Last fall, I took a trip to Tokyo on behalf of Open Perception, to do some work for MUJIN, an awesome robotics company who are trying to bring some much needed autonomy to the factory. With their easy-to-use, in-browser planning solution, they’re able to find optimal trajectories for pretty much any task you can think of: avoiding obstacles, bin picking, handing off open containers of liquid without spilling.

Of course, planning only makes sense if you know the state of your environment. We were able to partner with them to build the MUJIN Scanner; easy-to-use software for building metrically accurate models of an environment, and localizing known CAD models (e.g. robots) on the fly.

Last week they had a big presence at IREX2013. It’s awesome to see what they’re doing, and cool to know that something I programmed could become (part of) a real product.