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It’s easy to forget the fact that robotics is as much a software problem as it is hardware. Programming is obviously overshadowed by the allure of mechatronics, but without a proper software solution, you are left with nothing more than an expensive paper weight in your hands. The road to widespread adoption of robotics is fraught with unexpected problems that may ultimately hinder real-world use. There are a lot of problems finding software solutions.
Jacobi Robotics was founded in 2022 with a specific problem in mind: singularities. Confusingly, the term has a completely different meaning for robotics than for the world of Ray Kurzweil’s AI advancement projection.
The concept is far more subtle in robot-land, requiring some actual knowledge of the category to fully understand. This is a term rarely encountered outside research papers. However, this is a very real issue with real-world implications.
“Singularities are the Achilles heel for industrial robots,” says Jacoby. “In repetitive tasks, where the robot repeatedly and blindly follows the same motion, the robot can be programmed to avoid singularities through weeks of tedious manual fine-tuning of robot paths. But for many robot applications, the robot path must be modified periodically due to small changes in material or thermal expansion.
If you’re at all familiar with robotics hardware, you’ve probably heard the term “degrees of freedom” in reference to a robot arm having six or seven degrees of freedom. It refers to the joints of the system and the axes along which those joints are capable of moving. Singularities are points in space where the robot cannot move. When this happens, humans usually need to intervene to get things moving again.
Jacobi robotics takes its name from the Jacobian matrix, which in turn is a reference to the pioneering nineteenth-century German mathematician Carl Jacobi. In the world of robotics, this concept refers to the relationship between the velocities of the joint and the end effectors. To further simplify what I’ve already said, the concept and the company in its name relate to robotic path planning.
Jacobi Robotics was founded by a quartet of UC Berkeley robotics students along with Professor Ken Goldberg. In addition to serving as the company’s chief scientist, Goldberg is also the co-founder of package sorting robotics company Ambi Robotics, so he’s been through this rodeo before.
To start, the team focuses almost exclusively on issues involving singularities, which can stop a robot dead in its tracks at unexpected times. In the world of robotic arms, this presents a big issue for major applications, like bin picking, package sorting, palletizing – these are more or less the major things when we talk about industrial robots.
Jacobi has been in pilot projects with select partners. That list also includes automation deployment firm Formic, as well as a large consumer electronics firm the company isn’t ready to name yet (you know how these kinds of things go in the corporate world). According to Formik, Jacobi’s approach to attacking singularities has significantly reduced deployment time even at this early stage. It is certainly in the best interest of a startup like Formik to address the many potential problems during the deployment process rather than sending out technicians after the fact.
Along with Goldberg, the company’s founders include CEO Max Kao, CPO Yahav Avigal, chief architect Lars Berscheid, and chief roboticist Jeff Ichnowski (who also serves as an adjunct professor at CMU’s Robotics Institute). Jacobi closed a $1 million pre-seed in early 2023 and is currently focused on growing a proper seed as it looks to bring its solution to market. Current investors include Swift Ventures and Berkeley Skydeck, the UC Berkeley accelerator, which included the startup as part of a recent demo day.
The software currently provides support for many of the largest robotics arms vendors, including ABB, Fanu, Universal, and Yaskawa.
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