12.8.21-DemoDay-Kota-Weaver

KOTA WEAVER: Thank you. So I'm Kota Weaver. I'm one of the founders and I'm the CTO of Skylla Technologies. And we are a robotics company. Our MIT connection is Dr. Sheng Liu, who is our president and a co-founder here, and had his PhD in robotics at MIT in '93.

So our main purpose is to make robots safer and more effective by teaching them how people move. So a lot of robots out there, you see in like grocery stores and things like that, actually kind of get stuck when they see people, and they don't do a good job of moving in a people-centric world. So that's really the problem that we try to solve.

So there are a lot of challenges that actually happen in not only public spaces, but also in manufacturing environments. And this is our first target, just because this is where robots already are the most common. So there's a big, big increased demand for automation, especially with the COVID crisis and also with the decreased workforce. In addition, a lot of these factories have this constant layout change, when they need to build new parts, things like that.

In addition, there are a bunch of mobile manipulators out there. But a lot of these tasks actually require much higher precision and much higher accuracy than these robots can provide. So, as far as we're aware, no existing mobile robots can actually solve these problems. So our solution, we have a little controller.

So we basically provide a box that has various navigation solutions and also localization and manipulation. Yeah, and so the key thing here is that we have this human-aware navigation, which is sort of it dynamically navigates, and when people can move around, it knows how to move around that. In addition, our navigation accuracy for when we want to actually place things is within about 0.3 millimeters.

And so, as I mentioned, we basically teach these robots how people move. We have a ton of actually human, real human motion data that we use to put together these, to train our systems, to allow for these complex planning motions. And we also have the no-code programming solution.

And there's sort of this easy teach and monitoring UI. So this market is actually growing very, very quickly. So the automation market as a whole is expected to be over $300 billion US dollars by 2027. And the growth rate for the autonomous navigation market actually outpaces that quite a bit.

So we actually are in factories around the world right now, so think maybe about 15 factories right now. So this is one of the robots that we've been working on. So this we did as collaboration with DMG MORI, who's the world's largest machine tools company. So you can actually buy these robots right now for about $300,000, if you have that lying around.

So we've put together two different products with them, within this category of robot. And these basically move parts and also tools between machines. In addition, we're in sort of a testing phase with East Japan Railway Company. So we're in their train stations doing sort of monitoring and data collection-related applications.

So what we're looking for is for partners who might be interested in actually using our system, and also, I guess, basically just potential strategic partners as well, that may have any needs for this kind of thing. Thank you very much. Again, my name is Kota Weaver. Feel free to contact me at the email listed there. OK.

SPEAKER 2: Thanks, Kota. So could you tell us a little more about your technology, what it actually is and how the integration happens into a robot, what the process is like.

KOTA WEAVER: Yeah, so I guess really kind of the key thing is that we tend to work-- in our previous experiences, we've typically worked with customers at a pretty early stage of their development of a new robot platform. So we basically work closely with them to jointly sort of customize our platform for their needs.

So some customers might have certain needs where they require a certain type of motion that we don't necessarily have support for. And so we very often will work with them on that. Or if they have some sort of need to customize the interface, or that kind of thing as well. In addition, we also are looking for potential retrofit kinds of applications.

So that's, yeah. So if you have an existing robot, we can integrate with that.

SPEAKER 2: And what's the actual technology, whatever you can say to that point.

KOTA WEAVER: Yeah, so one of the big things that we have is we have a set of algorithms that handle-- that basically, where we taught the robot how people move around, how they interact, so that it can better, so that it can basically avoid people or can move around spaces where there's a lot of congestion. So like I said earlier, with Japan's train stations, there's a lot of human traffic. So that's an area that they use our technology to move around that space in a more effective way.