Service robot sales set new records last year, led by logistics robots at 110% sales growth and 28% growth in medicaal robots, reported the International Federation of Robotics.

Toyota Research Institute demonstrated its research into machine learning, simulation, and manipulation in a virtual open house, which included a ceiling-mounted kitchen gantry robot.

OrionStar said its new Robotic Coffee Master has two six-axis arms and relies on 3,000 hours of machine learning to simulate master-level brewing techniques.

Omron Asia Pacific said its partnership with Techmetics Robotics has produced an autonomous mobile robot designed for safe and automated disinfection of public spaces indoors.

China-based Pudu Technology has raised $15 million to continuing developing and deploying its service robots for the restaurant and hospitality industries.

Violet, a new disinfection robot rapidly developed by Akara Robotics, uses Intel Movidius technology to detect humans and avoid exposure to UV radiation.

Companies including Rocos are preparing to deploy service robots including humanoids at hotels and other venues around the 2022 Beijiing Winter Olympics.

Cheetah Mobile and OrionStar quickly repurposed more than 100 service robots as Smart Epidemic Prevention and Control Robots and said they have performed well in Chinese hospitals.

As interest in autonomous mobile robots grows for applications ranging from logistics and retail to healthcare, so too have the fortunes of AMR enablers such as Brain Corp.

Ripcord is applying industrial automation lessons to the digitization of millions of paper records to help business processes be more efficient, remotely accessible, and less wasteful.

The Laundroid consumer robot, which has been at CES for the past few years, hit the usual snags of price and performance, but other household robots will come.

by Frank Tobe, Publisher, The Robot Report with Manoj Sahi, roboticist and educator, India   Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies, wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell highly specialized devices for business use, and a fast-growing number of start-up companies produce innovative…

by Frank Tobe and Manoj Sahi The consumer robotic market has been on a roller coaster ride of evolution and market penetration. The amount of money companies and consumers were paying for robots and the features that they were getting ultimately did not match up. Low-cost service robots have similar problems. The technologies and robot…

Where are the robots? Where’s that $100 billion industry we’ve seen in the forecasts? Since the 1980’s we’ve seen robots outside of the factory – vacuums, drones, bomb disposal devices, embedded systems for cars, hazardous materials and location monitoring bots – but expected to see more. Our expectations are so much higher than what’s thus…

Sang-Rok Oh, KIST advisor In a presentation at InnoRobo, the Innovation Robotics Summit held March 23-25 in Lyon, France, Sang-Rok Oh, from the South Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), and an advisor to the government on r-learning, described the early childhood project that many of us have read about. Most of the stories,…