The Robot Report Podcast

Samantha Johnson, founder and CEO of Boston-based startup Tatum Robotics, describes the company's anthropomorphic robotic system designed to sign tactile sign languages for people with deafblindness - they can't hear or see. Johnson dives into the challenging system design and the opportunities for such technology. Samantha also discusses her passion for helping the deafblind community, educating us about some of the daily challenges of those living with deafblindness.

In this episode, we discuss the news of the shutdown of Argo AI and the state of autonomous driving, including the upcoming IAC race event. Mike interviews Covariant.AI CEO, Peter Chen, and they discuss the new CovariantOne RaaS solution, that's based on performance SLAs for the Covariant warehouse solution.

In this episode, we talk to Eliot Horowitz, founder and CEO of Viam Inc. Viam launched the open beta of its new robotics platform. Viam provides an open-source robot architecture that turns complex functionality into simple APIs, with an integrated cloud service to orchestrate production deployments. Co-hosts Steve Crowe and Mike Oitzman also discuss news of the week, includes the end of delivery robot testing with Amazon and Fedex.

This week, cohosts Steve Crowe and Mike Oitzman discuss the recent unveiling of the Tesla Optimus bipedal robot at the Tesla AI Days 2022 event. We also learn about the latest in warehouse and logistics automation in an interview with Swisslog USA President, Markus Schmidt.

This week, we talk with RoboTire CEO Victor Darolfi about automating tire-changing in auto shops. Victor explains the challenges of combining vision and robots to automate dirty, back-breaking work.

Co-hosts Steve Crowe and Mike Oitzman are joined by Dan Kara to preview and discuss the upcoming RoboBusiness and Field Robotics Engineering Forum. The events take place October 19-20, 2022 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. To register, go to robobusiness.com

Cohosts Steve Crowe and Mike Oitzman discuss the latest news about commercial UAVs, the recent FTC investigation of Amazon's pending acquisition of iRobot and Mike interviews Kishore Boyalakuntla, VP of products at automation provider Berkshire Grey

Michael Kohen, founder and CEO of Spark AI, joins the show. Michael discusses situations in which AI and machine learning still come up short for robotics systems and how his company's human-in-the-loop system helps solve edge cases in real-time. He shares specific real-world examples, including details about Spark AI's partnership with John Deere and its autonomous tractors. The podcast also discusses the top stories of the week, including the US government imposing restrictions on AMD and NVIDIA selling certain AI chipsets to China. We breakdown what this could mean for robotics.

Jessica Yip, co-founder and chief operating officer of Canadian startup A&K Robotics joins the podcast. She discusses A&K's autonomous, electric pods that are being tested at airports to move passengers with mobility issues around concourses. The podcast also recaps the stories of the week, including Chili's pausing a robotics pilot, Locus scoring a major win with GEODIS and more.

This week we get an update on the technology embedded within the Indy Autonomous Challenge racecars in a conversation with Joe Speed, plus we learn how Skyline Robotics is deploying robots to clean skyscraper windows in New York City.