Tag: humanoid

Persona’s founders are certain the world can use another humanoid robot

Posted on by faz_business


Jerry Pratt and Figure quietly parted ways last month. The MIT research scientist spent just under two years with the Bay Area-based robotics firm. In 2022, he left Boardwalk Robotics, a humanoid startup he founded and led, and joined Figure’s well-funded ranks as CTO months before it exited stealth.

It was only last week, however, that Pratt made his exit public. The news arrived via LinkedIn, as he announced the founding of another entry in the increasingly crowded world of humanoids. Persona AI is presently as early stage as early stage gets, having been officially founded only last month.

The startup is the brainchild of Pratt and longtime associate Nic Radford, an industry vet with his own impressive resume including seven years as part of NASA’s robotics before founding Nauticus Robotics and Jacobi Motors.

“We wanted to get some early indications from both people who wanted to work with us and investors, that if we did something like this on LinkedIn, it wouldn’t fall flat on its face,” Radford told TechCrunch.

The news was as much a hiring announcement as brand unveiling. “Hey LinkedIn!” Pratt enthusiastically noted on the business site. “Ever dreamt of creating your own Iron Man suit but without the billionaire playboy part?”

Radford and Pratt say they want to bring on additional 10 to 20 “founders” (their quotes) to help shape the company. “Jerry and I are obviously a pivotal part of this,” Radford said, “but so will the next 18 people in. We really want to illustrate to them the esprit de corps of the company.”

At this early stage, Persona’s pitch doesn’t stray far from the various humanoid firms with which it’s set to compete. The introductory text on its website is largely a celebration of those technological breakthroughs that form the foundation of this unique moment in robotics.

The founders write,

Now is a good time for the commercialization of humanoids. Computer vision and perception algorithms can now detect motion, identify and segment objects, and estimate poses at frame rate; electronics and computation have shrunk in size and increased in performance, such that they can be fully onboard a robot and not hog the energy budget; mobility and manipulation algorithms are now competent enough to maneuver around rooms and do commercially useful work; machine learning is increasing robot capabilities while reducing programming burden; investors are starting to believe in the potential of humanoids; and commercial entities are requesting humanoid robots in various applications where they can add real value.

That’s about as deep as the pitch currently goes outside of investor decks and employee interviews. Whatever advantage Persona believes it will ultimately have over Agility, Boston Dynamics, Figure and the rest isn’t clear at this very early stage.

“In some ways, it’ll be very similar, in other ways it’s different,” Radford answered cryptically. “It’s like the way GM feels themselves against Ford or Toyota or any car company. Every company feels, deep down, they’ve got certain competitive advantages. And then, deep down, every company’s commoditized and distilled down into the same things. They all provide transportation. Do we have our version of the Dodge Hemi? We’d like to think so.”

Pratt, for one, felt confident enough in Persona’s vision to leave a top spot at one of humanoid robotics’ most prominant and best-funded companies, Figure. Pratt says the split was amicable, and when I spoke with Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock last week about his new project, Cover, he spoke highly of his former CTO. Pratt says the decision was, in part, geographical.

“I was going between Pensacola [Florida] and California every two weeks,” Pratt said. “At first when I joined Figure, I thought [Pratt and his wife] could move to California at about the two-year mark. I had planned to do it, but it just really wouldn’t work out. It was a fairly mutual parting of the ways.”

Rather than setting up shop in a traditional robotics hotbed like Boston or Pittsburgh, Persona will split its operations between Pratt’s home of Pensacola, along with Houston. The latter will serve as the company’s primary headquarters, eventually accommodating around two-thirds of Persona’s staff.

Humanoid robots are learning to fall well

Posted on by faz_business


The savvy marketers at Boston Dynamics produced two major robotics news cycles last week. The larger of the two was, naturally, the electric Atlas announcement. As I write this, the sub-40 second video is steadily approaching five million views. A day prior, the company tugged at the community’s heart strings when it announced that the original hydraulic Atlas was being put out to pasture, a decade after its introduction.

The accompanying video was a celebration of the older Atlas’ journey from DARPA research project to an impressively nimble bipedal ’bot. A minute in, however, the tone shifts. Ultimately, “Farewell to Atlas” is as much a celebration as it is a blooper reel. It’s a welcome reminder that for every time the robot sticks the landing on video there are dozens of slips, falls and sputters.

Boston Dynamics' Atlas in action

Image Credits: Boston Dynamics

I’ve long championed this sort of transparency. It’s the sort of thing I would like to see more from the robotics world. Simply showcasing the highlight reel does a disservice to the effort that went into getting those shots. In many cases, we’re talking years of trial and error spent getting robots to look good on camera. When you only share the positive outcomes, you’re setting unrealistic expectations. Bipedal robots fall over. In that respect, at least, they’re just like us. As Agility put it recently, “Everyone falls sometimes, it’s how we get back up that defines us.” I would take that a step further, adding that learning how to fall well is equally important.

The company’s newly appointed CTO, Pras Velagapudi, recently told me that seeing robots fall on the job at this stage is actually a good thing. “When a robot is actually out in the world doing real things, unexpected things are going to happen,” he notes. “You’re going to see some falls, but that’s part of learning to run a really long time in real-world environments. It’s expected, and it’s a sign that you’re not staging things.”

A quick scan of Harvard’s rules for falling without injury reflects what we intuitively understand about falling as humans:

  1. Protect your head
  2. Use your weight to direct your fall
  3. Bend your knees
  4. Avoid taking other people with you

As for robots, this IEEE Spectrum piece from last year is a great place to start.

“We’re not afraid of a fall—we’re not treating the robots like they’re going to break all the time,” Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders told the publication last year. “Our robot falls a lot, and one of the things we decided a long time ago [is] that we needed to build robots that can fall without breaking. If you can go through that cycle of pushing your robot to failure, studying the failure, and fixing it, you can make progress to where it’s not falling. But if you build a machine or a control system or a culture around never falling, then you’ll never learn what you need to learn to make your robot not fall. We celebrate falls, even the falls that break the robot.”

Image Credits: Boston Dynamics

The subject of falling also came up when I spoke with Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter ahead of the electric Atlas’ launch. Notably, the short video begins with the robot in a prone position. The way the robot’s legs arc around is quite novel, allowing the system to stand up from a completely flat position. At first glance, it almost feels as though the company is showing off, using the flashy move simply as a method to showcase the extremely robust custom-built actuators.

“There will be very practical uses for that,” Playter told me. “Robots are going to fall. You’d better be able to get up from prone.” He adds that the ability to get up from a prone position may also be useful for charging purposes.

Much of Boston Dynamics’ learnings around falling came from Spot. While there’s generally more stability in the quadrupedal form factor (as evidenced from decades trying and failing to kick the robots over in videos), there are simply way more hours of Spot robots working in real-world conditions.

Image Credits: Agility Robotics

“Spot’s walking something like 70,000 kms a year on factory floors, doing about 100,000 inspections per month,” adds Playter. “They do fall, eventually. You have to be able to get back up. Hopefully you get your fall rate down — we have. I think we’re falling once every 100-200 kms. The fall rate has really gotten small, but it does happen.”

Playter adds that the company has a long history of being “rough” on its robots. “They fall, and they’ve got to be able to survive. Fingers can’t fall off.”

Watching the above Atlas outtakes, it’s hard not to project a bit of human empathy onto the ’bot. It really does appear to fall like a human, drawing its extremities as close to its body as possible, to protect them from further injury.

When Agility added arms to Digit, back in 2019, it discussed the role they play in falling. “For us, arms are simultaneously a tool for moving through the world — think getting up after a fall, waving your arms for balance, or pushing open a door — while also being useful for manipulating or carrying objects,” co-founder Jonathan Hurst noted at the time.

I spoke a bit to Agility about the topic at Modex earlier this year. Video of a Digit robot falling over on a convention floor a year prior had made the social media rounds. “With a 99% success rate over about 20 hours of live demos, Digit still took a couple of falls at ProMat,” Agility noted at the time. “We have no proof, but we think our sales team orchestrated it so they could talk about Digits quick-change limbs and durability.”

As with the Atlas video, the company told me that something akin to a fetal position is useful in terms of protecting the robot’s legs and arms.

The company has been using reinforcement learning to help fallen robots right themselves. Agility shut off Digit’s obstacle avoidance for the above video to force a fall. In the video, the robot uses its arms to mitigate the fall as much as possible. It then utilizes its reinforcement learnings to return to a familiar position from which it is capable of standing again with a robotic pushup.

One of humanoid robots’ main selling points is their ability to slot into existing workflows — these factories and warehouses are known as “brownfield,” meaning they weren’t custom built for automation. In many existing cases of factory automation, errors mean the system effectively shuts down until a human intervenes.

“Rescuing a humanoid robot is not going to be trivial,” says Playter, noting that these systems are heavy and can be difficult to manually right. “How are you going to do that if it can’t get itself off the ground?”

If these systems are truly going to ensure uninterrupted automation, they’ll need to fall well and get right back up again.

“Every time Digit falls, we learn something new,” adds Velagapudi. “When it comes to bipedal robotics, falling is a wonderful teacher.”