Ken Goldberg's Ambi Robotics Emerges from Stealth
After years of research on robot manipulation, Ken Goldberg and his team at Ambi Robotics are emerging from stealth and launching their robot packaging company!
From Wired's "This Robot Could Help Fulfill Your Online Shopping Sprees":
Working in a simulated space, scientists create 3D models of all kinds of objects, then calculate where a robot should touch each one to get a "robust" grip... "In our case, the examples are not images, but actually 3D objects with robust grasp points on them," says Berkeley roboticist Ken Goldberg, who developed Dex-Net and cofounded Ambi Robotics. "Then, when we feed that into the network, it had a similar effect, that it started generalizing to new objects." Even if the robot had never seen a particular object before, it could call upon its training with a galaxy of other objects to calculate how best to grasp it...
Ambi Robotics' research has found that the most versatile and efficient end effector for e-commerce warehouses is the suction cup: It's been able to get a good grasp on 96 percent of parcels they've tested.
Read the complete Wired article here!
From The Robot Report's "Ambi Robotics, formely Ambidextrous, raises $6.1M for picking robots":
Ambi Robotics, formerly known as Ambidextrous Laboratories, raised $6.1 million in seed funding for its picking robots and operating system that are based on simulation-to-reality artificial intelligence (AI). Co-founded by the great Ken Goldberg, a professor at UC Berkeley, Ambi Robotics said its exiting stealth mode, although its work on improving robotic grasping hasn't been a secret in years...
"Using our unique approach to deep learning AI based on simulation-to-reality transfer, AmbiOS quickly configures our systems for a variety of sensors, robots and package categories," said Goldberg. "Our AmbiSort robot and gantry system reliably achieves superhuman sorting - allowing human workers to sort hundreds of thousands of cmmercial packages at twice the speed of manual picking."
Read the complete The Robot Report article here!
From Forbes' "Power Grab: Warehouse Robots Take Materials Handling to Next Level":
Startup Ambi Robotics is building and deploying (via an undisclosed customer in production) AmbiSort, an enclosed, industrial robot. It can sort through items in a bin, scan them and place them on a gantry to be stowed for last-mile journeys - and do it twice as fast as traditional manual picking...
"The pandemic changed our shopping patterns in ways that won't be reversed," said Ken Goldberg, co-founder of Ambi Robotics. "The challenge is efficiently delivering the growing deluge of packages. Fortunately, sorting packages is one skill that robots can learn."
Read the complete Forbes article here!
Congratulations to the whole team at Ambi Robotics!