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Polymath Robotics — Build an autonomous industrial vehicle in sim
Design autonomous behaviors for industrial vehicles in simulation, using Python (not ROS). Whatever you design in simulation can be executed by a physical vehicle using the same code.
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Hey PH, Stefan from Polymath Robotics, launching both our company and a tool called Caladan.
My last company, Starsky Robotics (autonomous trucks), was really hard because of the challenges of modern robotics. Getting a vehicle to drive itself reliably takes 6 months of engineering effort, at minimum. Even then, the autonomy itself is often buggy and unreliable, and impossible to transfer from one type of vehicle to another.
As a result, many autonomy companies run out of steam before they have a reliably-working product, let alone product-market fit. At Starsky, we’d constantly get asked to adapt our autonomy to some valuable (but niche) enterprise use case … which we’d have to reject, because it’d essentially mean starting over again.
So, Polymath is focused on taking autonomous vehicles off of ‘hard mode,’ starting with industrial vehicles.
We’re building autonomy software that can work with any industrial vehicle in a contained environment. Essentially, we build the autonomy, you build the app on top of it, including any custom behaviors that make sense for your specific customers.
Today, we’re also launching our Caladan tool to PH users, which lets you build autonomous vehicle applications in simulation via API. The standard version is free to use, and we’d love your feedback.
Here’s an example app for an autonomous tractor (https://github.com/polymathrobot...) we built with Caladan. But you could build apps for mining trucks, yard trucks at ports, or really any industrial vehicle in a closed environment.
Three cool things about Caladan:
1. You can program autonomous vehicle applications in whatever coding language you want. You don’t need to know ROS, Gazebo, or even Linux.
2. Whatever you build in Caladan can translate to a real vehicle. So you can prototype your behaviors in sim at low cost, and they’ll work when you have a vehicle ready to test with.
3. You can test your code on our demo vehicle (this tractor, which we nicknamed ‘Farmonacci’).
You can get started building with Caladan for free in one of two standard environments (a farm, or a port). When you’re ready, you can upgrade to a custom vehicle and environment.
Note that Caladan is mostly for technical users at this stage; you do need to be able to write some code.
Here’s a short tutorial video from my co-founder Ilia.
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We’d love your feedback, PH!
👏 I’ve worked in AV perception - what you’re bringing to market is key for safely testing and aligning an AV software system with a vehicle’s physical sensor + chassis + powertrain stacks. Massive problem space, can’t wait to see where you take the solutions.
Excited to see a team solving how to quickly and easily develop code and push it to a robot for testing.
Fondo