Heartland Robotics, Inc. has raised $20 million in Series B financing as it remains confident about its future robots, according to a company statement. The new funding was led by Highland Capital Partners (News - Alert).

Existing investors, Charles River Ventures and Bezos Expeditions, also took part in this most recent financing. Sigma Partners is a new investor.In a related move, Paul Maeder, co-founder of Highland Capital Partners, will join Heartland’s board of directors.

“We are thrilled to welcome two world-class venture capital firms as investors and as business partners to help Heartland finalize product development and bring our innovative line of robots to market,” Scott Eckert, Heartland’s president and CEO, said. “Their experience and capabilities will be instrumental in helping the company to execute our vision.”

Highland Capital Partners is focused on communications, consumer, digital media, healthcare and information technology companies. It has over $3 billion of committed capital. Highland has invested in companies such as: Ask Jeeves, Avid Technology, CheckFree (News - Alert), Conor Medsystems, Coremetrics, lululemon athletica, Lycos, MapQuest, Navic Networks, Ocular Networks, Odyssey Healthcare, P.A. Semi, Quattro Wireless, Quigo, Starent Networks (News - Alert), Sybase, Telica and VistaPrint.

In commenting on the new funding, Paul Maeder, who is general partner at Highland Capital Partners, said that, “Heartland’s vision for improving the competitiveness of American manufacturing through innovative robotic technology is compelling for manufacturers and important for America.”

Founded in 2008, Heartland Robotics was started by Rodney Brooks. He is the co-founder of iRobot and a former director of MIT’s (News - Alert) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Its goal was to introduce a “new generation of robots to improve productivity in manufacturing environments,” according to a company statement. They are still very confident about the robots of the future.

“Our robots will be intuitive to use, intelligent and highly flexible. They’ll be easy to buy, train, and deploy and will be unbelievably inexpensive. Heartland Robotics will change the definition of how and where robots can be used, dramatically expanding the robot marketplace,” Brooks said.

One of the company’s goals is to bring robots into “places that have not been automated before” and “will make manufacturers more efficient, their workers more productive, and keep jobs from migrating to low-cost regions,” the company says in a statement.

In recent company news, Paula Long, a co-founder and former vice president of Products and Strategy for EqualLogic, was named by Heartland Robotics, Inc., as vice president of software development, according to a report from TMCnet.

Another company news item is that the Society of Manufacturing Engineers will award Brooks SME’s highest recognition, honorary membership, TMCnet reports.