Kevin Chavez (Dexterity.ai): “Dexterity.ai: Robotics for the future of logistics”

Speaker: Kevin Chavez (Dexterity.ai)

Title:Dexterity.ai: Robotics for the future of logistics

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Abstract:  Transitioning robots from well-controlled lab environments to the real-world has been an outstanding challenge for decades. There are many challenges that span a variety of engineering disciplines in machine intelligence, simulation, modeling, algorithms, control, and robotic hardware & software. This includes the need to effectively sense the environment under broad and dynamic conditions, process this sensory data in real-time, and convey the robot’s understanding of the world to various other systems (both humans and machines).
Dexterity is a robotics startup that has engineered and deployed robotic systems that can intelligently manipulate tens of thousands of items in production, reason about and operate in dynamic environments, collaborate with each other using the sense of touch, and safely operate in the presence of humans. Dexterity’s robots ship hundreds of thousands of units in packaged food and parcel warehouses each day and are in production 24/6. The data we collect has taught us what works in the real-world and what doesn’t.
The consequences of realizing even limited robot autonomy within semi-structured workflows are urgent and compelling — the logistics industry has a 300,000-job shortage and would be transformed if robots could fill the gap. This talk will discuss our technical advances to date, which are poised to deploy thousands of robots, and present outstanding problems that need to be addressed before we can proceed to make robots truly ubiquitous.

Bio:Kevin is one of the founding engineers at Dexterity. Over the years, he has led or contributed to many of the foundations of Dexterity’s technology stack – across perception, machine learning, planning & scheduling, robot control, robot application SDKs, UI/UX, data management, visualization, and more. Today, he focuses on the AI efforts at Dex – and everything needed for those to be successful. Prior to Dex, he worked on the Google Assistant, building a platform for conversational agents. Kevin graduated from Stanford with a BS/MS in electrical engineering where he focused on signal processing, optimization, and machine learning. He also worked towards controlling simple robots with neuromorphic hardware at the Brains in Silicon lab, which – incidentally – is where he met other founding members of the Dexterity team.