TECHNOLOGY FOCUS
Robotics and Automation
A roundup of recent advances in engineering technology. In this issue, a look at breakthroughs and commercialization of robots.
ROBOTS IN THE FIELDS
Farming operations, which feature repetitive work in challenging conditions, seem ripe for an infusion of automated help. That insight has driven investment in startups operating in the agricultural robotics space. FarmDroid, the manufacturer of field-ready robotic systems based in Vejen, Denmark, announced in October 2024 that it had obtained 10.5 million euros in capital to help fund its expansion into global markets.
FarmDroid announced in July 2024 that it had 500 robots in use in 23 countries, including limited deployments in California, Michigan, and Oregon, where they seeded and weeded crops. The company’s FD20, which was demonstrated this past growing season, is a solar-powered field robot that uses GPS to mark the position of each plant at seeding and subsequently performs both inter-row and intra-row weed control.
Because the FD20 can target individual weeds with a micro-spray system, FarmDroid says its robots can reduce the overall volume of pesticide use.
FarmDroid isn’t the only robotics company operating in agriculture. Harvest CROO Robotics in Tampa, Fla., has developed an AI-enabled system for identifying and plucking ripe strawberries. And France’s Naio Technologies has deployed two different models specialized for tending to vines in wine-growing regions.
AUTOMATED CARHOPS
Some drive-in diners of the 1950s featured roller-skating waitresses who brought orders out to parked cars. While nostalgia-soaked patrons might love to see the return of this service, Austin, Tex.-based Pipedream Labs is offering the next best thing. In November 2024, it announced the launch of its robotic food-delivery system, which uses underground robots to shuttle food orders from the kitchen to customers.
According to Canon Reeves, co-founder and chief technology officer of Pipedream, many restaurants and grocery stores face a challenge when it comes to fulfilling pickup orders. The labor and logistics of running orders out to waiting vehicles can be daunting. The ultimate delivery system would be something akin to teleportation, he told The Robot Report.
Pipedream hasn’t cracked that, but they have developed a system than relies on a network of buried tubes, similar to the pneumatic tubes used in bank drive-through windows.
In late 2023, Pipedream demoed a system in Peachtree Corners, Ga., that extended a network of tubes nearly one mile long to connect restaurants and stores in the shopping center to a set of kiosks in the parking lot. Orders were loaded onto bins that rode atop small autonomous vehicles through the tube network.
The newest system, located at a fast-food restaurant at an undisclosed location in Texas, took less than a week to build across the restaurant’s parking lot. Reeves said he wanted to reduce the build time to less than three days.
Reeves was quoted by The Robot Report, laying out the company’s ultimate vision as part of a door-to-door delivery system. “We believe in this world where our system can hand off to other systems,” he said. “You can image this system getting it close to your neighborhood, and maybe a sidewalk robot finished that last 100 feet to your doorstep.”
DO INDOOR ROBOTS NEED LEVELS OF AUTONOMY?
Some 10 years ago, the Society of Automotive Engineers unveiled a set of categories for differentiating between levels of “self-driving” for autonomous automobiles, with Level 5 being the as-yet-unachieved gold standard for a car that can get around with no human driver.
Autonomous indoor robots generally don’t have backup drivers the way robo-taxis do. Recently Relay Robotics, the Campbell, Calif.-based maker of hospital and hotel delivery robots proposed a set of autonomy levels for helping potential buyers better understand what autonomous robots can—and can’t—do. A blog post written by engineers working for the company laid out a set of standard terminology.
“Relay robots in particular, are being deployed in busy hospitals and hotels across the world. However, unlike automated driving, there is currently no widely adopted standard for levels of autonomous navigation for indoor robots,” wrote Sonali Deshpande, senior navigation engineer, and Jim Slater, robot systems architect. “Our objective is to present such a framework.”
The five-level categorization is determined by installation complexity, the ability to navigate social situations or changing environments, and the potential to move between floors within a building. Robots that can operate only along paths that are defined by paint or buried wires, say, would be Level 1, while “Level 5 robots are robots that could navigate in all indoor environments on par with human skill, as well as do so in a completely new environment without detailed prebuilt maps and a manually intensive installation process,” the engineers wrote.
CAT’S EYES FOR AUTONOMOUS ROBOTS
The vertical-slit pupil of a cat’s eyes serves a purpose. During the day, they reduce glare, while at night, the pupils widen to allow light to hit a reflective layer to boost vision in the dark.
Now, a group of researchers in South Korea have taken inspiration from cat’s eyes to produce a new advanced vision system for robots.
The system includes a slit-like aperture that filters excess light to help focus on key objects. A reflective layer much like the one in a cat’s eye improves visibility in low-light conditions.
The researchers said the system allowed enhanced object detection and recognition capabilities.
"Robotic cameras often struggle to spot objects in busy or camouflaged backgrounds, especially when lighting conditions change,” said Young Min Song from Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in a press statement. “Our design solves this by letting robots blur out unnecessary details and focus on important objects."
One advantage of the vision system is that it relies on the design of the lens rather than on heavy computer processing, making it more energy efficient than conventional vision systems.
ROBOTIC FINGER CAN TAKE A PULSE
Building a robotic sense of touch is still in the beginning stages, but researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei report developing a finger that is sensitive enough to conduct routine medical exams such as taking a pulse or checking for abnormal lumps.
While lack of sensitivity is a concern with existing robotic fingers, a larger worry for patients is safety. Hard robotic fingers could be seen as potentially harmful if they poked vigorously. Fingers made from softer material have not been able to sense physical properties of the body well enough for diagnoses.
The researchers reported that the simple, soft finger they developed has conductive fiber coils with two parts—a coil wound on each air chamber of the device’s bending actuators (the parts that enable it to move) and a twisted liquid metal fiber mounted at the fingertip. Signals from these coils told the researchers how much the finger bent as it touched an object and how much force it applied.
© 2025 The American Society of Mechanical Engineers. All rights reserved.