04.30.24-Startup-Ecosystem-Conference-Startups-Venti-Technologies

SAMAN AMARASINGHE: Hi, everyone. My name is Saman Amarasinghe. I'm a faculty of EECS. And five years ago, me and my colleague Daniela Rus, who is the director of CSAIL, and Heidi Wyle, we started this company, Venti.

So if you look at a generation ago, most of the things we used came within 100 miles area. During COVID, you might have realized things you use come from everywhere. Your meat came from Argentina. Your toilet paper came from Malaysia. And the chips in your car came from Taiwan. And there's a huge amount of data being moved, and part of this involves trucking. So these trucks, if you can eliminate the driver from the trucks, it will be a lot more reliable and also save a lot of cost in here.

So what Venti has been doing over the last five years, we are at a point that we have operations at-- I'll give one example. At Singapore port, PSA, we have 35 of these large container movers. They are all running autonomously throughout the port, 24/7, moving containers from one pile of containers to another. Singapore has automated the cranes, so it's a end-to-end system that has no human involvement in the system.

So the neat thing is, from last January, all those trucks are now fully operated by the port. We handed them to the port. There is no safety driver, nobody in there. It's kind of eerie to see these vehicles with no driver running around the port at this point.

So I want to show you a little bit of a video. Hopefully we can show that. So this is our truck in there. It's going through normal roads in the port with other human drivers in there. And there are a lot of these unprotected intersections that people-- even in port, even though it's operated by the company, there are a lot of drivers that are all over the place, breaking rules, very impatient, and we have to operate in that environment in here.

And we will go and park near a crane that was given to us, pick up the container, and we will round and deliver the container. So here we are, waiting for the container to get delivered by the crane. And then, once the container arrives in here-- the crane just arrived in here, and it's going to provide the container. And then, once it that, we will do that.

So from the top right corner, you will see that the image of the port, the map where we are and how we manage it. So now the container is moving in here. So let me stop the video here and continue.

So we have this operation in the port. And now what we are looking at is to expand beyond the ports. We have a couple of pilot projects in factories, warehouses, and airports, moving containers in here.

Over the last 10 years, the first five years as academic project and last five years as Venti, we built this entire stack of autonomy that involved-- we can operate in many different vehicles. And we have the full autonomous stack in there. And also we have a cloud stack that can do things like fleet management and planning for the bigger infrastructure in here.

So we have this thing built right now. And this is a pretty interesting system. We are operating on mixed human platforms in here. Even though we are in ports, as I said, humans are very unpredictable. They break a lot of driving rules, and we have to account for all those things. And we did all these things without doing any modification to the port. So there is no infrastructure at all. And we are not only doing these 30-ton vehicles, we also have different sized vehicles that we are operating on.

The interesting thing is, to load and unload these containers we have to park within 5-centimeter accuracy these huge trucks to get the container dropped in there. And we are now actually doing better than humans. We can actually do about 2-centimeter accuracy parking those vehicles in there.

So first five years of this company, in a true MIT fashion, we are very inward-looking. We had about eight engineers and one sales person. And what we did was, we want to build something that actually works and useful. And now we are very happy to say we have a system that's in production, in operation in the port. So we are now at a point ready to basically expand this system. And we are really looking to find people who are in logistics, who are in airports, warehouses, railroads, other areas where autonomous vehicles that can move goods can be very useful. Thank you.