Polymath Robotics
General Autonomy for Industrial Vehicles
Polymath is building a general autonomy stack for cautious vehicles. Our software allows any industrial vehicle - whether it's a tractor in a field or a bulldozer in a mine, drive itself. We bundle together AI, ML, Controls, ROS, Safety and best-in-class deployment practices to enable our customers to tell automated vehicles to do via a REST API. We're on more robots than we have engineers, are seeing our revenue (and robotic fleet) grow rapidly, and are looking for folks who want to help automate the world.
Jobs at Polymath Robotics
Active Founders
Stefan Seltz-Axmacher
YC Badge: 0x1fee3f3ac35e96b5c30c43d4c277db576b863777
Ilia Baranov
There is a certain enchanting magic that comes from working with robots; By waving our hands, we can make machines seem alive.
Company Launches
Hey, we’re Stefan & Ilia, founders of Polymath Robotics.
Polymath makes autonomy software for industrial vehicles.
Today we’re excited to introduce Caladan: a set of simulated vehicles & environments you can use to build autonomous industrial vehicle applications via Rest API.
The problem
Building an autonomous industrial vehicle is a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project. Just getting a vehicle to drive itself reliably takes 6 months of engineering effort at a minimum. Even then, the autonomy itself is often buggy and unreliable, and impossible to transfer across different vehicle types.
As a result, many autonomy companies run out of steam before they even have a reliably-working product … let alone product-market fit.
Our solution: general autonomy software
Polymath software handles generalized basic autonomy — in other words, driving around and not hitting stuff — for any industrial vehicle in a controlled environment. That means autonomous industrial vehicle companies can have an autonomous vehicle on day 1.
Since we’re just working on autonomy, we can focus on making the system stable and reliable. No more battling with weird controls issues or buggy obstacle detection.
Caladan: build on Polymath autonomy in simulation
Caladan makes it easy to build autonomous vehicle behaviors in sim. The tool is a set of simulated vehicles & environments you can use to interact with Polymath autonomy via Rest API.
That means you can program custom autonomous vehicle behaviors and applications using Python, not ROS. And when you’re ready, whatever you’ve built in Caladan can seamlessly transition to a physical vehicle.
Product demo / example application
Here’s an example application you could build with Caladan (you can download the example code here).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFSxBcWxsUU&feature=youtu.be
The free version of Caladan comes with a simulated farm environment or simulated port environment. You can also reach out to us about a custom environment & vehicle in Caladan.
Does Polymath autonomy work for my vehicle/use case?
Polymath autonomy is limited to industrial vehicles in closed environments, since the system will stop immediately if there’s trouble, and fall back on teleoperation in hazardous situations.
Use case examples: ⛏ Mining trucks • 🚜 Agricultural vehicles • 🌲 Logging trucks • ✈️ Ground support equipment at airports • 🚢 Yard trucks
Can I try it?
Heck yeah. You can try Caladan for free by signing up here.