Mahimana Bhatt and The Waymo for Excavators

The construction jobsite is one of the most dangerous places a person could be. There are millions of things that could go wrong, even if everyone is doing everything exactly to code. The biggest risk that Mahimana Bhatt saw here was the danger of operating construction equipment within the jobsite. These large machines are a useful tool, but are immensely dangerous to operate, especially in demolition. The last thing you would want as an operator would be to get trapped within one of these machines while demolishing a building. This is why Bhatt created Flywheel AI, an AI and logistics company that’s bringing autonomy and teleoperation to Excavators, and soon, full automation to the jobsite.

Bhatt is a 23-year-old Entrepreneur now located in San Francisco, California. While Flywheel is his most recent endeavor, Bhatt has been doing robotics since before he was even in high school. During his college education at Worchester Polytechnical Institute, Bhatt interned at another AI company, Motional. Here, he got his first taste of the AI industry, and how it could relate to the physical world. He helped wo develop software for autonomous mobility and did well enough to not only get hired as a full-time software engineer, but subsequently a senior software engineer! He worked at motional until (from the time of this being written) four months ago, where he and his friend Jash Mota stared the AI company Flywheel. Flywheel has the goal of solving the skilled labor shortage, and workplace safety issues involving heavy equipment. Their goal is to create Tele-operational excavators, which is a fancy way of saying remote control. An operator could be in the comfort of his own home, in an office of some kind, or even at the jobsite where he is being employed and remotely operate his excavator from a safe distance. By taking the driver out of the cabin, the risk for personal injury during jobsite activities drops significantly, and a singular operator could work on multiple jobsites in one day the control system isn’t limited to just one excavator, but many! If a connected machine is on a jobsite, the operator can work there.

Flywheel works as a retrofitting system. By connecting actuators to the physical controls of any machine and then retrofitting the machine with 360-degree cameras, the operator will have the ability to use simulator-styled controls to operate the machine remotely and have full visibility of the worksite (Potentially more visibility than an in-person operator!). Bhatt and Flywheel hope to not only just take people out of harm’s way, but also eventually completely automate excavators! The overall goal is near complete automation of construction equipment, so while this startup is still in its very early infancy (a reminder, still only four months old!), I’m excited to see where Flywheel takes their innovation to next!