This webinar was presented live on Wednesday, October 2, 2019. Click below to watch it on demand.     In this webinar, we will dive into how to build a continuous integration pipeline using AWS RoboMaker. We show how customers can use AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild in conjunction with their AWS RoboMaker IDE to easily…

Microsoft introduced last fall an experimental release of the Robot Operating System (ROS) for Windows 10. This week during its Build conference in Seattle, Microsoft announced its ROS support is no longer an experiment: ROS is now generally available on Windows 10 IoT Enterprise. ROS, of course, is an open-source platform that provides robotics developers…

Open-source software for robots is becoming increasingly widespread in industry as well as academia. For some companies, the Robot Operation System (ROS) is already a competitive and innovative factor. The ROS-Industrial (ROS-I) Conference in Stuttgart, Germany, showed what developers and users are currently doing and why Amazon and Google are now using ROS for their…

The year is 2019, and we still don’t have the robots that we’ve imagined would help us with all the tedious and dangerous tasks that we have to suffer through. A lot has improved since the early days of robotics, but the autonomous intelligent robot is not here. And it looks like such a robotics…

The cloud robotics race is heating up. One month after it was revealed that a Google Cloud Robotics Platform is coming in 2019, a juggernaut of a competitor has released a similar solution. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of Amazon, has released its RoboMaker cloud robotics platform to give developers a centralized…

Open Robotics, the organization behind the robot operating system (ROS), announced a Technical Steering Committee (TSC) to, you guessed it, set the “technical direction for ROS 2.” That will start with determining the ROS 2 roadmap, developing core tools and libraries and establishing working groups to focus on important topics. Open Robotics says its wants to…

With the launch of the Collaborative Robotics Laboratory, the Southwest Research Institute solidifies its position as a leader for R&D and project work for groups adopting ROS and collaborative robots for industrial work. Synopsis On August 14, 2018, the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), a non-profit applied research and development organization located in San Antonio, Texas,…

By Frank Tobe, editor and publisher, The Robot Report UPDATED: October 6, 2013 CBS Evening News focuses on jobs aspect of deploying robots in American factories. Click to see. Small and medium shops and factories (SMEs) are an untapped marketplace for robotics and direly in need of automation to remain competitive in this global economy.…

By Frank Tobe, Editor and Publisher, The Robot Report For many years now Willow Garage has invested in open source and open platform robotics. Their goal has been a reflection of the vision of it’s founder (and chief funder) to advance the state of robotic technology in autonomous devices. And advance the state of robotics it…

Today’s robotics industry could use some strategic guidance,  particularly in the area of healthcare.  By Frank Tobe, Editor and Publisher, The Robot Report  It is clear to me that the next big markets for robotics are: SMEs (robot workers and co-workers in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) Medical and healthcare (nursing assistance, surgeon augmentation, operating room…

A version of this post originally appeared on Singularity Hub, June 6, 2012. By Frank Tobe, Editor and Publisher The Robot Report Robot manufacturers are beginning to shift theirattention from industrial to service robots. The robotics industry is on the cusp of a major transformation. Today’s factory robots are solitary precision instruments, mimicking the repertoire…

A version of this post originally appeared on Automaton, IEEE Spectrum’s robotics blog. By Frank Tobe, editor/publisher, The Robot Report What’s the best approach to building commercially successful robotics companies? Here are two arguments from two prominent people in the robotics industry: Identify a need that can be filled with a robotic solution in a large…

Pieter Abbeel was one of this year’s MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 (TR 35) award winners as was Brian Gerkey of Willow Garage. Pieter and his team at UC Berkeley programmed a robot to learn how to perform tasks such as folding laundry without detailed instructions. Brian oversees development of the Willow Garage open…