delivery.

Pudu Robotics unveiled its newest offering, the PuduBot 2. Featuring a range of upgrades, this new generation of universal delivery robots offers better environment adaptability, stronger sensors, higher battery power capacity, and superior stability to the first-generation PuduBot launched in 2017.

Vection Technologies, provider of 3D and virtual reality (VR) solutions for enterprises, has unveiled 3DFrame for Webex by Cisco. 3Dframe is the no-code metaverse presentations App that brings Webex meetings’ content to life.

I have always loved technology. When I was young, growing up only a few kilometers from where the Universal Robots headquarters is today, I remember finding a bug in a soccer video game I played, and I tried for months and months to make a better game. Even though it turned out to be much harder than I thought, and I ended up with nothing, it got me into coding, which was a learned skill that followed me for many years ahead. 

ABB is expanding its FlexPicker Delta robot portfolio with the IRB 365. With five axes and 1.5kg payload, the IRB 365 is both flexible and the fastest in its class for reorientating packaged lightweight products such as cookies, chocolates, peppers, candies, small bottles, and parcels.  

UiPath has acquired Re:infer, a natural language processing (NLP) company focused on unstructured documents and communications. Founded in 2015 by Ph.D. scientists from the Centre for Artificial Intelligence at University College London, Re:infer uses machine learning (ML) technology to mine context from communication messages and transform them into actionable data. 

FANUC, supplier of CNCs, robotics and ROBOMACHINEs, announces a West Campus expansion that will push its operational space in Oakland County, Michigan to nearly two million square feet. The construction will include a 655,000 square foot state-of-the-art facility to house manufacturing, engineering and R&D projects.

Rice University mechanical engineers are using legs of deceased spiders as mechanical grippers that can blend into natural environments while picking up objects, like other insects, that outweigh them. An open-access study in Advanced Science outlines the process by which Preston and lead author Faye Yap harnessed a spider’s physiology in a first step toward a novel area of research they call “necrobotics.”

Universal Robots has reported Q2 revenue of USD 83 million. Universal Robots highlights particularly strong growth in global welding demand as being key to its success in the first half of the year. The company has also increased its revenue from Original Equipment Manufacturer [OEM] channels.