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LiDAR has been a cornerstone of self-reliant vehicle and robotics industries . While it ’s become an industry banner , the engineering science has its drawbacks . principal among them is high cost .
As the former CTO and CEO ofLiDAR loss leader Velodyne , Anand Gopalan is aware of the technical school ’s addition and subtraction . It ’s telling , then , that the executive ’s late undertaking opted to skip out on the technical school altogether . In fact , Vayu Robotics is pose LiDAR - gratuitous navigation as one of its biggest selling points .
Co - found in 2022 by Gopalan — two years after takingVelodyne public via SPAC — Vayu Roboticsis working to make delivery robotics cheaper and more scalable . ditch LiDAR is a piece of that teaser . Instead , the troupe has embraced foundation models : the machine see technology at the heart of the recent procreative AI burst .
“ The traditional nomadic robotics approach involved putting multiple detector on a robot ( often at outstanding cost ) and then writing software in the anatomy of mental faculty that are built to do one task at a time , ” Gopalan write in a jam waiver . “ This lead to very expensive sensing element and compute , combined with very brittle software that can not cover with incertitude or new situations .
“ or else we have taken an approach that involves a transformer based mobility foundation theoretical account combine with a newfangled type of brawny inactive sensor that does away with the want for lidar especially in scurvy pep pill covering . ”
Delivery robot are Vayu ’s first step . It ’s a large — and growing — industriousness , albeit one that has run into mess of pitfalls along the way . The company has get up up interest from investor , including Khosla Ventures , bringing its to - date raise to $ 12.7 million .
More importantly , however , it ’s signed “ a substantial commercial agreement with a large east - commercialism participant to deploy 2500 golem to enable radical - truehearted goodness delivery , with like commercial client in the pipeline . ” The company has yet to disclose the specifics of that heap , though the satisfying frame signals a company that has moved beyond the pilot phase .
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Another differentiator is Vayu ’s on - road coming to delivery — a change from the standard , slow - moving sidewalk robots that have thus far been deploy by companies . The company says its organisation is capable of moving a 100 - pound payload at speed of up to 20 miles an hr .
“ The unequaled set of applied science we have developed at Vayu have allowed us to solve problems that have plagued rescue automaton over the preceding decennary , and finally create a solution that can really be deployed at scale and turn on the trashy transport of good everywhere , ” Gopalan notes .
