Tech’s Wildest Robot Dreams
Amid a funding boom, roboticists are eagerly coming up with increasingly sophisticated designs.
The robots are coming! Or so it appears.
After decades of speculation about the arrival of robots that get closer to the ones envisioned in science fiction, venture funding to robotics companies has shot up in recent years—hitting $7.2 billion in funding last year, a 30% increase from 2020. Robotics mania is closely linked to the dawn of the AI era, with the significant advances in artificial intelligence making it possible to develop increasingly sophisticated robots whose capabilities go well beyond those of the rather humdrum ones we’ve had in the past, like the Roomba.
As a result, robotists are dreaming bigger and stranger and wilder, and after talking with founders and investors in the space, I’ve come up with a set of some of the most unique robots currently under development. They’re ones like Shimon, a robo-musician who’s a Mozart with the marimba, producing new music no human could ever manage to play. And they’re ones like the humanoid companion bots from Realbotix.