Some robotics startups mentioned in the article:

https://www.softroboticsinc.com/ (soft robotic grippers)

https://www.righthandrobotics.com/ (order fulfillment, picking, sorting)

http://www.codewithroot.com/ (educational learn-to-code robots)

http://rewalk.com/ (licensee of exosuit technology)

https://www.k-team.com/ (licensee of kilobot swarm technology)

The swarmbots are pretty impressive:

> “I originally thought I would never have hardware,” she said. “But the reason I thought that was a robot cost $100,000. [Today] I can build novel robots for a couple of hundred dollars. That’s a routine thing in my lab. I have a thousand robots, at $20 [each].”

— Radhika Nagpal

> Nagpal has licensed kilobot technology to K-Team, a manufacturer of small mobile robots. Today, 10 other labs around the world own kilobots, and two have 1,000-kilobot swarms

They're cute, but they don't appear to actually do anything except buzz around...

They're good for researching self-organizing behaviors to create code that can be used in more useful bots. The more useful bots may have more robust locomotion and/or other capabilities like sensing but will correspondingly be a little or a lot more expensive.

Good point, I didn't share some follow up googling. Here's a better showcase of them assembling planar shapes:

https://vimeo.com/103329200