Innovation can be challenging, even for companies with a clean slate. Those who have an established track record of 15 or more years of business must navigate history, culture, product lines, and other entrenched forces that can be both assets and inhibitors. Our honorees have shown that past success doesn’t preclude tomorrow’s progress by leveraging robot fleets for construction and extending real-time intelligence to billions of devices.

DeWalt and August Robotics
For getting fleets of robots to drill down into construction efficiency
Gargantuan data centers do not spring up overnight. Their many construction complexities include holes for structural support as well as mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. To streamline what can be a particularly labor-intensive process, DeWalt and August Robotics developed robots that can be operated together as a fleet to handle physically demanding tasks such as concrete drilling while supporting a collaborative human-machine model. In July, August Robotics reported that its drilling robot delivers up to 10x faster drilling speeds versus traditional methods, reducing construction times by 190 weeks across 26 major projects.

Synaptics For developing edge intelligence in an open-source model With AI token expenditures soaring in many businesses and security, privacy, and latency concerns preventing many applications from using cloud-based AI, many companies are eager to explore edge-based options. Best known for its pioneering work in developing the touchpad 30 years ago, Synaptics has developed Astra, an open platform to bring real-time intelligence into devices such as factory equipment, medical devices, home appliances, and retail systems. At Google’s developer conference, Synaptics showed off how an Astra-powered development board equipped with Google’s Coral NPU could generate real-time music based on the tracked movement of jellyfish.

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