Big thanks to Joyce Sidopoulos, Peter Barrett and Ken Goldberg for filling in the last few weeks. I’m excited by the boost this newsletter has been getting in recent months and wanted to keep the light on while I was out. Three weeks is the longest break I’ve taken for work in…ever, really.
Went to a bunch of museums (do yourself a favor and check out Edward Hopper at the Whitney and Morris Hirshfield at the American Folk Art Museum — can’t recommend them enough) and spent a few days in Aruba, of all places. Still not sure why flights were so cheap, but if you’re ever looking for a nice place to stay on the island for $150 a night, let me know. There’s also a great animal rescue. Go make friends with a miniature donkey.
The minute you get off the plane at JFK, however . . . Let’s just say the inner peace from meditating on a white sand beach every morning wears off even faster than the tan. Suddenly you’re tossed back into New York during travel season in 30-degree weather. If anyone in the Leeward Antilles is looking for someone to write a robot newsletter, hit me up.
The truth of it is, I’m back on the clock this week because we’re less than a week out from CES. I spent yesterday combing through 1,600 unread emails in an inbox that was zeroed out the day I left. Without giving the game away, I will say that there’s going to be a lot of fodder for Actuator at the show. Likely next week’s newsletter will be written from CES, about CES.
We’ve seen a slow creep of robotics in recent years, but this feels different. There’s the simple fact that I (and many other regulars) haven’t attended the show in a few years (January 2020 was very auspicious timing for an event that brought 171,000 people from all over the world into the same space). Robotics has had the beginnings of a renaissance during that time, so it follows that it will have a bigger presence at the biggest consumer electronics show.
To all of my fellow journalists covering the space, a word of warning: bad robots are nothing new. They tend to be more prevalent in the consumer space than anywhere else. People looking to spend a couple hundred bucks on a home robot likely don’t do the same level of due diligence that goes into choosing a $100,000 robotics system for your factory.
Claims get overblown, things don’t work out as promised, stuff breaks and there’s no one from the company ready to fly in to fix it. Be careful out there, folks. A lot of bad robots are going to be mixed in with the good ones. I’ve received multiple emails from companies claiming to be bringing the world’s first consumer robot to the show, and we all know how meaningless and wrong that claim is.
Image Credits: Thamrongpat Theerathammakorn / Getty Images
The other important element of this is the degree to which CES has become an automotive show over the past decades. The obvious import of this is that many automakers are getting aggressive about robots — either through investments or through their own divisions. Hyundai’s Boston Dynamics acquisition was very much in the limelight at last year’s show. …….