{"id":65002,"title":"📍 Polymath Robotics: plug \u0026 play autonomy for industrial vehicles","tagline":"Polymath lets you easily add autonomy to any industrial vehicle, and build your own applications via Rest API.","body":"Hey, we’re Stefan \u0026 Ilia, founders of Polymath Robotics.\n\n**Polymath makes autonomy software for industrial vehicles.**\n\nToday we’re excited to introduce **Caladan**: a set of simulated vehicles \u0026 environments you can use to build autonomous industrial vehicle applications via Rest API.\n\n### **The problem**\n\nBuilding an autonomous industrial vehicle is a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project. Just getting a vehicle to drive itself reliably takes 6 months of engineering effort at a minimum. Even then, the autonomy itself is often buggy and unreliable, and impossible to transfer across different vehicle types.\n\nAs a result, many autonomy companies run out of steam before they even have a reliably-working product … let alone product-market fit.\n\n### **Our solution: general autonomy software**\n\nPolymath software handles generalized basic autonomy — in other words, **driving around and not hitting stuff** — for any industrial vehicle in a controlled environment. That means autonomous industrial vehicle companies can have an autonomous vehicle on day 1.\n\nSince we’re _just_ working on autonomy, we can focus on making the system **stable and reliable.** No more battling with weird controls issues or buggy obstacle detection.\n\n### Caladan: build on Polymath autonomy in simulation\n\nCaladan makes it easy to build autonomous vehicle behaviors in sim. The tool is a set of simulated vehicles \u0026 environments you can use to interact with Polymath autonomy via Rest API.\n\nThat means you can program custom autonomous vehicle behaviors and applications using Python, not ROS. And when you’re ready, whatever you’ve built in Caladan can seamlessly transition to a physical vehicle.\n\n### Product demo / example application\n\nHere’s an example application you could build with Caladan (you can download the example code [here](https://github.com/polymathrobotics/caladan_examples)).\n\n\u003chttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFSxBcWxsUU\u0026feature=youtu.be\u003e\n\nThe free version of Caladan comes with a simulated farm environment or simulated port environment. You can also reach out to us about a custom environment \u0026 vehicle in Caladan.\n\n### **Does Polymath autonomy work for my vehicle/use case?**\n\nPolymath autonomy is limited to industrial vehicles in closed environments, since the system will stop immediately if there’s trouble, and fall back on teleoperation in hazardous situations.\n\n**Use case examples:** ⛏ Mining trucks • 🚜 Agricultural vehicles • 🌲 Logging trucks • ✈️ Ground support equipment at airports • 🚢 Yard trucks\n\n### **Can I try it?**\n\nHeck yeah. You can try Caladan for free by signing up [here](http://polymathrobotics.com/product).","slug":"GuQ-polymath-robotics-plug-play-autonomy-for-industrial-vehicles","created_at":"2022-07-29T15:56:38.207Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T02:00:13.329Z","total_vote_count":67,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/GuQ-polymath-robotics-plug-play-autonomy-for-industrial-vehicles","share_image_url":"//bookface-static.ycombinator.com/assets/ycdc/yc-og-image-c440a0ad1dacfb86eeeb343717479cc54d256614449b4ef719977a0a451f8bc8.png","company":{"id":27361,"name":"Polymath Robotics","slug":"polymath-robotics","url":"http://www.polymathrobotics.com","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/0d6f5a2035d19900b2a4411b03d2c1998b0aaa5e.png","batch":"Summer 2022","industry":"Industrials","tags":["Hard Tech","Machine Learning","Robotics","Unmanned Vehicle","AI"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/27361"}}