Robotics and drones,....and Brainchip,........(oh my)
Everyone on TSE realizes what a coup for Brainchip it is to now be associated with THE Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in any form or manner. But do you realize what is going on in the Pittsburgh area where CMU is located? I didn't.
Pittsburgh might be thought of by many as a former great "rust belt" industrial area that has lost it's mojo and luster over the years having fallen on hard times with the demise of the steel industry. and heavy manufacturing. That would appear to be not the case. The following couple of articles paint a different picture. And Brainchip is right there, ....in the CMU engineering labs??? Think about that ! Then, after you read the articles think about it again.
The first article is discussing how another U.S. upper midwestern former rust belt industrial city could learn a thing or two about reinventing itself doing things such as Pittsburgh is doing. Good luck with that,.....as there is only one CMU which is a highly vibrant think tank and incubator of tech ideas.
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Three Mile Island disaster helped launch Pittsburgh's robotics industry. What can Wisconsin learn from this?
by Kathleen Gallagher / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
The drone sweeps down Pittsburgh’s Robotics Row, a three-mile stretch that is home to more than 20 robotics companies. A stretch that’s in the middle of more than 100 robotics companies across a 10-county region. It’s a 34 second video that encapsulates Pittsburgh’s rise from dying blue collar steel town to tech hub with a big focus on robotics. A rise worth studying.
Pittsburgh’s robotics cluster -- it’s now tops in the Great Lakes region, alongside Boston and Silicon Valley on the coasts -- was fueled by a host of unique local assets, led by Carnegie Mellon University. But there are two factors that surface over and over in this economic success story:
Commitment to a technology focus and the leadership smarts to pile onto it.
These things always seem so obvious in retrospect. But when Carnegie Mellon University professor Red Whittaker and his team in 1979 started on the novel task of building robots to clean up the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant accident site, hardly anyone was thinking that way.
“I was looking for that iconic robotic development project that would put the technology on the map,” Whittaker told StateImpact Pennsylvania in 2019.
Tellingly, it wasn’t economic development theater that sparked Pittsburgh’s modern-day robotics cluster. No one sat in a conference room puzzling over how many robotics sector jobs could be created. In fact, there were probably few people, if any, outside of Carnegie Mellon thinking it was a potential center of excellence.
An explosion of employment opportunities.
Funny isn’t it. Today the region’s robotics cluster supports around 7,000 jobs and more than 45,000 technology workers at large - a 300% increase since 2011, according to the Pittsburgh Robotics Network.
This cluster has deep roots. Westinghouse Electric’s East Pittsburgh laboratories built the world’s first robot in 1927. Carnegie Mellon in 1979 opened its Robotics Institute (the biggest university-affiliated robot research group in the world) with a $3 million grant from Westinghouse and nine years later began offering the world’s first Ph.D. program in robotics.
The seeds for an authentic technology cluster were there. But the Midwest is littered with those. What made this one work?This is where the piling on comes in.
You had Red Whittaker, the father of field robotics who’s built more than 60 robots and inspired countless technologists and ideas.
You had Carnegie Mellon, which was dedicated not only to a regional recovery strategy, but to identifying and growing its best research and aggressively transferring innovative technologies to partnering corporations and startups. Groups rallied to support robotics cluster
So a grass roots reaction to the growing robotics cluster emerged; groups rallied to support and grow it. For example, volunteers started Pittsburgh Robotics Network in 2016 to coalesce the growing number of robotics startups. It formalized in 2020 under the leadership of Joel Reed, who’d been CEO of a local robotics company.
The network pulled in venture capitalists, banks and other companies to lend funding and other support. It did market research and created a cluster profile and landscape chart and organized programs like Discovery Day 2022 to showcase the city’s robotics ecosystem.
That helped attract what a report released earlier this year by Innovation Works and Ernst and Young says is more than $5.5 billion of venture capital investments into Pittsburgh’s robotics sector since 2019.
What’s going on in Pittsburgh is luring lots of big tech companies -- Facebook, Google, Uber, and Zoom, to name a few -- to put engineering offices there. It led Emrah Ercan, general manager at Ingersoll Rand, to post a shoutout on LinkedIn to Pittsburgh Robotics Network and Carnegie Mellon and its Robotics Institute’s National Robotics Engineering Center, whose employees work with big companies. “I am blown away by the ecosystem in Pittsburgh and am immensely excited about the partnership opportunities,” Ercan said.
The Pittsburgh region in September was chosen as one of 21 locations in the US to receive a Build Back Better grant from the federal government. The nearly $63 million grant will be used to expand the robotics cluster throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania by helping small businesses and entrepreneurs adopt and commercialize these technologies and upskilling workers. More piling on.
You don’t invent these things on the fly. John Morgridge, the Wisconsin native who oversaw Cisco Systems’ dramatic growth in the late 1980s and early 1990s once told me there’s only one way to grow a strong research focus at a large university. You start by making some big hires in a specific area, then provide enough support that hopefully a decade later you’ll have something.
The infinitely frustrating aspect of so many dead-end economic development efforts in the Midwest is that there is no follow-through on the good ideas. Proposals by brilliant researchers get bogged down in committees and innovative state and local government programs get hobbled by political bickering. The result is a culture of protected mediocrity that won’t allow excellence in one area because someone else might feel left behind.
It wasn’t always this way. Across the Midwest, industries like automobiles, dairy, electricity, and paper grew the same way as Pittsburgh’s robotics cluster. You start with an authentic technology area, then get the right people on board. The reason Wisconsin was so wildly unsuccessful with Foxconn is that it was a real estate investment project, not a technology play. No one intended to build a center of excellence on the back of research being done in the state.
“I would task every region’s economic development organization to see where they have those centers of excellence, then build around them,” says Jennifer Apicella, director of strategic partnerships and programs at Pittsburgh Robotics Network. “Ask if we need to spin up a special organization to support those key centers of excellence and grow them into the future.”
It’s scary to have to choose a technology to go all in on. Those you leave out might feel bad. But if you don’t play to win, you never win.
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( And another article on the same related subject matter )
Actuator: Fruit picking, drone deliveries and checking in with Pittsburgh's former Mayor
tcrn.ch
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Finally, and on a totally different note, yesterday I spent a couple hours looking at our new marketing guy - NN - on Linkedin and many of the folks who wished him congratulations and well wishes for success. I came away very impressed and excited for our future. We are definately on our way to being a sales driven organization powered in part by who knows who. I also believe that it's not what you know but who you know, that helps lead to sucess....as someone posted awhile back.
I am jacked up, totally pumped, and super excited for our future, more so than ever.
Regards, dippY