Intel Invests into Development of Humanoid Robots.

Intel Capital Invests into Aldabaran Robotics

[06/08/2011 04:57 PM]
by Anton Shilov

Intel Capital, an investment organization that belongs to Intel Corp. has made its first robotics industry investment, leading a $13 million investment in Aldebaran Robotics. The funding from Intel Capital will play a key role in allowing Aldebaran to develop its product offering into additional vertical sectors such as health and social care.

“Robotics is an area that Intel Capital has been interested in for some time. Aldebaran’s work in areas such as voice interaction and video analytics really highlights the advances made in perceptual computing and has the potential to offer innovative products and solutions across a range of sectors," said Marcos Battisti, managing director of Intel Capital in Western Europe and Israel.

The company currently manufactures and sells advanced, programmable humanoid robots focused on the education, personal services and research markets. Its products combine a range of facial and voice recognition technologies with location awareness capabilities, providing a flexible platform for application development. The investment from Intel Capiral and other partners will also help Aldebaran streamline its production operations and increase its research and development capabilities.

An investment into robotic technologies will not only let Intel to tap a new market, but will potentially enable to the company to better learn the peculiarities for chips that the robotics industry require.

“Working with Intel Capital is a step we believe will propel the business and help the technology we have developed reach its full potential. Our products have the flexibility to provide solutions across a range of applications and this investment will play a huge role in helping drive manufacturing efficiencies and further our research capabilities to help the business’ expansion into new markets. Intel products are ideally suited for the processing demands required by robotics. This investment from Intel Capital enables Aldebaran to become a key player in this nascent industry," said Bruno Maisonnier, founder and chief executive officer of Aldebaran Robotics.

The series C round of financing was led by Intel Capital, with additional participation from its current investors, CDC Innovation, iSource and Crédit Agricole Private Equity.

Tags: Intel, Aldebaran, Business

Discussion

Comments currently: 1
Discussion started: 06/09/11 07:54:54 AM
Latest comment: 06/09/11 08:04:07 AM

[1-1]

I work in the health-care as a medical transcriptionist (typist). We think that voice recognition will not make us jobless because of the huge step of the doctors to start dictating in a perfectly articulated manner, and the text will always need editing afterwards. There is one pilot program in the university of Tampere, where doctors use a software, but nothing else. It seems that my profession is still the same primitive time and money consuming sector. On the flip side is the fact that I have no formal education for this job. I can use the 10-finger system (370 chars/min) as a self-learned skill and my textes were sensored for the first two months in my first summer job. I can get a job in the South-West, but in the East hospitals say that I'm not qualified, were I to apply. It is hypocritical of themselves.My co-workers are a pretty dumb crowd, uneducated, low-class, middle aged women, who socialize at the coffee table, behind the boss' back and wipe feces on the mens toilet to put me into a bad light as the only man in the office. They don't even know grammar, but the doctors don't dictate it either, nor do they care or always check our texts anyway. It is a bit random. But my profession is expected to know medical vocabulary, however the bosses expect that we 'understand it', while this is merely a matter of 'memorizing it'. The contradiction is that we could never edit the text in a medical sense, although the head mistresses, our bosses, imagine that's what we always do.The doctors could write the text instead of having to dictate it in a hard microphone work, wait our delays and then having to check our editings themselves, especially the young doctors in their 20's and 30's. But our routine makes us faster multiplied by 3 and more formal text.