Draft:DailyRobotics

DailyRobotics is a startup focused on building a cost-effective solution that can automate labor-intensive farming tasks for multiple types of crops. The core technology is a software brain that transforms off-shelf robotics arms into intelligent ones. The system enables multi-purpose farming by mimicking human vision and motion. This breakthrough significantly shortens the development cycle from multiple years to just weeks or months, eliminating the need for collecting very large data sets for learning. Our solution bridges the gap by upgrading the abilities and capabilities of farmers so that they scale sustainable and local fresh produce production.

Overview
Mechanization and automation have created exponential growth in many industries that are built from repetitive tasks. Simple industrial robots have been a part of that equation since the 1960s. However, many industries and tasks have been constrained from growth because robots have failed to replicate the perception, intelligence, and dexterity of simple human tasks.

Many farming tasks (such as selective harvesting) are exclusively dependent on humans with very little mechanization. They require 1) human perception for exploring and understanding the fields and beds, 2) human intelligence for making decisions, and 3) human dexterity and bi-manual coordination.  Growers have been crying out for automation and mechanization for decades as labor costs are approaching half of the gross production revenue in certain crops.

DailyRobotics is building the ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of farming. A robot capable of performing multiple tasks. To achieve that we’re building software to program robotic arms to perform farming tasks. The Robot is designed to accomplish agricultural tasks autonomously.

History
DailyRobotics was founded in 2023 by Adham Ghazali & Waseem Ghrayeb.

Strawberry Harvester & Pruner.
DailyRobotics first product will be a robot capable of performing multiple tasks for taking care of strawberries, namely harvesting, and pruning. the Robot is equipped with two robotic arms capable of bimanual coordination.

The task of harvesting and Pruning strawberries is labor intensive and costs U.S. growers more than $50K per acre annually.

Technology
At DailyRobotics, we have chosen the most natural approach to automate agricultural tasks, which involves mimicking humans. Our unique approach consists of an embodiment that resembles a human upper body skeleton, while our planning and motion policies are learned directly from human demonstrations following a method known as Imitation Learning.

Unlike existing solutions, which are very limited to their building blocks and heavily engineered as they are based on priory-defined “State-Machine” paradigms, our system utilizes end-to-end learning algorithms. This strategic choice empowers our technology with the ability to generalize, continually improve, and facilitate rapid learning cycles. These capabilities are essential to addressing a wide range of scenarios, conditions, obstacles, and situations which is the case in such a complex and dynamic context.

Imagine a robot tasked with picking a ripe strawberry obscured by leaves. To accomplish this, the robot must detect the fruit, assess its ripeness, understand the surrounding environment, and interact intelligently to navigate through occlusions. To achieve such sophistication in planning within unstructured environments like farms there is a need for (1) Capable models and (2) enough data to learn from.