On Wednesday, Weston, Mass. and San Francisco startup Jibo revealed the world’s first family robot. The countertop digital assistant is the brainchild of an MIT roboticist, and designed to do everything from snap group photos to send messages to read children's stories.
And while Jibo is the lucky recipient of buzz today, the cutting-edge gadget fits in nicely with Boston’s overall leadership in robotics.
The Hub is a center for engineering talent, and it goes hand in hand that the city is one of the best in the country to score a job in the field. When its comes to hardware and robotics, Boston is the place to be. It’s the home of iRobot, the public firm producing both militaristic machines for defense use with the army and the consumer-facing robots like the automatic vacuuming Roomba, the latter now immortalized on display at Boston Design Museum. Teams of brainy students hailing from institutions like MIT, Harvard, the Olin College of Engineering and more are churning out new automatized creations, like furniture-building bots, year-round.
And there’s plenty more where that came from. But what does the future of the sci-fi-esque field hold?
“On one hand, it’s frightening," Jim Lawton, CMO of South Boston-based RethinkRobotics, shared with the crowd during the robotics panel at BostInno’s State of Innovation forum. "But it's also very exciting to see what's going to be created."
Now, take a look at the impressive lineup of robotics crafted in Boston below.
Boston Dynamics' Animal-Like Robots
Waltham, Mass.-based Boston Dynamics was bought by Google earlier this year for an undisclosed, but likely lofty, sum. The corporation is the brains behind four-legged machines faster than the world's fastest runner, unknockable, nimble, human-like robots and an Alpha Dog scarier, then, well, most any other animal you might see roaming around the woods. Go "Cheetah," go.
The Terminator 2. Otherwise Known as the "Squishy Robot"
MIT and Boston Dynamics are teaming up to create robots in the style of Terminator 2. And yes, they’re just as frightening as they sound. The researchers have forged a new self-healing material from wax and foam that can switch between hard and soft states. Read more about the "squishy robots" here.
Kid-Friendly Robo-Kits
On a softer note, KinderLab Robotics, a company creating toys and educational tools designed to get children excited early about science, technology, engineering and math, wants to put robots in the hands of kids to spur creativity and spark an early interest in STEM. This spring, KinderLab raised $78, 539 of its $50,000 Kickstarter goal.
Mosquito-Dissecting SporoBots
The Harvard Biorobotics Lab has also teamed up with a Washington, D.C.-based biotech firm to manufacture robots to extract the saliva glands from malaria-carrying mosquitos, with the end goal of expediting the creation of a vaccine for the bug-spread vaccine that is 100 percent effective. This spring, Harvard Biorobotics Lab and Sanaria launched an IndieGoGo to raise money to put more so-called SporoBots into action.
Automated Order-Fulfilling Autonomous Robots (Now Acquired by Amazon)
Back in 2012, online marketplace giant Amazon scooped up North Reading robotics firm Kiva Systems for $775 million to get access to the company’s completely automated order fulfillment system. Who, or rather, what, was putting together those orders? Kiva’s fleet of autonomous robots.
The Rubik's Cube-Solving Trainable Robot
South Boston-based RethinkRobotics is the maker of Baxter, an easily programmed humanoid robot made for the manufacturing floor. The robot can be trained to do any number of repetitive, yet detailed, tasks. Oh, and it can also solve a Rubik’s Cube faster than you.
IKEAbot
To the delight of all directionally challenged people, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab crafted the "IKEAbot" to assemble various pieces of modern furniture from the Swedish manufacturer. Moving based on a CAD model, the IKEAbot uses geometric reasoning and a symbolic planner to put together your new dining room table. It might be a good idea to invest in one of these come Boston moving day on the first of September.
