Gentle Machine Company was founded as a vehicle to pursue dexterous household robotics using the Deft Dexapod platform. When “robots” become ubiquitous household appliances, no one is going to call them robots anymore, and thanks to Hollywood “robot” implies a hazardous machine to many people – we’re getting ahead of that problem by accurately calling our mechanical hands system simply “Gentle Machines”. From the GMC company website:
Henry Ford revolutionized the world by bringing automobiles into everyday use. His parents used to tell stories about how Henry, when he was a child, had several dangerous encounters with horses and wagons that prompted his early interest in automobiles. At that time, “horseless carriages” were experimental and very expensive. Within a decade, Ford Motor Company was selling thousands of cars every month. Near that time, Ford wrote in a personal diary “The horse is DEAD!” Millennia of travel by horseback would soon be ending.
Gentle machines are designed to bring machine dexterity, currently as expensive and experimental as the early automobile, into everyday use. Routine and monotonous tasks can be automated by learning from a demonstration, giving you more time to focus on the work you enjoy. The work you do enjoy, you can perform via remote control anywhere in the world from the comfort of your home. Henry Ford made sure you could drive to work hundreds of miles from home. We’re making sure you don’t need to.
Read about the tech stack here. We are inspired by parallel work at Stanford BC-ConvMLP [and, more recently, ACT/ALOHA].