AI-Powered Landscaping Robots Demonstrated in Bay Area

Electric Sheep, a company creating AI-powered maintenance robots, has debuted its latest landscaping robot, Verdie.

The California-based company demonstrated its latest design in San Francisco earlier this month, showcasing its outdoor maintenance capabilities in the Bay Area.

The small-scale, wheeled robot uses tools in Nvidia’s Isaac SIM platform, trained over “millions of experiences” to perform a range of tasks including mowing grass and other lawn care chores. 

Verdie is powered by the company’s generative AI platform, ES1, which gives robots “reasoning and planning” capabilities, allowing them to operate in any outdoor setting without needing prior teaching.

“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,” a company statement said. 

“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.”

Verdie is set to launch commercially in the second quarter of this year, joining Electric Sheep’s other maintenance robot model, RAM. 

Electric Sheep said it is currently running ES1 on a fleet of 40 RAM robots in hundreds of yards across the U.S., with plans to expand with the launch of Verdie.

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“We are building a factory to train autonomous AI agents to do sustainable outdoor work,” said Nag Murty, Electric Sheep’s CEO. “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.”