Natick, MA-based Corindus has corralled $5.3 million of a proposed $10 million round of equity financing, according to an SEC filing. The firm is developing a robotic system that helps surgeons control the position of guidewires in veins in procedures to implant vascular stents, according to the firm’s LinkedIn profile. A call to company CEO David Handler was not immediately returned today, and it’s not stated in the SEC filing who participated in the financing. Prior to this financing, the firm raised $12.8 million in a Series B financing in spring 2008, according to a story I wrote about the deal for Mass High Tech.

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Long before San Diego was known as a hub of telecommunications innovation or for its proliferation of biotech companies, it was a leading center for the development of deep underwater technologies.

During the 1960s and ’70s, scientists from the U.S. Navy laboratories on Point Loma and UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography founded numerous startups with technologies derived from underwater sensors, acoustics, and signal processing techniques that had been developed for the Navy’s cat-and-mouse games with Soviet submarines. Robotic technology that the Navy had developed to recover a hydrogen bomb from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea in 1966 led almost directly to the formation of Hydroproducts and Ametek Straza, two companies that made deep ocean ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles) in San Diego during the 1970s. Hydroproducts and Ametek Straza faded from San Diego, however, after they were acquired by bigger companies that wanted to introduce ROVs to the offshore oil and gas industry.

It might not be apparent on the surface, but much of that expertise in subsea technologies remains in San Diego today, according to Leonard Pool, who founded Sidus Solutions in 2000 to develop deep underwater pan-and-tilt camera systems and related ROV positioning equipment. Pool, who is moderating a panel discussion today on “marine technology as an important growth industry” for San Diego, says close to 150 companies continue to ply their trade here.

Alvin Diving off California

“When the U.S. Navy decided that San Diego was going to be a port for submarines, all these companies sprang up,” Pool tells me. “We do get looked at as a cottage industry.” He says these companies have thrived, despite a post-Cold War decline in defense funding for new submarine-hunting technologies. One likely reason, Pool says, is that the “oil and gas community continues to look at San Diego as a hub for subsea technology development.”

Pool’s panel discussion is part of “The Maritime Collaboration Summit,” a two-day conference organized by the Maritime Alliance, a San Diego non-profit industry group, aboard the tourism ship Inspiration Hornblower. The summit, which ends today, is intended to increase awareness of San Diego’s importance as a hub for technology innovation, and to encourage collaboration between the scientific community and commercial maritime innovators, according to Michael B. Jones, president of the Maritime Alliance.

“Right now, the maritime community in San Diego is very fragmented with little visibility or public understanding of its importance,” says Jones, who also heads …Next Page »

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Robots have already found limited work in healthcare by assisting surgeons with operations and physical therapists with rehabilitating patients, among other jobs. So why can’t robots keep an eye on seniors and give them their medications?

Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) made headlines last month with the announcement of its recently created healthcare division, which is being headed by veteran software entrepreneur Tod Loofbourrow. The company’s ambitious plan is to develop a robot to help seniors live independently in their homes—something that no other company has accomplished. To learn more, I headed over to the firm’s headquarters last week.

The 7-year-old in me hoped to show up at iRobot and find the “medical droid” from Star Wars. But I knew not to expect to see such a humanoid robot, so I wasn’t disappointed when Loofbourrow told me that there were no healthcare robots to show me. Yet at one point during our interview, he flipped open his laptop and showed me a conceptual video of one of the company’s robots rolling over to an elderly person’s bedside and placing a bottle of pills on a side table. He said the video was intended to illustrate the company’s long-term vision for a healthcare robot, but the robot depicted was not a prototype of what the firm plans to market initially.

The senior citizen in the video, however, represented the first demographic iRobot aims to serve with a healthcare robot. There could be tremendous value in a robot that could help seniors live at home and avoid nursing homes, Loofbourrow explained, noting that the average nursing home in Massachusetts costs about $10,000 a month. Supporting patient care in the home may also help seniors avoid costly hospitalizations, which are a major factor in the whopping $2.4 trillion annual healthcare bill in the U.S. But the U.S. healthcare system hasn’t fully embraced using telemedicine—let alone robots—to enable patients to receive care in their homes.

Nevertheless, the leadership of iRobot decided that the time is right to launch a healthcare division, Loofbourrow said. The company has been interested in how its robots could be used to help patients for more than a decade. Indeed, company chairman and CEO Colin Angle told me back in 2006 that a robot for home healthcare was about three years from the market. And two years ago I spotted a concept robot the company developed called “CiCi” at a medical technology conference; an MIT robotics engineer told me for this Mass High Tech story that the stationary robot had two-way audio and remote-monitoring capabilities. Healthcare could eventually become a major business for iRobot, which already has succeeded in introducing robots like the Roomba for the household market and the PackBot for the military market.

“The company sees an opportunity to really transform a market,” Loofbourrow said. “So I’m here to build a very big business and a third leg of the stool for iRobot.”

Loofbourrow’s fascination with robotics dates back at least as far as his teenage years. As the Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner reported in his blog post last month, Loofbourrow was16 years old when he wrote a book called “How to Build a Computer-Controlled Robot” in the late-1970s. He explained that when he was a child, his father was an engineer at Bell Labs and their basement was filled with circuit boards and other parts for building robots. The robot he built around a single-board microprocessor featured voice recognition and ultrasonic navigation, he said.

The Harvard University graduate was most recently founder and CEO of Waltham, MA-based Authoria, a provider of talent management software that Loofbourrow grew into a $40 million annual business with more than 300 employees in the U.S., Europe, and India. He sold the company in 2008 to White Plains, NY-based Bedford Funding for …Next Page »

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IRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT), the Bedford, MA-based maker of robots such as the Roomba for vacuuming and the PackBot for the military, revealed today that it has created a healthcare unit to focus on developing robots that help seniors live independently in their homes. Technology veteran Tod Loofbourrow is heading the new healthcare unit as its president and will report directly to iRobot CEO Colin Angle, according to the company. Angle is expected to discuss the company’s healthcare strategy today at the TEDMED conference in San Diego.

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Sometimes a robot just needs a little help from its friends. And now a pair of former iRobot engineers who lost their jobs in last year’s downsizing at the Bedford, MA, company have struck out on their own to help iRobot’s popular Roomba floor cleaning robots do their jobs better.

Launched in January, Robot Add-Ons introduced its first Roomba accessory just four months ago and already has 10 products in its catalog, from protective bumpers to hypoallergenic filters. Created by Jim Lynch, an electrical engineer who invented iRobot’s Looj gutter-cleaning robot, and Barry Stout, a software engineer who contributed to the Roomba’s internal programming, the Georgetown, MA, startup has a mission to help consumers get more out of their investment in a home robot.

Roombas are “really good at accomplishing one task, but there are a whole bunch of other tasks they can do really well if given the right accessories,” says Lynch.

Robot Add-Ons is an entirely bootstrapped, self-funded operation—Lynch and Stout are handing everything, right down to filming product demonstration videos. All of the company’s products are available from its website and from other niche e-retailing sites for robot fans, and may eventually be available from the same stores that sell Roombas, such as Best Buy and Bed, Bath & Beyond. “The general marketing plan is to be wherever iRobot is,” says Stout. But even without a bricks-and-mortar outlet, sales are “doubling weekly,” he says.

Of course, iRobot itself (NASDAQ: IRBT) sells a line of Roomba accessories, including replacement brushes, filters, and batteries. So Robot Add-Ons is focusing on things iRobot doesn’t make—but maybe ought to.

“We’re trying to solve the everyday problems that people have with Roomba that prevent it from having a successful cleaning mission,” explains Lynch. “Like getting wedged under some furniture. If you walk in and there it is, stuck under the couch, then it hasn’t been very successful. We’re trying to help with the whole experience of owning a robot. That’s certainly a need I think we can fill.”

Robot Add-Ons’ product line includes a bumper extender that helps prevent the furniture-wedging problem; it’s a little horn, called the “Unicorn,” that makes the Roomba’s touch-sensitive bumper about an inch taller. There’s also a bumper pad that keeps the Roomba from scuffing furniture; three different types of cleaning pads that replace the Roomba’s main brush, making the vacuum more effective on hard floors; and a HEPA filter that traps smaller particles than those the Roomba’s own filter can catch.

Perhaps the most ingenious product is a …Next Page »

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Yesterday’s annual open house at Intel Labs Seattle, near the UW campus, did not disappoint. I got a whirlwind tour from incoming lab director Dieter Fox (who also talked with me about Intel and the future of robotics). In attendance were some prominent members of the Intel brass like chief technology officer Justin Rattner, and vice president of Intel Labs Andrew Chien. Vice presidents mixed with professors, researchers, students, and members of the tech startup community. (Among the luminaries I spotted were Matt O’Donnell, dean of UW’s college of engineering, Janis Machala from UW TechTransfer and Paladin Partners, and Matt McIlwain from Madrona Venture Group.)

There has been a lot of progress at Intel Labs since last year’s open house. Here’s a quick tour of the most interesting projects I saw, arranged by the type of technology:

—One of the main themes of the lab is everyday sensing and perception. That encompasses everything from smart sensors in the home that figure out what you’re doing in the kitchen to wearable cameras that help inform you about the world around you. Jeff Hightower, a researcher at the lab who did his Ph.D. at UW, showed me a demo of a project called “Personal 3D audio cursor” which involves a wearable camera, compass, gyroscope, and computer that senses where you are, who you’re with, and what you’re doing. The device then speaks to you over earbud headphones to identify the people around you using face recognition—and the sound appears to come from the direction of the person it is identifying.

It’s just an example of what can be done to enhance your information about the world around you. The real innovation, Hightower says, lies in the “online learning aspect” of the face recognition algorithm. You feed the computer three example photos of a person under different lighting conditions, and the software learns to recognize their face. Hightower says they are starting with photo albums to train the computer, and want to try things like people’s LinkedIn contacts as training examples. (Which makes me think of Learn That Name, the iPhone app for helping people recognize their LinkedIn contacts in the real world.) Hightower says this type of face recognition software will “absolutely be ready for prime time” in five years.

—Just across the room, UW Ph.D. Student Shaun Kane was giving a popular demo on “Bonfire,” a new kind of computing interface for extending your workspace from your laptop to your tabletop (see photo left). Using a camera pointed at the area around his laptop and virtual buttons projected onto the tabletop, Kane showed he could press the virtual buttons to do things like scroll through applications on his laptop. The camera tracked his hand movements and also captured an image of a business card placed on the table, which could be stored for reference. The software can potentially do things like make your laptop aware of all papers and objects on your desk; then the computer might do helpful things like turn off music when you take your headphones off and put them on the desk. This was the first time the project has been shown to the public; Kane will be presenting it at a research conference next week (UIST 2009 in Victoria, BC). The big-picture goal, he said, is to “make interacting with laptops richer, more involved, and smarter.”

—One of the big crowd pleasers was a mobile robot that could plug itself into a wall socket to charge up (see photo below). Software engineer Louis LeGrand, a UW alum, showed me how it works. The robot starts with an internal map of the lab space, so it knows where the electrical outlets are. It uses a range finder to get close to the wall, in the vicinity of the outlet. Then it uses an electric field sensor (not vision) to find the right electrical signature for the outlet—so essentially it senses the electricity in the wall. After about a minute of slow-moving adjustments, it plugs itself in. “We expect in the not-too-distant future, there will be a huge new market for robots—and Intel processors,” LeGrand says.

Next door, Dieter Fox showed me some interesting work on robotic manipulation of an object (like an apple or a bottle of water) using a robot hand and computer vision. Using a camera system, the computer figures out a physical model of what the robot is picking up. This way, Fox says, a robot can learn about the world around it the way a person would, by handling objects and looking at them. It’s a longstanding challenge in robotics, and quite a burgeoning area of research.

—Another theme of the lab is wireless power—everything from being able to charge your mobile device without plugging it in, to antennas and radio frequency identification (RFID) chips powered by the sun. Researcher Emily Cooper, who did her Ph.D. at MIT, gave me an update on the magnetic resonance project for charging devices like a laptop or a phone through the air (we saw it last year). The device now sends both radio signals and power in the same transmission, which could help you find power for your particular mobile device over a range of about one meter.

Lastly, outgoing lab director David Wetherall showed me “WISP” (Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform, see photo left), a type of enhanced RFID tag that contains sensors and a microcontroller and gets its power from an ultrahigh-frequency RFID reader. The device can also use solar cells to harvest more power. The lab is working with academic collaborators who use the WISP for everything from gaming applications to undersea neutrino detection.

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Yesterday afternoon I stopped by Intel Labs Seattle, the research lab run by the chip-making giant near the University of Washington campus, for the lab’s annual open house. It’s an extravaganza that always draws a big crowd from the local tech community. Besides the huge variety of lab demos, one of the most interesting things going on was a changing of the guard.

Dieter Fox, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the UW, succeeded David Wetherall as director of the lab two weeks ago, when Wetherall’s three-year term officially finished (see photo below). Fox is the fourth director of the Seattle lab, formerly called Intel Research Seattle; all have been UW computer science professors. While Wetherall’s expertise is in wireless networks, mobile devices, and Internet protocols, Fox’s strengths are in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. (He is the co-author of the 2005 advanced textbook, Probabilistic Robotics, with Sebastian Thrun of Stanford University and Wolfram Burgard from the University of Freiburg.)

So, will Intel Labs Seattle now be doing all robotics, all the time? Will the first general-purpose household helper robot come out of Intel (NASDAQ: INTC)? One can always hope—but Fox seems to have a broader and more practical outlook on the lab’s role in shaping the future of computing.

“Our role with respect to Intel is performing what they call disrupting research that is off-roadmap, but essentially our task is also to surprise Intel,” Fox says. “If we show what can be done with future computing systems, then we are serving our purpose. And beyond surprising Intel, we also want to surprise consumers by what can be done. It’s becoming more and more important that these computational systems are going to be observing the environment, using sensors. Today’s smartphones all have GPS, accelerometers, and all that. The key question is, how can we extract relevant information to make it more interesting for users?”

Seeing as robots are computing systems that sense and manipulate their environment, they will certainly figure prominently in the lab’s work—perhaps more than ever before. “For Intel, it’s clear the future of robotics is going to become extremely relevant. We need to see what are the key questions from a computational perspective, what kind of processing is needed for these systems,” Fox says. “Our key agenda is to inform Intel on what the future of computing looks like, especially computing connected to everyday scenarios.”

The idea is that if and when the market for intelligent household robots takes off, it’ll be Intel that provides their brains (in the form of microprocessor chips). But even beyond that, Fox says, “Intel could provide the processing that’s adapted to the specific needs of those systems, and along the way maybe also provide the computational toolset I need. So it’s not only the hardware, but it’s also a better understanding of how you extract information from these sensors. That’s also a theme for Intel—they want to go beyond just building the hardware, and show the whole user experience you can get if you have good computational power.”

Lastly, I got some closing thoughts on the lab’s evolution from its outgoing director. “The trajectory of the lab is, we’ve always done perception and sensing, starting with location, and we’re moving now to richer systems” like computer vision and robotic manipulation of objects, says Wetherall, who is going back to full-time teaching and research at UW this month (though he’ll stay involved with Intel Labs). “It’s quite a natural progression for the lab,” he notes. “That’s what leads to intelligent systems.”

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Boston is home to a huge cluster of hot game companies, from Harmonix to Turbine to 38 Studios. But you might be surprised to learn just how deep the region’s gaming history goes. If Xconomy had been around a century ago, we probably would have been writing about Parker Brothers, which got its start in Salem, MA, in 1883 and went on to create Monopoly, Clue, Risk, and Trivial Pursuit, to name just a few of the company’s blockbuster board games.

As Parker Brothers’ star gradually dimmed—it was absorbed by General Mills in 1963, then Tonka in 1987, then Hasbro in 1991—Boston’s prominence in the game and toy business waned as well. But today the Parker Brothers gaming legacy is re-emerging—and fusing with another local industry, robotics. The link? Tom Dusenberry, a lifelong game industry insider who got his start working on the Parker Brothers loading dock and eventually rose to become the founder and CEO of Hasbro Interactive, the video game subsidiary of toy giant Hasbro (NYSE: HAS). This week the multinational startup Robonica, where Dusenberry is now president, will launch its first product: Robini-i, a novel wheeled robot packed with sensors, radios, and a fully programmable onboard brain.

Roboni-i is arguably the biggest thing to hit the robot-toy business since the uber-popular Lego Mindstorms. And the new robot is emerging just a few miles from Salem, in Beverly, MA, where Robonica is headquartered. But there’s also a South African side to the story: Robonica CEO Johan Poolman, an electrical engineer by training, is the founder of a series of technology companies in the Johannesburg area, and works from the company’s R&D and manufacturing facilities in Centurion, a suburb of Pretoria. The company has 45 employees in Centurion, and obtained 100 percent of its financing from a pair of technology investment funds run by the South African government, Dusenberry says.

Sometimes, all a smart startup needs to succeed is a lucky break, and Robonica has caught a huge one. Hammacher Schlemmer, the specialty gift merchandiser, decided to feature the Roboni-i on the cover of its Holiday 2009 catalog, which is being mailed out to millions of consumers starting today. (”How cool is that?” Dusenberry cracks.) The robots are also available starting today from Robonica’s website, and will be stocked by FAO Schwarz, the Fry’s Home Electronics chain on the West Coast, and some Toys R Us stores, as well as Amazon and other e-retailers.

Dusenberry says the primary target audience for the Roboni-i is 13- to 17-year-old boys, for whom the remote-controlled devices will provide, in his words, “a killer interactive entertainment experience.” But after watching a demonstration at last week’s MassTLC Tech Tuesday event at Microsoft’s NERD Center in Cambridge—and, I admit, after taking the Roboni-i for a spin myself—I think it’s safe to say that the nimble little machines will appeal to gadget lovers of all ages.

Roboni-i comes pre-programmed with six action games that, in the words of a company announcement, challenge players to “beat the odds, race against time, manage resources, neutralize threats, execute special effects and collect bonus points to improve score.” Using the remote control, players can maneuver the robots around pylons, saucers, balls, and other accessories; the units also have sensors that allow them to navigate autonomously or …Next Page »

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Heartland Robotics confirmed today that it has raised $7 million in a Series A-1 venture financing round, a story first reported by Xconomy on August 21. The lead funder in the round was Charles River Ventures of Waltham, MA, according to Heartland president Patrick Sobalvarro. Bezos Expeditions, the Seattle-based venture investing operation of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, also participated.

Heartland’s announcement, also detailed in a forthcoming press release, is the first time the Cambridge, MA-based company has gone public with information about its investors. Our earlier story, which was based on a regulatory filing and interviews with anonymous sources, did not name Charles River Ventures as a participant in the new round. According to the information released today, Bezos Expeditions and BrooksLab, LLC, which is headed by Heartland Robotics founder and chief technical officer Rodney Brooks, participated a previously unreported $5 million Series A round sometime in 2008—meaning the stealth-mode company has raised about $12 million all told.

Sobalvarro tells Xconomy that Heartland’s attraction to Charles River Ventures boiled down to experience—both the firm’s, and that of Devdutt Yellurkar, the CRV partner working with Heartland. “I think Charles River has a lot of experience with innovative, early-stage companies, and Devdutt in particular has run companies building complex products involving a lot of software, [including] as the CEO of Yantra,” Sobalvarro says. “That kind of experience really brings a lot to the table when you’re building and early-stage company.”

But Heartland was also looking for a venture firm with demonstrated fundraising traction, Sobalvarro says. “The thing that anybody needs to be conscious of when the economy is the way it is right now is that some venture firms have been really successful in closing new funds and others haven’t,” he says. “Frankly, CRV closed a new fund in the spring and that meant a lot to us.”

Heartland continues to be somewhat guarded about its technology, saying only that it is designed to make manufacturing more productive and efficient. “We’re doing an innovative kind of robot for …Next Page »

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Regulatory documents filed today show that Heartland Robotics, the Cambridge, MA, industrial robotics startup founded by MIT computer science legend Rod Brooks, has raised just over $7 million in an equity offering. The documents don’t reveal the identities of the funders, and Heartland has not announced the names, but Xconomy has learned that one of the investors is Bezos Expeditions, the Seattle-based venture investing operation of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

Reached this afternoon by phone, Heartland president Patrick Sobalvarro confirmed that the offering had taken place, but described the lead funder in the round only as a “top tier” investing firm. He says Heartland plans to make a formal announcement about the investment soon, but has not yet obtained clearance from the funders to release their names.

A bit of detective work shows that Bezos Expeditions is one of them. Heartland’s regulatory filing—a standard “Form D” that privately held companies must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission when selling stock—includes Melinda Lewison in the “related person” field, which is usually reserved for company founders, executives, and board members. Lewison is a principal at Bezos Expeditions.

Lewison did not immediately respond to Xconomy’s request for confirmation and comment about the investment. But we have confirmed through another source that Bezos is one of the participants in the round.

Heartland, founded last fall, is still in stealth mode, but Brooks said last year that the company’s robotic technology is designed to empower laborers in manufacturing facilities to be more productive. Brooks, who is chairman and chief technology officer at Heartland, has said in discussions with Xconomy that he is “trying to do for manual workers what PCs did for information workers, i.e., let ordinary manual workers become their own information engineer and increase their own productivity.”

Sobalvarro, an MIT-trained computer scientist who previously founded surveillance video analysis software company IntelliVid, said Heartland is not yet prepared to add detail to that story. “What I would say is that we’re at a stage where we’ve really got the business proposition clearly confirmed,” he says. “We’ve been working with a couple dozen manufacturers and …Next Page »

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The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International says its conference and exhibition in Washington D.C. this week is the largest event of its kind, featuring the world’s biggest collection of robotic vehicles for use in the air, land, and sea. Judging by the news conference agenda, however, the four-day convention could almost be called the Northrop Grumman Robot Show.

The Southern California defense contractor, which operates a major unmanned systems business in San Diego, accounts for eight of the 15 news conferences the Virginia-based industry association has scheduled for today and tomorrow.

Gene Fraser

The scope of Northrop Grumman’s work in robotic vehicles seems to have grown so big that E.J. “Gene” Fraser, a vice president in the company’s strike and surveillance systems division, is giving an overview of the company’s unmanned systems—in the air, on the ground, and at sea. The company’s major programs include:

—The high-altitude Global Hawk UAV, or unmanned aerial vehicle, operated above Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. Air Force.

—The Broad Area Maritime Surveillance program, a $1.2 billion development effort that seeks to adapt Global Hawk technologies for specialized use by the U.S. Navy in monitoring vast tracts of ocean.

—The Fire Scout, an unmanned helicopter under development for the Navy. Northrop Grumman says the Fire Scout completed a series of flight tests aboard the USS McInerney last month as the warship cruised off the coast of Mayport, FL.

—The X-47B unmanned combat air system, a Navy strike aircraft capable of carrier landings and takeoffs. Northrop Grumman is completing final assembly of its first X-47B prototype, with a first flight tentatively set for November.

As unmanned, robotic vehicles become increasingly commonplace, Fraser tells me the pre-conference buzz is focused not so much on breakthrough …Next Page »

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The world’s largest collection of unmanned aircraft and other robotic systems is coming in for a landing this week in Washington, D.C., at a four-day conference that’s sponsored by AUVSI, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. Today’s the big day for video capture, with live demonstrations of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and UGVs (Unmanned Ground Vehicles) taking place at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in St. Inigoes, MD. The rest of the conference returns tomorrow to the Washington Convention Center.

As it turns out, a lot of expertise in robotics and unmanned systems is concentrated in San Diego, Boston, and Seattle. Companies based in all three Xconomy cities have scheduled presentations and press conferences, although I could find just one, Insitu, from the greater Seattle area. Here’s my rundown:

—Aurora Flight Sciences (Manassas, VA). The government contractor has scheduled a press conference Wednesday afternoon that could be related to its Excaliber UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) or SunLight Eagle, a large, solar-powered UAV. Aurora, which maintains close ties with MIT and operates a major R&D lab in Cambridge, MA, successfully completed a first flight of the Excaliber last month, and describes the vertical takeoff and landing UAV as the first in a new class of unmanned combat systems. The company said in May it had completed a series of SunLight Eagle flights.

—Hydroid (Pocasset, MA). Hydroid, which was acquired by Norway’s Kongsberg family of companies in December 2007, has set a press conference Tuesday morning to discuss the capabilities of its line of torpedo-like autonomous underwater vehicles.

—Maxon Motor (Fall River, MA). Roger Hess of Swiss-owned Maxon is giving an oral presentation on “A Robot To Help The Environment” as part of a conference track on unmanned ground vehicles. Maxon makes precision electric motors and high-precision drive systems.

—Protonex (Southborough, MA). Paul Osenar and colleagues from fuel cell systems developer Protonex are giving a presentation on their development of fuel cells for long-duration electric UAVs and UGVs.

—Insitu (Bingen, WA). The Boeing subsidiary has scheduled a news conference Tuesday morning to discuss the Integrator, its next-generation UAV, and latest technological advances within its family of unmanned systems.

—Northrop Grumman’s Aerospace Systems and Information Systems divisions (San Diego). The Southern California defense contractor has arranged a number of media updates Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning—as well as conference presentations—to describe work that encompasses its high-altitude Global Hawk UAV, the unmanned Fire Scout helicopter, its Remotec Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) for bomb disposal and other work, and its $1.2 billion Broad Area Maritime Surveillance UAV program intended to provide oceanic intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance for the Navy.

—SAIC (San Diego). The big defense contractor also known as Science Applications International Corp., the U.S. Coast Guard, and University of Alaska will discuss the use of unmanned aircraft systems in oceanic airspace over international waters.

—General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (San Diego). GA Aeronautical plans to give a presentation Thursday morning on the multi-mission capabilities of its Predator B UAV.

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The future of heart surgery is in something called a “snake robot,” at least according to the people at Newport, RI-based Cardiorobotics. We decided to check it out in more depth since Cardiorobotics just raised $11.6 million this week to see if it can demonstrate this is truly the next frontier in minimally invasive ways of fixing irregular heartbeats.

Cardiorobotics, a spinout from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, got its start in the nearby Pittsburgh Life Sciences Green House in 2005. The company now splits its operations between the Steel City and Newport. I got the update from the company’s president and CEO, Samuel Straface.

Like many medical device companies, Cardiorobotics has its sights on replacing a standard surgical procedure with something a lot less invasive. The company’s initial goal is to help patients avoid open-heart surgery for irregular heartbeats (arrhythmias), particularly atrial fibrillation. Instead of cracking open the chest with a breastplate incision, and forcing patients to shoulder the risk of going on a heart-lung machine, Cardiorobotics envisions doing a single tiny incision in the chest, that has an opportunity to improve patient recovery and reduce the risk of complications from surgery. Atrial fibrillation is the most frequently diagnosed type of arrhythmia, and affects an estimated 2.3 million people in the U.S.

Cardiorobotics is planning on starting clinical trials of its device in Europe by the end of the year, and if everything goes right, the technology could win its first regulatory approval for the market in two years, Straface says. Both cardiac surgeons and cardiologists, he predicts, are going to be quick to adopt this technology.

“The snake robot is plug-and-play,” Straface said, adding that getting certified to use the robot will not be too difficult or expensive. “If you’ve played on video games, it’s not too different,” he said.

How is it supposed to really work? Straface helped walk through this idea step by step. The snake, officially called the Articulated Robotic MedProbe (ARM), is inserted through a small hole under the breastbone, and then carefully curves around the tight, finely structured muscle of the heart. The snake has a camera with its eyes focused on the heart tissue responsible for the arrhythmia. And with a delicate, finely timed movement, the snake cuts small lesions into each of the upper heart chambers, or atria, using a narrowly focused microwave laser or other energy emitter to kill those cells that were keeping the heart from functioning normally. Its work complete, the snake then eases itself back through the chest, adjusting itself again to avoid harming the tissues it moved through before. When the procedure is done, the snake robot gets thrown away.

Cardiorobotics set up its headquarters in Newport in 2007, and Straface took over as president and CEO this year after he previously served as an Executive-in-Residence at the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse.

Other companies have similar robotic devices for heart surgery, notably Sunnyvale, CA-based …Next Page »

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Much of the buzz about Amazon’s surprise announcement yesterday that it is acquiring popular online shoe retailer Zappos for more than $900 million is about whether the Las Vegas-based company really needed to sell, or was pressured to do so by its main venture backer, Sequoia Capital. But the first thing I wondered when I heard the news was what the acquisition might mean for Kiva Systems, the Woburn, MA, startup whose robots staff a huge Zappos distribution center in Louisville, KY.

Zappos has been working with Kiva for almost two years, and the company’s shelf-toting robots, which help speed the process of order fulfillment, have been operating in the Louisville location for over a year. And in fact, the shoe seller recently ordered more Kiva gear to prepare for the holiday rush, says Kiva CEO Mick Mountz, whom I reached by phone this morning. “We don’t know anything more than what’s in the press right now, but our reaction is that this is a good thing for Kiva,” Mountz says. “They’re growing quickly, and growing their Kiva system to support that. If you take the press releases at face value, they are going to keep the two companies separate, and it’s all about growth. What that implies to us is that they’re going to need more Kiva equipment to keep doing that.”

Indeed, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh said in an open letter to employees that the Louisville warehouse might even grow into a hub for Amazon’s own inventory. “As many of you know, we were strategic in choosing our warehouse location due to its proximity to the UPS Worldport hub in Louisville,” Hsiesh wrote. “Amazon does not have any warehouse locations that are closer to the Worldport hub. There is the possibility that they may want to store some of their inventory in our warehouse or vice-versa. Right now, both Zappos and Amazon believe that the best customer experience is to continue running our warehouse in Kentucky at its current location.”

Kiva’s whole mission is to help companies get products off the warehouse shelves where they’re stored and into boxes for shipment to consumers faster, using agile wheeled robots that carry the shelves to stock pickers. That means Amazon has always been one of Kiva’s dream customers—and now, thanks to the Zappos acquisition, it’s an actual one. “What that means to our business is that the number-one and number-two e-retailers are now using Kiva, the number two being Staples,” says Mountz.

E-commerce companies have been Kiva’s strongest customers lately, according to Mountz. “From where we sit, e-commerce is doing pretty well right now,” he says. “Diapers.com recently got some expansion gear from us. Quiet Logistics, which is supporting the Gilt Groupe, just purchased some additional gear.”

And if Amazon wants to keep expanding at its current rate, it’s going to have to look at warehouse automation technologies, Mountz believes. “If you look at their business, they are at $20 billion a year and growing at 5 percent. That means they need to add a billion dollars of capacity a year—that means opening one or two new distribution centers every year. Along those lines, the Zappos folks have plenty of space down in Louisville, and a great location next to the UPS Worldport hub, so if we had to predict, we’d think they’re going to end up using that building for even more beyond the growth Zappos has planned.” [Update: In a follow-up e-mail, Mountz noted that Amazon's recent growth rate has actually been closer to 15 percent or $3 billion in additional gross revenues every year.]

Meanwhile, Kiva is busy building and delivering the equipment Zappos needs for the holidays, Mountz says. “We have ongoing, project-level dialogue with Zappos every week, and we’ll just have to see what they learn over time,” he says. “We think Kiva is going to be a big part of their material handling as they go forward.”

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Where does technological innovation happen around Boston? What are the sources of new software and hardware creations? You’ve probably heard about Google and Microsoft moving to Cambridge in the past couple of years—but did you know Microsoft has two labs in Cambridge, not one? Or that another Silicon Valley company has a research lab just upstairs from Google in Kendall Square? Then of course there’s IBM’s social software lab, which gave us Wordle. And the aerospace robotics research lab on the 12th floor of a Cambridge office tower at One Broadway.

So far, my columns have been stories—with beginnings, middles, and ends—based on little things we reporters like to do, such as interviews, with plenty of quotes from the innovators, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists I visit.

This week is different: for today’s column, I’ve done exactly no interviews. But I have done a good amount of research. This week, I decided to write about something I have been noticing for quite some time—the growing presence of non-university software and IT research and development labs in the Boston area, especially around Kendall Square here in Cambridge. At Xconomy, we’ve written about several of these labs and efforts piecemeal—like when Google came to town, or when Microsoft hired Reed Sturtevant to open a new advanced development lab at One Memorial Drive. We’ve even chronicled the decline of a once-world famous computer science lab, the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), which is still based on Broadway in Cambridge, not far from MIT.

But I’ve always wanted to wrap these up into a bigger article, with full details on each lab—how many people they employ, what areas of technology they specialize in, and so on. Truth be told, I haven’t gotten to that in this column, either. But I’ve made a start.

Below, with the help of our rising star intern from Boston University, Roxanne Palmer, and chief correspondent Wade Roush (who wrote many of the stories I mentioned above), I’ve mapped out the labs we know about. I’ve also added a few descriptions about the efforts when available. A few caveats: the list doesn’t include university labs, such as MIT’s Media Lab. Also, there is wide disagreement in IT, especially when it comes to software, about what can be considered R&D. I’ve tried to focus on labs or efforts that go beyond routine or normal product development to farther-out efforts that are riskier, more open-ended, and aren’t expected to bear fruit until a year or three down the road.

To see details about a lab and links to our stories, where available, you can either click on a little orange light bulb on the map below (these are creative R&D efforts, get it?) or browse the company list at this Google Maps page. If you go with the light bulb option, you may have to zoom in to see individual labs that are close together. For instance, both Google and VMware are housed in the same building at 5 Cambridge Center—but you only see one icon unless you get very up close and personal. The same is true for Aurora Flight Sciences and Conduit Labs, which are both at One Broadway in Cambridge.

A last caveat: this is a work in progress, and it’s not based on any exact science. So I’d love your feedback, both about labs I’ve included that maybe shouldn’t be here because the work is too short-term and routine, and about those I’ve missed (and I’m sure I’ve missed a lot). Either drop a comment below or write us at editors@xconomy.com.

View Boston Tech R&D Labs in a larger map

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There is a lot of great stuff going on in Boston right now. Granted, there are still many signs of paralysis throughout the system, but there are also many high-quality entrepreneurs in the marketplace attempting to change the world with exciting, innovative solutions to some very large problems.

June 2009 has been dubbed “Innovation Month in New England,” so I thought I would tick off some of the investment themes we are excited about today.

* My favorite theme is the convergence of IT and life sciences (we dub it “technology for healthcare”), as that manifests itself in smart devices, important advances in healthIT, and the promise of personalized medicine and sophisticated diagnostics. The parallel developments in bio-informatics, computing power, material sciences, microfabrication, power management, and imaging modalities have dramatically advanced our ability to diagnose, manage, and cure many chronic diseases. I am particularly intrigued with the “connected health” paradigm—and who will be the winners and losers as this model becomes a reality.

* I am spending a lot of time with robotics entrepreneurs these days. There are exciting and very obvious applications in the industrial, manufacturing, medical, and consumer markets. And Massachusetts has a world-class robotics ecosystem already in place.

* Developments in mobile applications as well as wireless infrastructure are very exciting.

* We are seeing a number of important consumer infrastructure opportunities which will better optimize the allocation of advertising dollars and improve marketing efficiencies. We are particularly excited about advances in video infrastructure and distribution.

* Tech-enabled business services, particularly in the financial services industry, show great promise. Banks and insurance companies simply need to be more efficient in how they do business.

* We still see compelling opportunities in the enterprise software space, although admittedly fewer than in years past.

* Since 9/11 we have observed that the government—on a massively parallel basis—has been subsidizing numerous technologies in the name of homeland defense through non-dilutive grants and contracts. We have been pursuing an investment thesis which is centered on the ability to redirect some of these technologies to large industrial or commercial applications.

* We have been pursuing a number of exciting opportunities in the platform semiconductor space, which drives many of our other investment themes above.

* And lastly—and most recently—we elevated cleantech as a new investment theme. We do so cautiously, recognizing the many challenges these companies now face. Our principal focus is on demand-side energy management, which is more akin to business models found in the above themes. We have avoided supply-side, generation companies, which require extraordinary amounts of capital, have very significant technical risks, uncertain business models, and extended development timelines.

We are always happy to engage with great entrepreneurs, particularly if they are focused on some of the themes above. Several important events in June will take on these issues, including the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, or XSITE 2009, an all-day conference at Boston University on June 24. Many of these themes will also be discussed at an event Scott Kirsner is hosting on June 25, also at Boston University. Please come and join in the debates.

[Editor's note: This column also appears, in slightly different form, on Michael Greeley's blog, On the Flying Bridge.]

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In case you haven’t noticed it, the recovery is underway. The economy is affecting all aspects of business, of course. But every day here at Xconomy we write about the unrelenting pace of innovation and see firsthand how, if anything, the pace has picked up during the recession—nothing like hard times to get the creative juices flowing, it seems. The current outpouring of new products, ideas, and companies spans many fields, from biotech to computing, mobile devices, robotics, energy, and more—with the potential to affect all aspects of our lives. And it’s this torrent of innovation, not any bailouts or stimuli, that will drive us out of recession and ensure future U.S. competitiveness.

Because New England is a world leader in high-tech innovation, we’ve decided it’s high time to move past all the doom and gloom surrounding the economy and highlight and celebrate innovation in the region in a new, and bigger, way. To that end, we are extremely pleased today to announce XSITE 2009—the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, a full-day event that will be held on June 24 at Boston University. We have partnered with BU’s Office of Technology Development to hold XSITE 2009, the first of what will become an annual conference focused on innovation in New England. The event will take place at BU’s School of Management on Commonwealth Avenue. And we are honored that BU President Bob Brown will be giving the welcoming address.

XSITE will bring together innovators from every sphere of the innovation community—across all the disciplines I mentioned above and more, and across institutions including universities, venture firms, startups, and the biggest public companies operating in the region.

We are thrilled with how well the idea of this summit has resonated with leaders in all these areas and institutions. Just a sampling of the many luminaries who will be taking part in XSITE includes: Juan Enriquez of Biotechonomy, who will deliver a keynote address; Nobel Laureate Phil Sharp of MIT; Jeff Nick, chief technology officer of EMC; Reed Sturtevant, managing director of Microsoft Startup Labs; Alnylam Pharmaceuticals CEO John Maraganore; Boston Power CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud; Boston Scientific co-founder John Abele; Mohamad Ali, IBM’s senior state executive for MA; Yet-Ming Chiang, co-founder of A123Systems; and Mick Mountz, CEO of industrial robot maker Kiva Systems.

Startup aficionados, meanwhile, will have lots to love about XSITE, which will feature some of the coolest and most promising young companies in New England. In addition to Kiva, these include black silicon developer SiOnyx, fat-busting firm Zafgen, “roadable” airplane maker Terrafugia, Web video audience tracking firm Visible Measures, and Satori Pharmaceuticals, which is developing a pill to fight Alzheimer’s disease. We will also lift the curtain on several stealth-mode startups at the summit (of course we aren’t naming them yet).

And summit attendees will have a chance to share their own ideas about innovation in a variety of ways, including during the XSITE Xpo, a dynamic session in which a dozen of New England’s most promising startups will tell their stories and audience members will pick which firms will likely be the most transformative in the years to come.

We will be revealing more about the event in the next few weeks. On Twitter, follow us at @XconomyXSITE (hash tag #xsite09) and see our current lists of speakers and get registration details at www.XSITE2009.com. We look forward to seeing you on June 24.

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Visiting a warehouse equipped with Kiva Systems‘ robotic fulfillment technology is a spooky experience: the little orange robots scoot about in busy silence, toting shelves full of products to human pickers who move the right products into boxes for shipping. There are no grinding, beeping forklifts, and not even much conversation, since there are so few human workers. So it makes sense that the first company to specialize in outsourced fulfillment services using Kiva’s technology would be called Quiet Logistics.

The startup announced today that it has installed a Kiva fulfillment system at its Andover, MA, site and that the so-called “QuietCenter” is already handling orders for Massapequa, NY-based Internet retailer Music Parts Plus.

The Andover center is envisioned as just the first in a network of automated warehouses, each of which would handle fulfillment for multiple customers. The buzzword for this practice in the warehousing industry is “third-party logistics,” or 3PL, and it’s similar in spirit to the multi-tenant architecture offered by Software-as-a-Service companies such as Salesforce.com. But Quiet Logistics is the first 3PL company to use Kiva’s technology.

“We’re excited to see Quiet Logistics delivering on its vision,” Kiva CEO Mick Mountz said in today’s announcement. “Their 3PL multi-tenant model is the perfect platform for bringing the value of Kiva Systems material handling to customers who rely on best of breed service partners.”

Quiet Logistics said the online catalog at Music Parts Plus—a playground for guitar aficionados—contains over 5,000 separate products, from picks to lubricants. The company was growing so fast it could no longer manage its inventory efficiently, yet it’s too small to afford its own Kiva setup. So it turned to Quiet Logistics.

“Companies like Music Parts Plus want and need to focus their time and resource on their core capabilities such as merchandising and marketing,” Bruce Welty, Quiet Logistics’s CEO, said in the announcement. “We deliver the service they need to fulfill a customer’s order and expectations. We operate in the background rapidly, efficiently, accurately and above all quietly.”

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Imagine a soldier is wounded in the middle of a violent firefight in the streets of Mosul, Iraq. With bullets whizzing in every direction, it’s almost guaranteed that a medic would be shot in a rescue attempt. Enter the BEAR robot, which rolls up to the wounded soldier, scoops her up in its arms, and spirits her away to safety. This scenario, still hypothetical at this point, is the initial aim of the BEAR (Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot).

Vecna Technologies, which developed the BEAR in Cambridge, MA, for the U.S. Army, tells Xconomy that the rescue robot is expected to be put through its paces for the first time at Fort Benning, GA, as early as mid-April, representing a major milestone in its development. “We’re a bunch of nerds mostly from MIT, Stanford, and other nerdy schools,” says Andrew Allen, an engineer who is managing the project at Vecna. “We need the feedback from the field to know what are the technical challenges, so that the soldiers in the field can be helped by this system.”

Video footage of similar field tests in 2008 made a YouTube sensation of Waltham, MA-based Boston Dynamics’ BigDog, a stunningly agile quadruped robot. (A YouTube clip of the robotic canine has been viewed more than 8 million times and counting.) The BEAR will undergo some of the same tests as the BigDog, including a climbing exercise and a swift kick by a soldier intended to gauge its ruggedness and stability, says Allen.

Though designed for some of the same missions as BigDog, the BEAR is a humanoid robot that stands 6.5 feet tall on two legs. The legs bend at the hip and knee joints and both the thigh and calf segments have treads, enabling the robot to kneel and drive like a tank (it can’t yet walk upright). On its treads, the robot can carry up to 500 pounds in its hydraulic-powered arms, a level of strength that exceeds other robots in development for the military, Allen says. The BEAR is designed to be controlled remotely by a single person and can also do things autonomously like pick up a box and move it to a specific location.

“The ways that a BEAR can be used are nearly endless—and our team of engineers from top universities continually push these limits,” Deborah Theobald, CEO of Vecna, said in an e-mail. “Needless to say, we’re very excited about the BEAR project, and all of the robots that the team has invented.”

The BEAR is not expected to be ready for actual military use until 2015, and the robot is still very much a work in progress. For instance, Allen says, Vecna has designed a stabilization system that might allow future models of the robot to take …Next Page »

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“Robot coming through…Robot.”

That was the cry, heard throughout the day Saturday at Boston University’s Agganis Arena, scene of the Boston regional finals of the annual FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics competition. The robots were constantly on the move as teams ushered them back and forth from the competition area—think basketball, with lots of twists for this year’s theme—to the staging area/work zones “backstage.”

As always, the finals were a wild affair with lots of screaming and yelling, blaring rock music, face paint galore, and costumes that would have done Rocky Horror fans proud (to give you a clue, the guy announcing all the teams wore a cape and skated around the floor on roller blades). I was there for much of the morning, speaking with competitors and planners and a few guests that included iRobot founders Helen Greiner (an Xconomist) and Colin Angle, human genome sequencer Craig Venter, Marc Hodosh (another Xconomist and chair of Boston FIRST), and FIRST National Advisor and MIT engineering professor Woodie Flowers, among others. (Flowers was lowered by cable from the rafters at last year’s FIRST event, to the tune of Mission Impossible. This year, he told me, “I came in through the back door.”) I didn’t speak to annual judge Steve Wozniak, a founder of Apple Computer, because he wasn’t there. The reason: he will compete on Dancing With the Stars, which airs tonight. The entire crowd, though, did a shout out to him at Friday night’s opening, crying out in unison: “GOOD LUCK WOZ!” (Hodosh says they are sending in the video to the TV show, in hopes it will air tonight.)

Some 53 teams, most, but not all (see below) from around New England, took part in the event. But that’s just a fraction of the entire competition. Last year, when you include all age groups taking part in FIRST, the organization drew more than 160,000 young people from 38 countries worldwide. What I saw was just a piece of the high-school category, which itself drew 1,500 teams last year—and should be even bigger this year.

The basic idea for the high-school event is that all teams must begin with the same core electronics and motors. They then can spend up to another $3,500, with no part costing more than $400, to fine-tune and evolve their robots, which enter into “coopetition”—both competing against and cooperating with—other teams in a series of ever-changing alliances.

This year’s game was called Lunacy. It was a basketball-type game played on a hockey rink-type floor (without the ice). As the game description goes, “Two three-team robot alliances …Next Page »

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