Robotic systems provide as much news as AI and cybersecurity over the past year. This news regards funding. I don’t follow the whole VC arena closely, but having been in entrepreneurial start-up mode a few times in my life, I know well the value of the life blood of money.
Naturally, this news combines AI and robotic software solutions. Might as well hit two trends at once. Xaba, a Toronto based developer of AI-powered cognitive software to automate programming and deployment of robotics and CNC machines, has announced it has raised US$2 million in a seed extension round of funding to bring to market AI-driven fabrication processes and intelligent autonomous machines.
It says the funding will enable it to democratize robotic automation and drive sustainable manufacturing.
The funding round was led by BDC Capital’s Deep Tech Venture Fund with participation from Hitachi Ventures and existing investor Hazelview Ventures. The investment will be used to establish and staff a new robotics lab and accelerate the delivery of two Xaba manufacturing platforms.
Xaba is augmenting industrial robots and cobots with xCognition, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software solution. xCognition leverages innovative proprietary machine learning algorithms to model the elasto-mechanical-dynamic behavior of industrial robotics and cobots, as well as workpiece variances. This includes variances in location and shape, using proprietary rule-based language models to eliminate coding of robotics programs. xCognition solves the challenges of deploying industrial robots by completely automating how they are programmed and adopted. This solution not only increases accuracy, consistency, and throughput, but also significantly reduces the time and costs of robotics deployments.
Xaba has two manufacturing platforms – xCognition and xTrude – which use proprietary, state-of-the-art industrial artificial intelligence (AI) to provide AI-powered cognitive industrial automation, consistency, robustness and high execution quality. Its platforms eliminate the need for constant human supervision, reprogramming, and waste – factors that significantly impact the return on investment of any major manufacturing or construction process.
xCognition is Xaba’s AI-powered software solution. This industrial robotics digital twin captures and models the true physics of any industrial robotics system (elastic, dynamic, mechanical, tooling). This includes workpiece variances both in location and shape, leveraging rules-based language models and multi-modal datasets that capture legacy data and best practices to enable any robotics system to execute tasks such as drilling, welding (MIG, TIG & Laser), assembling, riveting, laser, data acquisition, and more with maximum accuracy, repeatability, and minimum human supervision.
