A startup founded by ex-DeepMind engineers wants to turn its customers into robot teachers

Jonathan Scholz, the cofounder of Reimagine Robotics, started Google DeepMind's applied robotics team.

Reimagine Robotics How do you fix a 100,000-year data gap? This robotics startup is betting the answer lies with its customers.

A team of former Google DeepMind engineers has founded Reimagine Robotics to build robots that can learn on the job.

Reimagine's CEO told BI that working at Google made him realize customers need to be able to teach their robots new skills.

A group of former Google DeepMind engineers has a potential solution to robotics' 100,000-year data gap: you.

Jonathan Scholz, the CEO of Reimagine Robotics, told Business Insider that the startup plans to build robots that are actually useful by turning its customers into robot teachers.

Scholz, who previously led DeepMind's applied robotics team, founded Reimagine last year with former Google colleagues Oleg Sushkov, Akhil Raju, and Misha Denil.

The London- and Sydney-based startup emerged from stealth earlier this month and is backed by VC firms Fly Ventures and Firstminute Capital.

In his first media interview since coming out of stealth, Scholz told Business Insider that Reimagine's mission of building robots that can be refined and taught in the field — a process known in the world of AI as " post-training " — stemmed from his experiences at Google.

Show don't tell: Reimagine's robots are designed to be grabbed and manipulated.

Reimagine Robotics After three separate robotics projects he built at DeepMind failed to get beyond the pilot phase, Scholz said he realized the issue was not the underlying technology, but how it was deployed in the real world.

"It clicked for me that it wasn't just a capability problem," he said.

"What you really needed to do to get robots deployed out there was to make them usable and adaptable by the staff who actually understand the work." 'Monkey see, monkey do' To bridge this gap, Scholz said Reimagine has adopted a "monkey see, monkey do" approach to learning for the company's fleet of robot arms and assemblers, some of which are mounted on surfaces while others move around on wheeled platforms.

He said customers will be able to teach robots new behavior by showing them how to do a task, watching them attempt it, and then correcting them by physically manipulating the robotic arm.