Covariant.ai has developed a platform that consists of off-the-shelf robot arms equipped with cameras, a special gripper, and plenty of computer power for figuring out how to grasp objects tossed into warehouse bins. The company, emerging from stealth Wednesday, announced the first commercial installations of its AI-equipped robots: picking boxes and bags of products for a German electronics retailer called Obeta.
…The company was founded in 2017 by Pieter Abbeel, a prominent AI professor at UC Berkeley, and several of his students. Abbeel pioneered the application of machine learning to robotics, and he made a name for himself in academic circles in 2010 by developing a robot capable of folding laundry (albeit very slowly). Covariant uses a range of AI techniques to teach robots how to grasp unfamiliar objects. These include reinforcement learning, in which an algorithm trains itself through trial and error, a little like the way animals learn through positive and negative feedback…Besides reinforcement learning, Abbeel says his company’s robots make use of imitation learning, a way of learning by observing demonstrations of perception and grasping by another algorithm, and meta-learning, a way of refining the learning process itself. Abbeel says the system can adapt and improve when a new batch of items arrive. “It’s training on the fly”, he says. “I don’t think anybody else is doing that in the real world.”
…But reinforcement learning is finicky and needs lots of computer power. “I used to be skeptical about reinforcement learning, but I’m not anymore”, says Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto who also works part time at Google. Hinton says the amount of computer power needed to make reinforcement learning work has often seemed prohibitive, so it is striking to see commercial success. He says it is particularly impressive that Covariant’s system has been running in a commercial setting for a prolonged period.
…Peter Puchwein, vice president of innovation at Knapp, says he is particularly impressed by the way Covariant.ai’s robots can grasp even products in transparent bags, which can be difficult for cameras to perceive. “Even as a human being, if you have a box with 20 products in poly bags, it’s really hard to take just one out”, he says…Late last year, the international robot maker ABB ran a contest. It invited 20 companies to design software for its robot arms that could sort through bins of random items, from cubes to plastic bags filled with other objects. Ten of the companies were based in Europe, and the other half were in the United States. Most came nowhere close to passing the test. A few could handle most tasks but failed on the trickier cases. Covariant was the only company that could handle every task as swiftly and efficiently as a human. “We were trying to find weaknesses”, said Marc Segura, managing director of service robotics at ABB. “It is easy to reach a certain level on these tests, but it is super difficult not to show any weaknesses.”