Lego for professionals - Olive Robotics wants to democratize robot development
At automatica, Olive Robotics will present itself in Hall B4 in the AI.Munich exhibitor group. I asked the founders, who come from the TU Munich, for an introduction.
The Munich-based startup Olive Robotics wants to drastically simplify the development of individual robotic (sub)systems and offers kits made of recombinable components for this purpose. To this end, the Munich-based company packages many robotics-related functions such as actuators (servo motors, grippers, etc.), sensors (IMU, cameras, distance sensors) and other functions (battery, WiFi, etc.) in specially developed, interoperable hardware modules that can be combined at will to form larger systems. All components of the modular system function as ROS and ROS2 nodes out of the box and require neither complex driver installations nor other complicated integration. The commissioning of a module is thus reduced to the simple plugging in of a USB-C cable.
Supplementation of existing systems is too time-consuming
Benjamin Felbrich, co-founder of Olive Robotics: "It's way too complicated to build your own robots or extend existing systems these days. Commercial self-contained systems like Kuka or Franka are great for many applications. But if you just want to add a camera and a gripper to the workflow, the problems start. Then you encounter many manufacturers offering either sensors, or actuators, or controllers. To combine these components into individual systems, engineers then have to spend a lot of time on hardware integration and software setup. We save our customers this effort and give them more time to deal with more exciting issues, such as AI-based control, image recognition, or integration with their own tech stack."
The technology
Olive Robotics places particular emphasis on AI capability out of the box. Each module has a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) and is preconfigured with common software frameworks such as PyTorch, Tensorflow and OpenCV. This allows complex machine learning tasks such as inference with sensor data, image recognition, or the execution of pre-trained behaviors to be executed directly on the component. This distribution of intelligence to the individual modules eliminates the need to send large amounts of data to a central computing unit, which reduces data flow and saves time.
Custom apps as well as pre-trained neural networks can be uploaded and updated with a few clicks in the included web interface of each module. In the specially developed Olive Robotics App Store, module-specific apps, neural networks and data sets can be shared and distributed. This allows users to share experiences with each other or make profits with smart apps.
Felbrich commented, "The vertical integration of our products is particularly important to us. It enables us to coordinate and optimize every component of the system, from the capacitor on the circuit board, to the operating system of the modules, to the higher-level cloud infrastructure."
The team
The Olive Robotics team is convinced that the future of robotics lies in modularity and vertical integration. The specific business idea found its origin at the Chair of Media Technology (LMT) at the Technical University of Munich. The team consisting of Prof. Eckehard Steinbach, Director of LMT, Leox Karimi, Edwin Babaians, and Benjamin Felbrich has about 50 years of combined experience in robotics, AI, and mechatronics. The Munich-based startup is looking for reinforcement in the areas of marketing and sales.
Engagement
Olive Robotics is in an early stage of company growth and is actively seeking investors for a seed round to fulfill existing customer orders.
Automatica
Olive Robotics will present its technology at Automatica 2022 in Munich. You will find the booth in Hall B4 (Future Robotics) within the AI.Munich exhibitor group. LinkedIn contact.
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The author of this blog is significantly involved in the AI/robotics project Opdra. He advises on almost all issues related to robotics incl funding/subsidies. More about him can be found here.