broad range of capabilities, including innovative mechanics, intelligent controls, computer vision, sensors, and other technologies. “What’s really critical for us is finding great founders, because great founders can solve problems that were unforeseen,” Kuder said.
Yet even during his presentation, Kuder called out Ping Wang, a familiar figure in San Diego’s tech startup ecosystem who was recently hired to serve as the accelerator’s technical director.
For the past four years, Wang has been running the Ansir Innovation Center, a private tech incubator. But Wang also has a doctorate in computational neuroscience from UC San Diego and studied neural networks and brain-inspired neurocomputing under the pioneering neuroscientist Terry Sejnowski at the Salk Institute.
As the accelerator’s technical director, Wang will review the technical merits of applications submitted by startup teams for the program. (The deadline for applications is March 8, and the program begins May 25.)
Connecting the dots, Qualcomm’s Haghighi explained that Qualcomm’s foray into robotics represents a new market for the kind of wireless innovations that went into the smartphone over the past 10 or 15 years. As former Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson famously declared, “The personal drone is basically the peace dividend of the smartphone wars.”
Anderson, now the founding CEO of drone-maker 3D Robotics, explained that “the components in a smartphone—the sensors, the GPS, the camera, the ARM core processors, the wireless, the memory, the battery—all that stuff, which is being driven by the incredible economies of scale and innovation machines at Apple, Google, and others, is available for a few dollars. They were essentially “unobtainium” 10 years ago.”
As the high end of the smartphone market becomes commoditized, Qualcomm sees robotics as a potentially huge new market for a variety of wireless technologies, including its Snapdragon chipsets, which integrate the core processor, graphics processor, GPS, and cellular modem in one package. The Snapdragon product line is known for greatly easing the design burden on mobile phone manufacturers, and would presumably make it easier for robot design teams as well.
Artificial intelligence, however, is one of the crucial technologies that robots will need to navigate autonomously—and to become useful commercial products. “By coming in really early in this industry,” Kuder said, “we’re hoping we can find those foundational companies.”
By proactively seeking out AI technologies, Qualcomm is playing for the future as it recruits the next generation of robotics startups for its accelerator. At the same time, the wireless giant is looking for ways to seed its technologies in the just-emerging greenfield market for robotics.
Whether there are enough robotics startups ready to make that next-generation leap is a question that should be answered over the next two months, as Techstars notifies the companies admitted to the program.
