Cracking the Robot Riddle and Building an Icon
The internet and VCs love humanoid robots. Will they return the love? Cleaning a floor might be accomplished using a complex humanoid robot with say 75 degrees of freedom to push a manual vacuum. Or the job can be done with a profoundly simpler robot designed for just that purpose. The current fascination with “general purpose” humanoid Read More Humanoid Robot Blues
Up and Running, er Crawling With our funding secured and solid interest from the media, things looked pretty good. The one less-than-good item was sales. We needed to establish a relationship between marketing and sales where, if we spent X dollars on marketing, we’d be able to count on Y dollars in sales—fundamental business stuff. But unfortunately, marketing Read More Tertill: The Verdict
Why I Love Technologies of All Sorts Mechanics As a child, I was fascinated by how things worked. All by themselves clocks kept time, radios made music, and rockets flew. Figuring out how such things functioned was my enduring compulsion. That and dreaming of a future filled with wonders enabled by ever-advancing technology. Disassembling things was a key Read More The Joy of Techs
Where are all the robots? In my early career I had expected that behavior-based programming, the idea that made Roomba possible, would quickly lead to an avalanche of other robot applications. That hasn’t happened. And even in the case of Roomba, 16 years passed between the publication of the new paradigm and Roomba’s launch in 2002. I chalk up that Read More Top Ten Things I Want Robots to Do
Our Kickstarter campaign had fulfilled, if not our wildest dreams, then at least our more rambunctious domesticated ones. We felt we had collected enough pledged funding to fill our backers’ orders. And we believed that our results constituted market validation—people wanted our product and were willing to pay for it. But our crowd funding income wasn’t nearly enough Read More Funding Tertill
After trying and, sadly, failing to get our warehouse robot concept adopted by the industry, Harvest Automation retreated to serving our existing agricultural customers. Thirty or so nursery and greenhouse businesses across the US, plus a couple in foreign countries, needed spare parts and periodic servicing to keep their fleets of robots moving potted plants. After the Read More Harvest…
“Tertill wants to be built in China” is what I would confidently tell people. We knew that getting from a hand-crafted 3D-printed shell to a partnership with an overseas factory was going to be a journey with some twists and turns, but it was one that we needed to take. I still think it was the right Read More How We Built Tertills
Working on robots is fun. And building a robot that touches people’s lives and eases their burdens is satisfying in great measure. Such incentives lead many to consider a career in robotics. Because of my long residency in the field, aspiring roboticists often ask me questions like: “How can I get into robotics?” “What should I study?” “What degree do I Read More Dare You Dance with the Robot?
Rory, Jay, John, and I were very enthusiastic about our new weeding robot. We envisioned Tertills rolling into gardens around the world, leaving in their wake weed-free soil and bountiful harvests. But before that could happen, we would need a little more than enthusiasm. It takes scads of cash—at least several million dollars—to develop just Read More How We Kickstarted Tertill
Robots will grow our food. Or so futurists have predicted since the Art Deco era. And the vision is beguiling. In principle, robot farmers could control weeds without herbicides, they could maximize yields by attending to the needs of each plant individually, and they could harvest produce without human toil or injury. Laudable goals all. But robot farming is tricky. Although many Read More Robots…