stefan8r

I seem to recall a time when they all left earth and thanked us for all the fish...

In fact, during our interview with TechCrunch we let Kirsten drive our unmanned test vehicle from her browser at home!

I'd challenge this assertion. Rio Tinto has been on the forefront of automation, but there's a long list of equipment they operate that they don't have an immediate pathway to automate.

To my knowledge, the main players automating ultraclass mining trucks are Caterpillar, Komatsu, Hitachi, and ASI. CAT has been working on autonomy for a long time, and to my knowledge only offers full driver-out autonomy on a handful of models. Sandvik also has some really cool see-and-repeat autonomy in underground mining. It doesn't surprise me if Rio Tinto is talking about a full zero entry mine (worth it just because no people to hit = faster driving vehicles = more production/yr), but to my knowledge they buy their autonomy from others and no one I know of (besides us) would automate all the various types of equipment that go into running a mine.

A different large mining co had an initiative to build their own autonomy, but the project got cancelled when it wasn't making fast enough progress and the CEO was replaced with someone more Caterpillar friendly.

We don't have in house mining experience - but again we're not building autonomy just for mining. We're building generalized basic autonomy so the folks starting mining-specific autonomy projects don't get stuck re-building the basic autonomy wheel.

I always liked this reference as I thought it applied to a lot of ML stuff.

Step 1: Collect Data, do some analysis, train a model or two Step 2: … Step 3: Profit!

Thanks so much! Glad to see you’re doing well!

Spot on. Except we’re just the onboard software (BYO HW)

Thanks - appreciate that. And thanks for reading my response in the right tone (I was nervous no inflection might do me a disservice).

I’m not familiar with Tangram, but thanks for sharing. I’ll take a look!

There is definitely a world where customers “graduate out” of using Polymath, people do the same with Stripe (I know Uber has been at that decision point in the past). There’s probably a reasonable cap on how much we can charge a customer as a result (more likely pegged to the cost of 10-100 FT roboticists) and in time we’ll have to offer enterprise level SLAs.

So far we’ve seen traction with startups, tech consultants who are servicing big industrial co.s, OEMs, and the large industrial co.s themselves.

My hunch is that as we stop “doing things that don’t scale,” we’ll stop serving the big industrial companies themselves (and leave them to our other customer groups).

Thanks so much for the kind words!

1) We are mostly built on ROS (for better and worse) and are starting to migrate some containers to ROS2. Down the road I see an architecture that has some ROS, some ROS2, and maybe some homemade stuff (or maybe even other frameworks).

2) Ilia should be able to give you a better spec overview, but we we’re generally trying to be as stack agnostic as sanely physically possible. Roboticists have really strong preferences when it comes to hardware (often shaped by which components previously ruined demos in their life), and we want to be able to work with whatever you want to work with.

Reach out re:internships! No promises, but now that we have a stack you can build on for free that will definitely affect our decision process!

To double click on the Twilio API example:

In most robotics applications teams are building the equivalent of new speculative phone networks, building specialized infrastructure, acquiring specialized hardware companies to ease computer:phone connections, and running out of money before they can find product market fit for mass texting some sort of consumer.

Sure, they can still integrate Twilio poorly and fail. Or they can build a use case that no one cares about - but at least they won’t need 5 years to get to that point.

Might be a bit of a misunderstanding here. We’re not providing a sim world for you to do ML training on. Caladan would actually be a pretty terrible tool for that - it’s a static low-res environment without any other agents.

In Caladan we’re giving you a whole autonomous robot (in sim) that you can order around via a simple API.

In our use case the 5-10% that I’m talking about is really hard, but most teams / projects run out of funding before they get to that point (because making the robot, and making it autonomous, is so time and cost intensive it dominates the project).

Thanks for sharing Jaybridge. I hadn’t come across them but will reach out / try to dig into them.

Thanks so much for the note and the kind words. Would love to grab a coffee or something! My email is first @ polymathrobotics.com, but I'll reach out as well!

Maybe we can play bocce instead of coffee?

This is a good, well thought out point that I 60% disagree with (respectfully, of course). I think you're absolutely accurate in describing how robotics is today, and you're definitely partially correct about how it will remain, but I think you're biasing towards thinking robotics (as a field) is exceptional to the types of progress that have happened in software.

To unfairly simplify that assertion, it reminds me of a founder who once told me that "robotics will never be as easy as software. It's just harder and will always be so."

I don't know if I think each autonomy company needs to figure out vehicle dynamics any more than I think each company needs to figure out their cloud infrastructure. At a certain scale (and amount of success) you will certainly need smart people thinking about it, but you can get pretty far on a 90% standard AWS instance. Things like wheel slippage are challenging, but their challenging in similar ways across vehicle types (but different from other tasks you need to work on when building that higher level autonomy).

Similarly, if you assume you can safely stop when there's danger, there are a relatively finite number of environmental conditions you should operate in - which we can build, maintain, and improve "once" as opposed to making every mining OEM or Ag autonomy shop build from scratch. In time, there might be certain portions of this stack that you can swap out with your own (or with some other company that's better at seeing in the fog, for example); but I fundamentally don't believe that every robotics company needs to solve all of these hard problems well on their own for every application.

Re:Sim - for paying customers we are putting their specific vehicle (and sometimes their environment) as a part of the offering. We're also using sim to help figure out how to position sensors (which will be another cool thing that we want to show at some point).