Making Robot Arms Work Anywhere: From Space to Strawberry Fields
Thu Nov 21 2024
In this episode, I spoke with Dave Coleman, Chief Product Officer and Founder of PickNik Robotics, about how they're making robot arms work in challenging, unstructured environments. PickNik has helped over 110 companies deploy robotic arms in diverse applications, from picking strawberries in dynamic farm environments to building lunar colonies with NASA.
3 Ideas from the Interview
Traditional industrial robotics solutions don't address the needs of modern applications like small businesses, restaurants, farms, and space exploration, creating an opportunity for new approaches to robot manipulation.
The robotics industry needs common platforms to avoid reinventing the wheel, similar to how game engines revolutionized video game development.
Advanced physics simulation with tools like Mujoco enables testing complex behaviors like force feedback and object deformation, significantly reducing the gap between simulation and real-world deployment.
2 Quotes that Stood Out
"We basically wanna get robot arms into every part of our life. Small businesses, restaurants, your home. We want it to be outdoors and farm fields. We want it to be in hospitals, in space, building our next lunar colony." - Dave Coleman
"Let's stop wasting all of this investor money on building the same thing over and over again." - Dave Coleman
1 Opportunity
While PickNik focuses on manipulation software, there's a clear opportunity for a company to develop specialized simulation environments for robotic applications in specific industries. For example, creating highly accurate physics simulations for food handling or medical procedures could help robotics companies validate their solutions before deployment, reducing development time and costs.