David Cohen has seen this movie before. As the founder and CEO of TechStars, he knows that the first year in any city is about building community, making impressions, and proving the model. Then things get turned up a notch.

“Year one is a lot of excitement, the town really supports it,” Cohen said. “People come out to the first Demo Day and they see it for the first time as a finished product, and people talk about it. Year two, you get a much bigger audience. I’ve seen that pattern everywhere.”

Seattle is no exception. The second-ever TechStars Seattle Demo Day, held Thursday afternoon, saw attendance way up, with 350 or more investors, entrepreneurs, and insiders flocking to the SoDo neighborhood to see some of the hottest startups in town. The competition was fiercer, with 700 applicants for just 10 spots, compared with 400 a year ago.

And the money was flowing faster—as of Thursday’s demos, nine of the 10 proto-companies already started raising financing rounds, TechStars Seattle director Andy Sack said.

“Last year, the companies coming out of TechStars 90 days after Demo Day had successfully raised over $2.5 million,” Sack said. “This year, coming into Demo Day, the companies have already raised over $3.5 million.”

Here’s a rundown of the 10 companies that showed themselves off Thursday evening, with some key notes from the presentations. We’ll have more from Cohen later, as he looks at the trends in companies and incubators overall, and some more thoughts from Sack on year two of the Seattle TechStars experience.

Beamit Mobile
Tagline: Enables convenient international money transfers from the U.S. to a mobile phone abroad
Beamit is targeting the huge market of international remissions—the money that immigrants send back to friends and relatives in their home countries once they get to America and start earning cash. That amounts to $325 billion globally each year, CEO Matt Oppenheimer said, with 80 percent handled outside the traditional banking system.

Beamit seeks to make those transfers easier and cheaper by using mobile devices and the Internet as a platofrm. People in the U.S. will be able to send money to a virtual wallet in another country online or through a mobile app, which the recipient could either spend from their device or cash out at a traditional transfer office.

The first test market is the Philippines. Beamit can make transfers free for its most loyal customers, Oppenheimer said, which implies that Beamit makes money on fees of some kind. The startup already has closed a $750,000 convertible note, and is raising a Series A round.

Bluebox Now
Tagline: Turning brand advertising into daily viral campaigns.
The former employees of Pelago, which was acquired by Groupon, have a platform that allows retailers and other brands that offer loyalty or rewards programs to increase consumer spending by offering casual games as a hook, rather than dry, boring email campaigns.

The loyalty market has more than 2 billion memberships, but two-thirds of them (66 percent) are inactive, co-founder Chad Reed said. Early tests show the concept has shown a ten-fold increase in the use of loyalty programs, Reed said.

Customers include Murphy USA, which operates gas stations like those seen at Wal-Mart locations, and Caesar’s Entertainment, the casino company. Bluebox Now is raising a $500,000 round, with $100,000 already committed as of the presentation.

EveryMove
Tagline: Rewarding and inspiring people to a healthier lifestyle.
One of the health-minded startups on stage Thursday, EveryMove seeks to connect consumers with rewards from their employers, health insurers, and other brands by collecting, tracking, and visualizing health-related data. So, if a user checks into their gym via Foursquare and completes a series of runs via Runkeeper, they could qualify for a discount from their insurance company.

In one of the most energetic presentations of the day, co-founder Russell Benaroya pitched this as a social movement, a huge business opportunity, and a no-lose proposition for everyone involved. Advertisers get targeted access to health-conscious people, employers and insurers and … Next Page »

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[Updated 4:35 pm] Bedford, MA-based iRobot laid off about 55 people last week from its government and industrial robots division, Xconomy has learned. I heard from a source familiar with the company that some of the layoffs came to light because ex-employees posted on social media looking for new positions. An iRobot spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The staff cuts come as the pioneering robotics company (NASDAQ: IRBT) announced its third quarter financial results this afternoon. The press release mentions that the company “implemented a reduction in force” because of “expectations for a reduction in government-funded research in 2012.” There is an earnings conference call scheduled for 8:30 am Eastern Time tomorrow.

The last significant layoff at iRobot was back in 2008, but this one is bigger, according to my source. The latest staff reduction is also notable because it affects the biggest division in the company—the one that houses some of its most famous products, like the PackBot military robot.

I have heard that iRobot has roughly 550 employees, which would make the layoff about 10 percent of the firm’s total workforce. Those numbers are not confirmed, however.

In the past year, Xconomy has reported on iRobot’s progress and expansion in Michigan, among other things. It’s not yet clear in which cities the staff cuts have occurred.

[Updated with comments from iRobot] A company spokesperson just confirmed the layoffs, but with slightly different numbers: “We can confirm that iRobot Corporation has had a reduction in force. This difficult action was taken based on our current view of future defense spending and a shift in program structure. In 2012 we see a significant decrease in our externally funded research and development. This transition from development to production requires our Government and Industrial robot division to reduce the size of its workforce. The reduction accounted for approximately 8 percent of the total workforce.

“We will be addressing this on the call tomorrow.”

[Updated 5:40 pm] iRobot has confirmed that 55 full-time employees were let go from the company’s offices in Bedford, MA; Durham, NC; and San Luis Obispo, CA.

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CyPhy Works, the Boston-area robotics startup led by iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner, has raised an additional $1.2 million in equity financing, according to a regulatory filing. The investors in the round weren’t disclosed, but John Simon and Anita Jones are listed on the form as directors of the company, which was originally called The Droid Works. General Catalyst is an existing investor in CyPhy, which is still in stealth mode but is reportedly working on flying robots (UAVs), among other things. The startup previously raised $1.75 million early last year and won a $2.4 million government research grant in late 2009 to study UAVs.

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[Updated 6/7/11 5:15 pm PDT] Sunnyvale, CA-based Liquid Robotics, maker of an autonomous, wave-powered robot that can glide on or below the sea’s surface, carrying industrial, scientific, or military instrumentation payloads, said today that it has raised $22 million in Series D funding. Vantage Point Capital Partners led the round, which was joined by Schlumberger, the provider of oilfield exploration services. A January regulatory filing showed Liquid Robotics had collected $18 million out of a potential $23.2 million in equity-based financing; Liquid Robotics says that filing pertained to the same funding round announced today, but that the fundraising hadn’t been completed at the time of the filing.

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Some big names were on the agenda yesterday at the 2011 Convergence Summit, which is being held in a downtown San Diego hotel under the auspices of the nonprofit Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance. A couple of the speakers actually delivered some interesting news:

—Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs made the first unexpected announcement from the stage during a keynote talk yesterday morning, when he revealed the San Diego wireless giant has been collaborating with the X Prize Foundation to establish guidelines for a $10 million Tricorder X Prize. The underlying concept of the $10 million challenge is to develop a rapid, portable, and low-cost diagnostic tool capable of diagnosing patients better or equal to a panel of board-certified physicians. It’s an idea right out of Star Trek, which I’ve explained in more detail here.

—Following Jacobs onstage was Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, who revealed he plans to start a new medical school in San Diego sometime next year. Topol didn’t provide many details during a conversation with Qualcomm executive Don Jones, who has been driving the company’s multi-pronged foray into wireless health technologies. But he vented somewhat, describing the medical establishment as “sclerotic and fossilized” and “very resistant to change.”

Topol, who founded the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine in 2002 (four years before he joined Scripps in San Diego), is clearly looking to do things differently. He said only a few medical schools are using iPads and are teaching students how to use the Vscan, a handheld ultrasound imaging device that General Electric introduced in 2009. “Medical schools today offer nothing about wireless technologies or genomics,” said Topol, who indicated the medical school he is planning would emphasize the adoption of the latest technologies. While Topol sounded hopeful, he acknowledged that the process of starting a new school is “really difficult” and requires going through years of approval.

—One speaker did not make news in the usual sense. A talk by Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein, associate director at the FDA Center for Devices & Radiological Health was billed in the program as “a view into the agency’s oversight of wireless health devices, applications, and services.” But Bernstein didn’t provide much insight into the agency’s slow regulatory process or reasoning for asserting regulatory authority over a broad spectrum of emerging technologies.

Bernstein reminded the audience, which included more than 200 technology entrepreneurs and healthcare executives, that it was 20 years before the cell phone played a meaningful role in a physician’s daily activities and 22 years before surgeons began to use Thomas Edison’s lightbulb to illuminate their operating rooms. In other words, have patience restless wireless health entrepreneurs. It takes decades to adopt new technologies in healthcare.

WLSA CEO Rob McCray and InTouch Health Robot with the FDA's Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein

Bernstein’s presentation itself was the real news, and something of a distraction. The FDA official did not appear personally on stage, but instead used a medical telepresence robot from Santa Barbara, CA-based InTouch Health. Bernstein operated the RP-7 robot remotely from the East Coast, and his visage was limited to the robot’s 15-inch display screen. I was of two minds after Bernstein ended his talk and the robot rolled offstage and down a ramp—the audience watching apprehensively. While it was disappointing that Bernstein didn’t appear personally, it was nevertheless encouraging to see a top FDA official use remote telepresence technology to deliver his presentation without a hitch. And it also meant the agency didn’t have to pay for his trip.

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The big IT event we’re running this spring, Beyond Mobile, is now just two weeks away. We’ve got a trio of big thinkers from big organizations coming in to help us grapple with our big question—namely, what comes after the current wave of smartphones and tablets? What will our computers look like, and how will they act, in the year 2021?

Today, though, we want to announce some exciting additions to the program—the leaders of three Bay Area companies who’ll give us a look at what the future holds in the three specific areas of privacy, robotics, and healthcare. And we’re also kicking off a fun Twitter contest where you, dear reader, get to be the futurist. More details on that below.

First, just as a reminder, the main dish at Beyond Mobile will be an on-stage conversation with three leading thinkers from the West Coast information technology community, including Bill Mark, vice president of the Information and Computing Sciences Division at SRI International (which is hosting the event); Dan Reed, the leader of the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research and vice president of technology policy and strategy for Microsoft overall; and Larry Smarr, the director of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Techology, better known as Calit2.

The organizations that these distinguished speakers lead are each charged, in their own way, with mapping the way from today’s information environments to the smarter, faster, cheaper, more pervasive forms of computing that are surely over the horizon. I got just a taste of what may be coming in an interview last week with Bill Mark, whose own research focuses on “smart spaces” where embedded sensors and processors may take over many of the communications, information-retrieval, and advisory functions mobile devices now provide (and offer many more in addition). SRI is studying how government and military leaders, educators, and businesspeople might make use of such technology, and we’ll go deeper into that—as well as similar ideas being explored at Microsoft and Calit2—at the event.

Then, as a kind of dessert after that hearty meal, we’ll hear the following short “burst” presentations:

Chris Babel, CEO of San Francisco-based TRUSTe, will talk about his organization’s efforts to ensure that publishers, software makers, and advertisers respect consumer privacy on the Web—and about the mounting privacy concerns that will need to be addressed in an era of pervasive mobile and cloud-based computing.

Trevor Blackwell, the founder of Mountain View, CA-based Anybots (and a partner at the Y Combinator venture incubator), will share his vision of the role robots will play in remote presence, teleworking, and collaboration.

Michael Nusimow, CEO and co-founder of the Y Combinator-backed startup DrChrono, will demonstrate his company’s iPad-based electronic medical record platform system for doctors, and will talk about the ways our interactions with doctors may change in a future where most health information will be cloud-based and mobile-accessible.

And we’ll be sure to leave time—as we always do at Xconomy events—for lots of audience questions and networking.

We’re doing our best to make this event affordable for all. Students can register for $10, employees of startups under three years old can register for $30, and others can register at the early-bird rate for $60 (that rate expires tonight, so act fast). But starting today, there’s an even cheaper way to attend.

We’ll be giving away three pairs of tickets to Beyond Mobile to the winners of a special contest on Twitter. All you have to do is tweet your zaniest ideas about the future of computing over the next 10 years and append the hash tag #XconPredicts. For example:

“By 2021 even robots will be collecting unemployment #XconPredicts”

We’ll keep an eye on all of the predictions you share, and we’ll pick the best ones in three separate contest sessions ending Friday May 6, Tuesday May 10, and Friday May 13. Remember, the idea here is to have a little fun and come up with futuristic predictions that include a dose of humor or hilarity, sarcasm or schadenfreude. Have at it, good luck, and see you on May 17!

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If the future is here but unevenly distributed, as William Gibson said, then where is it concentrated?

One place, certainly, is the contract research giant SRI International. Created by Stanford University in 1946, it’s the organization we have to thank for inventions like automated check processing, the computer mouse, hypertext, the ARPANET (which evolved into the Internet), and ultrasound as a medical diagnostic tool. And SRI is still innovating today—one of its recent creations is Siri, the virtual-assistant iPhone app that was spun off as a startup last year and quickly snapped up by Apple for a reported $150 to $250 million.

SRI researchers like the legendary Douglas Engelbart have long had a knack for seeing how the rest of us will be using computers in the future. Eager to hear what SRI is cooking up these days, I talked yesterday with Bill Mark, the head of the institute’s Information and Computing Sciences Division. Aside from directing a staff of 250 scientists, Mark is a software systems designer who studies smart spaces—environments where embedded computers help people work, learn, or communicate more effectively.

Mark argues that despite our culture’s current infatuation with iPhones, iPads, and the like, mobile devices are actually ill-suited for many tasks, especially those involving group interactions. In those situations, he says, it would make more sense to embed computing smarts in the environment, be it a conference room or a classroom.

I asked Mark to lay out some of those ideas as an appetizer for Xconomy’s May 17 forum Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021. At this evening event on the SRI campus in Menlo Park, CA, Mark will be on stage alongside Calit2 director Larry Smarr, Microsoft eXtreme Computing Group leader Dan Reed, and myself to talk about the current trends shaping the way computers will fit into our lives in 10 years’ time. The following outtakes from my conversation with Mark give a partial preview of the topics we’ll unpack at the event. To hear the rest, you’ll have to buy a ticket. (Disclosure: SRI is an Xconomy underwriter.)

Wade Roush: To build the Siri mobile app—which can help users do things like buy concert tickets or book a table at a local restaurant—your scientists drew on years of defense-funded research at SRI on natural language understanding and other aspects of artificial intelligence. But the app is still limited to fairly simple query-response situations. Will we be having full conversations with future versions of Siri?

Bill Mark: Yes, we view Siri as a first step in that direction. When you say something to Siri, it understands your intent and puts together a set of services that fulfill that intent. That is great—I really think Siri did a fantastic job, and we’ll see what Apple does with that core technology. But there is much more to the story than that. One thing is dialogue. In real life, we use dialogue all the time. It’s extremely rare that you say something and your assistant goes off and does it and that’s the entire interaction. Our research right now is pushing into systems that can do that.

Roush: That sounds an order of magnitude harder than just responding to a spoken search query.

Mark: It’s much harder. This sounds obvious, but one challenge is that the system needs to understand what it just told you. People in a dialogue assume that the other person, or in this case the piece of software, understood the previous utterance. Most systems don’t. There are also performance issues. The system has to come back with a reasonable response in a reasonable amount of time, otherwise it’s not dialogue. And the key piece is that the system has to … Next Page »

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Hundreds of people packed the Bell Harbor Conference Center on Seattle’s waterfront yesterday for the University of Washington’s annual Business Plan Competition. Now in its 14th year, the competition is a great showcase of energy and ideas from student entrepreneurs and some of their more experienced collaborators.

Last night, the group of 37 teams was whittled down to the “sweet 16″ semifinal round. You can learn more about the particulars of the competition at the Foster Business School website, and check out the list of the 16 semifinalists.

I wasn’t there as a judge, but decided to compile a few capsules of the proto-companies that caught my eye—even though some of them didn’t make the next round, or even have websites yet, we could be hearing more from these folks in the future.

Yoi! Gaming
Massively multiplayer video games are not exactly mainstream, but the people who are into them are really passionate—there are mini-celebrity players who make a living in competitive gaming, John Madden-esque online commentators, and big tournaments with serious prizes.

But Yoi! Gaming CEO C.J. Wong says there’s a gap between those big tournaments, which can be difficult to qualify for, and the smaller, local competitions that rely on having everyone in the same place. “We feel like we’re in 1918 before the NFL started—there’s a bunch of small leagues out there,” Wong says.

The idea behind Yoi! is to set up online matchmaking that can sort people into quick groups for competing against each other, with buy-ins and prizes—something that should sound familiar to anyone who’s seen online poker sites explode in the past decade.

Wong says, however, that online video gaming competitions have avoided the heat that regulators have applied to poker companies because the games are seen as more skill-based, and not related to gambling. Yoi! already has a license from Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of hugely popular game StarCraft—which, I am not making this up, is so popular in South Korea that tournaments are shown live on TV.

ZeroBrane
These guys are developing a small, cheap robot that uses a smartphone as its brain. The little machine, which looks like an iPhone riding a miniature pair of Segway wheels, is intended mostly for entertainment purposes on the consumer side right now—tooling around the house or “chasing your cat,” … Next Page »

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There’s something amazing happening in garages, basement workshops, and hackerspaces across the country. Generations raised on mass consumption, the local mall, and ordering products online from Amazon are rediscovering the joy of making stuff—and sometimes selling it. In fact, the twisty path from being a “maker” to being a full-blown entrepreneur is being traced by a growing number of people, especially now that there are resources like TechShop, the chain of membership-based workshops I profiled in December.

This phenomenon is worth a closer look—and next Wednesday night, April 27, TechShop and Xconomy San Francisco are getting together to host an informal evening event called The Maker Revolution: From Workbench to Business. TechShop is hosting this free event at its impressive new San Francisco facility at 926 Howard Street in SoMa, and I’ll be moderating a panel discussion about how greater access to tools, software, and other resources is fostering a vibrant community of creators and businesspeople in the Bay Area and beyond.

Joining us for the event will be Dale Dougherty, a co-founder of O’Reilly Media and the editor and publisher of MAKE Magazine; Andy Filo, inventor of the i-Cybie robot dog; Kate Sofis, the executive director of SFMade, a non-profit promoting the manufacturing sector in San Francisco; and Mark Hatch, the CEO of TechShop.

Each of these panelists will bring a unique perspective to the discussion. Dale Dougherty has been following—indeed, helping to invent—the entire maker phenomenon through his magazine and O’Reilly’s expanding series of Maker Faire events. Filo is dedicated to perfecting the process of invention—he has a small home shop designed to help him “go from a concept or invention to reality in the shortest time possible.” Sofis’s organization is helping to ensure that local craftspeople and entrepreneurs have the ability to flourish. And Hatch brings an experience running big service organizations like Kinko’s computer services business to the growing TechShop chain, where 30 to 60 percent of members use the facilities to build things they eventually hope to sell.

The 'Innovation Cathedral' area at TechShop San Francisco

Along those lines: You’ve probably heard of Dodocase, the San Francisco company that sells fancy leatherbound cases for the Apple iPad. But did you know that Dodocase founders Patrick Buckley and Craig Dalton did all the prototyping and early production runs for the Dodocase at TechShop’s Menlo Park, CA, location? Clustered Systems is another great example: electrical engineer Phil Hughes and a partner spent a year using TechShop tools to build a prototype liquid cooling system for computer servers. Today Clustered Systems is selling its system to owners of data centers, where they reduce energy consumption for cooling by as much as 50 percent. The company is busy hiring engineers, technicians, and salespeople to cope with the demand.

With design software and prototyping equipment coming down in cost to the point that regular folks can rent access to it for $100 a month, the barriers to starting small-scale manufacturing operations like these are coming down fast, and on April 27 we’ll examine both the opportunities and the pitfalls inherent in this trend. We’ll also hear quick presentations from several local entrepreneurs who are making good on their dreams. The event (which is free, but please register here) gets underway at 6 pm with mingling and tours of TechShop.The formal program will go from 6:30 to 8 pm, followed by more networking and tours. I hope you’ll be able to join us.

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Fifty-three teams battled it out on Saturday at the Boston regional edition of the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition, a robot-building contest for high school students celebrating its 20th anniversary season year. The nonprofit behind the competition was founded by Segway inventor Dean Kamen.

Each year, student teams get a robot parts kit and a fixed amount of time before the showdown to build their machines. The robots are built to compete in a game created by FIRST that often contain elements of other sports like basketball (2009′s games) and soccer (last year’s competition). In this year’s game, “Logo Motion,” the robots earned points for student teams by hanging as many triangle, square, and circle balloon pieces in the playing field as possible, with bonus points going to the robot that could hang the pieces to form the FIRST logo. Student teams had the chance to score additional points by  designing and building a “mini-bot” that could race to the top of a vertical pole. Three robots and high school teams partnered on each side (a “coopetition”), as part of FIRST’s mission of fostering both a sense of healthy competition and teamwork.

Below is a list of the winners who will be competing in the FIRST championships in St. Louis, MO, later this month. Full details can be found here

Winner  1—Team 88, Bridgewater, MA
Winner 2—Team 1099, Brookfield, CT
Winner 3—Team 78, Newport County, RI
Engineering Inspiration Award winner—Team 1100, Northboro, MA
Rookie All Star Award winner—Team 3466, Westford, MA
Regional Chairman’s Award winner—Team 246, Boston, MA

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The world needs robots, hopefully more than Mars needs moms.

The first part of that was Rodney Brooks’s message in his talk at the annual meeting of the National Venture Capital Association in Boston yesterday. Brooks, of course, has a strong interest in seeing the mass adoption of robots. He’s the co-founder of iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) and Heartland Robotics, the Boston startup that aims to revolutionize U.S. manufacturing. Brooks retired last summer from an illustrious 29-year academic career, mostly at MIT, to focus on Heartland, which raised a $20 million Series B round last fall.

Here are a few takeaways from the Brooks talk, which was delivered to a room of venture capitalists:

Brooks started by making the economic case for mainstream robots. The populations of Europe, Japan, and the U.S. are getting older, he showed—the ratio of elderly to young people is increasing. That means “older people are competing for the physical services of younger people, so the price goes up too,” he said. “Physical stuff that needs to be done for people will get much more expensive.” And robots are a way to help do that stuff more efficiently, he said—think robotic wheelchairs or simple machines to lift and carry groceries and heavy items.

Brooks then traced the geographic path of low-cost manufacturing since World War II. He showed that the U.S. has outsourced cheap industrial labor to a series of countries—first Japan; then Korea, Taiwan, and China; and then Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. Next up: Burma, Bangladesh, and perhaps African nations. “I don’t think this is sustainable in the long term,” Brooks said. “Everyone comes up in this flat world.”

He didn’t give an overt commercial for Heartland Robotics—the company is still pretty guarded about its technology—-but the idea (as I understand it) is that inexpensive helper robots in factories and workplaces could increase U.S. competitiveness, and eventually lead to what Brooks calls the “third wave of the industrial revolution.”

I gleaned a few more hints about what Heartland’s robots might be able to do. Judging from Brooks’s research over the years in computer vision, object recognition, dexterous manipulation, and interactive robots, I’m guessing they’ll be aware of people and objects around them and what exactly they’re looking at. They’ll be able to pick up and manipulate simple items, all while being safe for people to be in close quarters with. Most of all, they’ll be cheap and easy to use—a new breed of … Next Page »

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Liquid Robotics, headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, has collected $18 million in equity-based financing in a round that could reach as high as $23.2 million, according to a regulatory filing. The four-year-old startup makes an “autonomous marine vehicle” called the Wave Glider that carries sensor payloads and moves by converting wave motion into thrust. The device was originally developed to monitor humpback whale populations, but today Liquid Robotics is marketing it for defense, scientific, and commercial applications. In 2009 a Wave Glider circumnavigated the island of Hawaii in nine days at an average speed of 1.6 knots.

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Make no mistake—this is Boston’s big bet on the future of robotics.

Cambridge, MA-based Heartland Robotics is announcing today it has raised $20 million in Series B financing led by new investor Highland Capital Partners. New investor Sigma Partners also participated, as did existing investors Charles River Ventures and Bezos Expeditions. All in all, it’s a vote of confidence by the Boston-area venture community in one of its homegrown companies—even as the region faces increasing competition in robotics from Google and other Silicon Valley companies.

More specifically, the new money and support will help Heartland Robotics “finalize product development” and bring its “innovative line of robots to market,” said Heartland CEO Scott Eckert, in a statement.

The company is still being cagey about giving any details on its technology or specific applications. The basic idea, it says, is to make U.S. manufacturing more productive and efficient by “introducing a new generation of robots” into “places that have not been automated before.” In a statement, Heartland founder and chief technology officer Rodney Brooks said the firm’s robots will be “intuitive to use, intelligent and highly flexible. They’ll be easy to buy, train, and deploy and will be unbelievably inexpensive.”

That last bit is key—the robots have to be really cheap for the economics to work out, and for Heartland to reach its goal of keeping American manufacturing jobs from migrating to low-cost regions. That would seem to preclude robots that have human-like dexterity, which was the focus of research Brooks conducted in recent years at MIT involving robotic arms and hands that can manipulate tools and everyday objects using tactile sensors and computer vision. But the robots could have some dexterity—enough to load and unload equipment parts, say, or perform assembly-line tasks. And they probably could be mobile, like iRobot’s Roomba, and could help move items around the workplace, like Kiva Systems’ warehouse helper robots, for example.

Heartland Robotics previously raised a $7 million Series A round from Charles River Ventures and Bezos Expeditions, the Seattle-based investment firm of Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. Heartland was founded in 2008 by Brooks, the co-founder of iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) and former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Brooks retired from MIT last summer to spend more time on his new company.

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None of this would have happened 10 years ago. Where to begin?

Last month, I walked into a room of about a dozen robotics experts and technology startup investors. It was one of the sessions at the MassTLC Innovation “unConference” in Boston. The discussion centered around how to build a successful robotics company. But it was some of the newer context around this question that turned the session into a watershed moment I won’t soon forget.

Two main takeaways: First, robotics companies around Boston have come a very long way since 2000, when I was a postdoc in a robotics group at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. That sort of academic research is still going strong, but the bigger story of the past decade has been the business success of robotic vacuum cleaners, bomb-disposal units, and surveillance drones, and how that has helped pave the way for a new generation of companies.

My second takeaway is that the business community thinks there is a new threat to Boston’s competitive position in robotics—and its name is Google. I’m not usually one to fan the flames of Boston vs. Silicon Valley arguments, but in this case the discussion hits close to home, so I wanted to see if there’s much truth to it.

The Boston area, of course, is home to numerous robotics companies—iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), Boston Dynamics, Harvest Automation, Heartland Robotics, Kiva Systems, iWalk, and CyPhy Works, just to name a few. Many of those companies were represented in the unConference session, along with investors from CommonAngels, Founder Collective, and General Catalyst. Historically the region has had lots of expertise, both in universities and industry, in key technologies underlying robotics such as sensors, actuators, control algorithms, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and data storage.

Yet 10 years ago, most early-stage investors (angels and VCs) wouldn’t think of touching a robotics startup. The development costs and business risks were too high, and the technology infrastructure—onboard processing power, wireless communication, programmable chips, sensors, algorithms—wasn’t quite ready for prime time. Now things have changed, certainly in investors’ minds, … Next Page »

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Last week, Waltham, MA-based defense contractor Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) unveiled its latest prototype “exoskeleton.” This is a powered robotic suit that a soldier or worker could strap on in the field to enable them to load heavy equipment faster, carry supplies or munitions using less energy, or—let’s face it—just look ultra-cool. Raytheon said in a statement that the new robotic suit is “lighter, stronger, and faster than its predecessor, yet it uses 50 percent less power.” The device is powered by high-pressure hydraulics and gives its wearer some degree of super strength.

In the demo, which took place at Raytheon’s Sarcos subsidiary in Salt Lake City, UT, an engineer wearing the suit (which includes arms and legs) punched through some boards, did pushups, and lifted weights with little effort. The news was reported fairly breathlessly by media outlets including CNET, Wired, Scientific American, and the L.A. Times. And I understand why—it’s a sexy technology that conjures up visions of “Iron Man” and mythical references to superhuman strength. Plus it’s far more accessible than all the top-secret stuff Raytheon does that is actually useful for the military—radar systems, cybersecurity, missile defense, and so forth.

But I wondered how much progress has really been made in exoskeletons—in the fundamental robotics, sensing, control, and energy technologies necessary to make a robot suit powerful, safe, and reliable to move around in. Raytheon declined to be interviewed for this story, but I did some digging around.

After all, I’ve been following the field since 2001, when I worked in the old Leg Lab at MIT, which was home to robots that could walk, run, hop, and keep their balance. Back then, the main problems with designing a robotic exoskeleton were how to make it powerful without being clunky, how to control it safely, and how to supply enough energy to it.

In 2002, I attended a private meeting of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program on “exoskeletons for human performance augmentation” (from which I still sport a nifty backpack, though it doesn’t give me super strength). The program manager was Ephrahim Garcia, a professor at Cornell University, who later handed it off to engineer John Main. At the time, about a dozen universities and research groups were competing to build exoskeleton technologies for DARPA, and Sarcos had one of the designs that eventually won out. A couple years later, I visited Sarcos (which Raytheon acquired in 2007) and got a tour of the Utah lab and an early demo from its leader, Steve Jacobsen, for a photo essay in Technology Review.

My first impression from the demo last week was that not much has changed in the field in the past decade. That’s a bit surprising, since other kinds of robots—Predator aerial drones, PackBots, Roombas—have become increasingly sophisticated as they’ve been commercialized and deployed by the military. As it turns out, though, my first impression of the Raytheon device was not entirely correct.

“They’ve clearly demonstrated increases in strength,” says Hugh Herr, a professor who leads the biomechatronics group at the MIT Media Lab, which works on things like smart … Next Page »

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[Video included, please scroll down] Trevor Blackwell used to think that telepresence robots were all about manipulation: being able to grasp and move things from afar. So he and his colleagues at Mountain View, CA-based Anybots spent years building robots with beautifully articulated hands that users could operate over a standard Internet connection. The company’s prototypes were so dexterous that they could make pizza, sort machine parts into bins, or even brew coffee in a French press.

But along the way, the Anybots team learned a lot about their robots. For one thing, the bots were a bit slow. “We could do a lot of things, but it typically took two or three times longer than if you were there in person,” Blackwell says. “You had to think about what you were doing, and you couldn’t move your fingers quite as quickly.” To some extent, that defeated the purpose of telepresence robots, which, loosely speaking, is to save users time by allowing them to get work done without having to travel to a remote location.

Also, the manipulator robots were difficult to build, and expensive. “We realized it was going to take a long time to get robot hands into volume production,” Blackwell says. “It was something we could build in the lab, but it was still many years away from being able to commercialize it.”

But about two years ago, as it turns out, Blackwell had an experience that inspired him to think about telepresence differently. “It was staring us in the face for years, and we didn’t see it until I ended up having an emergency,” he told me in an interview yesterday.

Blackwell had scheduled an important in-person meeting with some potential partners at Anybots’ headquarters. But a canceled flight left him stranded in a hotel in Canada, he says. So he logged in to Monty, a 150-pound wheeled prototype back in Mountain View, which sported not just arms and hands but cameras, microphones, and speakers. “I got the video working and went into the meeting. And it was really good. I remember [the meeting] as if I was there. It was a great experience, and I thought, ‘This is the thing we should be selling.’”

Blackwell was realizing, in other words, that telepresence was as much about vision and movement as it was about manipulation.

That was the summer of 2008. And this November, Blackwell’s eureka moment will start paying off, as the first 100 “QB” telepresence robots roll off Anybots’ production line. The $15,000 devices are intended for businesses where workers in widely separated offices can use them as a supplement—or even a replacement—for traditional video conferencing.

Already, tech companies have been using pre-production QB units as a way for remote bosses to practice “management by walking around,” to cite a strategy first popularized by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. “One of our favorite customers is a software company with about 50 developers, and 20 of them are in Russia,” Blackwell says. “So they use [QB] regularly to basically provide a door between those two offices, so that people can pop in and talk. The problem with video conferencing is that you generally have to arrange it in advance, book a conference room, and then everyone sits down and has a Meeting with a capital M. It’s very different from just being able to drop into someone’s cubicle and ask them an easy question.”

At this point, you’re probably thinking “Yeah, right. I’m supposed to have a real conversation with my boss/colleague/mom via robot?” Well, after conducting an entire interview yesterday with a person who was logged into a QB robot, I can report that the initial awkwardness goes away almost immediately, just as it does after your first couple of Skype video conversations. My guess is that the biggest barrier to widespread adoption of telepresence robots like QB will be cost, not ease of use.

I encourage you to pause here and watch the video blog post I shot at Anybots, then continue reading below. The six-minute sequence consists of an introduction by Blackwell, followed by a remote interview with Suzanne Brocato, Anybots’ “virtual receptionist.” The rest of this column delves into Anybots’ history and business model.

What’s interesting to me about Anybots is that the company’s seemingly drastic change of direction, from manipulator robots to teleconferencing robots, wasn’t actually a departure from Blackwell’s original vision. The way he describes it, that vision is all about … Next Page »

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Menlo Park, CA-based Willow Garage is one of a growing number of companies producing robots meant to navigate everyday human environments rather than factory floors or the surfaces of distant planets. As the New York Times described in an article last week, for example, early testers at the Mozilla Corporation are using the company’s Texai robot, which runs largely on open-source software, as a remote presence device, allowing workers to attend meetings and visit people in the office via an Internet video connection.

And now anybody can buy a related Willow Garage robot of their own for a modest $400,000—or just $280,000 for those who can demonstrate their open-source cred. Willow Garage announced on its blog Tuesday night that its PR2 model is commercially available for the first time.

Looking like a chunky, legless cousin of Honda’s walking Asimo robot—the PR2 slides on casters rather than walking—the machine isn’t designed for any specific application, but rather as a platform for innovation in robotics. It features manipulating arms for grabbing and carrying things, stereo cameras for eyes, and a laser scanner for navigation. Everything is modular, removable, and extensible, meaning robot builders could adapt it to do anything from nursing care to factory work, without having to create everything from scratch.

Willow Garage has supplied 11 PR2 units to beta testers in robotics labs, such as the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. But now the company says it’s ready for commercial production. “This is an exciting milestone for Willow Garage as making PR2 broadly available has been a major goal of ours,” Keenan Wyrobek, co-director of Willow Garage’s personal robotics program, wrote on the company blog. “With PR2 now commercially available, we can’t want to see what our new users will develop on our platform.”

Through a “discount award program,” buyers with a track record of creating and releasing open-source code will be eligible for a $120,000 discount off the PR2′s base price of $400,000. Applicants for the discount must submit a two-page outline of their open-source contributions and their plans for sharing any new code they produce for the PR2.

Willow Garage was founded by Scott Hassan, the founder of eGroups (now Yahoo Groups) and an early employee at Google. The company says it wants to “lay the groundwork for the use of personal robotics applications in everyday life” by investing in open-source software and operating systems for robots as well as non-patented “open platforms” for basic hardware components such as PR2′s grasping arms.

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Famed robotics expert Rodney Brooks, the former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is retiring from academic duties at MIT as of this week. The co-founder and former chief technical officer of Bedford, MA-based iRobot will be focusing full-time on his newest company, Heartland Robotics, based in Cambridge, MA. Brooks’s new role as professor emeritus at MIT will be effective this Thursday, July 1. He is 55.

There is some question as to whether Brooks will be the youngest professor emeritus in the history of his department (electrical engineering and computer science). Reached by e-mail, Brooks confirms he is the youngest of the current crop of MIT professors who are retiring this year—at least those on a list announced at a faculty meeting last month. And current regulations at MIT say a professor must be at least 55 to achieve emeritus status, so he is probably among the youngest, at least in recent history. “It may be that come this Thursday I will be the current youngest emeritus professor at MIT, but I can’t say that for sure,” Brooks says.

Brooks is widely known for his scientific contributions to computer vision, mobile robots, humanoid robots, artificial intelligence, and artificial life. He did postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT before becoming a professor at Stanford University (where he had done his PhD in computer science) and then MIT in 1984, where he has stayed as a full-time faculty member until now. Brooks was director of the MIT AI Lab before it merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science to form CSAIL in 2003. He stepped down as director of CSAIL in June 2007 to dive deeper into science and, as it turns out, to try to create a new industry.

“I spent my career at MIT developing new ideas for how to make robots intelligent. Through iRobot I have been very successful at getting robots out in the world based on those ideas. In terms of raw numbers the majority of robots that are sold today are behavior-based, and follow the ideas I worked on in the eighties,” Brooks says. “Now I am trying to develop a new class of robots for deployment in the real world that are based on the work that my students and I did during the nineties and later.”

In September 2008, Brooks announced he was leaving iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), the consumer and defense robotics firm he started in 1990, to build a new company. Heartland Robotics, which is backed by Charles River Ventures and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is looking to bring intelligent, dexterous robots to industrial workplaces in order to boost productivity and revitalize U.S. manufacturing. It’s still very early, of course. But given Brooks’s recent advances in robots that can manipulate … Next Page »

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Heartland Robotics, the Cambridge, MA, firm founded by Rodney Brooks and backed by Jeff Bezos and Charles River Ventures, said today it has hired Scott Eckert as its new chief executive. Eckert, a former Dell executive and co-founder and CEO of Motion Computing, succeeds Heartland’s outgoing president, Patrick Sobalvarro. Heartland Robotics, which raised $7 million from Charles River Ventures and Seattle-based Bezos Expeditions last year, is developing a new class of robots for manufacturing applications based on research done by Brooks, the MIT roboticist and co-founder of Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT).

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It strikes me that Michigan could be in a terrific position to become the next major distribution and logistics-type hub in the Midwest.

—There is a looming shortage of hourly direct labor around the country prepared to work at the $12-15/hr warehouse functions.

—Seems Michigan would have an abundant direct labor force and access to large/low-cost warehousing-type infrastructure (empty buildings).

—Michigan has decent proximity to Midwest addresses and can easily pump orders into the UPS/Fedex networks for next day around the world.

—Also, Michigan used to be the base for many material handling companies feeding automotive sector that could now turn to fulfillment.

[Editor's note: To help launch Xconomy Detroit, we've queried our network of Xconomists and other innovation leaders around the country for their list of the most important things that entrepreneurs and innovators in Michigan can do to reinvigorate their regional economy.]

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