Our Mission: Develop and promote robotic technology to increase efficiency, productivity and safety of people at work and home.


Robotic technology has advance in recent years to a point where a new generation of smarter, more flexible, and safer robots is emerging. These new machines promise to expand our understanding of the traditional applications of robotics, not only by reinventing their role in manufacturing, but also in playing more important roles in agriculture, healthcare, military, and domestic applications.

Building Smarter, Safer Machines.

A robot is a programmable machine, but it’s a dumb machine if it cannot be aware of and adapt to its environment. Improvements in core technologies – such as microprocessors, sensors, and algorithms – are fueling an explosive growth of smarter robots, more adaptable to their environment, more able to work alongside and safely assist people.

Reimagining the Industrial Robot

At Silicon Biology™, our robots are designed to co-exist with people in everyday environments. To reach this goal, our development efforts have tackled some of the most interesting challenges in robotics through various collaborative research projects that span multiple disciplines, such as object manipulation within unstructured environments; safe navigation in dynamically-changing environments; building a coherent world map; and completing a task after unexpected changes.

We also study how people work at an industrial task, and then try to create robots that could mimic that approach. Instead of a single, powerful robot arm with multiple degrees of freedom, our design uses human-like arms with almost the same extension as a small-sized person, and dexterity that matches how human joints move.

Creating Job Assistants. Not Job Takers.

Do Robots Take People’s Jobs?

In a global economy where cost rules, the only way for developed countries to compete against low-cost labor markets is through productivity gains -- and robotic technology can play a role in achieving that. However, while traditional robots excel at tasks requiring precision and repetition, the duration of product life-cycles may be too brief to justify the setup cost of more automated production lines and, thus, hinder broader adoption of automation.

We envision robots of the future as co-worker assistants – working safely alongside people rather than replacing them. This enhanced collaboration would allow sufficiently flexible implementation of automation and, by helping to equalize manufacturing costs, the key considerations for where future factories are built will be infrastructure, local regulation, tax, and business environment – not just cheap labor costs.


Designed to Work Alongside People

Our modular system is made completely from off-the-shelf parts. Its lightweight and compact design clamps to a workbench, and is easily moved to new stations and reprogrammed when a production line process changes. To make it even safer, soft pads and sensors cover its body, and its motors have restricted drive power and software-based collision detection to prevent damage during accidental encounters. It is smooth, with internally routed cables, so it's easy to keep clean, and few "pinch points" which can trap a curious human digit.