Covariant this week announced the launch of RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1). Peter Chen, the cofounder and CEO of the U.C. Berkeley artificial intelligence spinout tells TechCrunch the platform, “is basically a large language model (LLM), but for robot language.” RFM-1 is the result of, among other things, a massive trove of data collected from the deployment of Covariant’s Brain AI platform. With customer consent, the startup has been building the robot equivalent of an LLM database. “The vision of RFM-1 is to power the billions of robots to come,” Chen says. “We at Covariant have already deployed lots of robots at warehouses with success. But that is not the limit of where we want to get to. We really want to power robots in manufacturing, food processing, recycling, agriculture, the service industry and even into people’s homes.” The platform launches as more robotics firms are discussing the future of “general purpose” systems. The sudden onslaught of humanoid robotics firms like Agility, Figure, 1X and Apptronik has played a pivotal role in that conversation. The form factor is particularly suited to adaptability (much like the humans on which it’s modeled), though the robustness of on-board AI/software systems is another question entirely.
For now, Covariant’s software is largely deployed on industrial robotic arms doing a variety of familiar warehouse tasks, including jobs like bin picking. It isn’t currently deployed on humanoids, though the company is promising some level of hardware agnosticism. “We do like a lot of the work that is happening in the more general purpose robot hardware space,” says Chen. “Coupling the intelligence inflection point with the hardware inflection point is where we will see even more explosion of robot applications. But a lot of those are not fully there yet, especially on the hardware side. It’s very hard to go beyond the stage video. How many people have interacted with a humanoid in person? That tells you the degree of maturity.”
Full report : Covariant is building a large language model specifically for robots.
Is your head still spinning from all the AI news of late? It will all seem so quaint when the useful humanoid robots arrive. See: Rise of the Robots: Breakthroughs in Humanoid Robotics and the Dawn of Embodied AI
