Our Investment in FieldAI: Enabling Robots to Conquer Complex Environments
Robotics is becoming increasingly accessible as hardware has reached a level of maturity and standardization, providing a solid foundation (the "body"). The next challenge is advancing the robot's "mind." Specifically, the use of large language models and other AI systems that autonomously drive essential functions like perception, motion control, and decision-making. We are seeing robotic use cases becoming more achievable, thanks to hardware standardization, improved dexterity and manipulation, and better contextual understanding. These advancements are making robots more "plug-and-play," enabling them to adapt to a wider range of real-world scenarios.
We at Intel Capital look to invest in the leaders of robotics and autonomy. Over the years, we have invested in Figure AI, Beep and Formant. Now, we’re excited to announce our investment in FieldAI – pioneering Physical- AI.
Field AI has developed proprietary, “physics-first” foundation models that enable fully autonomous solutions. Field’s customers deploy their Field Foundation Models (FFMs) on any robot embodiment, or vehicle (legged, wheeled, flying, tracked) and any sensor. FFMs can be deployed in any environment, and can handle unknown and unpredictable real-world conditions. FFMs’ driven autonomyexcels in hazardous or hard to reach areas, allowing robots to collect high-precision data in sectors where human access is limited by safety concerns or complex physical constraints, particularly amongst industries including construction, energy, manufacturing, urban delivery, and security. Deployed robots can perform duties such as progress and object tracking, high precision inspection and readings, object manipulation and transportation, and surveillance within dynamic real-world environments at the edge with no prior map training, no GPS – truly out of the box.
What excites us about Field is not just its ability to enable on-edge robotic autonomy, but also the team behind it. FieldAI CEO Ali Agha brings deep expertise from his work leading the Autonomous and Robotics system division at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He has built a distinguished team with experience across AI, autonomy, and deep tech companies including DeepMind, Google Brain, Tesla Autopilot, NASA, SpaceX, NVIDIA, Zoox, Cruise, TRI, and others. We look forward to working closely with FieldAI to create an accelerated path towards next-generation AI-based robotics and deployments.
