Engineering news
University of Sheffield spin-out Opteran is developing its low-cost silicon-based approach to autonomy, known as ‘natural intelligence’, after raising £2.1m in seed funding.
Based on eight years of research by Professor James Marshall and Dr Alex Cope, natural intelligence could be used on cars, drones, mining robots and other vehicles. Its backers hope the technology could revolutionise AI technology by replicating ‘nature’s proven blueprints for autonomy’.
Although insects have small brains, they are still capable of sophisticated decision making and navigation using optic flow to perceive depth and distance.
Replicating this method could be “far more efficient, robust and transparent” for achieving autonomy compared to current deep learning techniques, Opteran claimed in a funding announcement. The company is reverse engineering insect brains to produce algorithms requiring no data centre or extensive pre-training, letting the artificial brain mimic tasks such as seeing, sensing objects, obstacle avoidance, navigation and decision making.
The technology has already been tested in trials. A drone weighing less than 250g controlled itself with complete onboard autonomy, using fewer than 10,000 pixels from a single low-resolution panoramic camera.
Weighing approximately 30g and integrating technology drawing less than a watt of power, the Opteran Development Kit (ODK) will enable the technology to be integrated into a wide variety of applications in the robotics market.
“2021 will be the year when natural intelligence will challenge deep learning in solving some of the most fundamental short-comings in autonomous applications,” said David Rajan, CEO of Opteran. “Already in a position to demonstrate the technology, we are confident that natural intelligence will become highly sought after as the way to deliver lightweight, low-cost and effective autonomy in a radically new way.”
The funding round was led by IQ Capital, with Episode1, Join and Seraphim Capital also participating. Following on from a pre-seed round from the Connecting Capabilities Fund of the British Business Bank, the latest funding round also includes angel investors and a CCF grant, a part of the Northern Triangle Initiative .
“The benefits and step change natural intelligence can bring to the field of autonomy are profound,” said Rob Desborough, partner in the Seraphim Space Fund. “Within a space environment, autonomous systems are truly on the edge where size, weight and efficiency are critical.”
Opteran will use the seed funding in the next 18 months to build out functionality in the algorithms and chipsets, including launching Opteran Sense for obstacle avoidance and reactive navigation, Opteran Direct for Slam, Opteran Decide for autonomous decision-making, and Opteran See, a 360º camera.
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