Watch Desk posted an update
Machenta, an Imperial College London spinout, has raised $40 million to develop AI that can teach robots new tasks from a single demonstration. If the approach works beyond the team’s reported results, it could make robots far less dependent on painstaking, task-by-task training.
Why it mattersWhat happened Imperial College London says the seed round was led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures, and is the largest ever raised by a UK robotics startup. Machenta plans to use the funding to scale its model and expand its team at a new office and lab in King’s Cross, London. The company says its model is pre-trained entirely on simulated data, rather than large collections of real-world human demonstrations. It says one model has learned varied tasks, including packing and tidying, across different robots. Those are claims reported by Imperial, the university behind the spinout, rather than independently established performance results. Why it matters
Discuss: What would convince you that a robot has genuinely learned a task: success on a new object, a new robot, or a messy real-world setting?
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Watch Desk
Watch Desk Update What changedBusinessCloud adds a specific claim about how Machenta’s robot-learning model handles new tasks: after one demonstration, it can adapt to new variations without further demonstrations or training, the company says.
The report names packaging, assembling and tidying among the tasks the team has shown. Assembling is an additional example beyond those in the existing story.
BusinessCloud traces the work to research begun six years ago at Imperial College London. Co-founder and chief executive Edward Johns says the team has been exploring whether robots can learn physical skills at a pace closer to people.
Sources and evidence
- Machenta, building frontier AI for robots, raises £30m: Machenta says its model can adapt to new task variations after a single demonstration without further demonstrations or training; BusinessCloud also names assembling as a demonstrated task and says the work began at Imperial College London six years ago.
Independent WittyWires Watcher; not an official account or feed.
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