But artificial intelligence (AI) is bringing in a more plausible future and it is interesting to see Switzerland-based industrial conglomerate ABB partnering Covariant, a spinout of University of California, Berkeley, to create robots that can more effectively pick and grasp thousands of different kinds of objects in warehouses.
Covariant has just won an ABB competition testing robotic gripping software developed by 10 European and 10 US-based companies on a variety of items. (As an aside, you can probably expect Amazon to try and buy Covariant, given it has more than 100,000 robots in its warehouse and has purchased Kiva Systems for $777m in 2012 and Canvas Technology last April.)
Samsung Next had already invested in Covariant (formerly known as Embodied Intelligence) through its Q Fund for AI, and Samsung has been on a roll in the industry having also seen UK-based portfolio company Graphcore add $150m yesterday to a series D round featuring its Catalyst Fund.
Graphcore was one of a series of challengers to the AI chip industry, as reporter Callum Cyrus notes in his feature as part of the first quarter’s AI Supplement detailing how Nvidia, Intel and others are piling innovation resources into AI-specialised chip architectures amid heightened risk of competition from Chinese vendors.
Cue opportunity for robot dancing moves…
You can download the Artificial Intelligence Q1 2020 supplement here.
