Easy Autonomous Navigation for Industrial Vehicles: Because People Keep Asking for It
Tue Jan 30 2024
In this episode, I spoke with Stefan Seltz-Axmacher and Ilia Baranov, co-founders of Polymath Robotics, about their innovative approach to industrial automation. Polymath is revolutionizing the robotics industry by providing a modular autonomy stack for off-highway vehicles such as tractors, bulldozers, and mining trucks. Their platform serves as an operating system for industrial robots, enabling companies to implement automation without having to develop core navigation and control systems from scratch. This approach has the potential to significantly accelerate the adoption of robotics across various industrial sectors.
3 Ideas from the Interview
- Big, expensive vehicles are often easier to automate than smaller ones because they're designed to move slowly and cautiously, and the cost of sensors is relatively small compared to the vehicle's value.
- Polymath is working on turning safety certification into a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) problem, potentially revolutionizing how robotics companies approach safety standards.
- The most valuable machines to automate are often among the easiest, with some mining trucks generating a million dollars a year in recurring revenue for their autonomy providers.
2 Quotes that Stood Out
"We're giving you that as a product so you can focus on integrating it into an actual product that's some farmer somewhere or some mine operator somewhere, or someone, whoever cares about. And you can focus on actually just making robots valuable as opposed to being the 1500th team to reinvent point-to-point navigation." - Stefan Seltz-Axmacher
"We're building a foundation to have a web store. Like what Universal Robots did for arms - here's the arm, here's the foundation, and here's 50 different companies that will make apple picking or CNC machine tending with it." - Ilia Baranov
1 Opportunity
Use Polymath's platform to start a robotics company: Leverage Polymath's modular autonomy stack to quickly develop and deploy autonomous solutions for specific industrial use cases, without having to build the core navigation and control systems from scratch. This could allow you to focus on solving unique industry problems or creating specialized applications on top of a proven autonomy foundation. For example, you could develop a solution for automating specialized tasks in agriculture, mining, or construction, using Polymath's platform as the base for your autonomous vehicle control.