Forbes: Anatomy of a Robot Revolution
"Two companies emerged from the entrepreneurial robot ashes of the
“great robotic flameout of the 80s and 90s”—perhaps a title fitting
enough to compliment the “AI Winter” period which had also ebbed and
flowed throughout these same two decades.
These two robotics companies, which, in effect, shifted the entire
industry into an advanced state with substantial forward momentum, are
Intuitive Surgical—which today leads the surgical robotics market with
its da Vinci surgical robot, that generates close to $3.5 billion in
annual revenue and has a $64 billion market cap—and iRobot—which leads
the consumer robotics market with its domestic cleaning robot Roomba,
that now sells over one million units per year and generates close to $1
billion in annual revenue.
Remarkably, just about everything in the establishment of the
modern-day robotics industry can also be linked back to Intuitive
Surgical and iRobot, whether it be the roots of AI, the evolution of
telepresence (along with the birth of the VR industry), the advancement
of robotic arms and haptics, the emergence and use of lower cost
sensors, the optimization of autonomous mobility, and even the
development of the Mars rovers. In fact, a large part of the entire
robotics startup ecosystem that exists today, as alluded to previously,
can also be linked back directly to Intuitive Surgical and iRobot
through both their founders and former employees who have gone on to
found many of the other pioneering robotics companies of today. Looking
at the history of these two companies is so vast with so many vital
components that relate to the evolution of the rest of the industry,
that to learn about their history, is to effectively learn about the
entire history of robotics.
And while one company was mostly built on the west coast and the
other was mostly built on the east coast, the parallels between both
companies is compelling. Both companies were launched in 1990 (when
considering Computer Motion’s merger with Intuitive). Both companies
were initially funded by NASA and then DARPA. Both companies invented
their core technologies between Stanford and MIT. Both companies spent
the first 10 years of their operations with no real revenue and were in
search of a specific application as they worked to refine their
technology. Both companies launched what would become their signature
products in the early 2000s. Both companies would be brought public in
the early to mid-2000s and would each see a massive surge in their
growth and stock prices beginning in 2016. Several of the key founding
members of each of these companies, not surprisingly, also collaborated
with each other at different points in time throughout their journeys."
Source: Forbes
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