Robots with human-like dexterity

Robots are critical to modern industry, but inflexibility limits their potential. Surprise is the bane of today’s robots – they can’t handle change. But adapting to a changing world is where humans excel – if a tool is in the wrong place, we figure out where it goes. If an unwieldy package is too heavy to lift, we recruit others to help. It’s not hard to build a basic robot, but it is an incredible feat to have a robot that is as flexible and dextrous as a human.

This is precisely the challenge that Samir Menon set out to address. He has been working to endow robots with this flexibility since his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford, where he formulated a framework to explain how the brain controls and coordinates the body. When we met Samir, we were struck by how he merged mathematics, the study of human movement, and an understanding of how the brain and body function together to create highly-intelligent and dexterous robotic solutions.

The result is Dexterity – intelligent robots with human-like dexterity. Dexterity’s robots can do what their predecessors cannot – their ability to learn as they pick, pack, and place novel objects is unsurpassed. This lets them take on manual human tasks that need more than simple, repetitive precision. And for them to scale sustainably, technical sophistication needs to translate into tangible customer value. Samir and the Dexterity team also have a high-touch approach with customers, gaining a deep understanding of their needs and offering a robots-as-a-service model that allows Dexterity to deploy quickly and have an immediate impact on customers’ warehouse operations.

Modern industries will thrive with robot solutions that can adapt and change with us, and we’re excited to help Dexterity accelerate this new reality by leading their Series A and by supporting Samir and the Dexterity team.

– Wen & Haomiao