Elysium Robotics is replacing electric motors in robotic systems with a device inspired by human muscles. This enables building highly-dexterous robotic hands, which will empower AI to perform in the real world and automate many tasks that only humans can do today.
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Rodrigo Alvarez-Icaza
Rodrigo Alvarez-Icaza is founder and CEO of Elysium Robotics, where he is replacing electric motors with muscle-like actuators to enable massive deployment of highly capable and low-cost robotic systems. He earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University in bioengineering (neuromorphic engineering) and was a key designer and member of the IBM team that built the first neural network accelerator, TrueNorth. Formerly a professor, Alvarez has more than 20 years of industrial and research experience.
TECHNOLOGY
Critical Need
Robotic systems are expensive and limited in capabilities because the electric motors that move them are big, heavy, expensive, and very power-hungry. Although recent advances in AI, sensors, battery, and computation technology are opening unprecedented capabilities, these cannot be realized with current actuation technologies.
Technology Vision
Elysium's actuators enable building robots that emulate humans' efficiency, agility, and dexterity because its muscle-like actuators are scalable, lightweight, low-power, and inexpensive. The intrinsic benefits of Elysium’s actuators reduce overall system-level complexity (simpler structures, smaller batteries, lower-cost drivers) and unlock a new design space for bio-inspired robots that engineers have been dreaming about for decades.
Potential for Impact
Elysium-enabled robots will automate dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks that currently require fine manual labor at a massive scale and at a fraction of the cost. Through these new robotic systems, mega-industries that depend on labor will be able to automate for consistency, reshore manufacturing, and fill the labor shortages that are limiting their scalability.
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