Robot brainstorm: Seaport incubator home to 74 companies in growing field

Robotics across Massachusetts is expanding, MassRobotics told city officials on a tour of their Seaport facility Tuesday — developing for defense, hospitals, manufacturing and occasionally the Macarena.

“Can you dance, Pepper?” MassRobotics Business Development Vice President Micaelah Morrill said to a shiny white, semi-humanoid form at the entrance of a classroom full of children operating rolling bots.

“We reprogrammed it,” she explained of Pepper. “She’s very useful. A lot of the applications for robots are in hospitals — she’s typically a concierge robot in hospitals. We reprogrammed it to like do the Macarena and fist bumps.”

The 50,000 square feet MassRobotics facility, toured by Mayor Michelle Wu and others Tuesday afternoon, is full of a range of robots moving in their own ways — from flying around, to lifting and placing objects, to building things.

The nonprofit hosts 74 companies in the field and worked with over 150 start-ups in their last six years of operation, representatives said.

“Here in Massachusetts, there’s 400 plus companies” said Morrill introducing the tour. … “Right now Boston is where you want to grow a company and is the leader of innovation in robotics. But we’re not actually the leader in robotics right now, and we can be, and we should be.”

One career statistics site, Zippia, lists Massachusetts as thirteenth for robotics engineers’ prospects in terms of total jobs and salary as of 2023.

Massachusetts, and Boston particularly, “dominates” in the fields of automating warehouses and manufacturing, said MassRobotics Director Tom Ryden. The state is less involved in medical robots than the west coast, Ryden explained, and has potential for growth in agricultural robotics.

One such sort of agricultural robot grows peppers solo in one of the robotics workspaces, sunning, watering and recording the visibly ripening peppers in a small unit.

Another project run by Northeastern students was allowing a person to communicate with a deaf and blind woman using a robot to translate into tactile sign language.

A deaf and blind woman working with the team, Jamie, said she could imagine using the project just simply to read or watch TV alone.

“Where robotics is now today is exciting, but it needs to be bigger, it needs to be more inclusive, and we need to change what it looks like,” said Morrill, explaining that for example just about 19% of the robotics workforce is female.

The organization also works to get students involved in robotics, hosting short-term classes — learning how to build a drone, or code, or make a robot walk and talk, Morrill explained — and a six-month Jumpstart Fellowship in partnership with BPS.

“Should we do more of this in school,” Mayor Wu asked a younger student using a computer to drive around and small boxy clawed robot.

“I think we should,” the kid answered back.