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The new global economic reality, combined with an unprecedented labour shortage, is encouraging companies to reconsider sustainability strategies. Until recently, sustainability has been synonymous with environmental goals for many businesses and, as a result, treated as an add on to corporate strategy. Sustainability can no longer be considered in isolation. 

Amazon will acquire iRobot, provider of cleaning robots for the home. Amazon will acquire iRobot for $61 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $1.7 billion, including iRobot’s net debt. Completion of the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval by iRobot’s shareholders and regulatory approvals. On completion, Colin Angle will remain as CEO of iRobot.

Cloud infrastructure services continued to be in high demand in Q2 2022. Worldwide spending increased 33% year on year to US$62.3 billion, driven by a range of factors, including demand for data analytics and machine learning, data center consolidation, application migration, cloud-native development and service delivery.

Pudu Robotics unveiled its newest offering, the PuduBot 2. Featuring a range of upgrades, this new generation of universal delivery robots offers better environment adaptability, stronger sensors, higher battery power capacity, and superior stability to the first-generation PuduBot launched in 2017.

Vection Technologies, provider of 3D and virtual reality (VR) solutions for enterprises, has unveiled 3DFrame for Webex by Cisco. 3Dframe is the no-code metaverse presentations App that brings Webex meetings’ content to life.

ABB is expanding its FlexPicker Delta robot portfolio with the IRB 365. With five axes and 1.5kg payload, the IRB 365 is both flexible and the fastest in its class for reorientating packaged lightweight products such as cookies, chocolates, peppers, candies, small bottles, and parcels.  

UiPath has acquired Re:infer, a natural language processing (NLP) company focused on unstructured documents and communications. Founded in 2015 by Ph.D. scientists from the Centre for Artificial Intelligence at University College London, Re:infer uses machine learning (ML) technology to mine context from communication messages and transform them into actionable data. 

FANUC, supplier of CNCs, robotics and ROBOMACHINEs, announces a West Campus expansion that will push its operational space in Oakland County, Michigan to nearly two million square feet. The construction will include a 655,000 square foot state-of-the-art facility to house manufacturing, engineering and R&D projects.

Rice University mechanical engineers are using legs of deceased spiders as mechanical grippers that can blend into natural environments while picking up objects, like other insects, that outweigh them. An open-access study in Advanced Science outlines the process by which Preston and lead author Faye Yap harnessed a spider’s physiology in a first step toward a novel area of research they call “necrobotics.”

According to Gartner, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) remains a popular software market for improving operational efficiency with tactical automation most often happening via screen scraping. In its recently published Magic Quadrant it evaluates 15 enterprise RPA vendors.