Ultra-Realistic Simulation Environment

• R&D, Simulation

Line up Rooties! A new week of training is about to start on our improved simulator.
A behind-the-scenes look at our ultra-realistic simulation environment based on UE4(Unreal Engine) and Carla.

Invasion of robots in Tel Aviv!

• R&D, Product

We're excited to share another awesome function behind the puzzle of Rootie - 'The Sweeper'.

Another physical, exhausting, and routine task that is done autonomously day-by-day by our units to maintain and clean different locations.
The following module includes extensive and deep development done behind the scenes to create a compact mechanical mechanism, highly energy-efficient, and most importantly, performs its operation daily in a reliable manner.

Rootie-GT(Ground Truth) low-cost and customized RTK for evaluation purposes

• R&D, Evaluation

We have been getting lots of questions about the use of RTK in outdoor navigation and localization, GPS is absolutely great for many scenarios, easy to use, relatively accurate, and does not require lots of computing resources.
On the other hand, operating rovers/drones in dense environments such as urban residential, commercial, agricultural fields, and others, this technology is barely usable.
These environments mostly suffer from high interferences and effects of multipath from nearby trees, buildings, cars, obstacles which causes large calculation errors.

These sets, Rootie's RTK base, rover stations are fully customized RTK solution. It was designed for internal purposes to offer low-cost, high accuracy, with multiple connectivity interfaces to ensure a large coverage (STM32, LoRa, Cellular, #AWS, and more).
This technology is used regularly within the development path to ensure proper validation of our algorithms while developing the core technology behind Rootie's GPS-denied solution.

COVID-19 Lockdown as An Opportunity

• COVID-19, Experiments

We at Rootie, like the rest of the world, were surprised at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that has emerged over the last year. When we heard this on December 19' about the first symptoms in Wuhan, China, I think most of us never believed that this would have such a profound effect on the entire world.

As mentioned, our mission is to significantly promote the sustainable maintenance market, while reducing the labor cost and physical work of the workers, using our RootieBots to autonomously navigate and map complex outdoor environments controlled by a remote cloud-controlled command-center.
After a year of living along the COVID-19, We have learned to take the disadvantages that this pandemic has caused to turn it into advantages for Rootie.

This picture sums up our month of lockdown here in Israel. Taking advantage of the situation that there are fewer people and vehicles on the roads to test our units and travel around the block!
Stay safe! Always look at the bright side!

Rooties Helps Developers Debug Better

• Robotics, ROS, Technology

We're happy to release a new ROS package! The following package was made as an internal tool to easily transmit and visualize the large-scale maps we are creating using our unique algorithms.
Under the hood, it is a wrapper over DRACO by Google and DRACO transport package by Jakub Paplham.
Seamlessly transmitting compressed large maps over WIFI / 4G / 5G, visualization on Rviz while massively reducing the PointCloud bandwidth and charges on data plans, AWS IOT messages.

Command Center

• Data, AI, Simulation

We are proud to introduce a glimpse into our internal cloud simulation environment, deploying and testing our algorithms at scale with a push of a button on multiple outdoor scenarios running parallel on AWS EC2. Getting accurate metrics for where we need to improve, and where we have reached perfection. And not just that! Using our cloud simulation we let our future customers experience Rootie's life-changing solution while managing teleoperations of a fleet or scattered autonomous units throughout remote places around the world using our command center web interface.

A Semi-Realistic 3D Environment

• Data, AI, Simulation

We are SUPER EXCITED to introduce our latest collaboration with Simplex Mapping Solutions Ltd - Semi-Realistic 3D Environment based on Gazebo simulator.
Targeting over 10 million customers is a big challenge and requires reliability, robustness, and in-depth preparation in many aspects. We are leveraging data and technology to constantly test and validate our algorithms and AI at different locations, use-cases, and outdoor conditions around the world.
Developing a unique set of tools such as our custom sensor modeling, augmentation, and far more than that!
As always, and part of our contribution to the global robotics community, we plan to release some of these tools within the upcoming months.

Happy 4th of July

• Holiday, Entertainment

Happy Independence Day to all our friends in America and abroad. Stay safe and have some fun!

BigData Meetup - AgTech Israel June 2020

• Holiday, Entertainment

Thank you AgTech Israel for inviting us and giving the opportunity to talk about the data behind Rootie for outdoor maintenance and Home-Farmers 🥬🥕
Such a wonderful community, great to see people from all around the world taking part in these sessions.

Rootie Dashboard

• Dashboard, Robot Operator, Data

We keep getting messages - what exactly are you doing? Can I join the pilot? Is it just another robotic lawnmower? We are glad that we inspire curiosity among people, and we promise that Rootie is not just another 'ordinary' robot.

Every month, our engineering team will reveal a short behind-the-scenes glimpse into our unique development process of Rootie – The Personal Garden Assistant. This month, the Rootie dashboard - in each experiment we gather large amounts of data from the fields (6GB+), to speed up the debugging and process the data quickly, we use real-time AI/ML manipulation to detect the anomalies while traveling outdoors and notify the operator on each action that requires human intervention.
The operator can access the data and get a visual representation of performance measures, reports, and sensor readings. It might be feasible to do it manually on one robot - but think about a hundred thousand and more.

Our RootieBot interacts with our dashboard and mobile application using #AWS backend infrastructure which gives a great comprehensive solution for processing the data quickly and easily.

Rootie The beginning of the journey and how it all began

• Gardening, Robotics

We started our journey of founding the company about a year ago after I visited my aunt who lived about an hour drive from Manhattan, New York.
In the area where she lives there are large yard areas for the private houses, and currently there is no satisfactory solution today that addresses this market.
The gardening and landscaping maintenance requires physical work, and buying appropriate equipment to keep this area clean, beautiful and usable.
Our idea is to provide a broad solution to this market, by combining between technology and traditional gardening.

Most of today's private yards uses only a few percent of the area for hot tub, barbecue, hammock etc. Our goal is to help the landowner maintain his yard autonomously, while making the 'unused' areas of it and make it more productive for us.

As a robotics engineer that deals with both commercial and consumer robotics market for few years, specializing in agriculture robotics, the way I see it, the big problem with today's agricultural robots that is it stays solely in the traditional and commercial industries, while some parts of it can be a tremendous benefit for users like our family.

To accomplish this, we have designed a robot that offers much more than the traditional robotic lawnmower most of us are familiar with. We put a lot of effort on making our system easy and simple to use on the user side, yet smart, complex and well-engineered on the robot side, using our own custom hardware, mechanics, AI, algorithms.
We are developing a platform that opens a new-era of interaction between humans and robots.