Image Credits:<\/strong> Intrinsic<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The other big piece of this is simulation. It\u2019s the key most robotics deployments these days, affording users the ability to run scenarios simultaneously in a virtual world to determine real-world outcomes. The platform uses Gazebo, an open-source platform stewarded by Open Robotics, which also managed the robotic operating system, ROS. The connected for-profit arm, Open Source Robotics Corporation, was acquired by Intrinsic last December.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019ve done with the acquisition is the core engineering team that used to work under OSRF (Open Source Robotics Foundation) is now working at Intrinsic,\u201d says Brian Gerkey, the Open Robotics CEO who now serves as the director of Open Robotics at Intrinsic. \u201cYou should think of Intrinsic as perhaps one of the more important, but really just one player within the ROS ecosystem. We happen to employ a bunch of engineers and we\u2019ve committed to supporting them to develop and contribute back to the ROS community.\u201d<\/p>\n

The news follows a massive round of layoffs felt across Alphabet, including Every Day Robotics. \u201cThe EDR (Every Day Robotics) team has moved in with what became (Google) Brain,\u201d she explains. \u201cThat product has merged with Google Deep Mind. We were working a lot with DeepMind already. The fully integrated Google DeepMind team fully intends to help us build more skills, including ones that would have been used with EDR potentially.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tan White says that in spite of a 40-person reduction of Intrinsic\u2019s workforce, the company wasn\u2019t majorly impacted by layoffs. Rather, she explains, the shakeups were part of a small pivot within the company.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe made some specific layoffs,\u201d she says. \u201cWe graduated and we\u2019ve actually made a couple of acquisitions. We were getting clear on what this project was. There were a couple of projects that were more hardware based, and we made a choice to not focus on that. That\u2019s what the layoffs were actually about. It was to focus on the software and the AI part of what we\u2019re doing and that first product. I think what confused the external world at that time is we were obviously doing the acquisition with Open Robotics. They were related in the sense that we\u2019ve decided we want to be software focused, which is where Open Robotics fit in really well.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company also acquired Vicarious in April of last year. Tan White says around 80% of that team is currently still working for Intrinsic. \u201cTheir expertise in certain applications has been critical,\u201d she adds. \u201cSome of the applications you\u2019re going to see in the skills we have are based on the Vicarious Code.\u201d<\/p>\n

Flowstate is now available as a beta. Intrinsic says it had more than 100 signups in the first hour of going live.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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