Electric Sheep – an artificial intelligence and robotics company specializing in large-scale landscaping operations, has announced a new autonomous robot to its fleet – Verdie. This electric robot can work alongside Electric Sheep’s other products and landscapers to perform edging, trimming, and even blowing. Verdie also looks quite cute doing it. Check it out.
Before you see Verdie in action, you should get to know the minds behind the new landscaping robot. Electric Sheep Robotics (ESR) is a San Francisco-based AI and robotics company funded by Tiger Global and Foundation Capital.
Focusing on a unique segment using tech to support outdoor maintenance providers, Electric Sheep has developed and implemented a growing lineup of robots that can autonomously mow alongside humans as they perform other duties in the yard.
The company’s technology is centered around ES1 – its proprietary AI software agent that utilizes real-world models to enable reasoning and planning while working in yards. This GenAI has already successfully been implemented in Electric Sheep’s electric mowing robot – RAM.
Today, Electric Sheep has announced a new member of the landscaping robot family that can work seamlessly along the RAMs – meet Verdie.
Verdie the electric landscaping robot is here to work
Imagine a future where your lawn is in dire need of maintenance on a sweltering August afternoon, but your pool or shaded patio is calling your name instead, so you leave the work to your landscaping robots. Thanks to innovations from Electric Sheep Robotics, that future is a reality.
The AI specialist launched Verdie today – an all-electric autonomous robot that utilizes ESR’s ES1 AI to put all the finishing touches on a freshly cut lawn; whether a robot or your teenager does that work is up to you.
ESR’s AI enables the RAM mower and Verdie to work together simultaneously “out of the box” with zero teaching necessary. It is designed to navigate and learn the environment around them using only artificial intelligence. Per the release:
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.
Electric Sheep states that its full-stack data channel and existing volume of data enables landscaping crews, campuses, HOAs, or residential customers to deploy the robots without any need for an engineer present. Furthermore, the software allows the robots to continuously learn and train for various tasks around a given yard.
ESR says it is currently operating a fleet of 40 RAM mowers around the US and will deploy the Verdie landscaping robots to commercial and residential customers in Q2 2024. As promised, here’s a video of Verdie in action:
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