Highlights:
- Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and FUSE Ventures participated in the seed round, which was headed by the early-stage investment firm Unusual Ventures.
- Roboto eliminates the issues with its AI-powered platform, which makes it possible to analyze and thoroughly comprehend vast quantities of sensor data without the need for homegrown tools.
Constructing robotics platforms is a challenging endeavor that requires processing vast quantities of data, but few tools are available to assist developers with this endeavor. Roboto Technologies Inc. intends to assist robotics developers in saving time while creating robots with the help of artificial intelligence. The startup emerged from covert today with USD 4.8 million in funding.
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and FUSE Ventures participated in the seed round headed by the early-stage investment firm Unusual Ventures.
When Benji Barash and Yves Albers-Schoenberg immigrated from Europe to Seattle and joined Amazon’s drone delivery program, they witnessed the difficulties of robotics development firsthand.
The founders said in the announcement, “We’ve had an amazing front-row seat to the incredible potential of robotics, having spent our careers working at Amazon on projects such as drone delivery. However, we also learned that, despite all the recent progress, building safe and reliable autonomous systems is still surprisingly hard and very expensive.”
In mere minutes, a single robot can generate terabytes of complex data, which must be stored and processed to be useful. As a result, many robotics platform developers must construct their tools to process, comprehend, and analyze this data, as only some commercially available tools are designed to manage it.
For instance, data and log parsers like Splunk, Datadog, and Tableau are excellent for handling unstructured data. However, they are not ideal for images, video, lidar, and other visual data generated by numerous sensors that robots use to comprehend their environment. Instead of focusing on robotics development, engineers invest hundreds or thousands of hours creating their own infrastructure to adapt existing tools to robotics.
The founders said, “This is time-consuming and quickly becomes a pain point for everyone working with robots. As companies collect giant volumes of data, robotics engineers must spend time wrangling it instead of doing robotics work.”
Roboto eliminates these issues with its AI-powered platform, making it possible to analyze and thoroughly comprehend vast quantities of sensor data without needing homegrown tools.
Barash and Albers-Schoenberg compared the new system to a “copilot for robotics,” claiming that developers could use it to discover anything they required by posing queries about their datasets. Using AI, researchers could readily obtain information about their platforms by conducting searches using natural language queries about sensor data, camera images, and other inputs.
For instance, a developer with an autonomous truck could ask the AI, “Identify all the drives where vehicle speed was more than 35 mph and an individual was seen on the right side of an image,” or “Count the times where right turn happened and speed exceeded 15 mph.” All of these instances could be utilized to retrieve the data associated with these instances to investigate what was occurring.
The platform also permits searches of additional data types, such as graphical time-series signals, like battery level, vehicle steering, and speed and acceleration. By providing a method for robotics developers to search this type of data using natural language queries quickly, developers can quickly comprehend how their machines operate.