March 22nd, 2012 is the day it all began. That's the day we officially incorporated the Open Source Robotics Foundation, the origin of what we now call Open Robotics. The prospect of starting a company is both scary and exciting; but starting an open-source company in a niche as specialized as robotics, now that is terrifying and exhilarating, if not a little unorthodox. All we had was a dream, some open-source code, and some very smart friends, a whole lot of them. We also had the wind at our backs.

OAKLAND, California, Dec. 14, 2020 /Press Release/ -- Silicon Valley Robotics, the world's largest cluster of innovation in robotics, announces the inaugural'Good Robot' Industry Awards, celebrating the robotics, automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that will help us solve global challenges. These 52 companies and individuals have all contributed to innovation that will improve the quality of our lives, whether it's weed-free pesticide-free farming, like FarmWise or Iron Ox; supporting health workers and the elderly manage health care treatment regimes, like Catalia Health or Multiply Labs; or reimagining the logistics industry so that the transfer of physical goods becomes as efficient as the transfer of information, like Cruise, Embark, Matternet and Zipline. The categories Innovation, Vision and Commercialization represent the stages robotics companies go through, firstly with an innovative technology or product, then with a vision to change the world (and occasionally the investment to match), and finally with real evidence of customer traction. The criteria for our Commercialization Award is achieving $1 million in revenue, which is a huge milestone for a startup building a new invention. Tessa Lau, Founder and CEO of Dusty Robotics, an Innovation Awardee said "We're almost there. Dusty Robotics' FieldPrinter automates the painstaking, time-consuming process of marking building plans in the field, replacing a traditional process using measuring tape and chalk lines that hasn't changed in 5000 years. The company's vision of creating robot-powered tools for the modern construction workforce resonates strongly with commercial construction companies. Dusty's robot fleet is now in production, producing highly accurate layouts in record time on every floor of two multi-family residential towers going up in San Francisco. The SVR'Good Robot' Industry Awards also highlight diverse robotics companies. In our Visionary Category, Zoox is the first billion dollar company led by an African-American woman, Aicha Evans, and Robust AI shows diversity at every level of the organization. Diversity of thought will be critical as Robust AI tackles the challenge of building a cognitive engine for robotics that incorporates common sense reasoning. "Robotics and AI will shape the next century in the same way the Industrial revolution shaped the 20th century.

For more than a century, factories and warehouses have depended on forklifts to move heavy objects from one place to another. Roboticist Melonee Wise, founder and chief executive of Fetch Robotics, thinks fully autonomous robots could do a better job. In a conversation with Forbes, she shared a sneak peek of a new version of her giant Freight bots that has the ability to pick up items from one place and drop them off at another with no humans involved. Fetch intends to debut the new Freight 500, called CartConnect500, which can lug up to 500 kilograms (or 1,100 pounds) at the Modex 2020 trade show in Atlanta on March 9. A fully autonomous version of the Freight 1,500, which can haul up to 1,500 kilograms (or 3,300 pounds), is in development and likely will launch later this year.

Evan Ackerman is a journalist who has been covering robotics (and some other stuff) for the last 11 years. Last time he counted, he'd written well over 6,000 articles, which seems like a lot. Tim Smith is the CEO of Element Public Relations, a boutique PR firm in San Francisco specializing in emerging technologies. Element has particular expertise in robotics, given their work with Willow Garage, Open Robotics, Fetch Robotics, Simbe Robotics, and others. For this article, Evan and Tim sent each other some questions about what it's like for a journalist to work with PR firms, and what it's like for PR firms to work with journalists.

Science fiction is the siren song of hard science. How many innocent young students have been lured into complex, abstract science, technology, engineering, or mathematics because of a reckless and irresponsible exposure to Arthur C. Clarke at a tender age? Yet Arthur C. Clarke has a very famous quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A magic leap that would change the world. They could match us in dexterity and speed, perceive the world around them as we do, and be programmed to do, well, more or less anything we can do.

Ten years ago today, an engineer at Silicon Valley robotics lab Willow Garage published a new code repository on SourceForge. The repository, made publicly available to anyone in the world who wanted to access it, hosted the codebase for a new project Willow was working on: ROS. The ROS code repo, set up by Ken Conley, ROS platform manager at Willow, on November 7, 2007 at 4:07:42 PT, was the first time the term ROS was used as a formal, public designation for Willow's Robot Operating System project. Choosing an exact date for the 10th anniversary of ROS is a little bit tricky, because what we know as ROS today is both older and younger than this: The concept of a robot operating system started at Stanford University, evolved through Willow Garage, and now resides with Open Robotics. It's a complicated story that has shaped much of the robotics industry in recent years, and as robotics research makes the difficult transition to companies and products, the influence of ROS is becoming even more pronounced. Over the last several weeks, IEEE Spectrum has been speaking with many of the people who helped shape ROS, from its origins as part of Stanford's Personal Robotics Program to Willow Garage and its PR2 Beta Program, and beyond. Of course, there are many other people who contributed to ROS, and we weren't able to talk to them all. This is our initial effort to put together an oral history and tell as much of the story of ROS as we can, in the words of the people who were there, making it happen. Eric Berger: Before ROS itself was a concept, Keenan Wyrobek and I were working in Ken Salisbury's lab at Stanford, running a project called the Personal Robotics Program. We had two things that we were trying to do: Build a hardware platform, and build open-source software tools with the fundamental goal of building a robotics development platform. We were grad students, the problems we saw around us were grad student problems, and we saw grad students in robotics wasting a whole lot of time. People who are good at one part of the robotics stack are usually crippled by another part--your task planning is good, but you don't know anything about vision; your hardware is decent, but you don't know anything about software.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Ten years ago, while struggling to bring the vision of the "Linux of Robotics" to reality, I was inspired by the origin stories of other transformative endeavors. In this post I want to share some untold parts of the early story of the Robot Operating System, or ROS, to hopefully inspire those of you currently pursuing your "crazy" ideas. This origin story starts when Eric Berger, my partner of seven years on this project, and I were starting our PhDs at Stanford.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. A new RoboBee from Harvard can swim underwater, and then launch itself into the air with a microrocket and fly away. At the millimeter scale, the water's surface might as well be a brick wall.

A group of Silicon Valley roboticists who developed Shakey, a pioneer mobile robot project, gathered last night at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., to dedicate the tall, wheeled machine as an IEEE Milestone. Joining the group were other robotics visionaries, IEEE officers and local IEEE section members, and fans of computing history. Shakey, developed at SRI International between 1966 and 1972, was honored as the world's first mobile, intelligent robot. "Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center developed the world's first mobile, intelligent robot, SHAKEY. It could perceive its surroundings, infer implicit facts from explicit ones, create plans, recover from errors in plan execution, and communicate using ordinary English. SHAKEY's software architecture, computer vision, and methods for navigation and planning proved seminal in robotics and in the design of web servers, automobiles, factories, video games, and Mars rovers."

In 1961, a robotic arm nicknamed Unimate joined the General Motors assembly line to perform basic welding tasks that were unpleasant and particularly dangerous for humans. The 4000-pound, six-axis robot ran off of magnetic tape. "If you start with Unimate," says Melonee Wise, CEO of Fetch Robotics, an industrial robotics startup that received a $20M investment from SoftBank in June, "you see that industrial robots were developed and entered the workforce based on a very specific way of thinking." Though subsequent robots would achieve greater dexterity, strength, and speed, Unimate served as the proto-model. For the next half century most industrial robots were caged-off behemoths that handled repeatable tasks adroitly but required costly physical reconfiguration to take on new tasks or change operating environments.