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AutonoMusings - Airware's Final Landing

AutonoMusings
AutonoMusings - Airware's Final Landing
By Joshua Ouellette • Issue #19 • View online
Welcome to this week’s AutonoMusings!
The most surprising autonomy news this week was drone software startup Airware’s decision to shut down. Just a few days ago, the company announced a new Tokyo office and partnership with Mitsubishi.
Airware went through a number of incarnations during its 7-year run, starting as an autopilot company, then building their own drone hardware, before refocusing on software services. Despite $118M in funding, Airware never found product market fit.
There were many factors in Airware’s demise. A major one is that drone technology evolved very quickly while FAA regulation moved very slowly. By the time Airware could have legally scaled US operations, the underlying technology was already highly commoditized largely due to DJI’s success with consumer drones.
That’s a hard position for a startup, however well-funded.
Good luck to all of the Airware Team!
- Josh

Bay area startup Applied Intuition just came out of stealth with an $11.5M Series A led by a16z to create simulation software to help autonomous vehicles learn to roam the roads safely without staging elaborate experiments. The software includes more than 100,000 road scenarios and millions of different outcomes.
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Mono-vision camera helps drones zip through tight gaps like a bug
On the whole, insect vision isn’t particularly detailed. But it’s remarkably effective at helping the bug perform precise maneuvers when needed. The University of Maryland’s Perception and Robotics Group are developing a system that enables drones to fly through small, unknown gaps using a single camera and onboard processing.
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‘Robat' navigates by sound like a bat, but stays grounded on wheels
On the other end of the spectrum from flying robots that mimic insect sight (see above), this sightless robot uses an ultrasonic speaker and two microphones to map the layout of the space around it. Although ultrasonic ranging is common in robotics, the Robat is the first fully autonomous “bat-like biorobot” to map spaces using echo information.
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MIT extends its robotic grabber game to unknown objects
Robots do a lot of things very well. But being dextrous isn’t at the top of that list. Researchers at MIT, however, have developed a system that robots to inspect and understand unfamiliar objects enough to pick them up and manipulate them. They system, called Dense Object Nets, also lets robots identify and pick up particular objects from a pile of others that are similar in size and shape. 
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An Amazon patent granted in 2016 is under fire by researchers who describe a cage affixed a robotic dolly with a small workspace for a human as “an extraordinary illustration of worker alienation.” In response to recent criticism, an Amazon VP tweeted that the company has yet to implement the technology that would allow humans to safely enter robot-only zones to make repairs or retrieve dropped objects and has no plans to.
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Joshua Ouellette

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