Top 5 innovative companies in service robotics

The robotic revolution is on the way and we will be welcoming them into our daily lives soon. From household chores to industrial automation, robots will increasingly be assisting us. Robotics is a hot research topic and big names like IBM, Samsung and Honda are all making significant developments.

There are also a lot of interesting private companies that are innovating in robotics across multiple domains. In this article we pick five highly ranked service robotics companies from the thousands of robotics companies we track in the VentureRadar database.

“I think robotics technology will change who we are, just as eyeglasses and fire changed who we were before,” Rodney Brookes, former director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

(1) Industrial Automation: Rethink Robotics describes itself as a new kind of robotics company, and the company’s mission is to create a new kind of manufacturing robot. One that introduces robotics into processes that manufacturers have never been able to cost-effectively automate. The robots can work safely alongside human counterparts, who are able to train them with no programming or engineering expertise. This approach of providing robots with ‘common sense’ allows them to perform a wide range of tasks and vastly improve productivity.

(2) Healthcare: Robosoft Services Robots has thirty years of experience developing robotics technology across a range of sectors including: transportation of people and goods, defence, security services, cleaning services and people assistance. ROBOSOFT has developed three main robots for the healthcare industry; the first is the assistive robot named Kompaï for vulnerable people, the second is robuWALKER which is a robotized walker and the last robot (which is not commercially available yet) is Estele, which is a remotely controlled echography robotic system allowing any expert clinician to perform remotely echographic diagnosis as if they are “on site”.

(3) Education: RobotsLAB has developed the RobotsLAB BOX, an all-in-one tailored solution featuring various robots and a tablet allowing teachers to control the robots, and run exercises and lessons in the palm of their hand without any prior experience with robotics. Without any prior experience in robotics or computer science, teachers can demonstrate abstract concepts like slope, sine, cosine, and vectors.

(4) Hospitality: Savioke develops service delivery robots for the hospitality industry, delivering things such as snacks and amenities to hotel guests, enabling hotel staff to focus on other guests’ needs.

(5) Garbage Collection: Robotech is a spin-off company of the public university in Pisa developing robots for education and entertainment (edutainment) and for domestic and professional applications. DustCart is the company’s urban robot which is a completely autonomous system for urban door-to-door garbage collection with real users. Robotech says it aims is to promote this product outside the world of research as soon as the market is ready and appropriate legislation is in place.

You can take a closer look at these impressive robots in action in the videos below:

Industrial Automation: Rethink Robotics / @RethinkRobotics