Electric Sheep, a San Francisco-based robotics startup, launched the Verdie robot outdoor lawn services maintenance using its proprietary AI and robotics software.
Verdie, like their other robots, is powered by Electric Sheep’s AI agent, ES1.
“We are building an RL factory to train autonomous AI agents to do sustainable outdoor work,” said Nag Murty, CEO and co-founder 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. We will be rolling out the Verdie to our customer sites throughout 2024 and continuing to build out this fleet of robots as autonomous agents trained on outdoor services.”
Details include:
- Using recent advances in GenAI, ES1 is a learned world model that enables reasoning and planning for both its RAM robot for mowing and now its Verdie robot used for edging and 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. ES1 achieves this through dense prediction of a world state with a single model, this is akin to ChatGPT for language but for spatial AI.
- The product experience this creates is two landscaping robots that can work “out of the box.” The agents are designed to be simply 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, both the Verdie and the RAM, don’t require an engineer on-site; they can just be shipped to a campus, HOA or park and begin tasks alongside the crew. This is only possible through 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 its ES1 agent 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.
