At their very core, robots are meant to help human beings. By performing tasks that are either menial or too dangerous for humans to complete, robots enable us to focus instead on creative and inspiring tasks. In an industrial setting, robots have the potential to handle countless tasks that will help streamline manufacturing and processing. As of now, however, manufacturers have been slow to adopt robotics - only 2% of factories in the US use an industrial robot arm. Part of the reason is safety - industrial robot arms are kept in literal cages as a collision with a human can be fatal. As a result, factory lines are highly static and take months to adjust. The technology has simply been too slow to make robots suitable for dynamic environments like a factory floor with humans.
That's what Jacobi Robotics seeks to change.
Jacobi Robotics is a company that develops motion planning for robot arms. In the field of robotics, motion planning is the computational process of computing a trajectory which moves a robot arm from one place to another as fast as possible without collisions. Traditional motion planning relies on rigid software that doesn't account for the dynamic nature of a factory floor. What Jacobi Robotics wants to do is to instill robots with the capabilities and intuition to make their own decisions in real-time, allowing them to accommodate variables that pop up in real-life situations.
Think of it this way-if a robot arm is performing work alongside other robots or people, then it needs to be able to operate without shutting down every time something gets near it. Its movements need to be coordinated with its teammates, allowing it to do its job collision-free. The Jacobi motion planner provides a time-optimized, jerk-limited, and collision-free motion plan for robotic arms. This makes industrial robot arms safe, flexible, and more productive than ever before.
Jacobi Robotics has received funding from such investors as Berkeley SkyDeck, which leverages their network of over 500,000 Berkeley alumni to fund over 300 startups per year. They've also collaborated with researchers from academic institutions such as ETH Zurich, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Technical University of Munich. They even recently launched a private beta for a cloud-based robot software, offering a suite of high-performance off-the-shelf services that increase robot productivity, reduce overhead for the engineering team, and extend the service life of robots.
So how exactly did this robotics company get started?
"The founding team met and did research together in manipulation and motion planning at UC Berkeley," says Max Cao, CEO of Jacobi Robotics. "We founded the company because of a frustration that breakthroughs in academia were not passing down to industry, and because despite the massive promise of robots, the adoption of robots in the industry is extremely low, even today."
The founding team consists of five technical founders with backgrounds in robotics research: Max Cao, Lars Bercheid, Yahav Avigal, Jeff Ichnowski, and Ken Goldberg. All five have experience in motion planning, giving them the insider knowledge to create a product capable of transforming the robotics, manufacturing, and logistics industries.
Max Cao's journey to Jacobi Robotics contains a myriad of academic achievements and consulting experience. He is a well-established technology entrepreneur who has spent his career innovating and implementing robotics solutions that enhance various industries and permanently change how robots are used in manufacturing or logistics. While pursuing his MEng degree in Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London, he spent time in management consulting at McKinsey. He then moved to California, where he met the people that would become Jacobi's founding team.
"At UC Berkeley, we did research at the bleeding edge of the robotics field and developed state-of-the-art algorithms in manipulation and motion planning," says Cao. "It is also where I realized that innovations in robotics have the potential to bring about a paradigm shift in labor comparable to that of synthetic fertilizers in agriculture and food production during the second half of the 20th century. With this context, I had absolute conviction in Jacobi's mission."
Cao isn't the only founding member who believes in the future of robotics.
"Reading Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, I became fascinated with his stories on robotics and the prospects for how technology will change the future," says Yahav Avigal. "My thoughts were filled with ideas for how human behavior could be analyzed to make better robots, so that robots could, in turn, do a better job at helping humans-notions which nurtured my passion in robotics and shaped the direction of my professional career."
Avigal underwent over five years of extensive training in the elite technological 8-200 unit of the IDF intelligence corps before he moved on to pursue a career in the field of robotics. He completed a dual B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Tel-Aviv University, and now a Ph.D in EECS with a focus on AI and Robotics at UC Berkeley.
"Advised by Professor Ken Goldberg, I developed an expertise in robotic arms, leveraging deep learning methods to increase the efficiency and reliability of robot manipulation tasks, such as grasping, object transport and folding laundry," says Avigal. This experience would later serve him in the founding of Jacobi Robotics, giving him the insight into creating a motion planning system capable of handling the dynamic environment of a factory floor.
Together with the rest of the founding team, Max Cao and Yahav Avigal have built a company that is changing the game of industrial robotics. Their work has been published in top-tier journals such as Science Robotics, and a paper authored by several of the co-founders recently won both Best Paper Award and Best RoboCup Paper Award at IROS 2022, one of the largest robotics conferences in the world. With Cao and Avigal at the helm, Jacobi Robotics is all but certain to unlock the widespread adoption and ubiquitous use of safe industrial robotics in the world.
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