We’re building general purpose robots for kitchens, starting with dishwashing. Restaurants will be among the first to embrace robots: they have high labor costs, relentless turnover, and a lot of dull & grimy tasks. We’re running 24/7 in one of the nation’s largest chains.

In robotics, human-robot interaction is almost as important as autonomy. The key is a simple UX: - Our robots pause when a lidar-monitored virtual wall is crossed - Screens with animated visuals guide staff when needed - Most importantly: minimize the burden on the user. They will put dishes down in every imaginable orientation, and it's the robot's job to adapt.

It’s critical that our robot knows whether it has a solid grasp before moving too far or too fast. Our perception system calculates the dish-to-end-effector pose in real time and compares it to the goal. If the grasp isn’t secure (or was missed entirely) the robot automatically retries.

Washing dishes is at the frontier of what robots can manage. Our system needs to handle stacked plates, silverware, sideways cups and much more. Our approach is unique and extremely effective: 1. Vision: our system can detect highly accurate 6-dof poses of dishes despite heavy occlusion, enabling precise manipulation 2. Hardware: We’ve designed fingers that handle specific dishes in various situations, and the robot can automatically change them 3. Planning: A high-level policy chooses the next goal (next dish to rinse/rack/stack, rack to move, time to run dishwasher, fingers to use) and a low-level policy builds a sequence of actions to accomplish it.

Our robots now run 24/7 without onsite support. What did it take to get there? 1) Relentless focus on pick success. We track and triage every failure, and the system pulls 80,000 real-world images a day for model retraining. 2) Systematically eliminating edge cases. The robot washes its fingers as they get dirty, nudges cups out of the corners, and drags bus tubs back into place when they shift. 3) Hardening the hardware. Fingers bend over thousands of picks, gripper pads wear down, and harnesses loosen. All problems we’ve solved to reach 24/7.

Restaurants will become one of the biggest adopters of robotics as they face labor shortages, rising costs, and tough competition. Our first application is dishwashing, already saving restaurants 30 hours of labor per week so teams can focus on guests.

Thrilled to reveal Armstrong’s latest robot! We’ve raised $12M to date to build general purpose robots for kitchens, starting with dishwashing. Our robots are running 24/7 without onsite support, washing thousands of dishes every day. There’s a lot happening behind the scenes: • 30 sensors feeding a neural net that detects dishes to the millimeter • A control policy trained over hundreds of thousands of picks • Optimized “fingers” the robot swaps as needed

Please welcome Armstrong, our latest announced investment. @ArmstrongRobots is a robotics company building general purpose robots for restaurant kitchens. medium.com/lerer-hippeau-ven…

We're excited to announce that we've raised $12M to bring general purpose robots to kitchens: armstrong.ai/funding-announc…