Pickle Robot adds Tesla veteran as first CFO

Pickle Robot adds Tesla veteran as first CFO

Pickle Robot, which builds autonomous unloading robots for warehouses and distribution centers, announced a new chief financial officer just days after a reports of a major deal with UPS. The Charlestown, Massachusetts-based company announced that it hired Jeff Evanson as its CFO on Thursday. Evanson had been consulting for the company since September and recently…

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Skana Robotics helps fleets of underwater robots communicate with each other

Skana Robotics helps fleets of underwater robots communicate with each other

Underwater autonomous vessels and robots could play a substantial role in defense operations, but submersibles have historically had trouble communicating across large distances unless they rose to the surface. But coming up to transmit poses the very obvious risk of being exposed. Skana Robotics thinks it’s made a breakthrough with underwater communications using AI —…

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How iRobot lost its way home

How iRobot lost its way home

There’s something painfully American about the arc of iRobot, the company that taught your vacuum to navigate around the furniture. Founded in 1990 in Bedford, Massachusetts by MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks and his former students Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday, punctuating a 35-year run that took…

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Digital artist Beeple put his face on a 0K robot dog next to Elon Musk and Picasso – it sold first

Digital artist Beeple put his face on a $100K robot dog next to Elon Musk and Picasso – it sold first

Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist known as Beeple, has placed himself at the center of the pack — literally — with his latest viral installation at Art Basel Miami Beach, and there’s still time to see it through Sunday. His “Regular Animals” project features $100,000 robotic dogs outfitted with hyper-realistic heads resembling Elon Musk, Mark…

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Behind the scenes of drone food delivery in Finland

Behind the scenes of drone food delivery in Finland

Finland’s weather is notoriously unfriendly; but even so, your food order might be delivered by a drone. On a rainy day after Helsinki’s annual Slush conference, Finnish entrepreneur Ville Leppälä took TechCrunch behind the scenes of a three-party partnership between Irish drone delivery company Manna, DoorDash-owned food delivery platform Wolt, and his own startup, Huuva….

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This Interstellar-Inspired Robot Actually Walks and Rolls

This Interstellar-Inspired Robot Actually Walks and Rolls

Remember that sarcastic rectangular robot from Interstellar that somehow managed to walk, roll, and save humanity while delivering deadpan one-liners? Yeah, turns out someone actually built a working version of TARS, and it’s just as mesmerizing as you’d hope. Meet TARS3D, the brainchild of roboticist Aditya Sripada and his longtime collaborator Abhishek Warrier. What started…

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TikTok robot star Rizzbot gave me the middle finger

TikTok robot star Rizzbot gave me the middle finger

A couple of Thursdays ago, I awoke at nearly 4:30 a.m. to a dizzying Instagram DM.   Rizzbot, a popular humanoid robot with more than 1 million TikTok followers and more than half a million followers on Instagram, had sent me a photo: he was flipping me off.  No words. No explanation. Just a robot with its middle finger raised.   Although I was shocked, a sinking feeling meant…

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