Montréal- and Menlo Park-based startup deploying physical AI at Ontario F&P plant.
There’s a lot of froth in the “smoke and mirrors show” of the robotics industry right now. At least according to Autonomique co-founder and CEO Vikrant Tomar.
“You will see robots doing backflips or dancing…but it’s useless when it comes to actual productivity, right?” he said in an interview with BetaKit.
“You will see robots doing backflips or dancing…but it’s useless when it comes to actual productivity.”
Tomar’s startup, based in Montréal and Menlo Park, Calif., wants to be a signal in the noise for manufacturers looking to automate operations. Autonomique announced today that its technology, which uses AI to control robot movements, has moved beyond a pilot phase and is being used to assemble car parts on a production line at a F&P Manufacturing plant in Tottenham, Ont.
F&P, which is the Canadian subsidiary of Japanese automotive parts supplier F-Tech, is using Autonomique’s physical AI software to direct its semi-humanoid robots to assemble chassis and suspension parts, which make their way into vehicles in fewer than four hours.
Tomar, who previously co-founded speech recognition startup Fluent.AI, spun Autonomique out of SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute). The company has offices in Menlo Park and Montréal, and the team is roughly split between both locations.
Physical AI is typically capital-intensive, but Autonomique integrates its tech into third-party hardware rather than building robots itself. The startup has closed the first tranche of an undisclosed seed round, backed by several Canadian investors with deep tech expertise, including Innovobot, Garage Capital, Inovia Capital, and the co-founders of Clearpath Robotics and Otto Motors. Some of these investors are part of a new Canadian Robotics Council committee to boost investment into domestic robots, given Canada’s relative sluggishness on industrial automation compared to other countries.
RELATED: Canadian Robotics Council creates committee to boost investment in domestic robots
In an email to BetaKit, Neha Khera, managing partner of Innovobot’s IRV fund, compared the physical AI space to the large language model market. “It all boils down to commercial execution,” she wrote. “Autonomique stood out because they are hyper focused on securing commercial partners and solving real business problems.”
The robot is meant to replace human workers, Tomar said, but workers could be moved to another role overseeing robots, as they are integrated with software that tracks their performance. Labour groups such as the Canadian Labour Congress have raised alarms about AI’s impact on the job market and workers’ rights. Through its recent AI strategy, the federal government has said that AI will help create jobs, but has provided little detail on how this will happen.
Feature image courtesy Autonomique.