Electric Sheep, a California-based outdoor maintenance company powered by AI and robotics, recently announced the launch of a brand-new robot.
This new robot, named Verdie, like other offerings from Electric Sheep, is powered by the company’s AI agent, ES1. This technology helps enable an outdoor autonomous system to operate in any outdoor setting with zero teaching.
Advanced AI and learning models to expand outdoor maintenance
Using recent advances in generative AI, ES1 is a learned world model that enables reasoning and planning for both its RAM robot for mowing and its Verdie robot used for edging, trimming lawns and bushes, and blowing leaves.
To accomplish these tasks ES-1 needs to understand the semantics of the world, create a map that can be used for coverage planning and highlight the edges of the workable area. In this case, trimming, edging or mowing grass are the integral areas. ES1 achieves this through dense prediction of a world state with a single model - similar to ChatGPT for language - but for spatial AI.
The robots are designed to be put on the property and turned on. Using only AI, they can understand the lawn around them and efficiently care for it.
Electric Sheep’s robots, Verdie and RAM, don’t require an engineer on site. The company says they can be shipped to a campus, HOA or park and begin tasks alongside the crew because of Electric Sheep’s full stack data channel and the large volume of data that the robots are continually trained on.
Electric Sheep is currently running ES1 on a fleet of 40 RAM robots in hundreds of yards across America and will be deploying the new Verdie robot with customers in Q2 2024.
“We are building an RL factory to train autonomous AI agents to do sustainable outdoor work,” said Nag Murty, co-founder and CEO of Electric Sheep. “The debut of our Verdie robot is the first AI robot for tasks like trimming and edging in the world of landscaping, and it’s exciting to see our ES1 technology power multiple robots that can work alongside a crew without an engineer on-site setting a specific path for them.”
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