Agtuary co-founder Angus Muffatti on using robotics and AI to transform agri-risk analytics with remote sensing and climate modeling

know why he's anonymous, but he's launching. He launched uh cheaprootarm. com today. Very excited for this. He's making a cheap robot. Go buy them now. He we we cover He used to have a different name on the show. We used to cover his post. I used to laugh every time because but it was it was rude.

So we just call him Dirt Man. Welcome to the stream. Dirt. How you doing, Dirt Man? No, he changed his name. He dropped He dropped the parenthesis. Wow. Classing it up. Introduce yourself. Who are you? Yeah. Yeah. Uh hey guys. Uh my name's Angus. Uh yeah, I'm I'm just a I'm an engineer from Australia.

Uh my background is like very much in aerospace and yeah I've been like obsessed with like building these kind of robot robots for I don't know like the last 10 years or something. Um yeah and it's uh you know building building this mini one.

It's really just it was really like a stepping stone for me on the way to building welding robotics.

um you know I've got some larger robots where I'm just setting up a workshop currently uh to do basically strap on cameras sensor systems and drive the whole thing drive the whole thing via AI cuz you know it's basic we're basically at the point where there's you know uh we have the ability to drive you know these really complex you know and industrial scale robotic systems like with you know the current robotic foundation models you know given the right training data um and so this like this small robot that I that I've got on, you know, cheap robot uh arm.

com is great. Uh was really really Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm surprised that it was available. I was like, "Hell yeah. " [Laughter] That's great. But uh but it was it was really just a test bed.

You know, I'm I'm working with a few guys, you know, one guy Julian out of Pennsylvania, you know, runs a runs a shop floor like a welding robot and another guy Stephen, you know, currently works for NASA.

you know he's built working on the vision system but it's really a test bed for us to you know you know validate our algorithms do small scale uh prototyping you know my the picture that I've got up there you I don't have uh many demos because it was basically thrown together at like 2 a. m.

night time last night, you know, got the Shopify store up and running and doing it live. So, what what do you want people to use these for? What are the use cases that you're imagining? Yeah. So, very much the same as uh I would say those le robot ones. Um it's just a much more robust platform.

So, improved like improved power in the servos, improved like structural integrity. Um, but the key like one of the key differences is I've actually built a like an industrial quality like kinematic solver.

And basically what all that what that's telling you is you know where the end where the endector of the robot needs to be. There's usually like a whole bunch of equations that you either solving numerically or you've got a you know a solver in a low dimensional space that you can work out really quickly.

Like I built a like I've built a really robust one for um for like six degrees of freedom and then this is just more than you get with the uh with I guess what's typically being used in all of those like AI like hackathons and so I've written all the software so you can take uh all of the outputs from an AI model and just stream joint commands to it you know connect it to like things like Nvidia's sim but you can also run it like a traditional industrial robot um and like and do path planning for really really high fidelity you know, trajectories and controls.

Uh, and like the benefit of that is like all of that all of that information uh that you can stream and record from those joints as you use the high quality kinematic solver is you can use that as the training data.

So you see a lot of these guy like a lot of these robot systems, they've got, you know, one arm and then another one's controlled by a human with a little lever and they're like going and doing these pick and place or whatever.

Um, and that like you're just streaming like this joint uh should be the joint angle of this other robot. Uh, and frankly that's really crap data for training robots. Like the like you get it done, but you can see all the movements all janky. It's the same kind of movement that the human's doing with a robot.

It's awkward. Um, but you like you know industrial robots, they've been uh doing this for decades and they have really nice trajectories, really smooth path path planning. But the bottleneck is like how do you get that high quality data?

Um, and you know, with this software combined with this, you know, little robot package, that's what I can, you know, that's what this can do for people, you know, help them get really high quality data without and only having to buy one robot. You don't need to buy like the equipment for two. That's amazing.

Um, what how is the health of this sort of open-source robotic hacker world right now? We had Clem on earlier from Hugging Face and he said this was an area that he was most excited about uh on on on his platform and and he you know he said they hosted a hackathon recently.

It sounds like there's a lot of exciting activity here and you're contributing to it yourself. Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, I basically just posted all the, you know, all the code on GitHub for free and I think there's uh it's it's like a really exciting time at the moment just because there's like there's so much activity and attention in it and there's many more people really coming into the field and you know having a go and learning part like not just robotics but on the hardware side right it's uh you know it's like my background is aerospace and mechanical engineering you know was uh you know built rocket engines once upon a time and it's you know uh you know we kind of got left out in the cold you know via Silicon a little bit, you know, you saw like, you know, but but you see all the, you know, the major all the really standout companies, you know, are all hardware companies, you know, space like SpaceX and Dural, you know, a whole range of them.

And I think there's a lot of like a lot of attention like just on this area has really put a lot of energy particularly into the open source space, which is awesome to see. How have sales been? Have you sold any yet? Yeah. Yeah. So, I've woken up, you know, uh, we got we got three sales so far. There we go. Boom.

Congratulations. Thank you guys. Thank you guys. That's three sales. That's 1,500 bucks in one day. You idealize that. I think we're in the millions. I think I think if you put together the right deck, maybe you take a trip to Sand Hill Road. You tell the right story. A quick flight. 200 on a billion to SFO.

200 on a billion. Easy. Get it done. Get it done. Yeah. Yeah. But you know it's uh you know I think like you said like hey my valuation should should be the same as figured cuz I've now shipped more apparently. Shots fired. Shots fired. Not my words. Yep. Yep. Oh yeah. Yep. Was uh was cooking earlier. Yeah.

I mean this uh this feels like something that uh would would be perfect for the AI grant program from Nat Freiedman. you know, this is going to be the enabling technology. This is going to be deeper in the supply chain for the robot that picks up the leaves or, you know, one of these fun delightful robots.

I hope Nat can continue that program. He's certainly has the resources for it. Uh, and it'd be very cool to see that partnered up with the I would like a robot. I'm definitely keen to head to the US. Uh, like you about 18 months ago, I stopped by the Gundo, you know, met like Augustus and like a bunch of other fellas.

It's been awesome to see those guys like, you know, I think I, you know, I went there when Valer Atomics was just a squat rack in an empty room. Um, it was just a squat rack with scraps. Uh, well, you seem like an alien of extraordinary uh robotic abilities. So, you know what? My vote is we get you over here.

Bring you in. Yeah. This is fantastic. Be there in a in a couple of months, I think. Great. Well, let's tune the robot up to crack open uh that would be useful. on the desk. It' be great if we could just hit a button cuz it's hard to reach over here and and and crack them ourselves. Yeah, it's brutal.

Congratulations on the lunch. Yeah, thank you so much. Really appreciate it, fellas. Um and yeah, love the show. Been a big fan since the beginning. So, keep it up. Remember, I'll never forget your name. First time it came up in the deck.