Robotics is a rapidly growing and changing industry. Each week we put together a collection of stories to help keep you up to date. Unfortunately, we can't cover everything each week, but we try to provide updates that we think are relevant to your career in robotics.
2023 is clearly the year of the humanoid robot. Multiple companies have made announcements this year that they will be manufacturing commercially available humanoid robots. Agility Robotics had one of the biggest announcements of the year this week when they announced that they are building the world's first humanoid factory. Although other companies developing humanoid robots will certainly have factories to manufacture them, it is unlikely that they will be manufactured on the same scale as Agility Robotics has planned. This new facility in Salem, Oregon claims to be able to produce more than 10,000 robots per year. To put it into perspective how big this is, there were approximately 44,100 robots ordered in 2022 according to the Association for Advancing Automation (A3).
LimX Dynamics has a commercially available wheeled quadruped robot, W1. LimX Dynamics is a Shenzhen, China-based company that develops legged robot hardware and supporting software. Although Swiss-Mile, a spinoff of ETH Zurich, has demonstrated a wheeled version of the ANYmal from ANYbotics, it has not been made commercially available. This would make the W1 from LimX Dynamics the first commercially available wheeled quadruped.
Earlier this year FERNRIDE, an electric yard trucking company, announced that it raised $31 million in Series A. This week Fernride announced that it brought in an additional $19 million to its Series A funding. This brings FERNRIDE's Series A funding to a total of $50 million. Hendrik Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Fernride, believes that these investments will fund their ambitious growth plans to become a global category leader for autonomous electric trucking.
Nicholas Kirsch is an employee of Sarcos Technology and Robotics Corporation. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely his own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Sarcos Technology and Robotics Corporation, its affiliates, or any other entity.
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