We hosted a group from the International Society for Professional Innovation Management on March 27th for an “Introduction to Robotics” discussion and demos in our lab. Fady Saad, a co-founder and Director of Partnerships at MassRobotics, kicked of the afternoon session presenting a background on Robotics and what the future may hold as these technologies are adopted and incorporated into our everyday life.

Attendees were then treated to demonstrations by two of our residents:

Maciej Pietrusinski and Daniel Posfai from Andros Robotics demonstrated a long reach robotic arm for warehouse automation that they are developing. The enabling technology is their patent-pending force-controlled actuator, which makes it possible to design light-weight collaborative robotic arms, perfect for mounting on mobile robots, with a long reach for retrieving items from top shelves.

Rahul Chipalkatty from Southie Autonomy Works, LLC (SAW) showed a novel interaction paradigm that they are developing for collaborative robot arms. SAW is a pre-seed-stage startup changing the way people interact with collaborative robots and the winner of ABB IdeaHub Robotics Accelerator 2015.