OffWorld is developing AI-powered industrial Swarm Robotic Mining (SRM) systems for heavy industrial jobs on Earth, Moon, asteroids and Mars. Its mining customers include BHP and Anglo American and it recently established an MOU with Ma’aden, Saudi Arabia’s national mining company. The U.S. scale-up is also collaborating with the European Space Agency (ESA), Luxembourg Space Agency and NASA, the U.S.’s space program.
“We are solving the hardest problems in robotics: materials handling and AI mastery over rock and ore,” says CEO Jim Keravala, a speaker at Science House, an accredited side program of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos Jan. 19-23 organized by Frontiers, the open science publisher. (Click here to see the separate article on The Science Roadmap to 2035 panel that Keravala participated in). “The field of robotics and autonomous system are vastly improving but the reality of operating mines, construction sites and other open unstructured environments is still a formidable challenge. Any anomaly can create obstacles for machine learning and AI and interrupt the revenue generating flow so there is a need for mitigation strategies as the robots improve.”
While swarm robotics can be used for construction, infrastructure and utilities, OffWorld is first focusing on one sector – mining – “so we can work hard to make sure we can address every anomaly,” says Keravala. The scale-up, which is headquartered in Pasadena, California and has subsidiaries in Africa, Europe and Australia, says its swarm robotic systems can decrease carbon emissions and the amount of energy used by the mining industry, reduce the number of humans working underground and workplace injuries, and empower communities in the Global South.
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