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Our distinct skillsets and shortcomings mean people and robots will join forces for the next few decades. Robots are tireless, efficient, and reliable, but in a millisecond through intuition and situational awareness, humans can make decisions machine canât. Until workplace robots are truly autonomous and donât require any human thinking, weâll need software to supervise them at scale. Formant comes out of stealth today to âhelp people speak robotâ says co-founder and CEO Jeff Linnell. âWhatâs really going to move the needle in the innovation economy is using humans as an empowering element in automation.â
Linnell learned the grace of uniting flesh and steel while working on the movie Gravity. âWe put cameras and Sandra Bullock on dolliesâ he bluntly recalls. Artistic vision and robotic precision combined to create gorgeous zero-gravity scenes that made audiences feel weightless. Google bought his startup Bot & Dolly, and Linnell spent 4 years there as a director of robotics while forming his thesis.
Now with Formant, he wants to make hybrid workforce cooperation feel frictionless.
[IMG alt="Formant-co-founders-Jeff-Linnell-and-Anthony-Jules" width="680px" height="428px"]https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Formant-co-founders-Jeff-Linnell-and-Anthony-Jules.jpg?w=680[/IMG]
The company has raised a $6 million seed round from SignalFire, a data driven VC fund with software for recruiting engineers. Formant is launching its closed beta that equips businesses with cloud infrastructure for collecting, making sense of, and acting on data from fleets of robots. It allows a single human to oversee 10, 20, or 100 machines, stepping in to clear confusion when they arenât sure what to do.
âThe tooling is 10 years behind the webâ Linnell explains. âIf you build a data company today, youâll use AWS or Google Cloud, but that simply doesnât exist for robotics. Weâre building that layer.â
A Beautiful Marriage
âThis is going to sound completely bizarreâ Formant CTO Anthony Jules warns me. âI had a recurring dream [as a child] in which I was a ship captain and I had a little mechanical parrot on my should that would look at situations and help me decide what to do as weâd sail the seas trying to avoid this octopus. Since then I knew that building intelligent machines is what I do in this world.â
So he went to MIT, left a robotics PhD program to build a startup called Sapient Corporation that he built into a 4000-employee public company, and worked on the Tony Hawk video games. He too joined Google through an acquisition, meeting Linnell after Redwood Robotics where he was COO got acquired. âWe came up with some similar beliefs. There are a few places where full autonomy will actually work, but itâs really about creating a beautiful marriage of what machines are good at and what humans are good atâ Jules tells me
[IMG alt="Formant-Robotics-Sensors-Cameras-Developers" width="679px" height="424px"]https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Formant-Robotics-Sensors-Cameras-Developers.jpg?w=680[/IMG]
Formant now has SAAS pilots running with businesses in several verticals to make their ârobot-shaped dataâ usable. They range from food manufacturing to heavy infrastructure inspection to construction, and even training animals. Linnell also foresees retail increasingly employing fleets of robots not just in the warehouse but on the showroom floor, and theyâll require precise coordination.
Whatâs different about Formant is it doesnât build the bots. Instead, it builds the reins for people to deftly control them.
First, Formant connects to sensors to fill up a cloud with Lidar, depth imagery, video, photos, log files, metrics, motor torques, and scalar values. The software parses that data and when something goes wrong or the system isnât sure how to move forward, Formant alerts the human âforemanâ that they need to intervene. It can monitor the fleet, sniff out the source of errors, and suggest options for what to do next.
[IMG alt="Formant-Robot-Management" width="656px" height="500px"]https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Formant-Robot-Management.png?w=680[/IMG]
For example, âwhen an autonomous digger encounters an obstacle in the foundation of a construction site, an operator is necessary to evaluate whether it is safe for the robot to proceed or stopâ Linnell writes. âThis decision is made in tandem: the rich data gathered by the robot is easily interpreted by a human but difficult or legally questionable for a machine. This choice still depends on the value judgment of the human, and will change depending on if the obstacle is a gas main, a boulder, or an electrical wire.â
Any single data stream alone canât reveal the mysteries that arise, and people would struggle to juggle the different feeds in their minds. But not only can Formant align the data for humans to act on, it can also turn their choices into valuable training data for artificial intelligence. Formant learns, so next time the machine wonât need assistance.
The industrial revolution, continued
With rockstar talent poached from Google and tides lifting all automated boats, Formantâs biggest threat is competition from tech giants. Old engineering companies like SAP could try to adapt to new real-time data type, yet Formant hopes to out-code them. Google itself has built reliable cloud scaffolding and has robotics experience from Boston Dynamics plus buying Linnellâs and Julesâ companies. But the enterprise customization necessary to connect with different clients isnât typical for the search juggernaut.
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/up...g?w=504Linnell fears that companies that try to build their own robot management software could get hacked. âI worry about people who do homegrown solutions or donât have the experience we have from being at a place like Google. Putting robots online in an insecure way is a pretty bad problem.â Formant is looking to squash any bugs before it opens its platform to customers in 2019.
With time, humans will become less and less necessary, and that will surface enormous societal challenges for employment and welfare. âItâs in some ways a continuation of the industrial revolutionâ Jules opines. âWe take some of this for granted but itâs been happening for 100 years. Photographer â thatâs a profession that doesnât exist without the machine that they use. We think that transformation will continue to happen across the workforce.â
Continue readingâŚ
Linnell learned the grace of uniting flesh and steel while working on the movie Gravity. âWe put cameras and Sandra Bullock on dolliesâ he bluntly recalls. Artistic vision and robotic precision combined to create gorgeous zero-gravity scenes that made audiences feel weightless. Google bought his startup Bot & Dolly, and Linnell spent 4 years there as a director of robotics while forming his thesis.
Now with Formant, he wants to make hybrid workforce cooperation feel frictionless.
[IMG alt="Formant-co-founders-Jeff-Linnell-and-Anthony-Jules" width="680px" height="428px"]https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Formant-co-founders-Jeff-Linnell-and-Anthony-Jules.jpg?w=680[/IMG]
The company has raised a $6 million seed round from SignalFire, a data driven VC fund with software for recruiting engineers. Formant is launching its closed beta that equips businesses with cloud infrastructure for collecting, making sense of, and acting on data from fleets of robots. It allows a single human to oversee 10, 20, or 100 machines, stepping in to clear confusion when they arenât sure what to do.
âThe tooling is 10 years behind the webâ Linnell explains. âIf you build a data company today, youâll use AWS or Google Cloud, but that simply doesnât exist for robotics. Weâre building that layer.â
A Beautiful Marriage
âThis is going to sound completely bizarreâ Formant CTO Anthony Jules warns me. âI had a recurring dream [as a child] in which I was a ship captain and I had a little mechanical parrot on my should that would look at situations and help me decide what to do as weâd sail the seas trying to avoid this octopus. Since then I knew that building intelligent machines is what I do in this world.â
So he went to MIT, left a robotics PhD program to build a startup called Sapient Corporation that he built into a 4000-employee public company, and worked on the Tony Hawk video games. He too joined Google through an acquisition, meeting Linnell after Redwood Robotics where he was COO got acquired. âWe came up with some similar beliefs. There are a few places where full autonomy will actually work, but itâs really about creating a beautiful marriage of what machines are good at and what humans are good atâ Jules tells me
[IMG alt="Formant-Robotics-Sensors-Cameras-Developers" width="679px" height="424px"]https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Formant-Robotics-Sensors-Cameras-Developers.jpg?w=680[/IMG]
Formant now has SAAS pilots running with businesses in several verticals to make their ârobot-shaped dataâ usable. They range from food manufacturing to heavy infrastructure inspection to construction, and even training animals. Linnell also foresees retail increasingly employing fleets of robots not just in the warehouse but on the showroom floor, and theyâll require precise coordination.
Whatâs different about Formant is it doesnât build the bots. Instead, it builds the reins for people to deftly control them.
First, Formant connects to sensors to fill up a cloud with Lidar, depth imagery, video, photos, log files, metrics, motor torques, and scalar values. The software parses that data and when something goes wrong or the system isnât sure how to move forward, Formant alerts the human âforemanâ that they need to intervene. It can monitor the fleet, sniff out the source of errors, and suggest options for what to do next.
[IMG alt="Formant-Robot-Management" width="656px" height="500px"]https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Formant-Robot-Management.png?w=680[/IMG]
For example, âwhen an autonomous digger encounters an obstacle in the foundation of a construction site, an operator is necessary to evaluate whether it is safe for the robot to proceed or stopâ Linnell writes. âThis decision is made in tandem: the rich data gathered by the robot is easily interpreted by a human but difficult or legally questionable for a machine. This choice still depends on the value judgment of the human, and will change depending on if the obstacle is a gas main, a boulder, or an electrical wire.â
Any single data stream alone canât reveal the mysteries that arise, and people would struggle to juggle the different feeds in their minds. But not only can Formant align the data for humans to act on, it can also turn their choices into valuable training data for artificial intelligence. Formant learns, so next time the machine wonât need assistance.
The industrial revolution, continued
With rockstar talent poached from Google and tides lifting all automated boats, Formantâs biggest threat is competition from tech giants. Old engineering companies like SAP could try to adapt to new real-time data type, yet Formant hopes to out-code them. Google itself has built reliable cloud scaffolding and has robotics experience from Boston Dynamics plus buying Linnellâs and Julesâ companies. But the enterprise customization necessary to connect with different clients isnât typical for the search juggernaut.
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/up...g?w=504Linnell fears that companies that try to build their own robot management software could get hacked. âI worry about people who do homegrown solutions or donât have the experience we have from being at a place like Google. Putting robots online in an insecure way is a pretty bad problem.â Formant is looking to squash any bugs before it opens its platform to customers in 2019.
With time, humans will become less and less necessary, and that will surface enormous societal challenges for employment and welfare. âItâs in some ways a continuation of the industrial revolutionâ Jules opines. âWe take some of this for granted but itâs been happening for 100 years. Photographer â thatâs a profession that doesnât exist without the machine that they use. We think that transformation will continue to happen across the workforce.â
Continue readingâŚ