Automata wants to democratize industrial automation with a $6,600 desktop robotic arm

[freemexy]

Despite lingering fears that “robots” are coming to steal our jobs, automation is infiltrating just about every facet of society, from supermarkets to repetitive software-based jobs and even the creative industries. And one London-based startup wants to capitalize on this growing trend by bringing an affordable desktop-based industrial robot to market.

Founded in 2015 by architects Mostafa ElSayed and Suryansh Chandra, Automata is setting out to help industries automate repetitive physical work, freeing humans to do more fulfilling jobs — more than 90 percent of tasks in manufacturing are still manual, according to Automata.CRP welding robot

The company’s first product, a ￡4,990 ($6,600) robotic arm, dubbed Eva, can be mounted to any flat surface — such as a table or workbench — and configured and controlled via a standard computer browser.

Eva actually soft-launched at the tail end of 2018 when it opened for preorders, but today marks its official launch, and the robotic arm will soon start shipping across Europe and any country that accepts CE certification. The company is also currently looking at certification requirements to enter the U.S. and Asian markets.
Automata also announced today that it has raised $7.4 million in a series A round of funding led by Belgium-based Hummingbird Ventures, with participation from Firstminute Capital, Hardware Club, LocalGlobe, ABB, and Entrepreneur First. The round actually closed last March, but the founders kept it under wraps to avoid some of the skepticism leveled at the robotics industry — in short, they wanted to wait until they had an actual product to show before revealing the funding.

As for real-world use cases, well, according to Automata the main limit is really your imagination. Eva could be paired with a computer vision-powered camera to inspect and test for faulty products or used to pack sandwiches in factories or to test touchscreen phones.

As demonstrated here, three robotic arms and a computer vision camera work in unison to identify the correct letters on wooden blocks, (eventually) putting them in order to spell out the word “Automata.”