Reported by Colleen Anderson, Director of Community and Events, MassRobotics

Ubiros
SparkAI

MassRobotics was invited to participate at CES 2023 through the CTA’s Allied Association Program. We were thrilled to be invited and knew this show would be the perfect place for us to raise awareness of our efforts to support the robotics community. We were more than happy to share our booth with some of our resident startups:  BirTech, Aura Systems, SparkAI, Collabots, and Ubiros.

This is the first time since 2020 that many of us have been back to Las Vegas for CES, so to say we were excited is an understatement. I remember one of my first CES Shows where I first saw Asimo from Honda. I was convinced there was a person dressed up and that it was not a real robot. The robots and technology at CES never disappoint, and 2023 was no different. The pure variety of applications and industries robotics are used in continues to grow. One thing that struck me this year was that the idea that robots are futuristic was slowly fading away. There were lots of robots moving around on the show floor, and show attendees interacted with them (or ignored them) as if they were any other attendee instead of some out-of-this-world superhero character.

We appreciated spending time with the startups that were able to join and support us during the show. We thoroughly enjoyed seeing all the conversations and witnessing the visitors engage with their products. Gavin Niu from BirTech brought his service delivery robot for us to check out in the booth.  Jungah Lee from Aura Systems was able to connect with some folks at our booth and explain Aura Systems’ innovative technology for autonomous vehicles. Speaking of autonomous vehicles and AI, the team from SparkAi was here in force. We finally got to meet Mike and Trent in person. We loved hearing whispers that the John Deere keynote highlighted their autonomous tractor with the spark.ai technology built in.

Our booth visitors were also excited to be able to touch and feel the Ubiros soft grippers.  I have to say, watching the muffin-picking demo definitely made me hungry. I heard a lot of positive comments from people who had not seen electrically actuated soft grippers before. Nice work team! As giant as this show is, we were still able to catch up with many of our partners, startups, and friends. Jeff Burnstein, president of A3 stopped by and was able to chat with the guys from SparkAi.  We are really looking forward to the Automate show in Detroit in May. Thanks for stopping by Jeff!

None of this would have been possible without the support of our partners. We were lucky to visit a few of them and grab a photo or two. We absolutely loved seeing the Realtime Robotics demo in the Mitsubishi booth. (Realtime was an early startup at  MassRobotics and now considered an alumni).

While we are on successful startups, congratulations to startup resident German Bionic, for  being a CES 2023 “Best of Innovation” Award winner for their new AI-powered smart wearable for physically demanding jobs. Let’s also give a shout-out to our friends from Pison, Maglev Aero, Cleo Robotics and Target Arm!

Now back to some of our partners: Analog Devices, Lattice Semiconductor, Danfoss, P&G, Amazon, MITRE, Mitsubishi Electric, AMD and Dassault Systems. We stopped by to say hello and popped a couple of pictures. Thank you all for your continued support and involvement in MassRobotics.

Again, thank you to CTA’s Allied Association Program for inviting MassRobotics. In case you are not familiar with CES, here some information from their website:

CES 2023 IS THE GLOBAL STAGE FOR INNOVATION

CES® is the most influential tech event in the world — the proving ground for breakthrough technologies and global innovators. This is where the world’s biggest brands do business and meet new partners, and the sharpest innovators hit the stage. Owned and produced by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)®, CES features every aspect of the tech sector.

If you have scrolled and read this far, here are some photos that would have been in our outtake video. As you can see, we managed to have some fun off the show floor!