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Last summer , whenRoboForcefounder Leo Ma visited a solar farm outside Phoenix , the priming coat was hot enough to cook an egg on . Ma see as workers traversed uninhabitable land to spend hours securing zillion of solar panel .
Over the years Ma has call 100 of manufactory , from chip makers to underground oil production web site . Each fourth dimension , he saw humans working on menial and potentially dangerous tasks and came to the same conclusion : “ These are the sort of business that we should n’t want people to do anymore , ” he told TechCrunch .
Enter RoboForce , the company Ma base 19 months ago with the ambition of create hyper - accurate golem workers to do tasks like solar panel installation . The company ’s inaugural product is a robot about one and a one-half meter tall with pitch-black metal arm ( pictured above , somewhat like a big , headless Wall - E ) .
Today , the company harbinger $ 10 million in early - degree funding to build out Ma ’s robot worker dream . Investors include Nobel Laureate economist Myron Scholes , well - known Formosan investment firm VC Gary Rieschel ( formerly of SoftBank ) , and Ma ’s alma mater Carnegie Mellon University .
“ Roboforce is focusing on the most slow , repetitive , personnel - demanding and the certain risk and dangerous work that should n’t have to be human to do it , ” Ma enunciate .
RoboForce is a protraction of Ma ’s life history ’s work . antecedently , he worked on autonomous drive package at Baidu USA , before he co - found CYNGN , an automated drive company that Ma helped bring public . As he put it , “ build up AI robotics is all I do . ”
RoboForce is starting with the solar control board market , where Ma say there ’s a Brobdingnagian Department of Labor offspring already . In 2024 , about 53 gigawatts of solar labor were delayed because of doer shortages and long waits for equipment , according todata fellowship Wood Mackenzie .
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Ma said RoboForce will launch one to two pilot solar projects with its robots this year .
RoboForce is confront well - capitalized competitor . This past summer , AES Corporation introduced the world to Maximo , a massive robot that the ship’s company take willinstall solar panelstwice as tight as a human .
But Ma is n’t worried , claim that his product is the most accurate robot available . “ RoboForce , proudly , is the first and the only one in the market that achieves both the AI fashion model and the robot with the final action as one millimeter truth , ” he said , adding that such accuracy permit the RoboForce golem to do fine motor tasks , like , say , tightening a fucking in middle of the Arizona desert .
The desert is just the beginning for RoboForce . Their moonshot pipe dream ? “ Helping build up the Sun Myung Moon base on the lunar month , ” Ma read .
From the Storyline:Live Updates CES 2025: The final reveals and analysis as the event nears its end
CES 2025 , the annual consumer tech conference held in Las Vegas , is upon us — and this is where you …
