[HN Gopher] Covariant.ai and applying deep learning to robotics ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-05-06 23:00 UTC)