3Laws Robotics Inc., a company that makes safety solutions for autonomous robotics systems, today announced it raised $4.1 million in seed funding led by TenOneTen with participation from the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund.
The company’s technology was originally developed at the California Institute of Technology and supported by a deep collaboration of industry leaders in robotics, control theory and computer vision. Its foundational system is safety software that can be deployed on any autonomous platform, such as warehouse robots, drones, articulated robot arms and ground vehicles.
The company’s name, 3Laws, is inspired by the “Three Laws of Robotics,” developed by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov as a guide to how robots should behave. They are essentially guidelines for safe interaction with humans written in the English language.
3Laws core product, called Supervisor, works by integrating into existing stacks without hardware or software modification and monitoring signals from sensors to ensure safety. By acting as an overseer over the actions of autonomous robots, Supervisor allows engineers to specify system dynamics, sensor integration and safety constraints. It intercepts commands sent by the autonomy stack and determines if an action is safe to proceed or not. Once the issue is resolved, the robot continues with its assigned performance.
“We’ve made significant advances over the past decade, and yet most machines are still not operating autonomously,” said Dr. Andrew Singletary, 3Laws co-founder and chief executive. “Up until now, there was no universal way of making a system safe and efficient and it’s incredibly challenging for autonomous systems to react safely to changes in real-time without bringing the system to a halt.”
For development engineers, the Supervisor helps remove corner cases that might arise in changing environments by providing real-time reactions to dynamic safety issues. For operations managers, 3Laws said Supervisor helps reduce risks by ensuring greater efficiency and increasing reliability on site.
The system has numerous capabilities including collision avoidance and geofencing to prevent damage to robots and avoid hazards. It also monitors robot balance to prevent tipping and falling, it also automatically detects and responds to system errors to minimize downtime.
“3Laws brings real-time guardrails to supervise AI-driven machines operating alongside people in dynamic environments. It’s a technological leap that allows both safety and system performance,” said Singletary.