SafeWorld emerges from stealth to build, deploy robot safety simulation technologies

SafeWorld emerged from stealth this week with $12.2 million in seed funding to build and deploy robot safety simulation software that lets enterprises test how AI-powered robots behave around people in rare, dangerous, and unexpected situations. The Oakland, Calif.-based startup, co-founded by CEO Kyle Wong and Carnegie Mellon Safe AI Lab director Ding Zhao, said its browser-based platform lets teams build scenarios from past incidents, safety standards, and robot logs and rerun tests continuously as software updates and new environments introduce risk. Shine Capital and a16z Speedrun co-led the round, with participation from Box Group, Carnegie Mellon University Endowment, Innovation Endeavors, SV Angel, and other venture and angel investors.

SafeWorld emerges from stealth to build, deploy robot safety simulation technologies The Robot Report https://www.therobotreport.com SafeWorld’s platform provides testing and simulation software to help enterprises evaluate and deploy robots safely and responsibly. The post SafeWorld emerges from stealth to build, deploy robot safety simulation technologies appeared first on The Robot Report. SafeWorld this week emerged from stealth with $12.2 million in seed funding. The startup aims to make safety testing on AI-powered robots easier with its simulation technology. “Our point of view is that if you’re going to have more capable robots, it just makes sense that you need to have more capable ways to test and to validate those robots,” Kyle Wong, co-founder and CEO of SafeWorld, told The Robot Report https://www.therobotreport.com/ . “Otherwise, you’re not going to deploy those robots.” “We already have been using robots for maybe 100 years,” said Ding Zhao, co-founder of SafeWorld and director of the Safe AI Lab https://safeai-lab.github.io/ at Carnegie Mellon University. “We started the company today because, when AI came, it actually brought automation to the next level. The robots, for the first time, were allowed to go out of the cage and share the same space with humans.” Zhao asserted that this level of collaboration requires a whole new level of understanding for the robot, which is where SafeWorld comes in. Shine Capital and a16z Speedrun co-led the funding round. It also included participation from Box Group, Carnegie Mellon University Endowment, Innovation Endeavors, SV Angel, and other leading venture capitalists and angel investors. Ultimately, SafeWorld wants to make it easier for robotics https://www.machinebrief.com/category/robotics companies to build safe https://www.therobotreport.com/tag/safety systems. The Oakland, Calif.-based company https://www.safeworld.ai/ currently has customers in industrial, manufacturing https://www.therobotreport.com/category/markets-industries/manufacturing/ , logistics https://www.therobotreport.com/category/markets-industries/logistics-warehousing-asrs/ , construction https://www.therobotreport.com/category/markets-industries/construction-demolition , and even some home https://www.therobotreport.com/tag/household use cases, Wong said. “Robotics companies themselves need to, of course, be accountable for safety,” said Wong. “The question, though, is more, ‘Should they build it from scratch every single time?’ We don’t think that makes sense.” Inside SafeWorld’s platform SafeWorld said it gives enterprises a scalable way to test how robots behave around people in rare, dangerous, and unexpected situations, without putting anyone at risk. “These are safety scenarios that have not existed yet in the world,” Wong said. “So then, how do you train against something that there’s not a wide dataset for? It’s a big challenge.” “We are providing robot safety simulation software that robotics companies or enterprises that are building robots can use to better provide evidence around safety, to test different types of safety scenarios before they happen in the real world, or test things that are effectively too rare, too dangerous, or too expensive to test in the real world,” he added. Teams can build scenarios right in the browser from past incidents, safety https://www.therobotreport.com/category/safety-security/ standards, and robot logs, with no simulation https://www.therobotreport.com/category/software-simulation/ expertise required. SafeWorld then runs the robot through thousands of variations with realistic, reactive human motion and measures safety performance. Because every software update and new environment can introduce new risks, teams can rerun these tests continuously, not just once before launch. The result is a safety record that engineering, safety, and operations leaders can stand behind, claimed SafeWorld. Wong noted that while many companies work with simulation, using it for safety brings new requirements. “Where that breaks down and gets different is really in the nuance of the feature and functionality,” he said. “You have to figure out what even is the testing criteria for safety. You obviously have different standards, but those standards are not all complete. Then you have different types of risk assessments.” When should companies start working with SafeWorld? For some robotics developers, it can be hard to tell when it’s time to start investing in safety. If you start too early, your system may change significantly before seeing the real world, rendering much of your work useless. But, if you start too late, you run the risk of delaying deployments. “We work with about half a dozen companies, and two-thirds of them are publicly traded companies,” Wong said. “I would say that if the timeline for your deployment is under one year, you probably need to start thinking about safety. If it’s beyond a year, it’s maybe a little too early.” The question of when to start thinking about safety is also different depending on the type of company. “There are two kinds of AI https://www.therobotreport.com/category/design-development/ai-cognition/ robotic companies. One is your bring AI to the robots. Another one, you bring robots to AI,” Wong said. The first category involves companies like Caterpillar https://www.therobotreport.com/tag/caterpillar/ , which already owns sophisticated hardware and wants to bring AI capabilities to that hardware. For these customers, safety is important on Day 1, because they already have hardware out working in the world. If you’re starting with software, safety comes later when you start working in the real world, but getting ahead on safety can still help these companies streamline things later on. “Safety has been foundational to Anyware Robotics from Day 1,” said Thomas Tang, CEO of Anyware Robotics http://therobotreport.com/tag/anyware-robotics . “Advanced simulation tools like SafeWorld give us a scalable way to test challenging scenarios, strengthen our safety processes, and better prepare our robots for real-world deployment.” Startup plans to promote safety research Looking ahead, SafeWorld said it plans to use its latest funding to deepen adoptions, build out its team, and promote safety research across the industry. “We’re really trying to go super deep in terms of enterprise adoption and going super deep with some of our enterprise customers,” said Wong. “There’s so much to do here with safety, it makes sense for us to really focus on that delivery.” “On the marketing side, we’re trying to do a lot in terms of promoting different research, whether that’s funding research or promoting research, and open-source work that is at the frontier of AI safety https://www.machinebrief.com/glossary/ai-safety ,” he added. As the robotics industry grows, Ding and Wong agreed that having third parties like SafeWorld can help build trust with other stakeholders. “Part of the reason why I think a third party is very helpful here is that there is an engineering part around safety, and then there is a trust part of safety, and you need both of those to deploy,” Wong said. “The trust part of safety is really around stakeholder management around safety and who actually signs off on that.” “This is really a deployment problem. So, having a third-part company to work on this is really necessary to win trust not only for the company itself, but also for the whole industry,” Ding said. The post SafeWorld emerges from stealth to build, deploy robot safety simulation technologies https://www.therobotreport.com/safeworld-emerges-stealth-build-deploy-robot-safety-simulation-technologies/ appeared first on The Robot Report https://www.therobotreport.com . Get AI news in your inbox Daily digest of what matters in AI.