Diligent Robotics Bringing Autonomous Mobile Manipulation to Hospitals

To experience the state-of-the-art in autonomous mobile manipulation, you'll want to find some well-funded academic lab to visit. Or maybe check out Google, or Amazon, or Toyota Research, or drop in on the RoboCup@Home competition. Really, the only other place you're likely to find an autonomous mobile manipulator is in a relatively structured environment in a factory or warehouse, and even that is pretty rare. Mobile manipulation is super hard, especially when you try to do it in a less structured environment which may be full of all sorts of horribly unpredictable things (like humans). Diligent Robotics, a startup founded by Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu, is undaunted by the challenge of autonomous mobile manipulation in semi-structured environments.