Anybots launches QB proxy robot
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
You probably wouldn't want to drive a car or fly a plane with this yet, as a network glitch could result in disaster, but there are plenty of activities where a shut-down can be done safely.
Just saying, lawn mowers are not exactly the safest things in the world. I'm working in field of robotics (more outdoors than anybots) and I wouldn't really want to see that yet. Robots are great at detecting obstacles to avoid with Lidar, they are not great at handling edge case scenarios. With our bot even in "autonomous" mode somebody is watching, not sure if I want to add a spinning blade to it.
All of the military bots are remote controlled, not autonomous. I can't think of any major autonomous vehicle being used for fluid tasks (i.e., not inventory robots). So what, you are going to have someone sitting there watching 10 robots mow lawns remotely? How much cheaper can that be than just hiring people to mow lawns.
I don't think robots are very good at replacing people in low wage jobs. A lot of uniformed people think that makes a lot of sense because robots replaced factory workers, but robots did not replace factory workers because they were cheaper. Robots replaced factory workers because they were better. They were faster and more accurate. A paint job done by a robot is better than one done by a human. I worked on a project automating the assembly of a medical device - it was just too damn small to be done by a person reliably. The system cost almost a million dollars, you could have paid the girl it displaced for years and years and years before you pay it off - except that the liability of making a medical device incorrectly is astronomical.
So I do not target low wage jobs as a prime market for robots, there is no money in it. Robots are good for replacing jobs that are the dull, dangerous, dirty, impossible for humans to do, repetitious etc.
A mower robot could also be safer. A person riding a mower is exposed to a lot of noise, sun, and shaking. If you are relatively disabled or have a bad back, you can't operate a mower. Just about anyone who can see, on the other hand, could operate a mower remotely. No exposure to noise, to dust, to sun, to bumps. Also, you would want to err on the side of safety, so if the robot is in any way unsure of itself (say because there are moving objects nearby) it should just shut off and wait for human guidance. Some jobs, like mowing, cleaning, planting, harvesting, etc, can easily be stopped with no problems. On the other hand, you wouldn't want to just shut down a car in traffic when something goes wrong.
If people can attend meetings in another country remotely, why couldn't they also push around a vacuum cleaner or pick strawberries remotely? This would avoid all the costs of travel and food and boarding in a foreign country. Rather than immigrants working illegally in the US, they could be operating machines in the US from their home countries.
Janitors already travel from building to building to clean the floors. If they could operate the cleaning equipment from home, why wouldn't they? Physically transporting a person is more expensive than transporting information, and the gap between the two will only widen.
It seems to me that the hard part is remote controlling the robot so that it can move around while not hurting itself and other people. The Anybot robot is already semi-autonomous in this sense. Once you have this basic feature in place, it's straightforward to add other capabilities.
$15K is on the pricey side, but for some industrial inspection tasks I can imagine this being a cost which can be justified. For just meeting folks in the office I'm not sure that many businesses are going to go for this. For casual use the cost is going to need to be lower, and from a hardware point of view there's no reason why the cost can't go much lower.
My biggest beef with this robot though is its mechanical design. There's no good reason that I can see why it has to be balancing on two wheels. As a technology the balancing system is fine, but it doesn't appear to be fail safe. If the robot suffers a failure, the most common of which will be battery failure, it should fail in a safe position. With a balancing robot if there is a failure it's just going to fall over and crash into stuff, generating a hazard and liability issues. Depending on the environment in which the robot is deployed, uncontrolled toppling could have very serious consequences (for example, starting a fire).
1) You can put a whole bunch of weight in the base. (This is the route that Willow Garage seems to be going. They have a huge lead acid battery in the base. The advantage of this is that it is static and 'always on'. The disadvantage is that your robot has to be really heavy.
2) You can be dynamically stable. With this approach when you are bumped you use your drive system to actively deal with the disturbance. The advantage of this is you can deal with much larger disturbances (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkzgglYjNvY) The disadvantage is that it only works when there is power.
I totally agree on the battery failure scenario and it is something we have thought about a lot. We have a separate board that just does the balancing and it has a separate Ultra-capacitor power supply that can power the drive system for several minutes; long enough to put our kickstand down and sit. You can crash the main CPU and pull the batteries out and the robot will sit safely.
I don't know if self balancing is for sure better than statically stable, but I think it is less clear cut than what you imply.
-Benjie (Engineer at Anybots, obviously)
From a safety point of view as long as you've identified the possible hazards and done something which mitigates against them to some reasonable extent then that's probably good enough.
TLB, can you share anything you learned from the QA? Were there any unexpected use cases?
We redesigned QB to look more abstract, so it doesn't seem like a 3rd party in the conversation, and it's light (35 lbs) and padded so we just drive it full tilt all over the office without worrying about the robot or furniture.
We originally thought the main use case would be avoiding trips overseas, but we find ourselves using it to ask questions of people in the next office. Email and IM went through the same trend, so I guess that shouldn't be surprising.
Is it bullet-proof? bomb-proof? flame-proof?
No. But robots are replaceable -- people aren't. We think one of the most valuable services a robot can perform is to get blown up instead of its operator.
Is robot-to-robot interaction as good as person-to-robot?
Is that because when you're routing the audio directly from robot to robot, that it's technically difficult to cancel the extra transmission that is being sent from robot speaker to robot microphone?
Modern 3D cad software & stereolithography are amazing. You can get a student edition of SolidWorks, upload the 3D files to stereolithography.com, and get parts back in a week. Cost for smallish parts is tens to hundreds of dollars.
What OS does the robot computer run?
Great product BTW ;)