Robotics start-up Skild AI has given a look at its artificial intelligence model designed to power a variety of robot form-factors, from quadrupeds and humanoids to factory systems.

The company, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, released videos showing its Skild Brain AI model enabling robots to climb stairs, maintain balance after being pushed, and identifying and picking up objects in cluttered environments.

Skild says the system should enable robots to carry out home tasks such as loading dishwashers or physically challenges such as climbing slippery slopes.

Skild Brain

Skild-powered robots are safe to use around humans, as they are trained to use a low level of force, the company says.

The Skild Brain model is designed to bring a level of scalability to robotics similar to that found in generative AI tools that are based on language or images.

The company says one of the biggest challenges to building a robotics foundation model is the lack of large-scale robotics data, the equivalent of the language and visual data on the internet, while collecting real-world data using hardware is slow and prohibitively expensive.

Skild is adapting to the challenge by using large-scale simulation and human videos found online to pre-train its foundation model at scale.

The model is then post-trained with targeted real-world data, Skild says.

Post-training data is gathered from every robot deployed in the real world that runs the system, co-founder Deepak Pathak told Reuters.

That data helps sharpen the skills of all the robots running the “shared brain”, said Pathak, who previously founded Meta Platforms’ robotics lab in Pittsburgh.

Skild says it has sold robots to clients including LG CNS, the IT solutions arm of LG Group, and other unnamed companies in logistics and other industrial applications.

AI expansion

The two-year-old start-up, which employs staff who formerly worked at Tesla, Nvidia and Meta, raised $300 million (£224.6m) in Series A funding last year, valuing it at $1.5bn.

Investors include Menlo Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

Last month Bloomberg reported that Samsung Electronics was making a $10m investment in Skild as part of a $100m Series B funding round led by a $100m investment from Japan’s SoftBank.

The round, which values the company at $4.5bn, also includes an investment from Nvidia, the report said.

Samsung views the investment partly as a way to keep visibility into Skild, while also keeping up with other South Korean conglomerates including LG, Hanwha and Mirae Asset that have investments of $5m to $10m in Skild, according to the report.