SoftBank Group Corp. is a Japanese multinational investment holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo which focuses on investment management. The group primarily invests in companies operating in technology that offer goods and services to customers in a multitude of markets and industries ranging from the internet to automation. With over $100 billion in capital at its onset, SoftBank's Vision Fund is the world's largest technology-focused venture capital fund. Fund investors included sovereign wealth funds from countries in the Middle East.
SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.
Canadarm or Canadarm1 is a series of robotic arms that were used on the Space Shuttle orbiters to deploy, manoeuvre, and capture payloads. After the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, the Canadarm was always paired with the Orbiter Boom Sensor System (OBSS), which was used to inspect the exterior of the shuttle for damage to the thermal protection system.
FANUC is a Japanese group of companies that provide automation products and services such as robotics and computer numerical control wireless systems. These companies are principally FANUC Corporation of Japan, Fanuc America Corporation of Rochester Hills, Michigan, USA, and FANUC Europe Corporation S.A. of Luxembourg.
Ecolab Inc. is an American corporation headquartered in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It develops and offers services, technology and systems that specialize in treatment, purification, cleaning and hygiene of water in a wide variety of applications. It helps organizations, both in private as well as public markets, treat their water for drinking use and for use in food, healthcare, hospitality-related safety and industry. Founded as Economics Laboratory in 1923 by Merritt J. Osborn, it was eventually renamed "Ecolab" in 1986.
Boston Dynamics is an American engineering and robotics design company founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Boston Dynamics has been owned by the Hyundai Motor Group since December 2020, but having only completed the acquisition in June 2021.
Robot Operating System is an open-source robotics middleware suite. Although ROS is not an operating system (OS) but a set of software frameworks for robot software development, it provides services designed for a heterogeneous computer cluster such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. Running sets of ROS-based processes are represented in a graph architecture where processing takes place in nodes that may receive, post, and multiplex sensor data, control, state, planning, actuator, and other messages. Despite the importance of reactivity and low latency in robot control, ROS is not a real-time operating system (RTOS). However, it is possible to integrate ROS with real-time computing code. The lack of support for real-time systems has been addressed in the creation of ROS 2, a major revision of the ROS API which will take advantage of modern libraries and technologies for core ROS functions and add support for real-time code and embedded system hardware.
Saban Capital Group LLC is an American investment firm based in Los Angeles, California focused on media, entertainment, and communications investments. Formed in 2010 by Haim Saban, Saban Capital Group owns Saban Films, & co-owns Univision Communications, and Celestial Tiger Entertainment.
JVL Ventures, LLC d/b/a Softcard, was a joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon which produced a mobile payments platform known as Softcard, which used near-field communication (NFC) technology to allow users to pay for items at stores and restaurants with credit and debit card credentials stored on their smartphones. The partnership was first announced on November 16, 2010; following a trial period in 2012, the service officially launched nationwide on November 14, 2013. The official Softcard app was available for NFC-compatible smartphones using the Android operating system and later on Windows Phone 8.1.
Meka Robotics was a San Francisco–based company that made robotic systems.
X, is an American semi-secret research and development facility and organization founded by Google in January 2010. X has its headquarters about a mile and a half from Alphabet's corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California.
James J. Kuffner Jr. is an American roboticist and chief executive officer (CEO) of Woven by Toyota. Dr. Kuffner is also Chief Digital Officer and a member of the Board of Directors of Toyota Motor Corporation. Kuffner continues to serve as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and as Executive Advisor to Woven by Toyota. Kuffner earned a Ph.D. from the Stanford University Dept. of Computer Science Robotics Laboratory in 1999.
Clearpath Robotics, Inc. was founded in 2009 by a group of four University of Waterloo graduates, and remains headquartered in Waterloo Region, Canada. The original goal of Clearpath was to streamline field robotics research for universities and private corporations, but the company has since expanded and is now also manufacturing and selling the OTTO line of self-driving vehicles for industrial environments.
Leila A. Takayama is an associate professor of Human–computer interaction at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has previously held positions at Google X and Willow Garage. She was elected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2013.
Ruwan Chandra Gopura is a professor attached to the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka and a former Head, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Moratuwa. He is currently the Head, Department of Medical Technology, Faculty of Medicine and Director/Research at the same university. Gopura was the chairperson of IEEE Sri Lanka Section in 2020. He was the chair of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Sri Lanka Section Chapter from February 2017 to February 2020. He was the secretary of the same Chapter from 2013 to 2017. Gopura was the secretary of IEEE Sri Lanka Section in 2015. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. Ruwan Gopura is a founding member of Sri Lanka Robotic Meetups. He is an editorial board member of reputed international journals. He won the IEEE Sri Lanka Section, "Most Outstanding Volunteer Award 2022 " at the IEEE Sri Lanka section awards held on the 17th September, 2022.
Scott Hassan is a computer programmer and entrepreneur who was the main programmer of the original Google Search engine, then known as BackRub. He was research assistant at Stanford University at the time. Hassan left before Google was officially founded as a company.
