I attended the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation from May 13th to 17th. It was hosted in Yokohama, Japan. Including the expo and competitions, over 9,000 people attended. Here are some of my notes broken into categories:
There were over 130 booths not including the robot demo area and 10 competitions.
There was a lack of North American based humanoid companies attending this year. It’s normal for Tesla and Boston Dynamics to not attend with a booth, but Agility, Sanctuary AI, Figure AI, and Apptronik also did not have booths or hardware. [Boston Dynamics did Spot demos in partnership with a Japanese firm, while Agility and Sanctuary AI gave short talks]
From the US, we had Westwood Robotics with THEMIS
I didn’t remember to stop by the booth and ask about the price for THEMIS. The very small sized humanoid they also make, named BRUCE, is around $15,000.
From Japan, we had both Kawasaki and THK. Kawasaki was showing some research versions of their humanoid and quadruped. These were made with off the shelf planetary actuators from China.
THK was showing a prototype humanoid meant to showcase their new cycloid actuators (which are planned to be for sale).
