[HN Gopher] Covariant.ai and applying deep learning to robotics
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       Covariant.ai and applying deep learning to robotics
        
       Author : wojtczyk
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2020-05-06 21:02 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.indexventures.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.indexventures.com)
        
       | canada_dry wrote:
       | > _the technology was shockingly advanced ... we were blown away_
       | 
       | This is a very impressive step on the road, but this kind of
       | hyperbole always sets off my _Segway_ early-warning-system.
        
       | krasin wrote:
       | Another impressive startup in this area is nomagic.ai. From what
       | I know, they are more advanced than covariant, had been in
       | production for more than a year and recently raised a decent Seed
       | round.
       | 
       | Good luck to both teams!
        
       | xiaolingxiao wrote:
       | Just for some context from someone who is involved in robotics,
       | both Google X and Samsung Research have research teams working on
       | robotics arms. I would expect to see a lot more of these
       | companies in the coming years, weaving a narrative of RL (
       | currently getting hyped a lot in academia, again ) and factory
       | automation.
       | 
       | Manipulation is another task that appear deceptively simple, but
       | is actually very complex for machines, similar to autonomous
       | driving. Personally, any solution involving manipulation with
       | _fingers_ cannot be viable. Thankfully their approach appear to
       | use a simple gripper. Most of their publication is around general
       | RL (https://covariant.ai/our-approach). And again similar to AVs,
       | the sim to real gap is pretty big here too.
       | 
       | One good thing is that warehouses is a more constrained
       | environment and can be further structured around specific robots.
       | And Amazon has internal robotics teams and have deployed robotic
       | arms in limited settings. It works there because the entire
       | warehouse is structured around robots, that's what it takes.
        
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       (page generated 2020-05-06 23:00 UTC)