Marc Raibert Joins Robo Madness Boston, March 11: Here’s the Agenda

We’re two weeks away from one of the biggest robotics events in Boston tech history. Robo Madness Boston will take place the afternoon of Wednesday, March 11, at Google in Kendall Square. Here’s the full agenda, pending a few last-minute tweaks.

I’m pleased to announce that famed roboticist Marc Raibert is joining the program. As a professor, he founded the Leg Lab at Carnegie Mellon before moving it to MIT. He then left his tenured faculty job to go full-time on Boston Dynamics, the company he founded to commercialize walking and running robots like BigDog, Cheetah, and Atlas. Boston Dynamics was acquired by Google in late 2013.

At Robo Madness, Raibert will give his thoughts on the future of robotics and join a discussion and Q&A with Spark Capital’s Todd Dagres (who has an interesting take on robotics software) and iRobot’s Paolo Pirjanian (who has his own unique perspective on commercial robots, particularly for the home).

These luminaries join an all-star cast that includes Rod Brooks, Helen Greiner, Mick Mountz, Daniel Theobald, Eric Paley, Holly Yanco, John Kawola, Steve Chambers, and many more. Together they represent cutting-edge startups, academic research, corporate technology, and seasoned investors, all looking to advance the state of the art in robotics and business. Their market sectors span consumer tech, manufacturing, retail, warehousing, healthcare, rehabilitation, agriculture, military, transportation, and more.

In addition to the scheduled program, there will be quite a few demo tables where you can interact up close with robots from Empire Robotics (beer pong), BiOM (prosthetic ankle), Robotbase (personal home robot), UMass Lowell (humanoid robot), iRobot (military bots), and more.

We’ll also be giving away three new Roombas to lucky audience members, courtesy of iRobot.

We are rapidly running out of space at the event, but you can still grab a ticket here. See you all on March 11.

Author: Gregory T. Huang

Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003. Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.