Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to see someone skate-walking down the halls of Detroit’s Huntington Place convention center. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of interesting stuff happening at Automate today, but it simply never occurred to me that $1,400 footwear was a possibility.
For the record, that person was Abe Pleta, the lead mechanical and design integration engineer and third employee at Shift Robotics. The company’s name belies its focus — at the moment, at least (who knows where future projects might take them). The product is far removed from the hundreds of robot arms lining the show floor.
The startup was ostensibly at the event as a representative of the Pittsburgh consortium — effectively a small cluster of interesting companies based in the area that also includes drone inventory firm Gather AI. But there’s another interesting layer to its presence the event: Shift has been increasingly looking toward the enterprise market. It’s one of tho...
