Electric Sheep Robotics (ESR), which is creating a large-scale outdoor maintenance company powered by artificial intelligence and robotics, announced the launch of a brand new robot for outdoor maintenance using its proprietary AI and robotics software. This new robot, named Verdie, like their other robots, is powered by Electric Sheep’s AI agent, ES1. This is ESR’s way to enable an outdoor autonomous system to operate in any outdoor setting with zero teaching.
Using recent advances in GenAI, ES1 is a learned world model that enables reasoning and planning for both its RAM robot for mowing and now its Verdie robot used for edging and trimming lawns and bushes and blowing leaves.
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.
The product experience this creates is two landscaping robots that can work “out-of-the-box.” The agents are designed to be simply put on the property and turned on. Using only AI, they can understand the lawn around them and efficiently care for it.
Electric Sheep’s robots, both the Verdie and the RAM, don’t require an engineer on site – they can just be shipped to a campus, HOA, or park and begin tasks alongside the crew. This is only possible through Electric Sheep’s full stack data channel and the large volume of data that the robots are continually trained on.
Electric Sheep is currently running its ES1 agent on a fleet of 40 RAM robots in hundreds of yards across America and will be deploying the new Verdie robot with customers in Q2 2024.
“We are building an RL factory to train autonomous AI agents to do sustainable outdoor work,” said Nag Murty, CEO and Co-Founder of Electric Sheep. “The debut of our Verdie robot is the first AI robot for tasks like trimming and edging in the world of landscaping, and it’s exciting to see our ES1 technology power multiple robots that can work alongside a crew without an engineer on-site setting a specific path for them. We will be rolling out the Verdie to our customer sites throughout 2024 and continuing to build out this fleet of robots as autonomous agents trained on outdoor services.”
To see a video of this new robot in action, click here.
