If you thought turning academic research into robots is challenging, you’d be right. Turning academic AI research into products is brutal. If you want to 10x the challenge, though, it would be to take that research and the fun prototypes that come out of the lab and turn it into a commercially viable company.
Robots work in all sorts of wild contexts, ranging from restricted workcells — away from humans and unpredictable obstacles — to autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) designed to work alongside humans and negotiate the dynamic obstacles in warehouses or factories. That is a huge challenge in a lab setting, but “real” robots don’t work in clean and tidy labs; they face dirty, dangerous and unstructured environments. And they have to take a beating and keep doing the job regar …
