Welcome everyone to This Is Robotics, episode #26 for November, 2023.

Oh, and BTW: Thanks for making us the #1 Global Robotics News Podcast for TWO YEARS IN A ROW. I’m Tom Green, your guide and companion into the wide, wonderful world of robotics. Welcome.

It’s that time of year when we take a look at Time Magazine’s picks for its Global Top Inventions for the year. This year, 2023, there are 200 selections in 21 different categories.

Robotics, as usual, has its very own category, category #18, but my oh my, robotics, now with its new partnership in convergence with AI, has it ever seeped its way into nearly every other category.

We’ll take a look at Time’s picks, plus we’ll pull one out and showcase it. It’s an amazing 5-year-old developer called Shift Robotics, from Pittsburgh. Shift has taken robotics, AI, and automation and brought them into the shoe business. Footwear!

What caught my eye was its founder, Xunjie Zhang, and his 3-minute description of the company’s design process, the "ask it, research it, plan it, create it, test it, and improve it" of finding a problem and coming up with a solution. Beautifully clear thinking and execution. Then we’ll see what Wired’s Brent Rose thinks about the company during his visit.

Following that is our annual Homage to Pittsburgh. A segment that we run every Thanksgiving. The heartwarming story of Pittsburgh’s fall and rise on the wings of robotics, after 29 steel companies filed for bankruptcy and left the city in tatters.

I usually do a preamble to our Homage to Pittsburgh segment, but this year we have a contributor providing us with one. Florian Pestoni, well-known in the robotics biz as co-founder and CEO of InOrbit, a cloud robotics platform, who is also a pizza fanatic and a great admirer of Pittsburgh. He just made a trip to Pittsburgh and jotted down his thoughts. We’ll share them with you.

Then we’ll take a look at our newest website: Robo AI News where we aggregate and curate the best in the convergence of robotics with AI; and we’ll look to you guys to Get On Our Wall at Robo AI News. We’ll show you how. It’s simple but powerful. Robo AI News is dedicated to the most interesting man in the world: Garry Mathiason: The Man Who Knew Way Before! More on Garry a bit later in the show.

Okay, let’s get on with the news.