Autonomous systems platform, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington, USA

Toyota Material Handling and Microsoft are using AirSim—an open source simulation platform originally developed to teach drones or robots to learn in high fidelity simulated environments—to train a forklift on tasks like picking up a pallet. This video illustrates the vision for a future warehouse with pre-trained, intelligent forklifts assisting people in everyday activities.

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Gurdeep Pall, CVP of Business AI at Microsoft shares his thoughts on the positive impact that autonomous systems will have on our planet, economy, and lives. The big idea here is having open and reusable tools and a platform that enables anyone to teach intelligence to machines. The low-code AI development platform and 3D simulations help create autonomous systems that can improve production efficiency, safety, and autonomy of mechanized systems.

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Today we’re joined by Gurdeep Pall, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft.

Gurdeep, who we had the pleasure of speaking with on his 31st anniversary at the company, has had a hand in creating quite a few influential projects, including Skype for business (and Teams) and being apart of the first team that shipped wifi as a part of a general-purpose operating system.

In our conversation with Gurdeep, we discuss Microsoft’s acquisition of Bonsai and how they fit in the toolchain for creating brains for autonomous systems with “machine teaching,” and other practical applications of machine teaching in autonomous systems. We also explore the challenges of simulation, and how they’ve evolved to make the problems that the physical world brings more tenable. Finally, Gurdeep shares concrete use cases for autonomous systems, and how to get the best ROI on those investments, and of course, what’s next in the very broad space of autonomous systems.

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