Originally published here.
What is Frodobots?
A little over a year ago Fabric invested in Frodobots Lab to support their ambitious mission of enabling embodied AGI. This entailed 3 large bets:
1. That 4G connected sidewalk robots could be produced orders of magnitude cheaper than they currently were
Frodobots have been able to reduce the bill of materials to ~$200 (vs. $5500 for Starship)
2. That people would enjoy the teleoperation of real world sidewalk robots such that we could scale to 1000s of robots around the world
Frodobots currently have 100 bots deployed across 30+ cities in every continent except Antarctia
They are partnered with YGG, the world’s seminal and foremost guild of gamers to be human teleoperators
3. Finally, that with large enough datasets, a step change in the quality of self driving algorithms can be achieved, attracting the world’s leading research labs
Deepmind have been collaborating closely with Frodobots on their Earth Rovers Challenge, first at IROS (the world’s second largest robotics conference), and this year at ICRA (the world’s largest robotics conference)
Furthermore, there are PhDs and Post docs from Universities such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, National U of Singapore, Seoul National U, U of Amsterdam devoting their entire work time to Frodobots.
The Organising Committee of Earth Rovers Challenge
An Even Greater Challenge Awaits
Having overcome these already difficult challenges and with Robotics being thrust into the spotlight of AI research (e.g. Wayve, PI, Figure) an even larger challenge became apparent; more valuable to the researchers than Frodobots’ unprecedented data generation is the provision of their robots for real-world model evaluation.
Not only this, but we are now potentially learning that the more data produced from ANY use case, the better the models trained for EVERY use case.
This means that the goal is not just to generate data within a handful of siloed use cases like sidewalk robots, but create a platform that enables the generation of data and real world testing for as many applications as possible.
Enter BitRobot
In the virtual AI world this is Bittensor. For embodied AI this is BitRobot: the platform for all distributed robotics research, be that data generation, model training, or evaluation.
Frodobots Lab have already created the first 2 subnets: Teleoperation of Sidewalk Robots and Development of Autonomous Urban Navigation Models for Sidewalk Robots. But there are a plethora of subnets to explore next:
An illustration of the types of subnets that can potentially run on the BitRobot Network
To that end, they have joined forces with Protocol Labs, who are also leading their $6m Seed Round in which Fabric are thrilled to back Michael and his team for the second time.
For more information on Fabric’s portfolio, opportunities and our investment thesis, please visit our website and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Farcaster & Orb.
