All posts by Kate Zhou

Suma Reddy, CEO of Future Acres, talks about her company which is focused on creating smart farming tools to reduce labor demand and increase efficiency. Suma introduces her journey into agriculture technology and the issues in current farming practices that can benefit from robotic solutions. Future Acres’s robotic harvest companion, Carry, autonomously transports crops within the farms and collects valuable data. Suma also discusses the impact of their technology and their visions for the future of agricultural technology.

 Suma Reddy is Co-founder and CEO of Future Acres, an AgTech startup building advanced mobility and AI solutions for farms to increase production efficiency, farmworker safety and provide real-time data and analytics. She is a three-times AgTech + ClimateTech founder (vertical farming, organic waste-to-energy, renewable energy), is on the advisory board of Scale for ClimateTech, a Board Member of GrainPro, and teaches Entrepreneurship for Sustainability and Resilience at the NYC School of Visual Arts. Suma is passionate about sustainable solutions and the disruptive technology that will help advance a better environment and more resilient world forward.

Links

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• Future Acres
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Oleg Shipitko, Chief Technical Director of Evocargo, an integrated logistics service company using autonomous vehicles speaks with Kate. Oleg talks about the need for automating operational logistics inside enclosed facilities centers and how their autonomous vehicles and other operational services can greatly improve the current way we transport goods within facilities such as ports, warehouses and factories. Oleg also discusses the sensing choices for the specific use cases of these autonomous vehicles.

Oleg Shipitko

Oleg Shipitko is the Chief Technical Director of Evocargo. He has a bachelors and masters degree in autonomous information and control systems (bachelors: 4.96/5.0, masters: 5.0/5.0), and a PhD in Space Science and Technology with focus in Mathematical modeling, numerical methods and program complexes.

Oleg has received numerous awards including: Best paper awarded at 32nd European Conference on Modeling and Simulation (ECMS-2018): Ground Vehicle Localization With Particle Filter Based On Simulated Road Marking Image and Best paper awarded at IV International Conference on Information Technology and Nanotechnology (ITNT-2018): Gaussian filtering for FPGA based image processing with High-Level Synthesis tools.

Links

• Evocargo
• Evocargo Youtube
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Kate speaks with Brad Bogolea, CEO and Co-founder of Simbe Robotics. Simbe Robotics developed a mobile robot named Tally, which is bringing advanced shelf insights to improve the retail shopping experience.

Tally provides a state-of-the-art sensing system on a robust, scalable platform that collects analytics in real-time.

Brad Bogolea

Brad Bogolea is the CEO and Co-Founder of Simbe Robotics, where he is responsible for the company’s vision and execution of its leading retail intelligence solution. In November 2015, Brad brought to market the Tally robot, the world’s first autonomous shelf auditing and analytics solution to help retailers ensure merchandise is always stocked, in the right place, and correctly priced. The National Retail Federation Foundation has named Brad to its list of “People Shaping Retail’s Future.

Prior to Simbe, Brad spent 10 years in the energy and wireless sensor industry. Most recently Brad worked at Silver Spring Networks, where he led global product management and business development efforts for their energy management and data analytics platform for energy utilities. Products under Brad’s leadership allowed the world’s largest utility companies and their energy consumers alike to gain efficiency and visibility of their energy usage through smart sensors and data.

Brad holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Pennsylvania State University where he also returned to serve as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

Links

• Simbe Robotics
• Download mp3 (34.8 MB)
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Matt Bilsky, founder and CEO of FLX Solutions, discusses the snake-like robot he invented called the FLX BOT. The FLX BOT consists of modular links, each with a joint that can extend and rotate to get into tight spaces. Each link includes sensors including inertial measurement units and a camera. The robot is used to navigate and work in challenging environments, such as above ceilings and within walls. Matt discusses the key innovations of his product as well as his academic and entrepreneurial journey that led him to the FLX BOT.

Matt Bilksy

Matt Bilsky, PhD, PE is the inventor of the FLX BOT, a licensed Professional Engineer, a Mechanical Engineering professor at Lehigh University, and a former repair/maintenance contractor. In 2017, he was awarded with the Lehigh University Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year. Matt has a Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. from Lehigh University focused on smart product design, Technical Entrepreneurship, and mechatronics. He holds two additional Lehigh degrees: a BS in Mechanical Engineering with an Electrical Engineering minor and a Master of Engineering degree also in Mechanical Engineering. Since he was a child Matt has been an innovator. In his basement shop he designed and built numerous electronic gadgets. In 2003 he started his first company, Mattcomp Services LLC, offering computer repair, networking, home theater, and handyman services. He also created a web hosting company in 2005, Mattcomp Hosting, including all necessary back-end components on dedicated servers.

Links

• Download mp3 (25.1MB)
• FLX Solutions
• FLX Youtube channel
• Matt’s Portfolio
• Matt’s Youtube channel

Kate speaks with Anni Kern, Head of Communication, strategy, and teams at Cybathlon for over four years. She describes the motivation and concepts for the Cybathlon organizations to develop a common platform to remove barriers between people with disabilities, technology developers, and the public. Anni also describes the specifics of Cybathlon competitions and the organization and planning.

Anni Kern

Anni Kern, CYBATHLON Head of Communication, Strategy, Teams and CYBATHLON @school. ETH Zurich is the inventor of the CYBATHLON project. The CYBATHLON offers a platform to advance research in the field of assistive technology and to promote dialogue with the public about the inclusion of people with disabilities in everyday life. The core of CYBATHLON of ETH Zurich is a unique competition in which people with physical disabilities compete against each other to complete everyday tasks using state-of-the-art technical assistance systems. At the CYBATHLON 2016, Anni Kern was responsible for the coordination and the support of the participating international CYBATHLON teams. Since 2017 she is among others responsible for the strategy, communication, conception of the live event as well as the CYBATHLON @school programme.

Links

• Download mp3 (11.8MB)
• Youtube channel
• Twitter: @cybathlon
• Facebook: @cybathlon 
• Insta: cybathlon_eth_zurich
• Linkedin: cybathlon

In this episode, we hear from Luca Colasanto, Senior Robotic Scientist at Realtime Robotics, about real-time robot motion planning in dynamic and complex environments with human-robot collaboration. Realtime Robotics focuses on accelerating conventional motion planning through optimization of algorithms and hardware to allow safe use of robotic tools in work areas with humans. Luca spoke to our interviewer Kate about Realtime Robotic’s fast motion planning technology, including key aspects, such as perception, algorithms and custom hardware.

Luca Colasanto

Luca Colasanto is a Sr. Scientist at Realtime Robotics focusing on AI-based grasping and multi-robot optimization. Luca completed his PhD in Humanoid Robotics at Italian Institute of Technology, focusing on control systems for bipedal walking machines and compliant actuators. During the past ten years, Luca has worked with successful startups to design and prototype new robotics products, and with science and technology leaders, such as Robert Bosch LLC (CA), Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (FL), and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland), He is the listed inventor in two patent applications and the author of several scientific publications. Luca speaks four languages and is a keen traveler, having visited or lived in more than 20 countries.

Links

• Download mp3 (15.1 MB)
• Realtime Robotics (Videos, Twitter, LinkedIn)
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In this episode, Kate Zhou interviews Farrell Helbling, postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Microrobotics lab, who has worked on developing the RoboBee, an insect-inspired robot that is the lightest vehicle to achieve untethered flight. Farrell discusses challenges with building the robot at centimeter-scale as well as integration of sensors and power electronics particularly in considerations with weight trade-offs.

Farrell Helbling

Farrell Helbling is a post doctoral fellow at Harvard University, where she focuses on the systems-level design of the Harvard RoboBee, an insect-scale flapping wing robot. Her research looks at the integration of the control system, sensors, and power electronics within the strict weight and power constraints of the vehicle. Her work led to the first untethered flight of an insect scale vehicle and was recently featured on the cover of Nature. She is the recipient of a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, a 2018 Rising Star in EECS, and co-author on the IROS 2015 Best Student Paper for an insect-scale, hybrid aerial-aquatic vehicle. Her work on the RoboBee project is also featured at the Boston Museum of Science, World Economic Forum, London Science Museum, and the Smithsonian, as well as in the popular press (PBS NewsHour, The New York Times, Science Friday, BBC, and Wired). She is interested in the codesign of mechanical and electrical systems for mass-, power-, and computation-constrained robots.

Links

• Harvard Biorobotics Lab
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