The hottest corner of the robotics space right now isn’t the robots themselves. Those companies have done an excellent job of getting their systems out into places like warehouses and factories, but the broader issue of actually managing and scheduling them is a bit more confusing. Proprietary software for these robotic systems is generally difficult to develop and will not work with third party systems.
When it was announced in 2021, Alphabet X grad Intrinsic offered the following information about his plans:
In recent years, our team has been exploring how to give industrial robots the ability to automatically sense, learn, and adjust as they complete tasks, so they can work in a broader range of environments and applications. Working in collaboration with teams at Alphabet and with our partners in real-world manufacturing environments, we’ve been testing software that uses techniques like machine insight, deep learning, reinforcement learning, motion planning, simulation, and force control.
This morning the company announced its first product, Flowstate, a development platform designed to deliver on some of those promises. The software is designed to help non-robotics experts develop workflows for these hardware systems.
“Our first product is a solution builder,” CEO Wendy Tan White tells TechCrunch. “With Intrisic Flowstate, what we’re saying is: you can design it, build it, and implement it. We are well aware that the world is still at the beginning of available skills. They can be put together in this workflow that we are offering. We will also allow [third-party] skills to be available, too. We want the broader ecosystem to start getting involved. One of the benefits of coming out of Alphabet is some of the more sophisticated abilities, like vision and forced feedback, where some machine learning or even deep reinforcement learning is required. We’ve also been able to create some of those abilities. What you’ll find in the flow state is not just the solution builder itself, but a library of skills, some of which don’t exist or aren’t easily accessible today.”
The core of the system is a graphical tree that allows users to chain together more complex workflows. Existing abilities include pose estimation, manipulation, force-based insertion, and path planning. The platform will also be open to third-party developers who can design their own skills to integrate into flows.
Image Credits: Intrinsic
The other big piece of this is the simulation. It is the key in most robotics implementations these days, as it gives users the ability to simultaneously run scenarios in a virtual world to determine real world outcomes. The platform uses Gazebo, an open source platform managed by Open Robotics, which also managed the robotic operating system, ROS. The for-profit connected arm, Open Source Robotics Corporation, was acquired by Intrinsic last December.
“What we’ve done with the acquisition is the core engineering team that used to work with OSRF (Open Source Robotics Foundation) now works at Intrinsic,” says Brian Gerkey, the CEO of Open Robotics who now serves as director of Open Robotics. . in intrinsic. “You should think of Intrinsic as perhaps one of the biggest players, but really just one within the ROS ecosystem. We employ a group of engineers and are committed to supporting them in developing and contributing to the ROS community.”
The news follows a massive round of layoffs at Alphabet, including at Every Day Robotics. “The EDR (Every Day Robotics) team moved in with what became (Google) Brain,” he explains. “That product has been merged with Google Deep Mind. We were already working a lot with DeepMind. The fully integrated Google DeepMind team intends to help us develop more skills, including those that would have potentially been used with EDR.”
Tan White says that despite a 40-person reduction in Intrinsic’s workforce, the company was not greatly affected by the layoffs. Rather, he explains, the changes were part of a small twist within the company.
“We did some targeted layoffs,” she says. “We graduated and we’ve actually made a couple of acquisitions. We were clear about what this project consisted of. There were a couple of projects that were more hardware based, and we decided not to focus on that. That’s what the layoffs were about. It was to focus on the software and the AI part of what we’re doing and that first product. I think what confused the outside world at the time is that we were obviously doing the acquisition with Open Robotics. They were related in the sense that we decided we want to focus on software, which is where Open Robotics fits really well.”
The company also acquired Vicarious in April of last year. Tan White says that about 80% of that team is still working for Intrinsic. “Their experience in certain applications has been critical,” he adds. “Some of the applications you’ll see in the abilities we have are based on the Vicarious Code.”
Flowstate is now available as a beta version. Intrinsic says it had over 100 signups within the first hour of launch.
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