Iván Hernández Dalas: Antioch raises funding to bring ‘software speed’ to robot development
Antioch says simulation can help robot developers overcome testing bottlenecks. Source: Antioch Validating a robot’s behavior in the real world typically means renting physical space, manually staging environments, and resetting hardware between every run, according to Antioch. It’s expensive, slow, and covers only a fraction of the scenarios a system will face in production, said the startup. Antioch today said it has raised $8.5 million to move development and evaluation of autonomous systems out of the physical world and into cloud-based simulation. The company ‘s stated goal is to eliminate the need for hardware and elaborate physical testing. “Robotics teams are spending weeks staging warehouses and investing millions into test facilities to validate their systems,” said Antioch co-founder Harry Mellsop, who previously worked on Tesla ‘s Autopilot team. “Meanwhile, companies like Tesla, Waymo, and Anduril spend hundreds of millions a year on simulation infrastructure to minim...