Boston Dynamics buys the young 3D vision company Kinema Systems



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Boston Dynamics, the robotics company known for causing a frenzy on the Internet for its animal and human-inspired robots, announced Tuesday the acquisition of a startup in 3D vision.

Kinema Systems is a startup based in Menlo Park that produces a 3D vision software called "Pick", which allows robotic arms to pick up and deposit pallets in warehouses.

Boston Dynamics has released a video of its newly acquired "Pick" system in action, with a static robotic arm picking up a variety of boxes of different sizes and placing them on a treadmill.

"By integrating the Kinema team at Boston Dynamics, we are expanding our perception and learning capabilities, while the Pick product is accelerating our entry into the logistics market." In addition to being a tool Powerful for industrial robotic arms, Kinema technology will help our mobile handling robots deal with a wide variety of concrete tasks, "said Marc Raibert, founder and CEO of Boston Dynamics, in a press release.

Read more: Boston Dynamics has built a robot that gives primitive appearance to Amazon's warehouse robots

This new advance towards warehouse automation seems to be aimed at making the company a more commercial entity. Boston Dynamics last month released a video of a mobile robot called "Handle", able to pick up and move boxes in a warehouse.

While Boston Dynamics robots have drawn the attention of the press in the past for their strange similarities to humans and animals, the company has not yet put product on the market, it focuses rather on research.

When Google sold the buzzy robotics company to Japanese technology giant SoftBank in 2017, reports revealed that he had become frustrated with the time taken by Boston Dynamics to develop a commercial product.

Raibert told TechCrunch on Tuesday that Google "laid the foundation" for monetization in the company, and pointed out that the marketing strategy was "a consistent thing".

"It's not like we came to SoftBank and they hit us with a hammer and suddenly said" make products ". They were also extremely excited about our R & D work, "he said.

Boston Dynamics integrates the Pick system into its Handle robot, but will also sell the software to other customers. He also plans to present live demonstrations of Pick later this month at Promat, a professional supply chain show and automation manufacturing.

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