Two robotics startups from Greater Boston debuted products this week at the RoboBusiness conference and exhibition.
Just a year old, Soft Robotics presented its gentle, air-powered versatile robot grippers in public for the first time. For Sonzia, a Somerville firm that incorporated in September, it was a first public demonstration of immersive, interactive environments for children with learning disabilities.
Soft Robotics showed us how a small version of the gripper, the size of a child’s hands, could pick up a variety of shapes — a ball, a set of keys, or even a prickly and delicate cactus — with the same set of fingers. Because current robot appendages are specialized for a single or handful of tasks, the upcoming challenge that researchers and startups (like Boston’s Empire Robotics) are tackling is to design a robot, or robotic hand, that can do many things.
Soft Robotics has been testing a small version of the gripper, but, about a week ago, put together a bigger version for the conference. Like a 5-armed octopus, I saw it grab an air-filled bag of chips without squeezing it too hard.
The technology is a combination of innovative materials engineering, that makes the “fingers” of the gripper elastic but durable, senior scientist Joshua Lessing told me. The company is targeting the food and medical industries, where safety and cleanliness is a concern, for the robots. A useful bonus: the a version of the material can be sterilized in an autoclave.
Lessing worked as a post-doctoral researcher at George Whitesides’ prolific lab at Harvard University, when Whitesides suggested he explore the soft robotics space. About two years in, he hasn’t looked back. Soft Robotics’ demonstration on the exhibition floor drew a steady crowd, and also caught the attention of VCs present, bagging a runner up award at the pitch contest on Wednesday.
Even younger, startup Sonzia is setting up in Somerville with the goal of building robots that can help people with learning disabilities adjust to social spaces. Among them is a telepresence robot that can help children with autism connect with their parents and loved ones, Shirley O’Neil, the founder, explained.
Though people with autism have trouble engaging with other people in conventional ways, researchers and therapists have observed that gadgets hold a special appeal. Another product that Sonzia is developing is an immersive, interactive simulation of real environments, such as the Koi pond in the video below. The goal is to help therapists observe interactions, and provide a learning platform for people with behavioral difficulties.
Other Greater Boston companies made a strong showing as well. Among them:
- Rethink Robotics’s almost-humanoid Baxter
- Empire Robotics, which is making fingerless grippers that look like beanbags in the Seaport district
- Harvest Automation, a builder of agricultural robots based in Billerica, Mass., which brought in plant-mover robots
- CyPhy Works, whose Helen Grenier, the grande dame of robotics and co-founder of iRobot back in the early 2000s, spoke on a panel about the Federal Aviation Administration and the future of commercial drones
- Rise Robotics, which is making a new kind of hard muscle, or “actuators” for robots and human exoskeletons
- ReWalk, the Malborough, Mass., company that went public this fall, presented a live demonstration of its FDA-approved exoskeleton
- iRobot, whose chief executive Colin Angle led a meta keynote about what it really means to be robotics company, really.
More on robotics this week in Boston:
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