Tech partnership brings Pittsburgh and Israel a bit closer
With help from 412x972, Pittsburgh-based robotics innovator Hellbender and Israeli startup Cyberbee create a 'marriage of products'
Finding one’s way inside a covered parking garage could become easier thanks to an international collaboration. Hellbender, a Pittsburgh-based robotics innovator, and Israeli startup Cyberbee announced a strategic partnership to integrate Cyberbee’s visual localization technology into Hellbender’s stereo camera system.
The efforts, CEOs of both companies told the Chronicle, will bring real-time centimeter-level navigation to mobile robots in GPS-denied environments.
“The possibility, or the ability, for robotic platforms to perceive spatial understanding, navigate a map indoors, independent of any infrastructure, while not using heavy hardware or costly hardware, is a game changer,” Cyberbee CEO Hagay Klein said by phone from Israel.
“Cyberbee has a really interesting piece of technology, which is a vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm, that runs on very, very small ARM processors. In English, what that means is, they’ve written a really clever piece of code that uses a single camera and an inertial measurement device — basically, the same hardware that’s sitting in your cell phone in your pocket right now — and what it does is it’s able to both map the area around it and figure out where it is in that space that it just mapped at the same time,” Hellbender CEO Brian Beyer said. “Most of what we make are the eyes and brains of robots.”
By pairing each company’s strengths, “we’re bringing together our uniqueness and Hellbender’s uniqueness,” Klein said.
“It was just a marriage of products that made sense,” Beyer said.
The potential for robots that move in GPS-denied places is vast.
Whether the technology is used for defense purposes or on pallet jacks, thanks to the partnership drones and robots can “understand where they are within the world, and therefore move throughout the world and make good decisions,” Beyer said.
Hellbender and Cyberbee, along with their CEOs, were introduced by Gal Inbar of 412×972. The tech-minded initiative, which was seeded by the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, seeks to bring Pittsburgh and Israeli businesses together.
“One of the things that we at 412×972 work very hard on doing is to cross-pollinate,” Inbar said by phone from Israel. “Both locations have amazing technologies coming out.”
On the Israeli side, the Technion, Tel Aviv University and various technological units from the Israel Defense Forces are largely responsible for innovations, Inbar said. Within Pittsburgh, “things are coming out of Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh and other places.”
An added value of bringing Pittsburgh and Israeli companies and professionals together is “the mindset,” he continued. “When you mix up, I would say, the entrepreneurship, that is the Israeli style, and the engineering approach, that is the CMU style, and you connect them together, wonderful things happen.”
This partnership is proof, Inbar said.
Thanks to 412×972, Hellbender sent hardware to Cyberbee. Within weeks, the latter “turned it into being location aware,” Inbar said. “This amazed the Hellbender team in terms of how quickly, how efficiently, they managed to do it in a manner that doesn’t consume very much power.”
Having begun to see the fruits of their labor, Klein and Beyer are excited for the future. Inbar is as well.
“We are just touching the tip of the iceberg,” Inbar said. “There is so much more collaboration that could happen between Israel and Pittsburgh. I see not dozens, but I think over 100 potential similar deals that could evolve.”
Though before those partnerships form, some understanding must develop.
Pittsburghers must recognize that “although Israel is so far away, in some manners, it could be very close.” And for Israelis, Inbar continued, the challenge is “saying Pittsburgh in a proper way.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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