Autonomous excavator startup Bedrock Robotics picks up $600M in funding

Autonomous excavator startup Bedrock Robotics picks up $600M in funding

Bedrock Robotics Inc. today announced that it has closed a $600 million investment led by Alphabet Inc.’s CapitalG fund and Emergence Capital.

The Series C round also drew contributions from Nvidia Corp., Bessemer and over a half-dozen others. Bedrock says that it’s now valued at nearly $1 billion. The cash infusion comes a few weeks after the company reached a major growth milestone: it started carrying out paid work on commercial construction sites.

Bedrock sells an autonomy module for excavators. Vehicles equipped with the Bedrock Operator, as it’s called, can navigate construction sites and perform earthmoving tasks with minimal human input. The onboard artificial intelligence models automatically avoid any obstacles that might be in the way.

The Bedrock Operator runs its software on a computing appliance that can be placed in the host excavator’s driver cabin. It’s powered by an unspecified chip from Bedrock investor Nvidia. The graphics card maker offers a ruggedized AI accelerator, the Jetson AGX Orin, that is optimized for demanding environments such as construction sites. It can withstand higher temperatures than Nvidia’s other edge processors.

The other component of the Bedrock Operator is a sensor array meant to be installed on the roof of excavators’ driver cabins. It supplies the data that the computing module inside the cabin uses to make driving decisions. According to Bedrock, the sensor array features eight cameras and a lidar device that can detect nearby objects in low-light conditions.

The GPS module that an excavator uses to navigate can encounter errors when there’s a building between the vehicle and the nearest GPS satellite. Similar issues emerge when the GPS module’s antenna is tilted, for example because the vehicle is on uneven terrain. The Bedrock Operator features a so-called inertial measurement unit, or IMU, that can mitigate such malfunctions.

An IMU contains a magnetometer, a device that measures how the host vehicle interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field, and several other sensors. Those sensors work together to determine the excavator’s orientation relative to the ground. That information makes it possible to correct GPS signal errors. Furthermore, IMUs can collect related data such as the speed at which an excavator’s arm rotates.

“We have proven that fully autonomous excavators can perform real work of value alongside the crews and workflows already in place on job sites,” said Bedrock Robotics co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Boris Sofman. “The next challenge is delivering that capability to more contractors as a dependable part of how projects get built.”

Bedrock will use its new funding to expand the adoption of its technology and build the field service  infrastructure needed  to support additional deployments. In the longer term, the company plans to expand its focus beyond excavators to other construction vehicles. 

Photo: Bedrock Robotics