Apparently, these were the droids they were looking for.
A standing-room-only crowd convened at SRI International last Thursday to meet the robots and robot makers being highlighted at Xconomy’s second annual Silicon Valley robotics forum, Robots Remake the Workplace. The bots in attendance ranged from the fairly tall—namely RP-VITA, a human-sized hospital telepresence robot built by InTouch Health and iRobot—to the very short, in the form of Romo, a motorized iPhone platform built by Romotive.
Also on hand were some human luminaries like Rod Brooks of Rethink Robotics, Aldo Zini of Aethon, Colin Angle of iRobot, Yulun Wang of InTouch Health, and Chris Anderson of 3D Robotics.
The event focused on the business opportunities and the employment challenges arising as robots find their way into more kinds of workplaces, from offices to warehouses to hospitals. We’ll bring you a more thorough summary of the event later this week, but for today, we just wanted to show you a few of our favorite photos. The images in our slideshow above were taken by Mickey Cook of SRI International and are used by permission. (Thanks Mickey!)
This is a also good time to convey our thanks to our event host SRI International, our event sponsor Silicon Valley Bank, and our media partner RoboBusiness Leadership Summit 2013. We also had help promoting the event from Silicon Valley Robotics and National Robotics Week.
Author: Wade Roush
Between 2007 and 2014, I was a staff editor for Xconomy in Boston and San Francisco.
Since 2008 I've been writing a weekly opinion/review column called VOX: The Voice of Xperience. (From 2008 to 2013 the column was known as World Wide Wade.)
I've been writing about science and technology professionally since 1994. Before joining Xconomy in 2007, I was a staff member at MIT’s Technology Review from 2001 to 2006, serving as senior editor, San Francisco bureau chief, and executive editor of TechnologyReview.com. Before that, I was the Boston bureau reporter for Science, managing editor of supercomputing publications at NASA Ames Research Center, and Web editor at e-book pioneer NuvoMedia.
I have a B.A. in the history of science from Harvard College and a PhD in the history and social study of science and technology from MIT. I've published articles in Science, Technology Review, IEEE Spectrum, Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Technology and Culture, Alaska Airlines Magazine, and World Business, and I've been a guest of NPR, CNN, CNBC, NECN, WGBH and the PBS NewsHour. I'm a frequent conference participant and enjoy opportunities to moderate panel discussions and on-stage chats.
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