University of California Berkeley
Assembly Line
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.