What is the body?
comma body is “the future of people.” You buy a comma body, buy a comma 3X (the head), attach the comma 3X to the body, and watch it come to life.
We believe that in order to solve AI, for most people’s definition, you must be embedded in the real world. We define AI as a machine that can do every task at least as well as a human. And in order to do human tasks, it helps a lot to have a human like body. The comma body is the beginning of that journey.
Today it’s a mobile platform for the comma 3X, but we will be building a knee and arms for it. Like everything we do, we try to distill the problem down to its essence, so unlike some companies, we aren’t focused on the humanoid shape. Wheels are a fine form of locomotion for cooking and cleaning, the dream tasks of the comma body. Two arms, a knee, and a comma 3X should complete a comma person (sold separately, knee and arm coming in 2023).
What software does it run?
The comma body runs openpilot! From openpilot's perspective, the comma body is a car. It runs the same camera and logging software, so we'll be able to learn from the fleet of bodies in the same way we learn from our fleet of cars.
At launch, the software will balance the body (using the same localizer as the car!) and allow you to drive it around via web interface. Shortly we’ll add video streaming to that web interface, allowing you to drive your body outside line of sight. We’d also like to add a VR app to drive the body from a first person view, this will be needed by the time we ship the arms.
Once we start getting data back from our body fleet, we can train models. The first model we will train (jointly with the driving model!) is a posenet, allowing inside out position tracking. When this model is shipped, the localizer will change from 3-DoF to 6-DoF. And once the dead reckoning is similar quality to what we have on the cars, adding a SLAM system will be very simple to allow drift free localization in your environment.
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Check out the code behind the the comma 3X and openpilot. Review, fork, and contribute to the open source ecosystem.