University of California Berkeley
Assembly Line
Interview: Ambi Robotics founder sees ‘huge opportunities’ in new markets
Ambi Robotics is an AI and robotics company developing advanced solutions that scale ecommerce operations to meet demand while empowering humans to handle more. Our flagship solution, AmbiSort A-Series, uses robotic arms combined with advanced gantry technology to automate the sorting of mixed parcels into destination containers. With continuous learning capabilities, our technology’s performance improves and evolves over time. We’re tackling some big challenges in ecommerce and supply chain, especially with the increasing demand for faster and more accurate parcel sorting. By bringing in our AI-powered robotic systems, warehouses can boost throughput, accuracy and cut costs—all without needing to completely overhaul their existing process.
For example, during a partnership with a global shipping and mailing company, we deployed our AmbiSort products into their existing middle-mile operations to help automate and speed up parcel sortation. During our time together, we sorted 87 million packages and trained over 400 of their parcel handlers for higher-value, certified robot operator roles. With this move, their employees were able to focus on more complex and higher-value work while cutting operational costs.
Our competitive edge is the ability to handle a wide variety of objects with precision and speed, thanks to our AI-driven system, and our ability to easily integrate with whatever warehouse layout is needed.
Jacobi Robotics raises $5M for motion planning software
Traditional industrial robot programming can take weeks to months. If you are a software programmer for a systems integrator, your schedule is often squeezed at the end of the project development cycle for your customer, after the hardware build and implementation delays hit the project schedule. Jacobi Robotics is trying to solve these issues for robot programmers with its new AI-powered motion planning software that it claims can deploy robot arms in days and requires 1000x less computation time.
The startup has made its software platform available to the general market, raised $5 million in seed funding, and released Jacobi Palletizer, the first in a series of AI-powered solutions that leverage Jacobi’s motion planning technology. Pallet-based logistics represents more than $400 billion worth of U.S. trade exports annually, driving a rapidly growing demand and deployment for robotic palletizers that stack cases onto pallets for storage and shipment.
The company was formed by a group of roboticists from the Berkeley AI Research Lab and came out of Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg’s AI lab. The company believes industrial robotics has reached an inflection point. Robots in production use cases are now being reprogrammed every six months instead of every six years. Shorter production runs and new use cases enabled by advancements in AI require robots that adapt to changes. In production deployments, Jacobi’s pilot partners have already seen a 95% reduction in deployment time and a 24% savings in overall project costs after deploying Jacobi.