Covariant Announces a Universal AI Platform for Robots

When IEEE Spectrum first wrote about Covariant in 2020, it was a new-ish robotics startup looking to apply robotics to warehouse picking at scale through the magic of a single end-to-end neural network. At the time, Covariant was focused on this picking use case, because it represents an application that could provide immediate value—warehouse companies pay Covariant for its robots to pick items in their warehouses. But for Covariant, the exciting part was that picking items in warehouses has, over the last four years, yielded a massive amount of real-world manipulation data—and you can probably guess where this is going. Today, Covariant is announcing RFM-1, which the company describes as a robotics foundation model that gives robots the “human-like ability to reason.” That’s from the press release, and while I wouldn’t necessarily read too much into “human-like” or “reason,” what Covariant has going on here is pretty cool. “Foundation model” Continue reading Covariant Announces a Universal AI Platform for Robots

Diminutive Deep Sea Drone Dives for Wrecks and Reefs

The global ocean is difficult to explore—the common refrain is that we know less about the deep ocean than we do about the surface of the moon. Australian company Advanced Navigation wants to change that with a pint-sized autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that it hopes will become the maritime equivalent of a consumer drone. And the new AUV is already getting to work mapping and monitoring Australia’s coral reefs and diving for shipwrecks. The Sydney-based company has been developing underwater navigation technology for more than a decade. In 2022, Advanced Navigation unveiled its first in-house AUV, called Hydrus. At less than half a meter long, the vehicle is considerably smaller than most alternatives. Even so, it’s fully autonomous and carries a 4k-resolution camera capable of 60 frames per second that can both capture high-definition video and construct detailed 3D photogrammetry models. Advanced Navigation says Hydrus—with a depth rating of 3,000 Continue reading Diminutive Deep Sea Drone Dives for Wrecks and Reefs