Pieter Werner

Blue White Robotics, a platform that provides Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) for farms to run themselves autonomously, announced $37M in Series B funding. They will use this new funding to increase the rapid adoption of autonomous farming, drive new US sales, and attract talent for their international team.

In the future, socially interactive robots could help seniors age in place or assist residents of long-term care facilities with their activities of daily living. But will people actually accept advice or instructions from a robot? A new study from University of Toronto Engineering suggests that the answer hinges on how that robot behaves. 

Scientists at Cornell University have created cell-size robots that can be powered and steered by ultrasound waves. Despite their tiny size, these micro-robotic swimmers –  whose movements were inspired by bacteria and sperm – could one day be a formidable new tool for targeted drug delivery.

Bright Data, has released new research that highlights the increased role bots are playing in automating key corporate functions, including customer service, web data collections and more. The research, carried out by Vanson Bourne, surveyed US and UK decision-makers from financial services, IT, and technology organizations. It uncovered clear demand in both regions for enhanced regulation to drive effective, compliant and responsible bot usage.

At the New York Climate Week and the UN General Assembly Energi.AI is launched, an initiative to generate intelligent software solutions for businesses that want to reduce their carbon footprint.  The goal of Energi.AI is to ensure 10 million companies are carbon negative by 2030.

As labor issues persist, Universal Robots will show PACK EXPO attendees automated solutions for hard-to-staff tasks such as box erecting and palletizing. Powering many of these applications is the company’s most popular cobot, the UR10e, now able to lift 25% more.

Kryon, provider of robotic process automation (RPA) and process discovery, announced the launch of a free offering of its Kryon Process Discovery tool. This cloud-native Software-as-a-Service Process Discovery tool is developed to help business teams automatically uncover blind spots and reveal hidden productivity bottlenecks.

Loop Robots, a European mobile robot company headquartered in Delft, the Netherlands, announced the close of $2M seed investment by a group of private entrepreneurial investors led by Nanotech Ventures and Locapes Investment Fund.

China’s cloud infrastructure market grew 54% year on year in Q2 2021 to US$6.6 billion, led by Tencent Cloud, which grew 92%. Tencent Cloud accounted for nearly 19% of total cloud infrastructure spending in China, but remained third behind Alibaba Cloud and Huawei Cloud, and ahead of Baidu AI Cloud. The four Chinese Cloud Titans managed to maintain their dominance of the market, collectively growing 56% to account for 80% of total cloud spending.

Researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology combined label-free microscopic imaging with artificial intelligence to quickly detect and classify SARS-CoV-2.