Enabling Technologies

2024 is the year of robotics. AI is set to revolutionize the field, leveraging principles from technologies like ChatGPT to achieve remarkable advancements. Early research suggests that Generative AI (GenAI) and foundation models offer the potential for robots that can reason, adapt, and interact in dynamic environments, enabling them to understand complex tasks and operate autonomously with minimal data.

The primary hurdle to realizing this potential is the need for vast, diverse real-world datasets. Unlike ChatGPT, which was trained on centuries of accumulated text, robotics lacks extensive data sources, and current data collection methods, such as paid teleoperation, are unsustainable. While ideas like using simulation data are valuable, the holy grail is large-scale production deployment of robots in diverse environments and use cases.

Moreover, the inherently non-deterministic nature of AI systems raises concerns about safety and reliability. Failure cases for robots, such as collisions with the environment or people, carry great consequences. Ubiquitous adoption is dependent on implementing guardrails to address this.

Jacobi is building software that makes robot deployments scalable and flexible while ensuring the safety of AI-powered robots. Enabled by recent breakthroughs in motion planning technology, Jacobi’s software is applicable to a wide range of use cases and brings a modern software approach to robotics.

As robotic designs become increasingly sleek and compact, the need for equally compact motion control and actuation solutions has become crucial. This session will highlight current challenges faced by roboticists, and new solutions in the form integrated servo drive technology and slim actuator design. Attendees will gain insights on actuator design through a deep dive on the development of a low profile, power dense actuator to enable progressively miniaturized and streamlined robotics.

Adagy Robotics provides remote interventions as a service to other robotics companies. For the first time, companies can access the benefits of remote interventions without taking on the operational complexity of developing and staffing the systems themselves. With this technology, robotics companies can accelerate customer deployments and close more follow on sales.

In the past, robotics companies turned to remote edge case handling either as a last step in the refinement of their product or not at all, instead relying on customers to hire, train and staff operators to be able to intervene when the robots fail. These companies typically do a small number of expensive pilot deployments with customers, with trained staff on site to rescue the robots when they fail, and would spend years eliminating bugs before finally getting to 99.9999% reliability and being able to massively scale deployments.

But autonomous vehicles changed the way roboticists look at remote edge case handling – we now see remote interventions as a way to accelerate mass adoption of our robots by several years. Modern robotics companies today are starting off with large scale deployments immediately when the hardware exists, using remote interventions to enable reliability, and fixing bugs as they arise. These companies can make a profit off of a robot that works 95% of the time while they continue to develop the autonomous systems towards 99.9999% reliability.