An interview with Cogniteam CEO Dr. Yehuda Elmaliah | DailyAI

Cogniteam operates within the IoT, robotics, and AI industries, delivering platforms to speed up robotic administration, deployment, and management. 

Based mostly in Petach Tikva, Israel, and with a US workplace in Boston, Cogniteam’s flagship product, the Cogniteam Platform, is a cloud-based system that allows the event, administration, and management of robots, IoT units, and fleets.

Cogniteam’s platfrom allows complete distant administration, with a customizable dashboard that permits customers to watch in actual time stay knowledge from wherever on the earth – no matter how massive and complicated their fleet is. 

Sam Denims from DailyAI interviewed Dr. Yehuda Elmaliah, the CEO of Cogniteam, to be taught extra in regards to the firm and its cloud platform.

Q: Inform us about Cogniteam and its origins

Dr. Elmaliah: “Cogniteam focuses on managing IoT devices, specifically for autonomous robots. We build a cloud-based platform that enables our clients, the robotic OEMs, operators, and support teams to manage, deploy, and control their robots and fleets.”

“For example, if you take a robotics company today, the time it takes between raising money and deploying a product can take around five or even six years. This lengthy process and long time-to-market can make it very difficult for them to raise money.”

“We provide an off-the-shelf solution to accelerate this process. Companies simply install our software agent on their robot or edge device. Then, they can automatically recognize and control their robots/edge. Through the cloud, they can manage, visualize, monitor, deploy software updates, and manage fleets within one platform. We call it a unified cloud platform for robotics.”

Sam Denims: “So you help clients manage and monitor their software, algorithms, sensors, etc, and push and pull data to the robots wirelessly through the Cogniteam platform?”

Dr. Elmaliah: “Yes, but the software itself, like the autonomy, is built by the client. We provide a platform that allows them to send and monitor updates to the robots. It’s middleware connected to the cloud and the client. This shortens the company’s time to market.”

Q: How does Cogniteam make constructing and deploying superior robots simpler?

Dr. Elmaliah: “Robotics is all about integration! If the company that bulids the robot understand that they will deploy quickly”.

“Today’s founders have the advantage of leveraging existing technologies and platforms. By utilizing established systems such as the Robot Operation System (ROS) for navigation and integrating algorithms and Cogniteam’s platform for managing, deploying, and controlling, they can focus on developing the unique aspects of their robots.”

“What used to take about six years can now be achieved in just two years.”

We additionally mentioned how the price of robotic gear, comparable to Mild Imaging and Ranging (LIDAR) sensors for scene understanding, has decreased through the years. 

This, mixed with robotic administration platforms like Cogniteam’s platform, lowers the bar for growing robotic techniques. 

Dr. Elmaliah elaborated: “Over the years, sensors have become much more affordable. If you look at a 3D LIDAR from seven years ago, it would have cost around $50 to $60 thousand dollars. Today, you can find a very good 3D LIDAR for $2,000, depending on the resolution, accuracy, and specifications. This is one part of the sensing equation.”

Along with sensors, edge units have turn into much more refined in recent times. They course of knowledge regionally moderately than sending it to the cloud, enabling robots to carry out machine-learning duties on the system stage.

Dr. Elmaliah defined: “Part of what we do is decide what to run on the edge or the cloud. With more powerful GPUs available today, you can perform more machine learning tasks on the edge. And you send computationally intensive tasks to more powerful systems in the cloud.”

Cogniteam’s platform allows shoppers to regulate robots, and monitor, and file sensor info from wherever from a customizable dashboard.

Q: Is there a robotics undertaking your platform just lately helped facilitate?

Dr. Elmaliah: “Yeah, sure. For example, one of our clients has a robot designed to sanitize hotel rooms using UV light. The robot can recognize rooms and turn on the UV lights as needed.”

“This highlights how the company uses our platform to manage the robot remotely. If there’s any issue with the robot, it can be remotely understood and addressed.”

“In fact, I received an email from the company’s CEO who told me, ‘Hey, you saved me $2,500 today.’ Curious, I asked why. He explained that there was a problem with the robot, and instead of sending a technician to the site, he could log into our system remotely to see the live stream data from the robot sensors and understand and fix the problem easily from his laptop.”

Q: How do you assume generative AI and huge language fashions (LLMs) will influence the event of AI robotics?

Dr. Elmaliah: “In robotics, the main challenge is not just building the robot but making it autonomous. You want to be able to depend on the robot to perform its mission reliably. Generative AI and LLMs will significantly shorten the time needed to achieve this autonomy.”

Dr. Elmaliah additionally described some initiatives Cogniteam is concerned in, such because the HRI Consortium (Human-Robotic Interplay), which goals to develop algorithms and behaviors for robots able to superior real-world social interactions. 

“Cogniteam is part of an Israeli consortium called Human Robot Interaction. In this consortium, we are working on enabling natural interaction between people and robots. This involves scene understanding, interpreting different events and actions, and fusing information from various sensors, including vision and audio.”

“As part of this effort, we are exploring large language models (LLMs) and comparing their performance to traditional approaches like Prolog for logical reasoning and fact-based understanding. We were pleasantly surprised that the LLMs performed quite well in this context.”

Q: What do you see as the way forward for AI robotics, and the way does Cogniteam match into that future?

Dr. Elmaliah and I additionally mentioned the way forward for robotics. I raised the purpose that generative AI and LLMs have been maybe not what most individuals considered after they imagined AI within the early 2000s. 

Quite, within the longer-term, AI has been synonymous with robots – significantly humanoid robots.

However how life like are humanoid robots? And what about their practicality?

Dr. Elmaliah defined: “We see many humanoid robots showcased at events and exhibitions. However, I don’t believe that these will be commercially deployed in practical applications in the near term. It will take at least 15 years to see humanoid robots really deployed in industry.”

“I see the future of robotics as one in which many new companies will enter the field, and there will be a huge demand. The numbers will multiply by at least ten over the next decade. However, in the next 15 years, robots will focus on performing a single mission, such as cherry-picking, forklifting, and similar specialized activities. Later on, we’ll see the emergence of multipurpose robots, like humanoids and unmanned vehicles at commercial scale.”

Dr. Elmaliah and I agreed that the utility of AI robotics lies in particular actions which may be repetitive, harmful, or bodily inconceivable for people to attain. 

With cheaper {hardware}, open-source working techniques, off-the-shelf algorithms, and revolutionary administration platforms like Cogniteam’s platform, robotics is not the complicated and expensive trade it as soon as was. 

To be taught extra about Cogniteam and its companies, go to their web site right here

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