The Monthly Beat - 4th of July BBQ Hangover Edition
A recap of the most interesting Pittsburgh tech news from the past few weeks, upcoming local tech events, and extras for the days ahead.
Good morning!
Hope you all had a great holiday weekend and ate many barbecued foods. I want to say a huge thank you to the 100+ of you who just subscribed in the past month! It was absolutely incredible to be featured in both NEXTPittsburgh and Technical.ly’s newsletter over the past couple of weeks, and I am beyond thankful for the support.
Finally, for those of you who have been here for a while—thank you for sticking around and sharing the blog with friends and family! I really never could have imagined this thing would grow so much, and it’s all because of readers like you spreading the word. For my part, I’ll continue to do my best to bring you 1–2 posts per month of the best Pittsburgh tech content I can muster.
Now then, let’s get into it.
What Happened This Past Month
The Big Story
First Trucks, Now Helicopters—Pittsburgh Tech Companies Push Forward with Autonomous Vehicles
Earlier this year, I reported on Aurora’s historic launch of driverless semi-trucks in Texas. If you’ve been following along, shortly afterward, Aurora had to put drivers back in the trucks because “of certain prototype parts in their base vehicle platform.” This is both exceptionally vague and thoroughly dissatisfying, but despite this setback, the company still made a huge splash with this launch, drawing the attention of the New York Times and other national outlets.
However, it doesn’t seem like national news has yet caught wind of what is an equally impressive achievement by local autonomous flight company Near Earth Autonomy. This past month, the company announced that it had successfully flown a standard Leonardo AW139 helicopter, which would normally require a crew, completely autonomously. While the company still needs to add some more features before this can be used in the field, this is certainly a huge milestone, demonstrating that Near Earth’s autonomous flight systems can not only work in new drones and such that are designed for autonomy, but also in legacy aircraft. The test was performed as part of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Aerial Logistics Connector (ALC) program, and it’s likely the military will be using these systems long before they’re available for commercial helicopters.
The Headlines
Astrobotic’s new rover (pictured at the top of the post) passed testing and is ready to go to the moon. This tough little rover, which is about the size of a shoebox, had to drive over obstacles in a thermal vacuum, survive electromagnetic interference, and operate in simulated harsh lunar light. Now that it’s proven itself, the rover will be sent to drive around on and collect data from the moon’s South Pole as part of Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission One later this year.
Speaking of robots, Integrated Industrial Technologies Inc. out in Blawnox built a robotic tire destacker. It does pretty much exactly what you would expect a robotic tire destacker to do, but still pretty impressive to watch in action.
In case you missed it, Matt Nicosia shared a guest post about a new Pittsburgh-focused AI MCP server that the folks from AI@Work (myself included) built as part of a hackathon. If you’ve been wondering what MCP is and what it can be used for, or just looking for a new MCP server to experiment with, this one’s for you!
SCIFs are finally coming to Pittsburgh. For those of you who are in the security/government space, you know exactly what I just said. For everyone else, though, SCIFs (Secure Compartmentalized Information Facilities) are the industry standard physical workspace for doing work that requires a Secret or Top Secret clearance. So while other, bigger businesses and local branches of government entities may have already had these spaces, this is a huge deal for small to mid-sized local businesses in this segment of tech.
Canonsburg-based Ansys has gotten approval for its acquisition by Synopsys from every necessary regulatory body except China. Could the ongoing trade tensions between the U.S. and China be affecting this? It’s unclear as of right now, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it.
Duolingo does Chess now. Is Chess a language? Post your take in the comments.
For some good local YouTube content to add to your queue, local open source advocate Chad Whitacre posted episode 2 of his Open Path video series. This episode focuses on financial accounting for open source and features a few clips from PyCon, the Community College of Beaver County, and Kennywood. Technical.ly also published a great profile of local startup Sensible Photonics that highlights their electric grid blackout prevention technology and their growth journey.
Last but not least, warehouse automation company Lucas Systems announced new software that gives real-time recommendations for building pallets. The software performs thousands of calculations per minute across a given warehouse to optimize the way things are stacked on pallets, considering product size, weight, stacking rules, shipping regulations, worker travel distance, safety, route order, and priorities to determine the best way to pick, group, sequence, and stack items. They also have a fun little .gif that visualizes this, which I’ve included below!
Lucas Systems’ Dynamic Pallet Builder (source: Lucas Systems)
For the Days Ahead
Looking for a weekly hangout with other folks who are interested in technology and entrepreneurship? Technically Coffee is a great one, 8am every Friday at Bakery Square. Sign up here.
JuliaCon, the Julia programming language conference, will be in Pittsburgh July 21–26th. Tickets are on sale here.
Women in Product will be taking place at City Kitchen Thursday, August 7th at 6pm. It’s a casual and welcoming space to connect with fellow product managers, share experiences, and build a stronger local product community. RSVP here!
Did you completely miss the U.S. Open because you just couldn’t carve out the time for it in your schedule? Check out Confirmed, a locally owned and developed time manager/scheduler app. Plans start at $5/month for a single user, and you can get your first month free with offer code
techbeat!
Thanks for reading, and have a great rest of your July!
—Austin
Great update about Auora driverless trucks.