International

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.

In a paper published in the Canadian Journal of Recreation Therapy, University of Utah researcher Rhonda Nelson and graduate student Rebecca Westenskow developed a protocol for using robotic pets with older adults with dementia. The protocol uses a low-cost robotic pet, establishes ideal session lengths and identifies common participant responses to the pets to aid in future research.

The convergence of AI and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and solutions (AIoT) is leading to “thinking” networks and systems that are becoming increasingly more capable of solving a wide range of problems across a diverse number of industry verticals. AI adds value to IoT through machine learning and improved decision-making. IoT adds value to AI through connectivity, signaling, and data exchange.

Researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) implemented a non-verbal Turing test that shows that people interacting with the humanoid robot iCub were not able to tell whether the robot was human-controlled or pre-programmed.

A miniaturized robot invented by Nebraska Engineering Professor Shane Farritor may soon work in space. NASA has awarded the University of Nebraska-Lincoln $100,000 through the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) at the University of Nebraska Omaha to ready the surgical robot for a 2024 test mission aboard the International Space Station. 

The new global economic reality, combined with an unprecedented labour shortage, is encouraging companies to reconsider sustainability strategies. Until recently, sustainability has been synonymous with environmental goals for many businesses and, as a result, treated as an add on to corporate strategy. Sustainability can no longer be considered in isolation. 

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.