United Kingdom

Ouster provider of digital lidar, and Velodyne, making lidar sensors, announced the completion of their merger. The combined company will keep the name Ouster and continue to trade on New York Stock Exchange. The merger creates a lidar provider with over 850 customers spanning the automotive, industrial, robotics, and smart infrastructure industries.

A team of researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology and TNO at Holst Centre have managed to make photodiodes – based on a similar technology – with a photoelectron yield of more than 200 percent. Efficiencies of more than 100 percent can be done because of quantum efficiency and stacked solar cells.

Walking robots, flying drones, protective exoskeletons and more were developed at UMass Lowell, which recently celebrated 10 years of robotics at the university’s New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center.

The stock of operational robots around the globe hit a new record of about 3.5 million units – the value of installations reached an estimated 15.7 billion USD. The International Federation of Robotics analyzes the top 5 trends shaping robotics and automation in 2023.

Pudu Robotics, a commercial service robotics manufacturer, has announced completion of a Series C3 financing round raising more than US$15 million. The financing round was exclusively invested by Puhua Capital, with Taihecap continuing to serve as the exclusive financial advisor. The new funds will be mainly used to build a new production base for Pudu Robotics in a move to expand production capacity and develop products for commercial cleaning scenarios.

The rapid retreat of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica appears to be driven by different processes under its floating ice shelf than researchers previously understood. Novel observations from where the ice enters the ocean show that while melting beneath much of the ice shelf is weaker than expected, melting in cracks and crevasses is much faster.

Swedish online pharmacy Apotea has fully automated its logistics center. The company can now ship more than 50,000 orders to customers per day. For the first time, the entire process has been integrated and for the first time worldwide, the eOperator, a robot for piece-picking, has been included in the AutoStore application. This is the result of an international collaboration between Element Logic, AutoStore, RightHand Robotics and Apotea.

Singapore robotics firm AiTreat will be embarking on a new product evaluation in the United States for their massage robot powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Mayo Clinic, USA.

Just one year after returning from its unscheduled break, automatica, the exhibition for smart automation and robotics, will be held again from June 27 to 30, 2023. This is due to a change in its rhythm. From now on, the international automation industry will meet at the Munich exhibition center in odd years, side by side with LASER World of PHOTONICS—World’s Leading Trade Fair with Congress for Photonics Components, Systems and Applications.

Driven by the resurgence in robot orders from automotive companies, the North American robotics market set all-time records in both robots sold and value in 2022. According to a report from the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), North American companies ordered 44,196 robots valued at $2.38 billion last year, representing increases of 11% and 18%, respectively, over 2021, the previous record.