By Akash Sriram
(Reuters) -Robotics startup Skild AI, backed by Amazon.com and Japan's SoftBank Group, on Tuesday unveiled a foundational artificial intelligence model designed to run on nearly any robot — from assembly-line machines to humanoids.
The model, called Skild Brain, enables robots to think, navigate and respond more like humans. Its launch comes amid a broader push to build humanoid robots capable of more diverse tasks than the single-purpose machines currently found on factory floors.
In demonstration videos, Skild-powered robots were shown climbing stairs, maintaining balance after being shoved, and picking up objects in cluttered environments - tasks that require spatial reasoning and the ability to adapt to changing surroundings.
The company said its model includes built-in power limits to prevent robots from applying unsafe force.
Skild trains its model on simulated episodes and human-action videos, then fine-tunes it using data from every robot running the system. Co-founders Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta told Reuters in an exclusive interview that the approach helps tackle a data scarcity problem unique to robotics.
"Unlike language or vision, there is no data for robotics on the internet. So you cannot just go and apply these generative AI techniques," Pathak, who serves as CEO, told Reuters.
Robots deployed by customers feed data back into Skild Brain to sharpen its skills, creating the same "shared brain," said Gupta, who previously founded Meta Platforms' robotics lab in Pittsburgh.
Skild's clients include LG CNS - the IT solutions arm of LG Group - and other unnamed partners in logistics and other industrial applications.
Unlike software, which can scale quickly, robotics requires physical deployment, which takes time, but Skild's approach allows robots to add new capabilities across different industries quickly, said Raviraj Jain, partner at the startup's investor Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The two-year-old startup, which has hired staff from Tesla, Nvidia and Meta, raised $300 million in a Series A funding round last year that valued it at $1.5 billion. Its investors include Menlo Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid)
