I apologize for not being directly related to this topic, but it is shocking that the company behind Panda, one of the MoveIt Tutorial robots, went bankrupt.
sorry, but your headline is not correct (in juristic / juridical terms) - at least as of September 6, 2023.
The article that you quote says “Cobot arm maker Franka Emika files for insolvency”. In that article, a post by Franka Emika is quoted that says that Franka Emika has filed for preliminary insolvency. Nowhere in the text the word bankruptcy is used. For good reasons.
Here’s some information on insolvency vs. bankruptcy (in Germany):
(at least to what I learned on German law) a bankruptcy requires a legal misconduct by the management. An insolvency can just happen without a legal misconduct by “running out of money”. A legal misconduct needs to be declared by a legal court. That’s not the case as of today. If for example, the provisional insolvency administrator finds new investors, the business could continue [Read the article of the Robot Report for more details].
I am neither a medical, nor a judicial expert, but I would say that the company is currently in hospital, maybe in the operating room, but the patient is not dead (which the word bankruptcy would implicate)…
In that sense: Get well soon, Franka Emika. Fingers crossed for Patrick Pfaff and his team.
[Please correct me if I am wrong or add information if anything else pops up in media.]
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Thank you for pointing out and explaining. Fixed the heading.
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I hope it stands for itself that this does not affect MoveIt in any way. The tutorials have been sponsored by Franka Emika several years ago, but there is no ongoing affiliation or vendor support in place. MoveIt is hardware agnostic, and we have continued changing up the example robots. Here, for example, is a recently updated tutorial that uses Kinova hardware.
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