SoftBank, the giant telecom company, is venturing out into the world of robotics and transportation services. DealStreet Asia said that SoftBank is trying to transform itself into the ‘Berkshire Hathaway of the tech industry’ with the recent launch of a $100 billion technology fund.

UPDATED 5/24/17: SoftBank’s acquisition of 4.9% of the outstanding shares of Nvidia Corp.

First SoftBank bought Aldebaran, the maker of the Nao and Romeo robots, and redirected them to produce the Pepper robot which has been sold in the thousands to businesses as a guide, information source and order taker, then bigger partnerships with Foxconn and Alibaba to manufacture and market Pepper and other consumer products, and most recently to establishing the $100 billion technology fund.

Recognizing that the telecom services market has matured, SoftBank is putting their money where they can to participate in the new worlds of robotics and transportation as a service. $5 billion in Didi Chuxing, China’s largest ride-sharing company, is a perfect example.

Didi Chuxing

Didi, which already serves more than 400 million users across China, provides services including taxi hailing, private car-hailing, Hitch (social ride-sharing), DiDi Chauffeur, DiDi Bus, DiDi Test Drive, DiDi Car Rental and DiDi Enterprise Solutions to users in China via a smartphone application.

Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba are big investors — even Apple invested $1 billion.

The transformation of the auto industry into one focused on providing transportation services is a moving target with much news, talent movement, investment and widely-varying forecasts. But all signs show that it is booming and growing.

For more information on this subject, read the views of Chris Urmson, previous CTO of Google’s self-driving car group, in my article entitled: Transportation as a Service: a look ahead.

SoftBank Group Corp. acquired a $4 billion stake in Nvidia Corp. making it the fourth-largest shareholder of the graphics chipmaker.

Nvidia

Nvidia, a gaming chipmaker, has been receiving a lot of media attention for their GPU deep learning AI which they call ‘the next era of computing’ — with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world around their sensors.

Nvidia recently introduced the NVIDIA Isaac robot simulator, which utilizes sophisticated video-game and graphics technologies to train intelligent machines in simulated real-world conditions before they get deployed. The company also introduced a set of robot reference-design platforms that make it faster to build such machines using the NVIDIA Jetson platform.

“Robots based on artificial intelligence hold enormous promise for improving our lives, but building and training them has posed significant challenges. NVIDIA is now revolutionizing the robotics industry by applying our deep expertise in simulating the real world so that robots can be trained more precisely, more safely and more rapidly.”

Tutorial 1: Speech

Helpful hints:

Follow these steps to create a box that we could put our python code into, and have our robot speak: “Hello”. “Hello I am a robot”.

1. Right click the main section box and go to “add new box”
2. Create a name for the box
3. Input main image
4. Select the type of box

Now we’re having a look at the script. Go into the scripts and click ok. And there we have our NAO little box. If we click into it, we have the python code. What we are going to do is change some of the codes to get our robot to speak.

1. Double click the box
2. Select the piece of code you need to alter to get our robot to speak(“def onInput_onStart(self)”)
3. Take out the pass section
4. Type in “ttsproxy = ALProxy(“ALTextToSpeech”)”. (Make sure you get the comment in there).
5. Underneath that, we are going to put “ttsproxy.say” and add the comment “Hello, I am a robot”.

The first line could create an object that gives us access to the robot’s text to speech capabilities. This object is assigned to the variable ttsProxy. We can access the object later through the name ttsProxy. I am going to mount the top line, and the alspeech is there. The second line calls a different function site. This function takes an argument “Hello, I am a robot” and then he uses a string or sequence of characters between two double quoted marks. The robot will speak the string that will pass to the say message aloud.  There are your simple first steps into python and choreograph.

You can now, hopefully, get your NAO robot to talk by using your python programming skills. Now have a play with it’s behavior to see if you can get your NAO to say a longer sentence, or maybe even sing a song. Have a play, and use your imagination!

Tutorial 2: Walking

Helpful hints:

No we’re going get your robot to walk using Python. The NAO can be program to walk to any point using the in-build Python Programming Language instead of using the drag and drop boxes in the choregraphe. Python is more expressive and allows you to do things like computing trigonometric calculations on the robot.

1. Right click the main section box and go to “add new box”
2. Create a name for the box
3. Input main image
4. Select the type of box

First, we want our robot to stand up. Drag a stand up icon into the box. I am actually using the NAO key so the 3D robot in the robot view, and this because we need to put the robot on connecting so we can see what’s going on quite clearly. Oversee when you are using this on the real robot and never forget to trigger on the motors and connect everything up properly.

Open the Code Box

1. Go to “def onInput_onStart(self):”
2. Write “motionProxy = ALProxy(“ALMotion”)”
3. On the next line write “walkTo(0.2,0.0,0.0)”
4. End it with “self.onStopped()”

The first line is a proxy called ALmotion, which what is we created here, which allows us to call the motion functions up. The second line is the walkTo, which moves the robot to a specific distance. Now, look on the decimal places: see that .2 is X and Y and the radius, so he’s going to move .2 forward. Then if I start playing with the other numbers here, he’ll move to the Y radius and then to the other turning point as well. The final bit is the self.on. To stop this, we will call and tell the choregraphe to stop the procedure when it is at the end and just simple loop and loop and loop.

If we are good, we should see this now on the 3D NAO. So if I hit play, we can see it walking along. Well done guys, you can now get your NAO Robot to walk by using
your Python programming skills. Tread carefully!

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In an article about the pace of sales for the SoftBank Pepper robot, the China Post reported that Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision (AKA Foxconn) has sent a team of 30 to survey the US market for future acquisitions of robot production firms.

On December 27th in Japan, another 1,000 of the $1,600 Pepper robots were sold online in just one minute  — this makes 7,000 sales in the past 7 months. The next sale date is January 28th. Foxconn is currently producing 10 Pepper robots per hour at factories in Yantai (Shandong Province, China) and is working to improve efficiency and raise production to 15 per hour.

The Pepper app store for add-on applications offers a range of more than 200 free and paid apps. These apps range from quiz games, English picture books, hairstyle and clothing chat games, timers, dance instruction, lie detection, brain games, exercise trainers, animal sounds, food apps like beef bowl and noodle shop locators, piano playing, baseball talking, English for kids and many more.

Pepper, created initially by France-based Aldebaran to act as a “social companion for humans,” is advertised by SoftBank as not only being able to read human emotions, but also to respond to emotional cues such as laughing or frowning.

Softbank recently upgraded Pepper to be able to memorize and store data on human responses by using cloud-based artificial intelligence applications developed by the company’s subsidiary, Cocoro SB.

The newsworthy part of The China Post story was Hon Hai Precision’s 30-person US delegation to explore purchasing companies that can help Foxconn increase its production of this very complex robot. Once sales expand from Japan to China (and then the rest of the world), production will need to keep pace; hence the concern and exploratory shopping trip. The joint venture between Alibaba, Foxconn and SoftBank has provided hundreds of millions of dollars for production ramp-up costs, which are likely to include money for capital expenditures such as robots and other automation devices, as well as for acquisitions of companies that make those devices.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Foxconn and Alibaba invest in SoftBank Robotics as Pepper goes on sale in Japan
• 2016 will be a pivotal year for social robots
• Nestlé 1st big buyer of Softbank’s Pepper robot
• SoftBank invests in Fetch Robotics
• Japanese telcos vie for share in consumer robot-as-a-service business

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Yesterday SoftBank, FoxConn and Alibaba cemented a strong robotics initiative. Having acquired a majority stake in Aldebaran in 2012 (just after the Amazon acquisition of Kiva), SoftBank’s interest in robots has been cause for confusion. Do they want an ‘emotional’ humanoid robot or is their interest in Aldebaran a pathway towards a more practical robot?

Well, it looks like SoftBank is interested in everything robotic, as they lead the $20 million A round in logistics company Fetch Robotics and announce a joint robotics production partnership with Alibaba and FoxConn. The new SoftBank Robotics Holdings Corp. (SBRH) is valued at $590 million, with Alibaba and FoxConn paying $118 million each for 20% stakes in SBRH.

SoftBank, Alibaba and Foxconn will “build a structure to bring Pepper and other robotics businesses to global markets, and cooperate with the aim of spreading and developing the robotics industry on a worldwide scale.” said the SoftBank release. And Pepper, will finally go on sale to customers on June 20 after delays from projected availability in early 2015. Pepper will cost 198,000 yen (approx $1610) plus a monthly service fee.

Pepper has already appeared in SoftBank and Nestle stores in Japan. This next step could see Pepper in your home, although SoftBank believes that the primary initial customers will be institutional. With Japan’s aging population serving as an inspiration point, SoftBank have been exploring applications for Pepper in nursing homes, for example, conversing with patients with dementia.

Masayoshi Son, Chairman & CEO of SoftBank, said, “Since foundation, we have followed our corporate philosophy of ‘Information Revolution – Happiness for everyone.’ I am very excited that we will partner with Alibaba and Foxconn, and challenge to go global with our robotics business, including Pepper, as a first step to realize our vision. To bring more smiles to people around the world, we will aim to be the No.1 robotics company.”

Pepper is just the first step. Remember Terry Gou’s famous “1 million robots in FoxConn factories by 2014” statement? When Gou made the plan in 2011, finding 1 million factory robots would have meant doubling the number of industrial robots in the world. With the world coming out of an economic slump, Gou’s plan was too ambitious at the time. However, industrial robotics has been growing rapidly ever since, and nowhere faster than in China. At the same time, the cost of robotics systems is lowering and the range of applications for industrial and now service and logistics robots is increasing.

Terry Gou, Founder and CEO of Foxconn Technology Group, said, “Foxconn is pleased to be partnering with SoftBank and Alibaba as part of our effort to drive the advancement of robotics engineering. This is a strategic area of focus for our company as we continue to advance our capabilities in intelligent manufacturing and realize our Industry 4.0 vision.” He added, “As a leading global technology company, Foxconn is committed to investing in innovation that enables us to deliver cutting-edge solutions to our customers and that supports our goal of leveraging technology to bring greater convenience to the lives of consumers around the world.”

It’s clear that Gou realized that the world couldn’t build robots fast enough to meet his demand in 2011 and that the demand was only going to increase. FoxConn, Alibaba and SoftBank are the emerging dragons of robotics. Unicorns swept the tech world by storm last year after Aileen Lee, Cowboy Ventures, wrote a data-rich analysis of fast growth startups with mega valuations. Since then, some have looked a little further and found ‘dragons’ to be more rewarding. By some accounts a dragon company is one that returns 100% of fund value to a fund – or by some other accounts – it’s a company with a real $1B, and not just a $1B valuation.

Amazon’s acquisition of Kiva Systems for $775m in 2012 was the first shot in a campaign that is just ramping up. Google’s purchase of eight robotics and AI companies in 2013 left many people excited, but it was the forays into robotics by Facebook, Uber and other more stealthy companies that got me excited. Unicorn or Dragon – there are a lot of young companies with bucket loads of cash and a very loose understanding of what their grown up status is. If they stay true to their startup selves, their sole mission is to grow like crazy – see Paul Graham’s seminal 2012 piece “Startup = Growth” . Investing in robotics may not be a strategy so much as a byproduct.

Sadly, cementing this initiative may be the final sinking of Aldebaran, the visionary robotics company we used to know. All the other robots, including NAO, have been shelved in favor of Pepper, and SoftBank has taken over all the software development, leading to big staff cuts at Aldebaran. Rude Baguette quoted an anonymous Aldebaran executive as saying; “If we were paranoid, we’d say that FoxConn stole the hardware, SoftBank stole the software, and Aldebaran was sucked dry.”

While the globalization of robotics is good in the short term, I hope that SoftBank’s initiatives lead to more innovation in robotics and robotics businesses. Globalization will drive growth, but only up to a point. It’s what Peter Thiel describes as “1 to n”, where “n” is always finite. In his book, Zero to One, Thiel describes the importance of the new opportunity.

• Japan’s new robotics push: Funding and deregulation
• Chinese shopping for global robotics ventures
• Sino-Russian robotics boosted as Skolkovo signs $200M deal with Chinese investment fund
• China takes long view in funding robotics, innovation
• Why is Japan the first to get Dyson’s new 360 Eye?
• SoftBank invests in Fetch Robotics
• Nestlé 1st big buyer of Softbank’s Pepper robot
•  Bruno Maisonnier moves on from Aldebaran
• Foxconn and Google cooperating to make robots

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

UPDATED 2/23/15 Softbank announced a delay in sales of their Pepper robot from February until sometime during the summer. Aldebaran announced that CEO and Founder Bruno Maisonnier and Jean-Christophe Baillie have left Aldebaran as CEO and CSO respectively.

TOP EXECS LEAVE:

According to an Aldebaran press release today, Bruno Maisonnier has sold his remaining shares of Aldebaran to Softbank (giving Softbank 95% of the shares) and will leave the company effective March 4th. He will then be appointed Special Advisor to Masayoshi Son and SoftBank Robotics. A new Japanese CEO, Fumihide Tomizawa, will be appointed the new CEO of Aldebaran and take Maisonnier’s place.

Jean-Christophe Baillie, Aldebaran’s Chief Science Officer, left the company two weeks ago and started a new AI gaming company NovaQuark.

Neither Baillie nor Maisonnier would comment on anything to do with the change in CEOs nor the departure of the two top execs.

A French blog focused on startups, Rude Baguette, back in December, provided an preview spin to what was happening at Aldebaran and, if true, is indeed a very sad story entitled: The Sad Story of Softbank’s Aldebaran Robotics and its Emotionally Intelligent Robot.

PEPPER DELAYED:

There appears to have been a lot of spin attempting to explain the delays and executive changes up until today’s official press release about Maisonnier’s departure.

For example, according to Tech-In-Asia, an Indonesian-based tech portal for all of Asia, Softbank received far more pre-orders from developers than expected and consequently wants to focus on meeting those developers needs so that by the summer there will be many more applications for Pepper. Pepper is also scheduled to go on sale at Sprint stores in the US this summer at a price to be announced. In Japan, the selling price is 198,000 yen which converts to $1,670.

Many financial analysts got spun too and took fragments of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son’s fiscal year recap to suggest that delays might also involve the recently announced collaboration between Softbank and IBM’s cognitive computer system called Watson. Masayoshi Son said:

“[Regarding the] collaborative project with Watson and Pepper, we have started discussions with IBM, actually we have started testing. Watson and Pepper will make an interesting combination. AI will be enhanced further by combining the advanced technologies of [both].”

The Associated Press reported that SoftBank announced that it will incorporate artificial intelligence technology from IBM into its empathetic robot Pepper.

The AI engine “Watson” is already used in health care, travel and insurance services in English, but an adaptation was needed to make it work and think in Japanese, said Steve Gold, Vice President, IBM Watson Group. Unlike other cognitive technology that responds rather mechanically, Watson can learn over time like a human brain, and understands the concept of probability, which makes it sophisticated and more human-like for applications such as Pepper, according to IBM.

It’s also been reported by SoftBank that some Pepper robots will be sold this month but only to software developers who have reserved a robot. Consumers won’t be able to get a robot until sometime between June and August. Details of the sales plan were still undecided, and an announcement will be made later, Son said.

No mention was made regarding the Romeo project or the continuation of Nao robots and support of the Nao community however SoftBank has a $100 million investment in Aldebaran and will hopefully find a way to perpetuate the company and its robot products.

Pepper with Softbank Corp President Masayoshi Son.

Farewell and thank you to Bruno Maisonnier, the founder and CEO of Aldebaran Robotics, which is now 95% owned by Softbank. Softbank had previously acquired a majority stake in the ground breaking French robotics company which created the humanoid NAO. Together Aldebaran and Softbank Robotics developed Pepper, the ‘world’s first robot that reads emotions’. Pepper is on display in Softbank and Nestle stores in Japan and there are somewhat delayed plans for Pepper’s sale in the US later in 2015.

Fumihide Tomizawa will become the new Aldebaran CEO effective March 4th. Tomizawa is also President of  Softbank Robotics Corp, with a background in global sales and business development. Tomizawa believes that the strengthened collaboration between the two groups will ‘drive Aldebaran’s growth globally’.

Maisonnier has agreed to sell his remaining shares in Aldebaran, step down as CEO and will become a Special Advisor to Masayoshi Son, the President of Softbank Corp. In a press release from Aldebaran, February 23rd, Maisonnier says that he wants to step back from the day to day operations of growing a robotics company and reflect on the changes that have occurred in the world, analyzing and integrating them back into the world of robotics.

“Fundamental things happened in the world, political, human and technological ones, that need to be analyzed deeply and integrated into the founding bricks of the future robotics area. I need time to think, I have books to write, and people to meet around the world.”

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Pepper delayed until summer
• The second wave of social robots is here
• Nestlé 1st big buyer of Softbank’s Pepper robot
• On Pepper, Aldebaran and emotional robotics: Interview with Bruno Maisonnier
• Natural language: The de-facto interface convention for social robotics

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

IEEE/Spectrum Senior Editor Erico Guizzo describes in a recent post (and two videos) how Aldebaran’s two-year Pepper project is coming to fruition.

The article identifies some hitherto unknown facts excerpted below:

• SoftBank, a large Japanese telecom and Internet provider, will begin selling Peppers to Japanese consumers and businesses in February for 198,000 yen (about $1,700) plus a monthly subscription fee.
• Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, known for building iPhones and iPads for Apple, is producing the robots.
• SoftBank is pricing the robot very aggressively, which should help drive demand. Masayoshi Son, CEO, founder and Chairman of SoftBank, says he’s willing to lose money selling the robots until the company can ramp up volume and reduce costs—a strategy he’s used successfully in the mobile industry.
• Aldebaran has spent an intense two years developing Pepper for SoftBank. Engineers worked day and night, with no breaks for weekends or holidays. The head count ballooned to 500 people at one point, with offices expanding not only at the Paris headquarters but also in Tokyo, Boston, and Shanghai.
• Last September, SoftBank and Aldebaran held a developers conference in Tokyo, where they provided details about Pepper’s technology and a set of software-development tools. A thousand attendees showed up, 600 of whom preordered a robot and developers kit. [Apps designed and provided by these developers are expected to add scope to the Pepper arsenal of capabilities.]

Two videos are included in Guizzo’s article and show some of Pepper’s capabilities. The article itself provides a fascinating timeline for the development of Pepper and why Aldebaran was chosen instead of a Japanese developer.

The article and videos are highly recommended! Click here to see them.

Photo credits: Erico Guizzo.

Earlier this year Softbank announced the launch of Pepper, a robot created specifically for SoftBank and the Japanese market. Last week Nestlé announced that it will use Pepper to sell its Nescafé products.

Pepper is designed to be engaging and friendly, a companion able to communicate through an intuitive artificial intelligence interface that reads and interprets voice, touch and emotions. It has two arms and rolls around on wheels. It is 47 inches tall and weighs around 60 pounds.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine, the plan is to start slowly, with 20 Peppers by the end of the year. But Nestlé has big hopes for the little robots and expects to deploy them in 1,000 stores next year.

The Nestlé deal is just the beginning of SoftBank’s Pepper ambitions. SoftBank plans on selling the robots to Japanese consumers early next year, and it will make the Pepper available in the U.S. at retail stores of Sprint, the telecom carrier acquired last year by SoftBank in a $22 billion deal. Bruno Maisonnier, chief executive of Aldebaran, SoftBank’s French company developing the robot, expects to sell “millions” of the machines, he told Bloomberg News in June. “We’re betting that a huge number of people will buy the robots.”

Pepper is able to read and respond to human emotion – to read people’s facial expressions and listen to their tone of voice to analyse how they’re feeling.

“Pepper will be able to explain Nescafé products and services and engage in conversation with consumers. I hope that this new consumer engagement model will expand across the world as an example of Japanese innovation” said Kohzoh Takaoka, President and CEO of Nestlé Japan.

Last week I dropped by Aldebaran’s studio to get a glimpse of Pepper in action, and was pretty excited about this robot. But then I talked with Bruno Maisonnier, the CEO of Aldebaran. And then I got really excited: what Pepper represents is another iteration in the realization of the roboticists’ dream.

Aldebaran built Pepper for Japanese telecom company SoftBank, which will start selling the robot to consumers in Japan next February for about US $1,900. The robot will be produced by Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn (who manufactures the iPhone and other Apple products). So with the marketing presence, technical abilities, and hardware systems now at a consumer-grade quality, we’re one step closer to Rosie the Robot. Or Her. Or the Cylon uprising. Remains to be seen.

Emotional interaction, according to Bruno, is “everything.” We spoke briefly on June 13, 2014 and I was able to ask him about some of this technology, its socio-cultural impacts, and the future of this work for Aldebaran. Several years ago I had been hanging around the Paris studio of Aldebaran and had seen Romeo (and wrote about it and NAO in my book on robots), so I had some sense of what was coming, but I was not expecting the emphasis on affective computing methods that Pepper embodies.

MAISONNIER: Pepper is a fantastic dream I’ve had for years – an interactive robot you can have at home that’s still large enough to be a companion and not just a toy or a pet. At Aldebaran we have a specific concept. We want to help people with robots. We want them to be companion. To help people grow, have fun, and connect them to others.

So first you need to have a cute, nice robot – not just something to say, ‘Oh, that it is nice,’ but the essence of the robot is something that lives in your home. This is not for geeks, so design is our first and most essential part. We want a natural way to interact with the robot and not have a 200-page manual that people need to read. So we need people to be comfortable and interact easily with the robot. We humans have evolved to interact with other humanoid shapes. And sometimes, even without words you understand what the other person means and yes or no can be clearly indicated with body language. We can see if someone is saying yes but meaning no, and if you are saying yes when you are sad, or no when you are happy the message is totally different. So if I want the robot interaction to be natural the robot has to understand that.

MEADOWS: How do you do that? That’s a tall order.

MAISONNIER: These drivers for both understanding and expressing emotions are key to our design. NAO was the first emotional robot, with many possibilities, but many limitations because of its size. Pepper is a larger robot, and one of the consequences of this design decision is that it can move faster. You can have the robot follow you, or if it has to go into your bedroom to look for something it won’t take 20 minutes, and it will be able to open doors. If you want to interact with emotional context, then size is important; [Pepper’s size offers] a more human interaction, rather than talking with something the size of a mouse.

MEADOWS: Ok, but an android is a bad design for a robot because the function follows the form.

MAISSONNIER: But for Pepper the function is to interact with people. The majority of people in robotics are coming from industrial robotics; they’re building left-brain robots. I’m not interested in that. There are huge applications, but this is not what I’m interested in. We want right-brain robots for friends and companions – robots that are more like Jiminy Cricket.

MEADOWS: Here at Geppetto we feel much the same way. Now Romeo and NAO have legs. Pepper’s got wheels. Why?

MAISSONNIER: The main driver is that Pepper is an emotional robot, and we rarely use our legs for social interaction. While there are some detriments, like going up stairs, there are also benefits to the wheels, such as giving the robot a longer autonomy because it can carry a heavier battery. The goal of the robot is to help by teaching, being a health coach, monitoring, growing, etc. So it is more right-brain. Yes, the form follows function because the interaction with humans is the function. So you don’t need legs.

MEADOWS: So how are emotions used to guide the robot?

MAISSONNIER: Communication is emotion. You are an artist and know this. When you are speaking, only about 20-30% of what you say is in the words. But 70-80% is not words – all the other parts are emotions. So communication is emotion.

MEADOWS: What are the methods you’ve developed to convey this?

MAISSONNIER: We’ve invented an emotional engine that collects many different inputs and combines them in multi-modal approaches that use facial analysis, tone of voice, body language, gesture, small noises like laughter, and understanding the micro-signals that your body sends when you talk with someone. All that is feeding a higher level message, which might be that “she said yes but she means no” for example. This serves as the input to our dialogue engine, and we have an expressive engine that uses automatic body language in response. It has all the possibliities – hand, movements, sound, voice, etc – to express the correct message.

MEADOWS: Beautiful. What do you do with this platform?

MAISSONNIER: We’ve been speaking about the robot itself, and all that is part of our expertise platform, but on top of that are the applications so users or developers can build apps via our API. All that goes to the developers, who are then able to use it as they want. There are many ways to use this. For example, if you are designing an application to play chess, you can use the API to deliver messages on your chess program. The system can appear frustrated, or sense frustration at key moments in the game.

The developers are core to our strategy. Aldebaran has an app store and we confirm the quality of the app so you can download this to users, free of charge, who can download the application from the store. We have an atelier [a french term between workshop, gallery, and studio] where everyone can enter, meet with robots, experiment with them, and play with our applications. This will be the home of the developers.

MEADOWS: I love this! Perfect. Are they only online or can I visit them?

MAISSONNIER: We will have an Aldebaran Atelier in Paris, on 26 June, 2014 and two more will open in Tokyo in August. By 2015 we will have two in the US (New York and California).

MEADOWS: Changing the subject a little, you have a robot that has some incredible surveillant abilities. I think there’s a risk here in that systems may not respect privacy, or may be used for ends that don’t align with the end-user. As I’ve written about on RoboHub, where I ask if surveillance is the new business model for consumer robotics, Andy Rubin is taking the robotics effort in the same direction he took the Android effort. This not only changes the landscape for Aldebaran, but it means that you have to address questions of privacy. What Is Google doing?

MAISSONNIER: I don’t know. It is opening up the [robotics] market. They will need some time before having ready robots because the culture of software is not the culture of hardware. Google is a software company, but though they have bought these companies this is not an immediate solution. Building a $1m robot is not the same as building a $1k robot .. they will need time. Their business model, as you said, is to sell advertisements. Do you want to have a spying robot at home?

MEADOWS: Well, most of us don’t seem to mind. Many people still use Google. Why is spying on me with my email different from spying on me with my robot?

MAISSONNIER: One is autonomous. If you send your mail you don’t see it flying around your house checking your books, checking your clothes. It has to be friendly, but as important is that it needs to be your friend that can protect you. You have to be sure it is on your side.

MEADOWS: Autonomy and invisibility are quite different. And a robot can do things that a user may not perceive. After all, email could be called a spybot as easily as a bots.txt file.

MAISSONNIER: This kind of thing will exist. If other robots like Aldebaran exist then between a spying robot and a non-spying robot, people will choose the right one. People will chose and we will settle the rules that we don’t want spying robots. I don’t want them, you dont’ want them. We would put a physical bridge, a switch, that will block communication and ensure privacy. That way people can say, “I want to authorize my robot to communicate with the outside world or not.”

MSM: I hope so. Where will people be able to find Pepper?

MAISSONNIER: Thousands of Peppers will be in SoftBank stores in Japan.

MEADOWS: I understand it will be about $2000, correct?

MAISSONNIER: Yes, for Pepper standalone, after that you can get insurance, monitor modules, repair modules, content, etc. These added components can be important. For me, the next step is to add content, applications in our application store – so a huge community of people will become interested in joining our adventure.

And what an adventure it will be. We look forward to seeing what great inventions Aldebaran turns out next.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• SoftBank + Aldebaran = Pepper
• NAO Next Gen now available for a wider audience
• My robot is smelling my dirty laundry (or, Notes on privacy, PRISM, and home service robotics)
• Robot love: Spike Jonze’s new sci-fi film ‘Her’ may be closer to reality than you think
• Is surveillance the new business model for consumer robotics?
• Deep Learning creating jobs in Apps, wearable tech and robotics

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The latest creation from Aldebaran Robotics – Pepper – is designed to live with humans. It doesn’t clean or cook but it talks, is mobile, can read emotions, and reacts autonomously to “make people happy.”

Pepper was created specifically for SoftBank and the Japanese market, and is designed to be engaging and friendly, a companion able to communicate through an intuitive artificial intelligence interface that reads and interprets voice, touch and emotions. It has two arms and rolls around on wheels. It is 47 inches tall and weighs around 60 pounds.

Pepper can already be seen greeting customers in two SoftBank stores in Japan and will be available for purchase beginning February, 2015 at a price of $1,925 (198,000 Japanese yen) (apps and monthly subscription fees not included). Pepper will have 12 hours of battery life.

UPDATE June 10, 2014 To achieve the low price point that Softbank wanted for Pepper, Aldebaran chose Foxconn as their manufacturing partner.

AN EMOTIONAL COMPANION

“Pepper tries to understand your emotions. If you burst out laughing, he will know you are in a good mood. If you frown, Pepper will understand that something is bothering you. Programmed to understand joy, surprise, anger, doubt and sadness by analyzing facial expressions, body language and spoken words, Pepper can also express emotions by body language, funny gestures or his voice.”

Pepper can make jokes, dance and amuse people thanks to a wide variety of entertainment capabilities, some of which are being developed in cooperation with start-up Yoshimoto Robotics Laboratory, Inc., a Yoshimoto Kogyo Group company. Aldebaran is continuing to work to let Pepper have the capability to learn through daily interactions with people – a feature planned for the commercial launch.

A variety of applications created by developers around the world are also scheduled to be available by the launch date. The Aldebaran software development kit (SDK) will be provided for creating Pepper apps, and this coming September, a Tech Festival is planned to provide specifications, development methods and other details to give developers a head start to be ready for Pepper’s February, 2015 launch.

SOFTBANK GROUP

SoftBank provides a range of mobile and fixed-line communications and Internet services. SoftBank acquired Sprint in 2013 and became a leading global carrier with over 100 million subscribers.

In 2012, SoftBank acquired 78.5% of Aldebaran Robotics (of Nao and Romeo fame), a fact that has been hidden to the public until now. Pepper is their first joint effort – and it is a very ambitious and extensive one. SoftBank’s extended vision for Pepper can be seen in this promotional document:



Robot dances are often the first demo made by roboticists eager to showcase their hardware, we’ve covered many robot moves in the past. The dance in this video is impressive because of the complex motions involved and difficult balancing acts, it’s also very artistic.

To make a robot dance, you usually pre-program a set of motor commands and timings, or a so-called choreography. To start the dance, press the robot’s “start” button and launch the music at the same time. When multiple robots are dancing together, you usually need a wireless signal to wake all the robots at the same time, so the dance seems synchronized. Here the maestro might be Bruno Maisonnier’s red NAO. In most cases, robots do not listen to the music or react to one another, although there is research being done (see paper by Xia and colleagues @ CMU) to make robot dancing fully autonomous. Here are some other examples of dancers that can actually feel the beat.

http://youtu.be/VTsUim_8q9g

Even if dancing robots can’t yet make you twirl on the dance floor, they are a great vector to get students excited about robotics. I vividly remember watching QRIO dance way back when Sony was still making it. Aldebaran, the company behind the NAO robot, is actually organizing a “Robotics Idol” dance competition in California, I would have loved to participate in that as a kid!

People appear willing to pay more to get the extra features of an iPad or tablet. Thus e-readers were a device for a particular moment in time that has been replaced by a newer technology. This process is analogous to secretaries being replaced by word processing machines and then by PCs, WordStar and Microsoft Word.

Temporary, Incremental and Transitional Solutions

CyPhyWorks new EASE drone.

A great example of a temporary solution is CyPhy Works‘ new pair of drones (EASE and PARC): timely, innovative and providing solutions for specific needs with a transitional solution: a tether.

CyPhy Works began with funding to research methods to view and analyze bridges and other potential security targets but soon concluded that conventional drones couldn’t handle the payload of cameras and instruments, sensor processing, security, and flight duration needed to get the job done.

“The biggest problem with [surveillance] robots today is they send them inside a building, they go down the stairs, no communications; they go around the corner, no comms. You go into a bunker and it’s got some rebar and you don’t get comms,” CEO Helen Greiner says.

“The problems are power and communications. It all comes down to that.”

“When you have a flying vehicle of a size, a diameter that can fit through a door comfortably, it will last for, you know, 20 minutes. And then the customers will want to carry something else, and that something else requires power, and it weighs the robot down and it ends up lasting 15 minutes, and somebody else puts something on and it ends up lasting 10 minutes, and none of it’s acceptable. You would have to be small and fly for at least a few hours to make it useful. With the filament, basically you get high-definition video images all the time, and then it has the added advantages in that it can’t be jammed, it can’t be spoofed, it can’t be intercepted. And it has unlimited power.”

Hence the tether, a clever adaption to today’s limitations enabling the drones to fly for as long as necessary, stream high-def images and sensor data to the base station for processing (instead of onboard), and with security assured (from the device at least) to the base station. [As an aside, the tether is enhanced by having the spooler autonomously controlled by the drone instead of the base station thereby reducing the chances for entanglement. Should it happen to snag or break, the vehicle can use its battery power to fly back to its point of origin.]

An example of an incremental product is the slow but steady movement toward autonomous cars. First there was adaptive cruise control (2001) which automatically adjusts your speed depending on the car in front. Next came active braking (2004), which could detect if a crash was imminent and apply the brakes if necessary. This was followed by lane assist (2008) and self parking systems. The 2014 Mercedes-Benz S Class by Daimler AG (ETR:DAI), will be the first car capable of fully driving itself (under certain minor limitations) by adding new rear-end sensors, pedestrian awareness and driver alertness cameras. The system will rely on 26 separate sensors, including radar and stereo cameras, to monitor traffic and pedestrians up to 650 feet in front. “Steering Assist” will steer in stop-and-start situations and at speeds up to 124 mph; it will slow entering curves but stay in its lane until the driver takes over. [This is just the beginning folks!]

Other incremental and transitionally useful consumer products include CaddyTrek‘s follow-the-golfer carts, Zodiac Marine & Pool‘s Polaris pool cleaners, Husqvarna‘s lawn mower (STO:HUSQ-B) and iRobot‘s (NASDAQ:IRBT) family of floor care products – all examples of early-adopter products for the tech savvy offering some level of utility for their stated tasks. 3D printers also fall into this category with a range of products from $300 on up to $1 million. The stocks of these companies have been highlighted by many of the analysts in recent months as great buys: Stratasys (NASDAQ:SSYS) (which just acquired competitor Objet), 3D Systems (NYSE:DDD) and Arcam AB (STO:ARCM). All three stocks have doubled in the last year. Alas, MakerBot, the do-it-yourself (DIY) phenom, is still privately held.

Really Great Inventions

The da Vinci surgical system by Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ:ISRG), Kiva’s warehouse robots and goods-to-man concept (Kiva was acquired by Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) earlier this year), and Liquid Robotic‘s wave gliders are present-day robotics stars. Each is unique and disruptive to the way things were done and each is just a precursor to how things will be in the near future.

Less well known inventions are the inroads the larger industrial robot makers have been making with lightweight single and dual-armed robots capable of working alongside their human counterparts – without a protective barrier between them. Yaskawa Electric (TYO:6506), ABB (NYSE:ABB), KUKA (ETR:KU2), ST Robotics and Universal Robots all have new products making waves in the industry. Rethink Robotics‘ Baxter is the newest player in this trend toward robotic co-workers.

Toys, Kits and Academic Training Bots

WowWee’s Femsapien, Parrot’s AR.Drone quadcopter and Aldebaran’s Nao.

Toys like Parrot‘s (EPA:PARRO) AR.Drone quadcopter (a present-day global hit) and WowWee‘s line of robotic toys and pets (Robosapien, Roboraptor, etc.) have sold millions of units. Aldebaran‘s Nao robots have a large following in high schools and colleges partly because of their enticing humanoid form, their involvement in robotic soccer games, and their high functionality for low cost.

But there are also toys and other robotic items that whither because the developer didn’t want to be diverted into a business when all he/she wanted was to build something fresh and fun. Many of the tele-presence devices getting crowd-funding in recent months are fun-tech gimmick products with no long-term business plan or even interest in having one.

Don’t get me wrong. Robotic toys are likely to be the precursor to more useful robotic inventions – perhaps from the same inventors. But there is definitely an explosion of this kind of robotic toy – SWIVL, Autom, Sphero, Romo and Botiful being examples.

Within academia, industrial robot companies have donated and made available low-cost robots and teacher’s guides for high schools, junior colleges, tech schools and universities for years to help stimulate STEM careers and robotics in particular. Staubli’s Robot House at SCI-Arc, a leading architectural school in Southern California, is an example. But in recent years, more humanoid and open source robots are becoming affordable. Also helping speed up development are open source software resources such as Willow Garage’s ROS.

Healthcare Robotics

In a few recent articles in robotics and healthcare media, including one by the editor of Robotics Review, there has been a call for leadership – for national direction in strategic areas of the robotics industry, particularly in the area of healthcare. Henrik Christensen and the team involved with the publication and presentation of “A Roadmap for U.S. Robotics: from Internet to Robotics” began the process and it has slowly gained momentum.

Early last year President Obama established the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Initiative which included a section for robotics. The initiative was funded with $500 million, 10% earmarked for robotics. The scope of his directive was to insure that critical (defense and security) products were manufactured by Americans in America. Tom Clancy’s new book “Threat Vector” shows just how critical this can be in his fictional account of a virus planted on a foreign-made hard drive component installed in an American-made disk integrated into a high-security American defense installation.

Other countries – the EU, Korea and Japan in particular – have public-private consortiums working on difficult problems for which solutions are in the national interest, hence the reason why they are funded. Other than the American Manufacturing Initiative, American doesn’t have any such strategically-funded national interest projects (except military and defense).

To my way of thinking, advancements in healthcare shouldn’t be held up or otherwise thwarted because of patents, research funding or other corporate or personal (selfish) rationalizations. Patient care should be paramount, profits and profitability secondary. But that’s not the way it is at present nor will it change without political intervention.

I’d like to suggest a change similar to what Henry Ford did when confronted with a similar situation 100 years ago.

In the early years of automobile development, a group owned the rights to a two-cycle gasoline engine patent. By controlling this patent, they were able to monopolize the industry and force car manufacturers to adhere to their demands or risk a lawsuit. In 1911, Henry Ford won a challenge to the patent. The result was that the patent became virtually worthless and a new association – which would eventually become the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association – was formed. The new association instituted a cross-licensing agreement among all U.S. auto manufacturers: although each company would develop technology and file patents, those patents were shared openly and without the exchange of money between all the manufacturers. By the time the U.S. entered WWII, 92 Ford patents and 515 patents from other companies were being shared between these manufacturers, without any exchange of money – or lawsuits. The best braking system was shared by all as was the best window wiper, and many, many other inventions passed freely from one car company to the others. The result was that the user – the car driver – benefitted with the safest and best cars, no matter the brand – and the auto industry flourished as a result.

If an association like the MVMA – with a charismatic and visible leader – were to be launched in the medical robotics arena, perhaps the wonderful new inventions we’ve all read about would become available quicker and with less constraints, patents, and other hold-ups. Patients – you and I – care-givers and healthcare systems would all share in the benefits and lives saved which would come from focused development speed-ups in the robotics-related healthcare marketplace.

Travis Deyle, is a postdoc researcher at Duke and a recent PhD from GA Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering where he was a member of the Healthcare Robotics Lab and a frequent blogger at Hizook.com. Fortunate for us, he kept a file of 2011 venture funded robotic projects and turned it into an interesting chart:

Source: Travis Deyle, Hizook.com

This chart may not reflect all of the equity investment activity in the robotics market but it is a far cry from the $6.9 billion that went into 997 venture funded deals in web and Internet startup companies over the course of 2011. This chart also doesn’t mention the many acquisitions, strategic partnerships and mergers that occurred. The most recent is the acquisition of French Cybernetix by Technip, an oil resources and ROV service provider to the industry.

Deyle describes why he thinks VC funding for robotics is a tough nut to crack:

Robotics companies have large capital requirements for robot hardware, few potential acquirers, and almost no “Google-scale” breakout success stories (i.e., IPOs). One of the best known robotics companies, iRobot, has a market cap of just $700 million. This makes robotics a difficult sell to your typical VC firm.

Although these 14 companies represent just a sliver of the 100+ robotic startups that are getting funded in one way or another, they do offer insight into those that are of interest to the venture capital community. Of the companies listed in the chart, it is interesting to note that two are foreign and the biggest investment is for a robotic hair implant device for balding men.

VGo telepresence robot, Harvest Automation’s nursery robot, Liquid Robotics’ wave glider.

1. Restoration Robotics and their new ARTAS System provide image-guided technology for hair follicle harvesting. It’s a massive market, hence the large investment. They received US FDA clearance mid-2011 and treated their first patient in August, 2011.
2. Redzone Robotics was featured by Pres. Obama last year and, in addition to the 2011 funding, received an additional $8.5 million just a few days ago. Their wastewater systems – pipe inspection and cleaning robots – provide critical environmental assistance to municipalities, contractors and engineering firms. Again, a big investment for a big marketplace.
3. Liquid Robotics and their wave gliders have been much in the news. They presently have four wave gliders traveling different paths across the Pacific and making their data available to scientists and lay people worldwide. Their gliders are valuable additions to the arsenals of scientific and environmental agencies, fisheries, aquaculture, pollution detection and resource discovery companies as well as defense/security and law enforcement agencies. Hence the large investment.
4. Aldebaran Robotics, a French company, makes the Nao and newer Romeo robots which they sell to schools and for robotic soccer and other competitions to promote STEM education, a limited but growing marketplace, hence the midrange venture investment.
5. Medrobotics is a Carnegie Mellon spin-off focused on surgical applications using flexible snake-like robotic devices for minimally-invasive procedures. Like other medical start-ups, there is a long lead time for product refinement and FDA clearances. Medrobotics has received funding in almost every year since it’s inception in 2005.
6. Tibion Corporation, is a Sunnyvale, CA start-up, providing bionic legs for stroke rehabilitation. This form of robotic-assisted rehab therapy, therapy with the use of an exoskeleton, is a big step forward from the $300,000+ fixed-position machines previously used.
7. MakerBot Industries, the 3-D printer maker for the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) crowd, and featured at Maker Faires held all over the country to mammoth and enthusiastic crowds, services the DIY, prototyping, small run, and hobby communities while more expensive 3-D printers support the additive manufacturing sector. The Maker Faire Bay Area DIY innovation festival will be held in May in San Mateo, CA.
8. Harvest Automation has a lot of good things going for it: (1) many of it’s investors are the very same ag businesses that will be buyers of the robots, (2) although focused on nursery automation to begin their business, they are poised to broaden their scope into many other facets of the ag industry, and (3) the key players are experienced in the business of robotics.
9. Orbotix is the developer of the sphero smartphone-controlled robotic ball. The ball has no buttons, no battery box, no socket or cord for a charger (although it does have a cup-like charging dock). Shake it and it glows; put it on the floor and direct it anywhere with your iPhone. It’s a Bluetooth-based, wirelessly-charged device first shown at the 2011 CES in Las Vegas. 
10. ThinkLabs is an Indian education company focused on science and technology. It uses simple robots, sensor enhanced devices, and robot competitions to provide hands-on inspiration for students taking their courses.
11. Precise Path Robotics began as an entity to participate in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and has migrated it’s navigation system into robotic lawn mowing and other robotic devices to provide maintenance and conditioning robots for the golf course market.
12. VGo Communications has thus far produced 2,000 telepresence robots and plans to lower the cost to near $2,000 in their next production run. You may have seen the ABC News stories about the high school student who couldn’t leave home but nevertheless, through the use of the VGo, attended the local high school, piloting his VGo from class to class and up and down the school elevator.
13. Aethon is a Pittsburgh, PA based mobile robot company that makes robotic carts and tugs for the hospital industry… tugs to pickup and deliver food, medicine, waste materials and general supplies. The company began in 2001 and has had many rounds of financing. This round of $1.74 million was less than the $2.5 million targeted.
14. CyPhy Works, a maker of small unmanned flying robots used to inspect bridges and other public infrastructure, has also received federal grants and research awards to develop its technology for both commercial, governmental and defense clients.

Source: Travis Deyle, Hizook.com

This chart may not reflect all of the equity investment activity in the robotics market but it is a far cry from the $6.9 billion that went into 997 venture funded deals in web and Internet startup companies over the course of 2011. This chart also doesn’t mention the many acquisitions, strategic partnerships and mergers that occurred. The most recent is the acquisition of French Cybernetix by Technip, an oil resources and ROV service provider to the industry.

Deyle describes why he thinks VC funding for robotics is a tough nut to crack:

Robotics companies have large capital requirements for robot hardware, few potential acquirers, and almost no “Google-scale” breakout success stories (i.e., IPOs). One of the best known robotics companies, iRobot, has a market cap of just $700 million. This makes robotics a difficult sell to your typical VC firm.

Although these 14 companies represent just a sliver of the 100+ robotic startups that are getting funded in one way or another, they do offer insight into those that are of interest to the venture capital community. Of the companies listed in the chart, it is interesting to note that two are foreign and the biggest investment is for a robotic hair implant device for balding men.

VGo telepresence robot, Harvest Automation’s nursery robot, Liquid Robotics’ wave glider.

1. Restoration Robotics and their new ARTAS System provide image-guided technology for hair follicle harvesting. It’s a massive market, hence the large investment. They received US FDA clearance mid-2011 and treated their first patient in August, 2011.
2. Redzone Robotics was featured by Pres. Obama last year and, in addition to the 2011 funding, received an additional $8.5 million just a few days ago. Their wastewater systems – pipe inspection and cleaning robots – provide critical environmental assistance to municipalities, contractors and engineering firms. Again, a big investment for a big marketplace.
3. Liquid Robotics and their wave gliders have been much in the news. They presently have four wave gliders traveling different paths across the Pacific and making their data available to scientists and lay people worldwide. Their gliders are valuable additions to the arsenals of scientific and environmental agencies, fisheries, aquaculture, pollution detection and resource discovery companies as well as defense/security and law enforcement agencies. Hence the large investment.
4. Aldebaran Robotics, a French company, makes the Nao and newer Romeo robots which they sell to schools and for robotic soccer and other competitions to promote STEM education, a limited but growing marketplace, hence the midrange venture investment.
5. Medrobotics is a Carnegie Mellon spin-off focused on surgical applications using flexible snake-like robotic devices for minimally-invasive procedures. Like other medical start-ups, there is a long lead time for product refinement and FDA clearances. Medrobotics has received funding in almost every year since it’s inception in 2005.
6. Tibion Corporation, is a Sunnyvale, CA start-up, providing bionic legs for stroke rehabilitation. This form of robotic-assisted rehab therapy, therapy with the use of an exoskeleton, is a big step forward from the $300,000+ fixed-position machines previously used.
7. MakerBot Industries, the 3-D printer maker for the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) crowd, and featured at Maker Faires held all over the country to mammoth and enthusiastic crowds, services the DIY, prototyping, small run, and hobby communities while more expensive 3-D printers support the additive manufacturing sector. The Maker Faire Bay Area DIY innovation festival will be held in May in San Mateo, CA.
8. Harvest Automation has a lot of good things going for it: (1) many of it’s investors are the very same ag businesses that will be buyers of the robots, (2) although focused on nursery automation to begin their business, they are poised to broaden their scope into many other facets of the ag industry, and (3) the key players are experienced in the business of robotics.
9. Orbotix is the developer of the sphero smartphone-controlled robotic ball. The ball has no buttons, no battery box, no socket or cord for a charger (although it does have a cup-like charging dock). Shake it and it glows; put it on the floor and direct it anywhere with your iPhone. It’s a Bluetooth-based, wirelessly-charged device first shown at the 2011 CES in Las Vegas.
10. ThinkLabs is an Indian education company focused on science and technology. It uses simple robots, sensor enhanced devices, and robot competitions to provide hands-on inspiration for students taking their courses.
11. Precise Path Robotics began as an entity to participate in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and has migrated it’s navigation system into robotic lawn mowing and other robotic devices to provide maintenance and conditioning robots for the golf course market.
12. VGo Communications has thus far produced 2,000 telepresence robots and plans to lower the cost to near $2,000 in their next production run. You may have seen the ABC News stories about the high school student who couldn’t leave home but nevertheless, through the use of the VGo, attended the local high school, piloting his VGo from class to class and up and down the school elevator.
13. Aethon is a Pittsburgh, PA based mobile robot company that makes robotic carts and tugs for the hospital industry… tugs to pickup and deliver food, medicine, waste materials and general supplies. The company began in 2001 and has had many rounds of financing. This round of $1.74 million was less than the $2.5 million targeted.

1. CyPhy Works, a maker of small unmanned flying robots used to inspect bridges and other public infrastructure, has also received federal grants and research awards to develop its technology for both commercial, governmental and defense clients.

“Smart” (robotic-like) products profess to add value, assure safety, and provide convenience through connectivity — claims that in many cases are true, particularly with in-car infotainment systems.

3,100 exhibitors, 1.86 million sq ft of exhibition space, 153,000 attendees of which 34,000 were international and only one good food stand (Nathan’s hot dogs – you can’t ruin a Nathan’s hot dog). Massive crowding, slow moving, loud, extravagant and wonderful. Thin TVs – so thin they looked like they couldn’t stand up by themselves without bending – 3D with and without glasses, projectors, smart appliances, and apps for everything from TVs to refrigerators to scales.

Consumer robotics represented a very small part of CES but had the same combination of glitz, glamour, marvelous stuff, misrepresentation, uninspiring products and hidden gems, just like the rest of CES. Robotics Trends hosted a Robotics Tech Zone but the action was well beyond their purview because many of the companies wanted to emphasize their consumer orientation instead of highlighting the robotic.

Romibo

One of the most interesting areas was focused on Digital Health – where one could easily see benefits from sensors and smart apps providing data for the cloud to process and selectively inform doctors or users of the results, and progress over time. The highlight of the area was Life Technologies $150,000 Ion Proton Genetic Sequencer, which, by the end of the year, will be able to sequence an entire human genome for about $1,000 in a few hours. Digital Health was also the only area where research was shown and where the NSF/Carnegie Mellon University Quality of Life Technology booth was located, an area packed with healthcare inventions and eager young inventors. Few fell under the robotics umbrella (most were digital apps and devices) except these three:

1. Romibo, a do-it-yourself robot for therapy, education and play.
2. PerMMA, a personal mobility and manipulation appliance for power wheelchair users.
3. Myomo, rehabilitation robotics and interactive gaming systems for stroke victim rehab.

Certainly the most publicity went to Tosy Robotics, a Vietnamese manufacturer of robotic and high-tech toys, for the launch of  their new mRobo, a transformer-type boom-box entertainment robot with a two-hour meet-and-greet by teen heartthrob Justin Bieber.

Tosy also showed their other robotic toys: DiscoRobo, a dance to the beat with lights toy, and Sket-Robo, a robot that draws.

Cubelets, $160, by Modular Robotics, had a small booth and a big hit for their educational robot construction kit. These magnetic blocks can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. Since each cube has unique functions, you can build robots that drive around on a tabletop and respond to light, sound and temperature.

Parrot, a French manufacturer of hands-free wireless devices for cars and phones, was the hit of CES 2010 with their AR.Drone, a quadcopter with two cameras that is driven from an iPhone or iTouch. This year they upgraded the camera to enable hi-def video, improved their software for still and video capture, and added a range of games and customization accessories… all shown at a huge outdoor booth at CES.

iRobot launched their Roomba, Scooba, Verro and Looj vacuums, floor washers, pool cleaners and gutter cleaning robots at previous CES’s, but at this CES they only had office visits for demos and marketing where they were also showing off their AVA concept robot and promoting their partnership with InTouch Health, a provider of telepresence collaboration for doctors, nurses, paramedics and patients and a place where iRobot’s lower cost AVA robots could be armed with InTouch Health’s hospital experiences and enable the resulting systems to be available to a larger audience.

More than 7 million robot vacuum cleaners have been sold thus far with real competition for iRobot showing up recently with a flurry of similar cleaners – all displayed at CES:

Look-alikes: (from left to right): Techko Maid, Agait, Ecovacs, xRobot, iclebo and Ottoro

iRobot Roomba, LG RoboKing, Samsung Tango The big news is that both Samsung and Ecovacs (above) offer a self-emptying dustbin option.

But LG and Samsung entered the arena, and, with their large consumer client base, vast manufacturing and marketing resources, and an array of add-on features, has been selling their vacuums in Asia and Europe; not yet in the US. iRobot should feel their presence very soon.

Another consumer products manufacturer (of home theater systems), South Korean Moneual, also sells a robot vacuum and a more interesting $1,000 home mobile air filter / security device. The mobile air filter is also designed as a safety system for the elderly, it connects with a wrist band that can detect a fall and can call for help if one occurs.

A skinless Pleo showing it’s complex innards

Pleo, the baby robotic dinosaur, was represented by both the seller (Innvo Labs) and the manufacturer (Jetta Co. Ltd.) that reincarnated the old bankrupt company, and was showing the new Pleo rb (reborn), with accessories and software enhancements.

Amongst the pseudo robotic products were three which act as a pedestal for the camera and video functions of iPhones and swivel or have wheels or tracks to move as wirelessly directed:

1. Xybotyx, a Colorado start-up, is launching a $111 wheeled platform and app for your iPhone that lets you drive your phone wirelessly.
2. Swivl by Satarii, is a $159 stationary platform for your iPhone camera or video. It swivels to follow you or can be remote controlled.
3. Romo by Romotive, is a $99 tracter-like iPhone holder which can stream video to your PC and also dance to music on your iPhone.

Karotz, by Violet (a subsidiary of Aldebaran, the builder of the Nao robot), announced the launch of their Karotz “intelligent internet companion” into the U.S. market with a $99 special price for the rabbit and 30% off all accessories. Ideal for learning how to develop apps with voice recognition and Internet connectivity, and now with Aldebaran stewardship, this interesting little device may hold a key to the future of human-robot communication.

Other vendors under the robotic umbrella included:

(from left to right): Windoro, Sphero, Ladybug, Mantarobot, Paro, Crawler

• Windoro, from Ilshim Global, a window washing device.
• Sphero, by Orbotix, a robotic ball controlled from your phone.
• Ladybug, by JS-Robotics, a bug-like mobile device with collision avoidance sensors.
• Mantaro telepresence robot, a mobile Skype platform using your own iPhone or iPad.
• Paro, the therapeutic furry seal-like bot for hospitals and eldercare.
• Crawler, by Topy Industries, an experimental tractor-like base for search and rescue.

Not exactly robotic, but for prototyping and DIY’ers, there were three 3D printers of note: Makerbot announced their new $1,750 two-color 3D printer, Essential Dynamics showed their $3,000 Imagine Printer that prints with a whole host of materials, including food, chocolates, silicone, cheese, epoxy, organics, etc., and the Cube from Cubify which offers both a $1,300 3D printer and also a service for those that just want to send their designs in and get back the finished product.

So there you have it — 25+ robot vendors focused on consumer products — less than 1% of CES — and perhaps only one or two to rave about. Maybe next year….

“Smart” (robotic-like) products profess to add value, assure safety, and provide convenience through connectivity… claims that in many cases are true, particularly with in-car infotainment systems.

3,100 exhibitors, 1.86 million sq ft of exhibition space, 153,000 attendees of which 34,000 were international and only one good food stand (Nathan’s hot dogs – you can’t ruin a Nathan’s hot dog). Massive crowding, slow moving, loud, extravagant and wonderful. Thin TVs – so thin they looked like they couldn’t stand up by themselves without bending – 3D with and without glasses, projectors, smart appliances, and apps for everything from TVs to refrigerators to scales.

Consumer robotics represented a very small part of CES but had the same combination of glitz, glamour, marvelous stuff, misrepresentation, uninspiring products and hidden gems, just like the rest of CES. Robotics Trends hosted a Robotics Tech Zone but the action was well beyond their purview because many of the companies wanted to emphasize their consumer orientation instead of highlighting the robotic.

Romibo

One of the most interesting areas was focused on Digital Health – where one could easily see benefits from sensors and smart apps providing data for the cloud to process and selectively inform doctors or users of the results, and progress over time. The highlight of the area was Life Technologies $150,000 Ion Proton Genetic Sequencer, which, by the end of the year, will be able to sequence an entire human genome for about $1,000 in a few hours. Digital Health was also the only area where research was shown and where the NSF/Carnegie Mellon University Quality of Life Technology booth was located, an area packed with healthcare inventions and eager young inventors. Few fell under the robotics umbrella (most were digital apps and devices) except these three:

1. Romibo, a do-it-yourself robot for therapy, education and play.
2. PerMMA, a personal mobility and manipulation appliance for power wheelchair users.
3. Myomo, rehabilitation robotics and interactive gaming systems for stroke victim rehab.

Certainly the most publicity went to Tosy Robotics, a Vietnamese manufacturer of robotic and high-tech toys, for the launch of  their new mRobo, a transformer-type boom-box entertainment robot with a two-hour meet-and-greet by teen heartthrob Justin Bieber.

Tosy also showed their other robotic toys: DiscoRobo, a dance to the beat with lights toy, and Sket-Robo, a robot that draws.

Cubelets, $160, by Modular Robotics, had a small booth and a big hit for their educational robot construction kit. These magnetic blocks can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. Since each cube has unique functions, you can build robots that drive around on a tabletop and respond to light, sound and temperature.

Parrot, a French manufacturer of hands-free wireless devices for cars and phones, was the hit of CES 2010 with their AR.Drone, a quadcopter with two cameras that is driven from an iPhone or iTouch. This year they upgraded the camera to enable hi-def video, improved their software for still and video capture, and added a range of games and customization accessories… all shown at a huge outdoor booth at CES.

iRobot launched their Roomba, Scooba, Verro and Looj vacuums, floor washers, pool cleaners and gutter cleaning robots at previous CES’s, but at this CES they only had office visits for demos and marketing where they were also showing off their AVA concept robot and promoting their partnership with InTouch Health, a provider of telepresence collaboration for doctors, nurses, paramedics and patients and a place where iRobot’s lower cost AVA robots could be armed with InTouch Health’s hospital experiences and enable the resulting systems to be available to a larger audience.

More than 7 million robot vacuum cleaners have been sold thus far with real competition for iRobot showing up recently with a flurry of similar cleaners – all displayed at CES:

Look-alikes: (from left to right): Techko Maid, Agait, Ecovacs, xRobot, iclebo and Ottoro

iRobot Roomba, LG RoboKing, Samsung Tango The big news is that both Samsung and Ecovacs (above) offer a self-emptying dustbin option.

But LG and Samsung entered the arena, and, with their large consumer client base, vast manufacturing and marketing resources, and an array of add-on features, has been selling their vacuums in Asia and Europe; not yet in the US. iRobot should feel their presence very soon.

Another consumer products manufacturer (of home theater systems), South Korean Moneual, also sells a robot vacuum and a more interesting $1,000 home mobile air filter / security device. The mobile air filter is also designed as a safety system for the elderly, it connects with a wrist band that can detect a fall and can call for help if one occurs.

A skinless Pleo showing it’s complex innards

Pleo, the baby robotic dinosaur, was represented by both the seller (Innvo Labs) and the manufacturer (Jetta Co. Ltd.) that reincarnated the old bankrupt company, and was showing the new Pleo rb (reborn), with accessories and software enhancements.

Amongst the pseudo robotic products were three which act as a pedestal for the camera and video functions of iPhones and swivel or have wheels or tracks to move as wirelessly directed:

1. Xybotyx, a Colorado start-up, is launching a $111 wheeled platform and app for your iPhone that lets you drive your phone wirelessly.
2. Swivl by Satarii, is a $159 stationary platform for your iPhone camera or video. It swivels to follow you or can be remote controlled.
3. Romo by Romotive, is a $99 tracter-like iPhone holder which can stream video to your PC and also dance to music on your iPhone.

Karotz, by Violet (a subsidiary of Aldebaran, the builder of the Nao robot), announced the launch of their Karotz “intelligent internet companion” into the U.S. market with a $99 special price for the rabbit and 30% off all accessories. Ideal for learning how to develop apps with voice recognition and Internet connectivity, and now with Aldebaran stewardship, this interesting little device may hold a key to the future of human-robot communication.

Other vendors under the robotic umbrella included:

(from left to right): Windoro, Sphero, Ladybug, Mantarobot, Paro, Crawler

• Windoro, from Ilshim Global, a window washing device.
• Sphero, by Orbotix, a robotic ball controlled from your phone.
• Ladybug, by JS-Robotics, a bug-like mobile device with collision avoidance sensors.
• Mantaro telepresence robot, a mobile Skype platform using your own iPhone or iPad.
• Paro, the therapeutic furry seal-like bot for hospitals and eldercare.
• Crawler, by Topy Industries, an experimental tractor-like base for search and rescue.

Not exactly robotic, but for prototyping and DIY’ers, there were three 3D printers of note: Makerbot announced their new $1,750 two-color 3D printer, Essential Dynamics showed their $3,000 Imagine Printer that prints with a whole host of materials, including food, chocolates, silicone, cheese, epoxy, organics, etc., and the Cube from Cubify which offers both a $1,300 3D printer and also a service for those that just want to send their designs in and get back the finished product.

So there you have it — 25+ robot vendors focused on consumer products — less than 1% of CES — and perhaps only one or two to rave about. Maybe next year….

In July of 2008, the app store concept was launched by Apple and it has dramatically changed the mobile industry. Over 1.2 billion apps were downloaded between Christmas and New Year according to Flurry Analytics. That’s about 60 percent higher than every week of December before Christmas, and marks the largest number of apps ever downloaded in a single week.

Robot app stores are now beginning to happen as well and visions of apps for tele-robotic safety and surveillance pop into mind, or light domestic duties, or…? My imagination runs wild at the thought and I imagine these new apps being easy to use, having multiple functions and a low cost.

But that is then and now is now. At present there are three significantly different approaches to an app store for robots (although additional “stores” are in the planning stage and many existing stores are making arrangements to expand beyond their own boundaries (like iRobot’s online store and Willow Garage’s application chooser)):

1. MyRobots, by Canadian RobotShop, has opened a combination app store and online environment to permit robotics products to be monitored and updated seamlessly as well as providing a Cloud repository for applications that run from the Cloud instead of the robot itself. MyRobots’ slogan is “Connect your robots; reap the benefits.” The online monitoring aspect of MyRobots is similar to the MyMotoman Remote Monitoring Service initiated my Yaskawa Motoman America in August.
2. Robots App Store, by San Francisco serial entrepreneur Elad Inbar, is developing their store to be an online marketplace for selling apps and also providing developers their own sales portal. Robots App Store, in addition to attempting to trademark the hyphenated words “Robot-app”, has a wonderfully informative info-graphic explaining the need and market for robot apps. What it doesn’t explain is how the process will be different than what most of us have come to expect when buying apps from Apple’s App Store. It involves tinkering with development tools and operating system platforms – a turnoff for all but the most avid hobbyist.
3. RoboEarth, an EU public-private consortium, is using the Internet to create a giant open source network and database repository that can be accessed and updated by robots around the world. Focused more on academia and industrial applications, RoboEarth speeds up robot learning and adaption in complex tasks and can execute tasks that were not explicitly planned for when the robot was designed.

Service robotics – as differentiated from industrial or defense/security/space robotics – needs to provide inexpensive and efficient assistance to humans to be profitable in the consumer marketplace and emerge as a serious industry. We already have vacuum robots and adaptive cruise control bots, but there are thousands of other possible applications. Entertainment, embedded systems, eldercare and home assistance are certain to be amongst the first groups to benefit as the service robotics industry materializes.

There are two different approaches to providing those services:

C3P0 The Ultimate Humanoid Robot

1. A universal robotic tool that will be able to perform all the tasks we ask it to do, including social communication – a robot like C3P0. This is the goal of humanoid robots. At this time, humanoid robots are costly, difficult to control, slow and intrusive. Although human-robot communication is part of the lure, and there is much progress in that area, we are at least five years away from devices that not only speak but understand. IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri are proving that it can be done but their software isn’t yet available to front-end robotic applications and there is, at present, little comparable in the robotics world (although the recent ABC Nightline interview of Hanson Robotics’ Philip Dick robot shows there is serious ongoing development). Even when the two-way communication aspect is further developed and made available to roboticists, it will be many more years until the goal of a C3P0-like sophisticated humanoid robot will be ready.

• A more near-term and progressive solution is to forego universality and design specific devices that provide limited, task-specific means to communicate and complete specific tasks… think Roomba.

Certainly #2 has more near-term promise and is where most of the market is focused for the rest of this decade. As service robots begin to meet the four core criteria of low cost, low intrusiveness, safety and modularity – which is happening almost daily with technology changes – an incredible number of opportunities for service robot apps can be foreseen. The key will be to make them practical, affordable and acceptable by humans as part of their day-to-day life.

Robots App Store:

At discussions with Elad Inbar, CEO of Robots App Store, I asked about the size of the marketplace and was surprised to find that there are 14 million service robots out there now, and it’s estimatited that by the end of 2014 there will be 24 million. If only 15% of them were able to buy two apps at an average price of $9.99, that’s $72 million in revenue. If they each bought five apps instead of two, the figure would be $180 million. If 20% purchased five apps it would be a $¼ billion business. How real and applicable those figures are depends on many complex variables: willingness of the buyer to tinker, quality of the apps, flexibility of the robots, price, disposable income, etc. In fact, apps for robots with an Apple or Android front end will not be available in the Robots App Store but will onlybe available through the Apple (or Android) App Store – which limits the market metrics… an example of this Apple exclusivity is the hundreds of thousands of Parrot’s AR.Drone quadcopters.

Regardless of the metrics, the process of developing and sharing apps can provide a giant leap toward rejuvenating the robots we have and teaching the audience (the buyers) that they can get what they want from their robot(s). Thus the buyer becomes more educated and demanding and the producers less capricious — and more profitable.

From an infographic by Robots App Store showing possible app prices for various robots

Inbar’s Robots App Store is “focused solely on the personal and service robots marketplace because “industrial robots are very limited in their functionality… not to mention that they are oriented to quickly repeat the same tasks 24/7 unlike personal and service robots that can be extended to virtually everything! I believe in the consumers market – as they will grow like a hockey-stick!”

When I asked what kind of apps we will see once the store opens, Elad said, “We have more than 100 approved robotic developers working on apps for Romba, Pleo, AIBO, NAO, DARwin and others arranged in categories like Entertainment (dances, etc.), Story Telling (for kids), Utilities (like home search engines), Tools (like face recognition and such) and many others.”

Finally, I asked about the mechanics of porting an app or game from one robot to another. “ROS by Willow Garage, Gostai, URBI and others are trying to build a standard open platform OS that will run across all robots. We, as a marketplace, don’t take sides in this battle. We are serving every robot, ever developer, and every OS. But surely we’ll have to take sides one day when the critical mass will decide which is the widely spread and used OS…. Personally I believe that ROS is in the best position to become the de-facto standard and I personally love to work with their code. It is easy, simple and their libraries can be ported quickly between different robots – a huge advantage for every robot apps developer.”

MyRobots:

The goal for MyRobots is to get all robotic platforms to collaborate and operate together (regardless of their operating system) via the use of Cloud robotics. Although like other stores MyRobots will sell downloadable apps too, their main interest is to develop applications that will run on the Cloud thereby freeing computation time and resources on the robot and will make a single app compatible with many different robotic platforms.

Says MyRobot’s Mario Tremblay:

Cloud Robotics is the application of the cloud computing concept to robots. This means using the Internet to augment the robots capabilities by off-loading computation and providing services on demand. Being connected to the cloud also helps robots to collaborate with other machines, smart objects and humans. Through this collaboration, robots transcend their physical limitations and become more useful and capable since they can delegate parts of their tasks to more suitable parties. By combining increased communication capabilities to the ability and flexibility of running and storing part of their intelligence (i.e. software, behaviors and apps) on the MyRobots infrastructure, smart objects and robots become augmented and constitute a new and revolutionary concept for the future of robotic intelligence: Cloud Robotics.

RoboEarth:

RoboEarth is an EU-funded consortium of educators, research facilities and corporations working together to provide a world-wide-web for robot applications. RoboEarth, in development for the last two years, can be seen as a giant network and database repository where robots share information and learn from each other about their behavior and environment thereby showing a better way of robot collaboration and information sharing. RoboEarth’s premise is to out-source application development by tapping creativity and experience from wherever they can. Further, they believe (as do I) that more apps sold equates to more robots sold. Quoting Markus Waibel:

The central beauty of the App Store idea is that it enables a feedback cycle: The more devices (phones/robots) you sell, the more lucrative the app store becomes for 3rd party developers to program new apps. And the more new apps, the more devices you sell. In my opinion, robotics does not yet have critical mass to jump start this at the present time.

RoboEarth is fast becoming a large shared repository for maps, object models, task descriptions, robot models, semantic relations, probabilistic relations and “action recipes” (apps) within the global academic community. It remains to be seen whether the big robot manufacturers will embrace the technology for their products.

One unintended consequence of RoboEarth’s efforts may be within the used robots marketplace. Imagine the financial gain if an older, unused robot is rejiggered to have new equipment as well as easy to train software to put the robot back to work on new projects. Another possible beneficiary is the end user who will be less likely to retain an intergrator/consulting service if the robot can handle ongoing changes on its own.

The ultimate goal of RoboEarth is to enable robots to share and store what they discover about the world on their own Internet.

As a personal aside, I live in a rural area outside of a medium-sized city. 4G LTE is planned for 2012-2013 for the city but not my area and I have to pay for a very unreliable T1 line to my office. It’s hard to imagine having a service robot doing its thing in my world while relying on the Cloud (as represented by my T1). Maybe the concept will grow on me with time but right now I’m wary and a bit afraid of the consequences.

What do you want from a robot app store? Let’s compile a long list of “wants” and send them off to these app stores and see whether they can get them for us. Why should we wait to see if our app magically appears in their store? Let’s ask for what we want. Send them to me and I’ll combine them all and send them off to the stores.

Here’s what I would like:

• For my old Pleo, anything that makes it do things it doesn’t already do.
• For my AR.Drone, a programmable camera shoot over a grid that I draw onscreen from a starting point where I place the drone.
• For my little iSobot, a complicated routine of fetch, grab and return.
• And for my new Swivl, something sexy where it follows my girlfriend around the room and refocuses as the distance changes.

But I also want to buy a used two-armed Yaskawa Motoman and put it to work in my workshop doing ad hoc tasks. I’d love to be able to add a hardware component add-on (or two), be able to use ROS or some simulation software to test my apps, buy some additional apps that do the kind of tasks I need to do in the shop, and have all that work seamlessly and without line-for-line coding, excessive cost or too much fiddling.

What do you want? Send them to me and I’ll combine them all and send them off to the stores.