Southie Autonomy

 Focus: Hardware or Software, Software. While robotics is a highly integrated hardware and software system, Southie focuses on the software side of robots as this is where the bulk of the adoption gaps can be solved. Today’s hardware is highly optimized and robust, but it requires so much NRE to get working. So, Southie aims to reduce the complexity and skill required to deploy and changeover robots, creating a new way to see ROI on robots. A multi-purpose, no-code robotic system that line operators can use and reuse. included every autonomous system you could think of, from underwater robots to aerial drones to joint R&D with MIT and Harvard to advance autonomous mobile manipulation. As engineers we built autonomous systems that would satisfy the user’s mission and the user knew what they wanted the system to do, but there was a disconnect in how the user directed and understood what the system was doing. Basically, there was a fundamental gap that we later learned was an adoption gap between user and robotic system.It turns out that you can use that same exact lens to look at the industrial robotics sector and you’ll find the same exact problem. There is a huge gap between the people who want to use robots (e.g. warehouse workers and operators) and who can actually deploy robotic systems (e.g. automation engineers). So, Southie has created a new way for humans and robots to talk to other (i.e. at the task level instead of instructions). The result is we’ve bridged the gap by letting operations users task robots at the operational level, instead of at the engineering level.