Everyone Can Build a Robot: Open Source Embodied AI With Seeed Studio | NVIDIA AI Podcast Ep. 300

Introduction to Seed Studio

0:00Previously, you need to spend months of trainings to understand the spatial planning on the robots, how it moves. But now what you do with the robots is after they're setting up, you train it. Like you train a dog. You teach it how to do it by holding its hand to do the operations for several times. Then you send all the data back to train on the cloud and deploy on a JSON.

0:27Welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm Noah Kravitz. Our guests today are Elaine Wu and Eric Pan from Seed Studio. Eric is the CEO. Elaine is the head of robotics. And if you're not watching this on video, if you're listening on audio, you might want to check out the video stream. We've got a handful of robot companions with us today. We're going to get some demos. We're going to talk about open robotics, open claw, edge computing, robotics and AI, all kinds of great stuff. So let's get into it.

0:58Eric, Elaine, welcome. Thanks for joining the NVIDIA AI podcast. Pleasure. Thank you for inviting us. Thank you for having us. And thank you for bringing your friends.

Seed Studio Overview

1:08So maybe we can start, and Eric, I'll ask you first, for a little bit of an overview for listeners, viewers who might not know Seed Studio. What the company is, and how you moved from open hardware into robotics and edge AI. Sure. So at Seed Studio, we have been supporting the global communities on open source hardware from 2008 for 18 years. So we do, starting by open source hardware modules, but we move on to all kinds of devices. We worked with NVIDIA for several years around just nanos.

1:42But now we have a lot more robotics, open source robotics from arms, from little desktop embodiments. So this goes on. Yeah. So as NVIDIA Elite Partner, so I see that our AI robotics team have built a lineup of the Jetson All-Rain devices as the most powerful and advanced robot brain. Together with that, we also have a full stack of robotic components from perception and from the control. So I see that our mission is to make technology more accessible to everyone.

2:16And so how is this convergence of AI and open AI and robotics, hardware, and technologies now like OpenClaw? How is this shaping the world of robotics and open robotics? I think it's a very evolving and progressive trend. If you're starting to understand microcontrollers, okay, everybody can use microcontrollers. Through all the open source hardware and maker movement. Then gradually people realize, okay, I have open source hardware.

2:48Can I use it for industries? Can I do real projects with that? So you see a lot of IoT, a lot of robotics in the early times start to pop up. Because it's easier for everyone, cross boundaries, coming from different industries. Now they can use technology for themselves, no matter where they are all over the world. And with all the AI, all these energetic AI, and people see it differently. Okay, I can really get things talking. I can really give a soul to my creations. It's not just a machine.

3:18It's a machine that can talk to you, can get assigned on tasks. And this is becoming a new society for robots. And the community, I think, is the root. Because you don't need one robot for everything for now. It's actually going to be specialized robots with open source models covering a specific domain. And it has to be done by millions of people all over the world. So we're happy to support NVIDIA in this whole process.

Importance of Open Robotics

3:45So along those lines, why is open, the idea of open, so important to robotics? And you hinted at this. And we've been talking with Frontier AI companies, you know, building models and building software tools. And just talking about how open source, the open community is just, things are advancing so much faster than they would be otherwise with everybody collaborating. Is it a similar thing in the robotics community? Why is open, Seed Studio has always been built on open.

4:15Why is that so important? Yeah, I think a very important factor is people don't know what to build to be the number one creation. So it's not a game. People are trying all kinds of diversities. It's like biology, that you have all kinds of creatures. They compete with each other. They evolve with each other. Then we have the best creations for every domain. And through open source, it's not only the technology is evolving fast because people can contribute with their own talents.

4:50And also, it's a trust. It's for adoption. So imagine you need to have an AI in your home, in your factories, in your retail stores. You want it controllable. You want to be able to modify it. You don't want to be locked away. So open source is facilitating a lot of new technologies to push to new boundaries. Instead of salesperson, we have the makers, developers. They naturally, with their curiosity, are trying to find out what's happening and integrate it into their business. This is, I think, by default, if you're talking about robots, that's the best way.

5:24Of course, there are closed source, there are traditional companies doing this forever, which are very expensive ways. But I think what we are looking at is that's not everything. We at least give the possibility to everyone to create their own physical AI for their belongings. And open also means accessible. Accessible to all developers and everyone can get in touch. For example, physical AI and embodied AI. So I think open, the most important thing, is lower the barrier.

5:58And with the open module and the customizable and also affordable and also a bunch of the tutorials that SID is keeping them moving, keeping creating that and to help developers to get very easily to hands on these different products, hardware, and also the open source dev kit and also growing together with the ecosystem. Right.

Customer Base and Products

6:22I should have maybe asked you this at the beginning, but who are your customers? Who are SID's user base? And what are some of the, are there particular domains? You mentioned, you know, manufacturing industry. Particular domains that you sell to your products, your robots are being used more than others? We have millions of customers, so most of them are calling themselves makers. Right. So it can be everyone, hobbyists, like students, but a lot of them are researchers.

6:53And they start to understand the possibility of technology and to integrate into their own domain. But they don't stop there. They move on. They're becoming employees. They're becoming startups. They're becoming the project needs in big companies. So you see the, like, micro veins going into every industry. So it's very hard to define who are our customers. But we see the majority by number are the, like, students and researchers.

7:24And if we move on, we see a lot of revenue or a lot of productivity are coming to small and medium businesses. Because previously, they don't have the power to do that. Now they have all the resources. And they can help each other to very fast adopting technology. And also, the big companies, they have problems in innovation. Because the company might be too big. Right. But they have all the, trying to have their innovation apps. In the innovation apps, how do you find people that can do everything in the fast paces?

7:54So the developers, the makers, they very naturally grow into all kinds of domains. What's, um, what's your best-selling product? Do you sell a kit? How do you, what does, if I'm a maker and I want to get into robotics, what do I buy from Seed Studio? So for now, we, I think, for robotics, we sold mostly is called the SOR. Okay. It's a project we're working with Hugging Face. It's an open source arm, but costing only $200. I've seen this arm. Yeah, yeah. It's super cool. It's a new generation of robots.

8:24Previously, you have a professional robot, robotists, to program it in a very long time, debug it. They have to maintain it. So it's going to be very expensive. So you see robots more for medical, for automotive. But the robots are more disposable. Yeah, $200. $200, and the kids can use that. How about every business, we can have some robots to help us. We did a lot of hacks on last year. A lot of people just using it for cooking, for barbecues. So it might be like a toy to many professionals.

8:57Yeah. But we have to have respect to the possibility underneath. Absolutely. If they grow up, if they think seriously, how can I use affordable robots for street business for a lot of pervasive possibilities? This is actually happening, and I think that's a root, a foundation for more premium robots, premium business. And a lot of people get to learn. A lot of people get to develop this into a more mature belongings.

9:27Yeah. And customers can get all of our products at our website. And we also have the global distribution channel. And also, we are pretty active in the developer ecosystem. Like Arik mentioned, we host the hackathons and the workshops in the different cities and countries. Yeah. So developers can easily find us. And how easy is it? How quickly could I? I'm not a developer. I'm fairly technical for a content person.

Getting Started with Robotics

9:57How quickly, if I got one of your arms, could I get up and running with it? Previously, you need to spend months of trainings to understand the spatial planning on the robots, how it moves. Spatial planning, I'd need an extra couple months. But now, what you do with the robots is after they're setting up, you train it. Yeah. Like you train a dog. You teach it how to do it by holding its hand to do the operations for several times. Then, you send all the data back to train on the cloud and deploy on a Jetson.

10:30The Jetson will use diffusion model to detect with the cameras to try and find the best way to execute the projects. If it's not doing right, retrain it. So, it's very organically and naturally. It should be for the skilled person who is like a chef, who is a blacksmith, trying to teach a robot in an organic way to make it happen. But it's not for someone else. It can't be done for themselves. This is my robot. It inherits or it's my apprentice.

11:00Right, right, right. Helping me to do something. And it can't help me on my business by not giving away my business. It's not replacing me. It's the robot I acquired and it's going to enhance my operations. Absolutely, yeah. This is really like, I think it's a different mechanism and different business model. And it's the same way that we talk about, you know, screen-based AI, right? That it's not replacing, it's augmenting, it's I use AI tools all the time. They help me do things faster, better, you know, but they're not taking my job. So, yeah, it's wild to see this coming into the physical world in, you know, sort of a bigger mainstream kind of way.

11:37It's just amazing. I wanted to ask you about, you mentioned, Elaine, the partnership, being an elite partner with NVIDIA. Could you speak a little bit to that relationship and what it brings to the Seed community? So, we started working with NVIDIA back to seven years ago, starting from the Jetson Nano. And then we become the NVIDIA elite partner and then by making the NVIDIA Jetson, Kira boards, and also the devices.

12:09So, by this, NVIDIA helped us a lot. So, first, I would say, first off, all thanks for the trust for building up this partnership. And then becoming the partner of the NVIDIA, we get very deeply tech support and helping us to get this hardware and the products ready to market. And secondly, I think NVIDIA's all emerging technologies is pretty active in their community, like Jetson AI Lab, and also their forum, and also their tech stack, like Asaxim and Groot, from their SDK to the models.

12:45So, we're pretty actively working together with the ecosystem to put in these emerging technologies into our devices, make that as a solution, as a tutorial or the demos. Yeah. And can I ask you how everybody's talking about OpenClaw? We've got a claw on the table here. How is the integration of OpenClaw onto Jetson accelerated, enhanced your development process? Yeah. So, for the OpenClaw, we have the different angle tries.

13:16So, first, it's in application-wise. So, now, before, as Eric mentioned, previously, if you want to program a robotic application that will be very complex, you'll need to program from this perception and to it control, I mean, almost every part of the robots, you'll need to hard-code that. And now, through the OpenClaw, we have tried, we have installed OpenClaw locally on the Jetson store, and also, it's called the local API of the model.

13:49We tried the Q1, 3.5, certified billing model. And then, it can do, if I text on the chat box of the OpenClaw, like, move up the robot arm, move down, or pick up the claw, and it can directly execute the task about that. So, that is also transforming the way where how we code. It's not coding anymore. It's just the texting and to control the arm. And the other way is that is a way for Jetson users.

14:19I think the update, so, update the repositories or the update, the debug, the issue inside of the Jetson, that will be a time-consuming thing. So, if we get the OpenClaw inside the Jetson, it can quickly help you debug or update the necessary thing on the Jetson. So, that will be an upgrade in efficiency, yes.

14:50Right. And to sum up, I think it's not only just a tool. The robot arm is becoming cloud itself. It's very agentic. So, the process is we connect this about two weeks ago to OpenClaw, and try to ask it. We give it a wild try. Find yourself, the libraries, you are in the SO arm, and find your libraries, read instructions, and build yourself into a physical world. It put together all the libraries and try to plan what do we mean by moving 20 centimeters up.

15:23So, it did all these missions, and we actually give OpenClaw a physical body. Not only help you to understand the world, but help you to build the world, help you to move the physical things around you. And the way you master it is you're talking to a cloud through a message, through a WhatsApp, or through a microphone area. So, I think this is totally liberating the cloud. Sometimes it feels scary. You know, you just talk to it, and then it starts to move. I was speaking with, I think, Harrison Chase from Langchain, and we were talking about agents and this idea of giving an agent an identity, what that means, right?

16:05And you mentioned before about, you know, putting a soul into the robots. Exactly. Right. And so, does the robot arm, like, does it communicate to you that it now understands, oh, I have a physical embodiment? Like, is it getting into that kind of thing with the identity? Exactly. Yeah. Because you can write in the soul. Yeah. What is, like, what's your role, what's your definitions, and what are your skills? So, we give, we don't, it's very controllable.

16:35You don't, we don't ask you to try all the wild gestures. We just give it the actions you want with all the peripherals, with all the objects on the table. That's, you know, you are chef. You should help us cook this egg. Now, he knows, okay, what, I should be following what kind of SOPs. But I think this is just a start is for, a lot of people use open cloud as their personal agents, like, be part of my job. But I think with all the robots, all the physical AI, you put in-store open cloud into more projects, they are actually far from you.

17:13But everybody can talk to them, and they can talk to each other to collaborate. We have a new society of them. Yeah. But, of course, we need to control them in some privileges on their, like, authorities. Right. Yes. But it's a different way we can use agents, and they can have their sub-agents as well. You need, like, a home assistant to manage all the staffs and coordinate them. You maybe need, like, an AI camera to look at everybody that's working and teach them, okay, you're going through the wrong way.

17:44And you can ask the AGV to feed the robot arm or something, and the robot arm can operate according to you. Okay, I taught you to do this. Now it's for you to repeat it ten times. I'm imagining in my home an orchestrator and then a robot to feed the dog. What I really want is a closed-folding robot. And I know that's very difficult with the articulations and such. But, well, we've got these robots here. So this is our very new release, the Rayboot arm. So that is also our another open-source project.

18:16Now on GitHub, it's already hit 1.3K stars. And so for this demo, we are showing it's doing the trajectory planning. It is showing it's very smooth. It's very stable. To compare it to the SOARM 101, it shows it's more robust. And also, we have mirrored this real-to-sim to the NVIDIA ASAC-SIM. And so every position and every actuator is moving, that is, you can see, in the ASAC-SIM for the simulation.

18:51Yes. So we give it two missions for the robot. It's called a Raybot. Okay. So I mean, we redefine robots. Okay, got it. It's all agentic AI. But it has two, actually now it has three features. First, it's open-source, but it can contribute. You see some of the parts, they are 3D printed. And we'll release all the files so people can turn this into, like, a microphone holder for you, to respond to you. They can, according to the purposes, scenarios, they rebuild the robots according to their needs. Right. And the second thing is more applied.

19:23You can see it's not designed for learning only. People see it and feel like, okay, I want to use it. You can do something with it, yeah. And then obstacle is, how much, would it be too expensive for my, like, cooking, for my small business? No, it's just $1,000 to start with. This one's $1,000. $1,000. It would be less than $1,000. And we're plastered with JSON Nano to do the local functions. You don't need a token. You buy JSON Nano. Right. Everything is running for it, on it. And you can work with, of course, the cloud or bigger, like Thor, to do more complex plannings.

19:57So you can have management system with more AI, but this more AI will be executing the SOPs accordingly. Yeah. So we hope this can enable, like, open source, applied, and agentic usages. Amazing. Do you, you know, you mentioned, obviously, that we want to stay as humans in control of the system, right, of the robots. And when you're working with tools like OpenClaw, and can actually, can OpenClaw write skills for robots?

20:27Sure. It extends. It doesn't matter. It's, yeah. Exactly. So are there concerns around safety issues? Are there particular guidelines that are specific to the robotics domain when you're working with, you know, AI and thinking about AGI? No. Because we just started to use the cloud to do that. Okay. Yeah. Still trying on the limits. Right. But for now, I think we... I forget. This just came out, like, a month ago. Exactly. You wake up every day, and you, okay, where are we now? Right. The terrain has been changing too fast.

20:57Every day. But what we are trying to start with is we see as a robot first. So it has all the robot guidelines we should follow. And if we connect to IT system, it should be have all the controls as if it's a human being. So we apply the basic layer first. Then we explore the boundaries, and we have a panic button. We can just shut it off. It's easier. You don't need to unplug your wires for a laptop. You just unplug it. Right. It should be a start. Right. Yeah. So thinking kind of, I don't know, a little bit abstractly and kind of thinking ahead,

Future of Robotics and AI

21:30you know, with so many people using OpenClaw and Clawcode and these agentic tools and Langsmith and creating all of these just thousands, millions of digital creations, you know, every day being built by these agents, how do you think about applying that mentality and applying these digital creations and kind of manifesting them in the physical world through robotics? Yeah, I think it's like following the OpenCloud discussion. OpenCloud is becoming an interface, interlink between the digital world to the physical world.

22:01Now we can control robot arms. But like a lot of details, how do you really move the parts? How do you really interact with your environment? So I think that's where ISAC sim is coming to play. It's mirroring all the modelings and you can simulate before you acquire the robots, before you deploy them. And they get a very precise renderings afterwards, so you can have the digital twin between them. And a lot of more people before, they don't have the resources.

22:32Like we, I think until now, we don't have one robot for everyone. Yeah. So how about we, more people can participate first through the aligns, through the simulations. But we build more sim-to-rail, rail-to-sim bridges. And as we have more cheap, affordable robots, the sim-to-rail gap will be very easily closed. Closed, yeah. Because a lot of people are validating, a lot of people are improving on the controls, on the details to make them smooth and practical. And you train the railways on these simulations and deploy in the field, they can, very organically,

23:08for most of the people, they use them as if they are talking to a creature. Yeah. This is going to be very exciting. It's amazing. It's amazing. So Elaine, can you talk about how open robotics, open frameworks, open models sort of help developers kind of bridge that gap, bringing their ideas into the physical world through robotics? Yeah. The first I want to point out the hogging face to the robot framework. So that is the transforming the way how we're building the robots.

23:40So as we mentioned, open clock is very easy. You can control the robot arms through the text, the chat box. But using the robots, there's a lot of researchers and the AI engineers doing the algorithms or the hardware engineers, they can get touched into their embodied AI, no matter what the background is. Because the robot framework, they provide the hogging face. They provide it with the data sets, with the model, and with also the policy, and into

24:15the one set of the framework to train the robot. That is end-to-end learning, rather than you need to code each part of the robot. Yeah. So, and also, I see that we're focused on the hardware. Mm-hmm. So together with the robot, together with the robot, we bring the ISO arm. We also have our robot arm compatible with the robot to help the developers to get easily quick-started. Yeah, and also, besides our hardware, I see that we also provide the services, the customer

24:46services, and also manufacturing services. How quickly we help the startups to get into that. For example, we work with Hogging Face for this rich mini. So we quickly, in five months, from the design to developer and manufacture that. In five months, we started 3,000, and 3,000 units shipped to every customer. Amazing. Yes. Wow, that's so fast. So what's next? What's on Seed Studio's agenda for the year?

25:16Are there different types of robots? Are there different frameworks? There's all-in on OpenClaw? What can you tell us? Yeah, I think what we created is a beginning. Yeah. And what we offered is a reference design. Because we're an open-source company, why don't we ever rebuild the robots at open-source? So we don't have expectations that we do something everybody will just use. Because they will come back to us, they always, can I change this a little bit for my creations? I'm doing a startup. Can I base on your creations and to wrap it up with my practices?

25:48Why not? So one key part of our business is we help people to scale. So we give people a reference design as a framework. They do the development. They come back to us. Okay, let's change and make it into some different creations. So we hope to see more of this happening. They have more physical AI. They look at open-source design. They have a problem to resolve. Now they have much faster, better, easier solution. And that's where we want to facilitate. We hope we can foster and support a big fleet of physical AI creations.

26:23I think that will be very fast to happen in the next one or three years. So you're able to customize the physical design of the robot to meet the customer's needs. Are you building, are you getting into, I don't know, like humanoids or quadrupeds, bipeds, that kind of thing? Or is it mostly arms? We actually do it the reverse way as humanoids. We don't want to be the one robot that does everything. Yeah. We don't want to build general robots. Yeah, right. But we disassemble the humanoids. We build, like, the head and the torso.

26:54We build the arms. And we build the wheels. So we start building more parts of the robots. And then people can combine them according to their usages. So very organically, they can find their practical loop flywheel of physical demands and the possible hardware. Yeah. Yeah. And also, for our product line, we have a line-up of the robot-compatible robots. We have arms. We have chassis.

27:25We have hands. And also, desktop robots. Oh, fantastic. Amazing. I think a very important trend is that we don't wait for someone to build a humanoid for us. Right. Yeah. Maybe we don't trust it. Maybe we cannot wait. Maybe it's too expensive. But now, everyone can build a robot for themselves. And if they have a cluster of needs, a community with similar scenarios, someone can create a business on the physical AI. I think that's more organic.

27:55No, it's amazing. There's something about the physical world, right? For all that, you know, we're talking and using and developing these on-screen tools. Seeing it embodied in the physical world just is a mind shift. And it's just amazing to see. Eric, Elaine, for viewers, listeners who want to learn more, maybe they want to find out about getting some robot parts of their own, Seed Studio. Is it SeedStudio.com? Yep. Yes. And with three E's in Seed. Yeah. Especially with three E's. Okay. And other places they can go learn more, social media.

28:29Yeah, we are on most of the social medias, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. So just search us and you'll find us. Perfect. Well, again, Eric and Elaine, this has been fascinating. And as you said, it's just the beginning. So looking around at what's on the table now makes me think what might be on the table next year. Appreciate you coming. Thank you so much for joining the podcast. And obviously, all the best with everything Seed's doing. Very nice talking and proud to share what we have been doing. Thank you. Should be. That's great. Thank you for having us.

28:59Our pleasure.