SLAMcore has received $5m (£3.8m) funding to help develop its robotic navigation systems that will help drones and driverless cars navigate around environments they’re not familiar with.
Amadeus Capital PArtners led the funding round, with SPARX and Toyota AI Ventures, MMC Ventures and Octopus Ventures all contributing funds to the company’s research and build project.
SLAMcore’s technology was developed by the Imperial College of Science’s Dr Stefan Leutenegger, Professor Andrew Davidson, and Dr Owen Nicholson with one of the university’s alumnus, Dr Jacek Zienkiewicz.
It uses simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) that gives robots the spatial awareness they need to avoid objects more intelligently. It works by calculating the robot’s position, understanding unfamiliar surroundings and working out the relationship between the two to navigate around them without risk of bumping into obstacles.
SLAMcore will soon be able to integrate with a range of robotic platforms to make it easy for businesses to enhance their robots’ accuracy. The company explained it’s most likely to benefit smaller firms that don’t have the revenues or resource t o develop their own navigation or spatial awareness platforms.
“The robotics revolution may seem just around the corner, but there is still a big gap between the videos we see on the internet and real-world robots,” SLAMcore’s CEO Dr Owen Nicholson told the Telegraph. “Here at SLAMcore, we are helping robot and drone creators to bridge the gap between demos and commercially viable systems.
“We’re really trying to democratise robots. It shouldn’t be the reserve of just a handful of tech giants because that’s not good for innovation.”
