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Editors from The Robot Report attended the 2023 ProMat event in Chicago. In episode 109 of The Robot Report Podcast, co-hosts Steve Crowe and Mike Oitzman discuss the news and stories from the event. Also in this week’s episode, Mike highlights news related to the future of AI and robotics from the recent Nvidia GTC event.

ProMat 2023 Review

New robotics companies at the show included:

• Mushiny
• Multiway Robotics
• Quiktron
• SEER
• Tuskrobots
• Slip Robotics
• Pickle Robots

The most interesting robotics solutions at the show:

• Autonomous forklifts were everywhere on the show floor
• Agility Robotics demoed the latest iteration of Digit robot
• RightHand Robotics’ demoed a new suction cup switcher
• Boston Dynamics Stretch trailer unloading demo worked well
• Slip robotics had a new, novel trailer-loading/unloading AMR-based solution
• Locus One Interoperability was a key new feature of LocusOne software
• Verve Motion exosuit is a solution to warehouse worker fatigue

For a complete summary of our editor’s picks for robotics at ProMat 2023, check out this story.

NVIDIA news this week:

• Omniverse Cloud for enterprises is now available as a platform as a service (PaaS) for compute-intensive workloads like synthetic data generation.
• Issac ROS DP3 release adds new perception capabilities and open-source modules
• New LIDAR-based grid localizer package
• New people detection support in the NVBLOX package
• GPU-accelerated 3D reconstruction for collision avoidance
• Updated VSLAM and depth perception GEM
• Source release of NITROS, NVIDIAs ROS 2 hardware acceleration implementation
• New Isaac ROS benchmark suite built
• The Robot Report story on Nvidia GTC
• NOTEWORTHY: Fireside chat between Jenson and Ilya Sutskever, Co-founder and Chief Scientist, OpenAI (Nvidia GTC site)