Inside the 2023 RBR50

A closer look at notable winners of the RBR50 Robotics Innovation Awards.

Each year, the RBR50 Robotics Innovation Awards program receives more nominations than can fit into the annual list. This year, the final selection reflects more rigorous judging criteria, current technological and business trends in robotics, and the world.

Since companies of different sizes build robots for widely differing applications, it is difficult to compare them directly. Add to that regional clusters, universities and research institutions, and new business models. It becomes clear the best way to analyze robotics leadership is to see what categories and industries they fit into.

Notable Winners

An emphasis on innovation led to 30 RBR50 winners being recognized for introducing new products, services and technologies. This included both hardware and software for autonomous systems. Eleven companies were honored for application and market innovations, while 9 were honored for their business and management prowess.

You might think giving three awards to spacerelated initiatives might be too much. But 2022 wasn’t a typical year for space robotics. NASA’s Perseverance Rover completed its first multiplesol, or Martian day, drive. The drive was split over three sols and helped the rover get closer to its final sampling location on its crater floor campaign. For this three-sol drive, scientists created and evaluated three times the number of drive path segments and associated terrain evaluations as it does for a normal drive. This was complicated even more by the fact that the team won’t know exactly where the rover would end its previous drive.

In July 2022, NASA put the James Webb Space Telescope into service. It operates as the largest optical telescope in space, using nearinfrared and spectral analysis sensors. The first science images exceeded expectations and pushed beyond the bar set previously by the Hubble telescope. Every image to come out of JWST delivers remarkable science, and its ability to see through dust clouds is providing never before seen images of the center of galaxies.

Finally, NASA also succeeded in its first planetary defense test mission. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, developed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins