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Comment by lpasselin | Hacker News Reader

What would be robotics' Silicon Valley?

All the big robotics companies are in Tokyo, to quote Wikipedia:

>The Robotics industry is more important in Japan than any other country in the world. Japan employs over a quarter of a million industrial robot workers. In the next 15 years, Japan estimates that number to jump to over one million and they expect revenue for robotics to be near $70 billion by 2025.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_robotics#Japanese_rob...

When in Japan I've interacted with robots in a shopping mall: they had replaced their information stands by robots with ipads, so you could either ask them a question (didn't work due to the mall's noise) or just enter the relevant information on their belly's iPad-like devices.

Reminds me of when all the advanced cell phone development was in Tokyo....

Though that this was a robot (or just humanoid shaped) in the mall is just a cultural artifact. A touch-screen info panel in a western place has the same (or better) functionality, just without the sentiment.

Japan is really big in industrial robots but I haven't seen as much out of there in terms of intelligent robots that sense and respond to their environment.

SONY AIBO.

'In 2006, AIBO was added into the Carnegie Mellon University Robot Hall of Fame with the description "the Sony AIBO represents the most sophisticated product ever offered in the consumer robot marketplace."'

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIBO

There seem to be a lot of robotics companies here in Boston. Boston Dynamics, iRobot, Amazon Robotics, Rethink Robotics, and a bunch of startups like the one I work at.

You mean what would be robotics' Y?

Pittsburgh

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