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Robotics and crowdsourced knowledge startup Frodobots has raised $6 million in seed funding to create BitRobot, which will likely be a Solana-based embodied AI analysis community.
BitRobot will goal to attach totally different subgroups in robotics analysis utilizing a shared token and community to unravel useful resource allocation and knowledge shortage. Protocol VC led the funding spherical, which additionally drew participation from Massive Mind Holdings, Solana Ventures, Virtuals Protocol and Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, amongst others. Frodobots beforehand additionally raised $2 million in pre-seed funding.
Frodobots began out constructing sidewalk robots that slowly trawled world metropolis streets to construct large crowdsourced datasets together with issues like audio, video and GPS knowledge. The mission goals so as to add token incentivization to change into a part of the decentralized bodily infrastructure (DePIN) motion.
Over the previous a number of months, nonetheless, Frodobots’ ambitions have widened: The lab’s co-founder Michael Chung Yeung Cho stated the aim is now to launch BitRobot and “clear up embodied AI.” Frodobots will likely be a subnet within the BitRobot community.
“If we have been to achieve success, we might be on par with the Teslas and the DeepMinds of the world,” Cho stated, including that the brand new mission would assist generate a “collection of actually performant foundational robotics fashions that may be deployed throughout all types of robots.”
The issue, Cho and his co-founder Jonathan Victor defined, is that wealthy robotics knowledge is scarce, and robotic builders are engaged on subsets of an even bigger shared drawback. Massive language fashions have all the web to coach on, Victor stated, however most robotics companies outdoors of Tesla’s self-driving unit are “beginning successfully from zero.”
That’s partly as a result of whereas a brand new AI mannequin, as an example, could possibly be benchmarked digitally in an hour, robotics faces the bottleneck of getting to check merchandise in the actual world. You’ll be able to’t know if a self-driving automotive actually works till you drive it for a trillion miles, Cho stated.
BitRobot will create a shared community of “subnets” in order that pooled assets and knowledge can extra effectively create robotics knowledge. People, fleets of humanoid robots and Frodobots’ sidewalk bots are instance subnets, in keeping with a doc shared with Blockworks.
With BitRobot, large quantities of assets could possibly be shifted between researchers based mostly on want, and a DePIN token reward system might align the financial incentives. There’s additionally cross-embodiment studying, which means that AI fashions educated on one sort of robotic — corresponding to a robotic arm — can successfully switch realized abilities to completely totally different robotic methods, like drones or wheeled robots. This works as a result of many robotic duties share core design wants.
A white paper containing extra particulars on BitRobot, in addition to the mission’s tokenomics, will likely be launched in a number of weeks.
