Yep, Actuator is coming to you a day early — mostly because it felt a bit weird to drop the robotics newsletter right in the middle of the robotics conference….
Yep, Actuator is coming to you a day early — mostly because it felt a bit weird to drop the robotics newsletter right in the middle of the robotics conference. Good news for everyone who’s sick of me telling you to SIGN UP FOR FREE RIGHT HERE: This is the last you’ll be hearing that from me for a while. Of course, next week’s edition is going to be filled with some of the event’s highlights, but at least it’s not a sales pitch, right?
Endiatx – “Robot pills for hardcore telemedicine, initially for upper endoscopies.”
Gather AI – “The world’s first autonomous inventory monitoring platform for the supply chain using off-the-shelf drones.”
Touchlab – “A compliant “e-skin” sensor technology to give machines a sense of touch. Our latest e-skin, Triaxial, senses normal and shear forces, enabling novel functionalities such as slip detection (with autonomous compensation) and even object identification through touch alone.”
Mobilio – “A single sensor package that enables safe movement for 400M users of canes, walkers, crutches, and wheelchairs. The device senses the user’s environment to avoid hazards and the user’s movements to ensure proper device use.”
Congrats to all. We had a ton of submissions this year and our illustrious judges were impressed with everyone who made it into the pitch-off. Keep an eye on all of these startups.
We’ve been going hard on promotion in the lead-up to tomorrow’s big event. Over the past two weeks, I’ve recorded a special edisode of Equity with Alex about the overall state of the industry, we’ve done a pair of TechCrunch Lives with Rapid Robotics and Attabotics (plus investors Bee Partners and Forerunner Ventures) and I hosted two Twitter Spaces with Ayanna Howard/Ayah Bdeir and Colin Angle.
Those last few are going to be available soon as TechCrunch Live podcasts, but in the meantime, I’m going to be turning over the intro to this newsletter to some of the more interesting insights from the pair of Twitter Spaces, then on to what’s already been an exciting week in robotics.
Starting in chronological order, we’re kicking things off with the dean of The Ohio State University’s College of Engineering, Ayanna Howard, and littleBits founder/E14 partner, Ayah Bdeir.
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
What does research and academic collaboration look like in the era of remote work?
Ayanna Howard: One of the things in my research in particular, is human-robot interaction, which typically means you have to have humans and robots in same space [laughs]. In general, in the field, anyone who is doing studies and research where you’re observing humans and robotics interacting in the wild, you had to rethink your fundamental ways of doing research. It was a little hard for the community to figure out. It also meant there was a lot more research on how to do remote-based research on HRI.
Ayah, what drew you to the VC side of the fence?
Ayah Bdeir: Throughout my tenure at littleBits, I was always very engaged with the startup community, whether through founder circles or advising startups that are just starting out or doing some angel investing. The thing that I realized really quickly is that a lot of the entrepreneur journey is transferrable. A lot of the challenges we go through, a lot of the insights, a lot of the self-growth we have to go through, are common across industries.
Should universities and research institutes be doing more to foster startups?
AH: I think so, and it’s one of the things universities are starting to do a lot more. Prior to my being at Ohio State, I was at Georgia Tech, and there was Create-X. At Ohio State, we recently launched the President’s Buckeye Accelerator program to basically fund and mentor students. Think of it as a kind of incubator-type accelerator/VC fund for students. It’s important, but it’s not necessarily to launch companies to get acquired, it’s to teach students how to be entrepreneurial, follow their dreams and learn the hard lessons that allow them to grow.
Both of your startups were focused on the STEM space. What needs to be done to get more kids interested in the category?
AH: The challenge we have now is more about access. In certain demographics, in certain neighborhooods — areas like Silicon Valley or Boston — the kids know about it and are excited about it. Now there’s resources available to purchase products and things like that. When littleBits came out, there were very few things out there. Now you can go to any Toys “R” Us and you have two aisles around STEM. But I think it’s about access and how you provide this to under-resourced communities. That’s where the gap is.
AB: I couldn’t agree more. On one hand, I’m very proud of what early inventors in the space have done, including what littleBits has done at a time when there was very little awareness. At littleBits, we made it our mission to create a community of kids that are inventors, changemakers and really focus a lot on the diversity of our community and getting more girls and kids who have different learning abilities into the community. And I’m very proud of what we were able to do in that space, but as Ayanna was saying, access is problematic in many underserved communities and continues to be. Oftentimes these things are available in affluent communites, but aren’t in communites in need. Ever since the pandemic, I’ve been really concerned about, yes, how can we get these kids into STEM, but then what happens when they graduate university and go into the workplace and they are treated unfairly and not paid as much. Social pressures or work pressures can cause them to drop out.
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
Next up, a snippet of my conversation with iRobot co-founder and CEO, Colin Angle.
Was there anything the Roomba encountered in the real world that you weren’t prepared for the in the laboratory?
There have been some unique pieces of furniture that emerged as being just banes of our existence. I think that the old couch with a sagging mattress was something that was the bane of our existence for a long time because that lower down couch was soft enough that it wouldn’t activate the bumper until it was pushing down on the front of the robot with enough force to cause the robot to get stuck. Without a range sensor of some kind, shooting infrared underneath the couch is only so effective. That one was just an evil thing that many, many robots became wedged in. We’ve been able to bring front-facing cameras, and start solving that problem using imagery.
How much of a part of bringing Roomba into the real world was tempering user expectations around what a home robot can do?
The promise of robots has been with us forever. Rosie from the Jetsons — why can’t robots do this or that? In the consumer robot space, pre-Roomba (and arguably post-Roomba, as well), the world has struggled to find areas where a robot really delivers more value to the customer than it costs. There’s only so big of a market for cool or entertaining robots or a robot that delivers some convenience. Vaccuming was this wonderful thing where the original Roomba worked well enough that people felt that for the price — at least in the early adopter parts of the market place — it made a ton of sense.
Earlier this year, we saw Amazon’s approach to the space, Astro. It’s not a direct competitor to Roomba, it’s more of a traditional take on the humanoid robot.
I think that over time, I think Astro will be better understood for the value proposition and it will be optimized around a very clear home. Is it your mobile security system? That could be a place that it goes that proves out to be understandable and justifiable. For that price value equation, I think that it’s an impressive robot in many ways.
The last update that we had about the lawnmower Terra was in April 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic. Are there any updates on that front?
What we said in the latest call is that we are working on non-floor-cleaning robots. Interpret that as you will.
Image Credits: Intrinsic
I had another enlightening conversation with Intrinsic CEO Wendy Tan White. She’s someone I’ve been trying to chat up for a while and finally had the opportunity to discuss some of the Alphabet X graduate’s progress, including its recent acquisition of Vicarious. The teams are working together to launch a platform designed to make it easier to program robots, including “Python-level programming” and a built-in simulator. That’s set to launch later next year.
“We’re really about trying to unlock the economic potential of industrial robotics and give a lot more businesses and developers real access to it,” Tan White told me. “Not just AI specialists or robotics PhDs. Give access to more folks who can really build applications more quickly with it.”
Image Credits: Wing
Speaking of Alphabet X graduates, I also had the opportunity to talk to Wing’s newish CEO, Adam Woodworth, who recently showcased how the firm is diversifying its drone fleet to expand to additional delivery types.
“The existing system that we built is a really strong foundation. The existing payload capacity carries about 2.5 pounds of stuff,” he told me. “The range is about six miles. That works really well for most of the on-demand delivery use cases that we’re focused on. While that main operational thread has been running, we’ve had R&D portions of the company looking at what other use cases there might be and what other vehicles can we develop in this same family of aircraft to be able to poke around different parts of the delivery ecosystem.”
One of Wing’s chief competitors, Amazon, announced this week that it’s bringing deliveries to College Station, Texas, later this year. The company will be teaming with both the city and local Texas A&M University in its roll out.
Image Credits: Amazon
“Amazon’s new facility presents a tremendous opportunity for College Station to be at the forefront of the development of drone delivery technology,” said Mayor Karl Mooney in an official release. “We look forward to partnering with Amazon and Texas A&M and are confident that Amazon will be a productive, conscientious, and accountable participant in our community.”
Surgery robot from ForSight Robotics. Image Credits: ForSight Robotics
Not a ton of robotic raises this week, but Forsight Robotics grabbed a healthy $48 million Series A for its cataract surgery platform, Oryom — “daylight” in Hebrew, turns out. Surgery robots such as these are an important step toward helping level the playing field of access to procedures — and the company happened to choose an extremely popular one, with more than 28 million performed annually. Says co-founder and CEO, Daniel Glozman:
We are pleased to be able to advance our technology with this investment to bring robotics into the world of ophthalmic surgery to help millions of patients who have to wait unnecessarily for procedures while their eyesight deteriorates. Our goal is to democratize this highly sophisticated procedure, enabling patients around the world to easily access the treatment that can restore their vision.
Think of Syrius’s robots as mini autonomous driving bots that can maneuver narrow warehouse aisles and lift and put away parcels. The company sees itself more as a software than hardware firm, with proprietary algorithms that tell robots how to move indoors.
“We’re a software company first” seems to be the rallying cry of so many robotics firms these days. Hardware’s hard, turns out.
Image Credits: Carnegie Mellon University
Robotic learning is pretty darn hard, too. That’s why this is such a cool project from CMU — that and the fact that it presents a fascinating new take on home robotics. In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning, or WHIRL (a bit of a stretch as acronyms go, but what are you going to do?) uses videos of humans performing tasks to train an off-the-shelf mobile robotic arm to do simple home tasks like opening drawers and taking out the trash.
“Imitation is a great way to learn,” said Robotics Institute PhD student Shikhar Bah. “Having robots actually learn from directly watching humans remains an unsolved problem in the field, but this work takes a significant step in enabling that ability.”
There are some exciting potential applications here for the burgeoning eldercare robotics category. I’m excited to see how this one progresses.
Actuator is out for this week. See you Thursday for our big (and bigly free) robotics event.
Mathematicians use AI to identify emerging COVID-19 variants
Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants…
Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.
Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.
The framework combines dimension reduction techniques and a new explainable clustering algorithm called CLASSIX, developed by mathematicians at The University of Manchester. This enables the quick identification of groups of viral genomes that might present a risk in the future from huge volumes of data.
The study, presented this week in the journal PNAS, could support traditional methods of tracking viral evolution, such as phylogenetic analysis, which currently require extensive manual curation.
Roberto Cahuantzi, a researcher at The University of Manchester and first and corresponding author of the paper, said: “Since the emergence of COVID-19, we have seen multiple waves of new variants, heightened transmissibility, evasion of immune responses, and increased severity of illness.
“Scientists are now intensifying efforts to pinpoint these worrying new variants, such as alpha, delta and omicron, at the earliest stages of their emergence. If we can find a way to do this quickly and efficiently, it will enable us to be more proactive in our response, such as tailored vaccine development and may even enable us to eliminate the variants before they become established.”
Like many other RNA viruses, COVID-19 has a high mutation rate and short time between generations meaning it evolves extremely rapidly. This means identifying new strains that are likely to be problematic in the future requires considerable effort.
Currently, there are almost 16 million sequences available on the GISAID database (the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data), which provides access to genomic data of influenza viruses.
Mapping the evolution and history of all COVID-19 genomes from this data is currently done using extremely large amounts of computer and human time.
The described method allows automation of such tasks. The researchers processed 5.7 million high-coverage sequences in only one to two days on a standard modern laptop; this would not be possible for existing methods, putting identification of concerning pathogen strains in the hands of more researchers due to reduced resource needs.
Thomas House, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at The University of Manchester, said: “The unprecedented amount of genetic data generated during the pandemic demands improvements to our methods to analyse it thoroughly. The data is continuing to grow rapidly but without showing a benefit to curating this data, there is a risk that it will be removed or deleted.
“We know that human expert time is limited, so our approach should not replace the work of humans all together but work alongside them to enable the job to be done much quicker and free our experts for other vital developments.”
The proposed method works by breaking down genetic sequences of the COVID-19 virus into smaller “words” (called 3-mers) represented as numbers by counting them. Then, it groups similar sequences together based on their word patterns using machine learning techniques.
Stefan Güttel, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester, said: “The clustering algorithm CLASSIX we developed is much less computationally demanding than traditional methods and is fully explainable, meaning that it provides textual and visual explanations of the computed clusters.”
Roberto Cahuantzi added: “Our analysis serves as a proof of concept, demonstrating the potential use of machine learning methods as an alert tool for the early discovery of emerging major variants without relying on the need to generate phylogenies.
“Whilst phylogenetics remains the ‘gold standard’ for understanding the viral ancestry, these machine learning methods can accommodate several orders of magnitude more sequences than the current phylogenetic methods and at a low computational cost.”
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
DOI
10.1073/pnas.2317284121
Article Title
Unsupervised identification of significant lineages of SARS-CoV-2 through scalable machine learning methods
While the size of the United States makes it hard for it to compete with the inter-city train access available in places like Japan and many European countries, Amtrak trains are a very popular transportation option in certain pockets of the country — so much so that the country’s national railway company is expanding its Northeast Corridor by more than one million seats.
Running from Boston all the way south to Washington, D.C., the route is one of the most popular as it passes through the most densely populated part of the country and serves as a commuter train for those who need to go between East Coast cities such as New York and Philadelphia for business.
Veronika Bondarenko captured this photo of New York’s Moynihan Train Hall.
Veronika Bondarenko
Amtrak launches new routes, promises travelers ‘additional travel options’
Earlier this month, Amtrak announced that it was adding four additional Northeastern routes to its schedule — two more routes between New York’s Penn Station and Union Station in Washington, D.C. on the weekend, a new early-morning weekday route between New York and Philadelphia’s William H. Gray III 30th Street Station and a weekend route between Philadelphia and Boston’s South Station.
According to Amtrak, these additions will increase Northeast Corridor’s service by 20% on the weekdays and 10% on the weekends for a total of one million additional seats when counted by how many will ride the corridor over the year.
“More people are taking the train than ever before and we’re proud to offer our customers additional travel options when they ride with us on the Northeast Regional,” Amtrak Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Eliot Hamlisch said in a statement on the new routes. “The Northeast Regional gets you where you want to go comfortably, conveniently and sustainably as you breeze past traffic on I-95 for a more enjoyable travel experience.”
Here are some of the other Amtrak changes you can expect to see
Amtrak also said that, in the 2023 financial year, the Northeast Corridor had nearly 9.2 million riders — 8% more than it had pre-pandemic and a 29% increase from 2022. The higher demand, particularly during both off-peak hours and the time when many business travelers use to get to work, is pushing Amtrak to invest into this corridor in particular.
To reach more customers, Amtrak has also made several changes to both its routes and pricing system. In the fall of 2023, it introduced a type of new “Night Owl Fare” — if traveling during very late or very early hours, one can go between cities like New York and Philadelphia or Philadelphia and Washington. D.C. for $5 to $15.
As travel on the same routes during peak hours can reach as much as $300, this was a deliberate move to reach those who have the flexibility of time and might have otherwise preferred more affordable methods of transportation such as the bus. After seeing strong uptake, Amtrak added this type of fare to more Boston routes.
The largest distances, such as the ones between Boston and New York or New York and Washington, are available at the lowest rate for $20.
I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.
I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.
This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding programme in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.
How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.
This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose.
This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.
Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centres in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.
We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.
Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.
Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.
In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.
Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.
The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.
Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.
At the crossroads
Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.
Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.
It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.
Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.
Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.
How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.
To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.
Diana Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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