Amazon’s “beehive” concept for future multi-storey fulfillment centers. Credit: Amazon

June 19, 2017 – June 25, 2017

At the Center for the Study of the Drone

In an interview with Robotics Tomorrow, Center for the Study of the Drone Co-Director Arthur Holland Michel discusses the growing use of drones by law enforcement and describes future trends in unmanned systems technology.

News

The U.S. State Department is set to approve the sale of 22 MQ-9B Guardian drones to India, according to Defense News. The sale is expected to be announced during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the United States. The Guardian is an unarmed variant of the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Predator B. If the deal is approved and finalized, India would be the fifth country besides the U.S. and first non-NATO member to operate the MQ-9.

The United States shot down another armed Iranian drone in Syria. A U.S. F-15 fighter jet intercepted the Shahed-129 drone near the town of Tanf, where the U.S.-led coalition is training Syrian rebel forces. The shootdown comes just days after the U.S. downed another Shahed-129 on June 8, as well as a Syrian SU-22 manned fighter jet on June 18. (Los Angeles Times)

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that the Pakistani air force shot down an Iranian drone. According to Nafees Zakaria, the unarmed surveillance drone was downed 2.5 miles inside Pakistani territory in the southwest Baluchistan province. (Associated Press)

A U.S. Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk drone crashed in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. The RQ-4 is a high-altitude long-endurance surveillance drone. (KTLA5)

The U.S. House of Representatives and Senate introduced bills to reauthorize funding for the Federal Aviation Administration. Both bills include language on drones. The Senate bill would require all drone operators to pass an aeronautical knowledge test and would authorize the FAA to require that drone operators be registered. (Law360)

President Trump spoke with the CEOs of drone companies at the White House as part of a week focused on emerging technologies. Participants discussed a number of topics, including state and local drone laws and drone identification and tracking technologies. (TechCrunch)

The Pentagon will begin offering an award for remote weapons strikes to Air Force personnel in a variety of career fields, including cyber and space. The “R” device award was created in 2016 to recognize drone operators. (Military.com)

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has formed a committee to study electronic drone identification methods and technologies. The new committee is comprised of representatives from industry, government, and law enforcement. (Press Release)

Commentary, Analysis, and Art

At MarketWatch, Sally French writes that in the meeting at the White House, some CEOs of drone companies argued for more, not fewer, drone regulations. (MarketWatch)

At Air & Space Magazine, James R. Chiles writes that the crowded airspace above Syria could lead to the first drone-on-drone air war.

At Popular Science, Kelsey D. Atherton looks at how fighter jets of the future will be accompanied by swarms of low-cost armed drones.  

At Drone360, Leah Froats breaks down the different drone bills that have recently been introduced in Congress.

At Motherboard, Ben Sullivan writes that drone pilots are “buying Russian software to hack their way past DJI’s no fly zones.”

At Bloomberg Technology, Thomas Black writes that the future of drone delivery hinges on precise weather predictions.

At Aviation Week, James Drew writes that U.S. lawmakers are encouraging the Air Force to conduct a review of the different MQ-9 Reaper models that it plans to purchase.  

Also at Aviation Week, Tony Osborne writes that studies show that European governments are advancing the implementation of drone regulations.

At The Atlantic, Marina Koren looks at how artificial intelligence helps the Curiosity rover navigate the surface of Mars without any human input.

At Phys.org, Renee Cho considers how drones are helping advance scientific research.

At Ozy, Zara Stone writes that drones are helping to accelerate the time it takes to complete industrial painting jobs.

At the European Council on Foreign Relations, Ulrike Franke argues that instead of following the U.S. example, Europe should develop its own approach to acquiring military drones.

At the New York Times, Frank Bures looks at how a U.S. drone pilot is helping give the New Zealand team an edge in the America’s Cup.

At Cinema5D, Jakub Han examines how U.S. drone pilot Robert Mcintosh created an intricate single-shot fly-through video in Los Angeles.

Know Your Drone

Amazon has filed a patent for multi-storey urban fulfilment centers for its proposed drone delivery program. (CNN)

Airbus Helicopters has begun autonomous flight trials of its VSR700 optionally piloted helicopter demonstrator. (Unmanned Systems Technology)

Italian defense firm Leonardo unveiled the M-40, a target drone that can mimic the signatures of a number of aircraft types. (FlightGlobal)

Defense firm Textron Systems unveiled the Nightwarden, a new variant of its Shadow tactical surveillance and reconnaissance drone. (New Atlas)

Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems unveiled the SkEye, a wide-area persistent surveillance sensor that can be used aboard drones. (IHS Jane’s 360)

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have developed a WiFi-based  system that allows drones to see through solid walls. (TechCrunch)

Israeli drone maker Aeronautics unveiled the Pegasus 120, a multirotor drone designed for a variety of roles. (IHS Jane’s 360)  

U.S. firm Raytheon has developed a new variant of its Coyote, a tube-launched aerial data collection drone. (AIN Online)

Drone maker Boeing Insitu announced that it has integrated a 50-megapixel photogrammetric camera into a variant of its ScanEagle fixed-wing drone. (Unmanned Systems Technology)

Telecommunications giant AT&T is seeking to develop a system to mount drones on ground vehicles. (Atlanta Business Chronicle)

U.S. defense contractor Northrop Grumman demonstrated an unmanned surface vehicle in a mine-hunting exercise in Belgium. (AUVSI)

Israeli firm Rafael Advanced Defense Systems unveiled a new radar and laser-based counter-drone system called Drone Dome. (UPI)

French firm Reflet du Monde unveiled the RDM One, a small drone that can be flown at ranges of up to 300 kilometers thanks to a satellite link. (Defense News)

RE2 Robotics is helping the U.S. Air Force build robots that can take the controls of traditionally manned aircraft. (TechCrunch)

The U.S. Marine Corps is set to begin using its Nibbler 3D-printed drone in active combat zones in the coming weeks. (3D Printing Industry)

U.S. drone maker General Atomics Aeronautical Systems has completed a design review for its Advanced Cockpit Block 50 Ground Control Station for U.S. Air Force drones. (UPI)

Researchers at NASA’s Langley Research Center are developing systems for small drones that allows them to determine on their own if they are suffering from mechanical issues and find a place to land safely. (Wired)

The inventor of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner has unveiled an unmanned ground vehicle that autonomously finds and removes weeds from your garden. (Business Insider)

Drones at Work

A group of public safety agencies in Larimer County, Colorado have unveiled a regional drone program. (The Coloradoan)

Five marijuana growing operations in California will begin using unmanned ground vehicles for security patrols. (NBC Los Angeles)

The Fargo Fire Department in North Dakota has acquired a drone for a range of operations. (KFGO)

The Rochester Police Department in Minnesota has acquired a drone for monitoring patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and other disorders. (Associated Press)

Drone maker Parrot and software firm Pix4D have selected six researchers using drones to study the impacts of climate change as the winners of an innovation grant. (Unmanned Aerial Online)

The Coconino County Sheriff’s Office and the Flagstaff Police Department used an unmanned ground vehicle to enter the home of a man who had barricaded himself in a standoff. (AZ Central)

Industry Intel

The U.S. Special Operations Command awarded Boeing Insitu and Textron Systems contracts to compete for the Mid-Endurance Unmanned Aircraft Systems III drone program. (AIN Online)

The U.S. Navy awarded Arête Associates a $8.5 million contract for the AN/DVS-1 COBRA, a payload on the MQ-8 Fire Scout. (DoD)

The U.S. Army awarded Raytheon a $2.93 million contract for Kinetic Drone Defense. (FBO)

The Spanish Defense Ministry selected the AUDS counter-drone system for immediate deployments. The contract is estimated to be worth $2.24 million. (GSN Magazine)

The European Maritime Safety Agency selected the UMS Skeldar for border control, search and rescue, pollution monitoring, and other missions. (FlightGlobal)

The Belgian Navy awarded SeeByte, a company that creates software for unmanned maritime systems, a contract for the SeeTrack software system for its autonomous undersea vehicles. (Marine Technology News)

A new company established by the Turkish government will build engines for the armed Anka drone. (DefenseNews)

Italian defense firm Leonardo is seeking to market its Falco UAV for commercial applications. (Shephard Media)  

Thales Alenia Space will acquire a minority stake in Airstar Aerospace, which it hopes will help it achieve its goal of developing an autonomous, high-altitude airship. (Intelligent Aerospace)

The Idaho STEM Action Center awarded 22 schools and libraries in Idaho $147,000 to purchase drones. (East Idaho News)

For updates, news, and commentary, follow us on Twitter. The Weekly Drone Roundup is a newsletter from the Center for the Study of the Drone. It covers news, commentary, analysis and technology from the drone world. You can subscribe to the Roundup here.

The Amazon is home to thousands of local indigenous communities spread across very remote areas. As a result, these sparsely populated communities rarely have reliable access to essential medicines and public health services. Local doctors in the region of Contamana report an average of 45 snakebites per month and no rapid access to antivenom, for example. We recently traveled to the rainforest to learn more about these challenges, and to explore whether cargo drones (UAVs) could realistically be used to overcome some of these problems in a sustainable manner.

We’re excited to share the results of our field tests in this new report (PDF); Spanish version here. For high-resolution photos of the field tests, please follow this link.

Our cargo drone flights were carried out in collaboration with the Peruvian Ministry of Health and local doctors. The field-tests themselves were coordinated by our local WeRobotics lab: Peru Flying Labs. Anti-venom was flown from the town of Contamana to the more remote village of Pampa Hermosa about 40 kilometers away. A regular boat (canoe) takes up to 6 hours to complete the journey. Our drone took around 35 minutes.

At night, we flew the drone back to Contamana with blood samples. While cargo drone projects typically use very expensive technology, WeRobotics prefers to use affordable and locally repairable solutions instead. Behind the scenes footage of the actual cargo drone flown in the Amazon is available in the video above.

Thanks to the success of our first drone deliveries, we’ve been invited back by the Ministry of Health and local doctors to carry out additional field tests. This explains why our Peru Flying Labs team is back in the Amazon this very week to carry out additional drone deliveries. We’re also gearing up to carry out deliveries across a distance of more than 100km using affordable drones. In parallel, we’re also working on this innovative Zika-control project with our Peru Flying Labs; drawing on lessons learned from our work in the Amazon Rainforest.

We’ll be giving a free Webinar presentation on all our efforts in Peru on Wednesday, February 22nd at 11am New York time / 4pm London. Please join our email-list for more information.

To support our local Flying Labs teams in Peru, Nepal and/or Tanzania with donations, kindly contact Peter Mosur (peter@werobotics.org). For media inquiries on the Amazon Rainforest project and WeRobotics, please contact Dr. Patrick Meier (patrick@werobotics.org). Ministry of Health officials and other local partners are also available for interviews.

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

• The Drone Center’s Weekly Roundup: 2/13/17
• The art of drone flight: Creating drone costumes
• The Monospinner: world’s mechanically simplest controllable flying machine
• Flying cars are coming, what will they mean?

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

Amazon announced that at the end of September they had 30,000 Kiva robots at work in 13 fulfillment centers, effectively doubling the number of Kiva bots that it had in 2014. “Our intent is to use [Kiva robots and the Amazon Robotics subsidiary] more widely, so stay tuned.”

UPDATE 11-1-2015: Added Grenzebach’s G-Com storage and picking system to the list of vendors offering competing systems to Kiva’s.

Phil Hardin, Amazon’s director of investor relations also said:

The wider use of robots at fulfillment centers has had a direct impact on productivity. It’s a bit of an investment that has implications for a lot of elements of our cost structure, but we’re happy with Kiva. It has been a great innovation for us, and we think it makes the warehouse jobs better, and we think it makes our warehouses more productive.

Amazon acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012 and recently renamed it Amazon Robotics. It is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon. This left a big gap in the marketplace for robotic innovation in distribution and fulfillment centers because Kiva’s goods-to-man technology was taken in house by Amazon.

Distribution centers (also referred to as warehouses, DCs, fulfillment centers and package handling centers) are principal parts of the order processing and fulfillment process. As the e-commerce boom continues to grow, warehouse managers need to find new suppliers to meet their automation needs for their DCs. Amazon is just one of many online e-commerce providers in need of robots and automation; Alibaba and Jingdong in China and Flipkart and Snapdeal in India are also big e-commerce companies adding robots to their warehouses.

eCommerce is the fastest growing segment of retail. In 2013 it represented less than 10% of overall retail, but has been growing at nearly 15% annually and is expected to continue at that rate for the remainder of the decade. Online retailers are having to change their operations to meet this growing demand.

A few startups are beginning to enter the market to fill the gap left by Kiva:

Fetch Robotics, a Silicon Valley startup, recently received $23 million in equity funding from SoftBank to scale up operations. The Fetch robot is a mobile manipulator that can be autonomously deployed to pick orders and place items into a pod on the companion Freight robot, which then autonomously navigates to a packing station. Multiple Freight robots can support Fetch robots and all are coordinated and monitored by a real-time web-based communications and information system that allows warehouse managers to know where robots are, how orders are being fulfilled and inventory status.

GreyOrange, a Singapore-based Indian startup, is beginning to distribute their Butler robots — square versions of Kiva’s round robots — along with their goods-to-man warehousing system, which is also very similar to Kiva’s system of moving portable shelving to a picker/packer station for picking and then returning them to a dynamic warehouse location. GreyOrange offers exactly the same process and sells the mobile robots, mobile storage units, pick/put stations, charging devices and warehouse control system. GreyOrange received a $30 million equity investment from a group of VCs to enable international expansion to Japan and China, and hire 25 additional people in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Harvest Automation, a startup initially focused on moving potted plants from one location to another — a very labor-intensive task in the nursery segment of the agriculture industry. Their HV-100 mobile robots reduce labor headcount and costs and provide needed pot manipulation at very low cost. Now that Harvest Automation has mastered the task and successfully brought their product to market, they are expanding into the warehouse with their new TM-100 mobile material handling platform. The rugged TM-100 enables workers to pick and place goods in a cart, which then autonomously whisks off and navigates to a selected destination for further processing.

In addition to the startups mentioned above, old-line companies are also entering the market. The 55-year old German-headquartered Grenzebach Group is a good example. Grenzebach has held interests in KUKA, Inos Automation, SnoxStellar AGVs, and Swisslog – all involved in robotics, vision systems and materials handling as well as their new G-Com mobile storage and picking system. Grenzebach is still the controlling partner in all but KUKA and Swisslog. [KUKA bought back it’s shares from Grenzebach and acquired Swisslog for $357m in September, 2014.] BLG Logistics was awarded the German Logistics Award 2015 for an installation in the warehouse of a trading company of 74 Grenzebach G-Com robots, delivering goods from 800 shelves to five picking stations.

Bottom line

Amazon isn’t the only e-commerce warehouse operator adding robots to their automation arsenal.  Think Coca Cola, Walmart, Nike, Ikea, FedEx, and UPS. And there are hundreds of name-brand suppliers of warehousing automation technology such as Westfalia, Egemin, Schaefer, Swisslog, Vanderlande, Daifuku, Intelligrated, JBT, Knapp and Thiele to name just a few. There is a transition in technology to reduce fixed racking and conveyor costs in favor of dynamic storage and mobility methods. Thus far only Kiva and these new startups are offering that level of disruptive system, but the big companies are sure to enter the fray soon with competing products.

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

• SoftBank invests in Fetch Robotics
• Competing robotic warehouse systems
• GreyOrange gets $30m for mobile robots
• Team RBO from Berlin wins Amazon Picking Challenge convincingly
• Robots in Depth: Melonee Wise on building robots, and robot companies

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

Co-founders of GreyOrange: Akash Gupta and Samay Kohli

GreyOrange, an India and Singapore-based materials handling startup, has received $30m in equity funding to ramp up production of their Butler shelves-to-picker robot system.

Big Butler

GreyOrange currently has more than 300 employees, a number it plans to double with this new funding. The company has two products: a package sorter and Butler.

Butler is a square version of the circular orange-colored robotic system that Amazon acquired from Kiva Systems in 2012. The Kiva process had proven invaluable in speeding up the transportation of goods from the warehouse, dynamically storing them for best access and shuttlling them to pick and pack work stations — all reasons why Amazon evaluated and then purchased Kiva for their internal use. The Butler version purports to do the same set of tasks. GreyOrange’s list of clients are distribution center-based and include Flipkart, the Indian version of Amazon, Amazon India and Delhivery, an integrator and provider of distribution center systems throughout India.

Two questions come to mind about the GreyOrange funding:

• Why was it needed?
• Does their technology infringe upon Kiva’s and Amazon’s?

Kiva Systems and Universal Robots were, and still are, two robotics stars robotics. They both sold for phenomenal amounts and they were both predominantly funded from their rapidly growing sales.

• Kiva Systems, which sold to Amazon for $775m in 2012, had previously received $18.1m in three rounds of funding. An ex-Kiva employee said, “it was simply growth: new customers provided partial payments for their systems upfront, and that was used to grow the company.  As long as you are growing quickly, you can actually have positive cash-flow.  Eventually profits kick in.”
• Universal Robots was initially funded by a Danish semi-governmental group but was subsequently self-funded, in a similar manner to Kiva, up until they sold to Teradyne for $350m earlier this year.

Recently, Farhad Manjoo wrote in the NY Times about the propensity of startups to stay private. He cited executives not wanting to give up control or subject themselves to regular scrutiny by those that don’t really understand the business. This trend is causing valuations to differ for private as opposed to held publicly held companies (privately held valuations are higher). It is also causing public investors to miss out some of the successful companies in this new growth industry.

In John Markoff’s new book Machines of Loving Grace he describes the principle on which the Kiva system was developed:

Kiva Systems had the insight that the most difficult functions to automate in the modern warehouse were ones that required human eyes and hands, like identifying and grasping objects. Without perception and dexterity, robotic systems are limited to the most repetitive jobs, and so Kiva took the obvious intermediate step and built mobile robots that carried items to stationary human workers. Once machine perception and robotic hands become better and cheaper, humans could disappear entirely.

Finally, a word about IP (intellectual property, in the form of patents and copyrights): GreyOrange has to be on Amazon’s radar for possible IP infringement. I am presuming that GreyOrange has vetted their IP versus Kiva/Amazon and concluded that they are unique enough to not cause legal problems.

The Amazon Picking Challenge is over and two things stood out. One: how many different arm gripper solutions were possible; and two: just how difficult the challenge still is. The gap between the top two teams and the other 26 teams was significant, with Team RBO scoring 148 points, Team MIT scoring 88 points and Team Grizzly next best with 35 points.

Just in: video from winning Team RBO (hattip to SushiCapacitor on Reddit)

https://youtu.be/LtWPH-bcc4M

The Amazon Picking Challenge was developed to spur advancement in fundamental technologies for automated picking in unstructured warehouse environments. This is something that Amazon badly needs to do better in order to fulfill all our e-commerce instant delivery orders. And it’s also something that will enable robots to better work in all areas of our life. Not surprisingly then, there was a lot of excitement at ICRA around the 2 day challenge.

One of the conference expo halls was given over to robot competitions. There were 16 bays with a set of warehouse shelves in each. Amazon had announced a menu of common e-commerce items that would be used in the challenge, but before each round the shelves were stocked with a randomized selection of items from the menu and each team was given a order list to fulfill. Each of the 28 teams was given time slots to practice in and then compete. Over the course of 2 days, 28 teams rotated through the competition.

It was similar to the DARPA Robotics Challenge, at least the 2013 first round. “Like watching paint dry.” With so much happening at ICRA, I was only able to visit the Picking Challenge for short periods of time. As a spectator, I spent most of my time watching robots do nothing. Large amounts of nothing. Occasionally nothing would be enlivened by an attempt to pick up nothing, or perhaps the shelf itself. Once or twice I saw a real pick… get dropped.

If I was very lucky, because the competition area was crowded with media, spectators and members of other teams, I might get to look at the laptops running code and showing representations of what the robot was perceiving while it looked like nothing was happening.

And the perception was the real event. I talked to Team MIT after they posted their score of 88 points, blowing all previous entrants out of the water. I had particularly noticed their combination of an ABB 2 armed robot with a flat scoop and a suction gripper. When asked if they attributed their success to the end effector or other mechanical solutions, the team gave all credit instead to their perception and path planning algorithms.

Ultimately that is the secret sauce that Amazon, and all the other major robot companies, would like to capture; better algorithms for existing robots. The range of hardware in use in the competition was broad. There were several Baxters, Yaskawa Motomans, Universal Arms, ABBs, PR2s, Barrett Arms, custom built 3d printer style rigs and factory automation. There were scoops, hands, grippers, and suction.

End effectors were made or covered in a range of substances, wood, metal, plastic, soft silicon. While it might all be about the algorithm, I will point out that the two most efficient teams did both use suction and soft surfaced grippers. A third thing that stood out to me was how many large robotics companies were in the audience of the Picking Challenge, watching.

Congratulations to the winning teams – and to Amazon for the support they gave the robotics community for this event. Amazon awarded travel grants to ICRA, arranged practice equipment and a $26,000 prize pool.  Participants will be encouraged to share and disseminate their approach to improve future challenge results and industrial implementations.

Some more information from Barrett Technology:

Of 25 teams from around the world, the winner of the Amazon Robotic Bin-Picking Challenge is the Technische Universität Berlin using Barrett’s WAM robotic arm.

The Amazon Picking Challenge is the centerpiece of the record-attendance IEEE Conference on Robotics & Automation in Seattle this year.  There are 28 teams here from around the globe who have brought their hardware and software to the competition.  Entries include robotic arms from ABB, Fanuc, Rethink Robotics, Universal Robots, and Yaskawa-Motoman.  The competition just finished, and the scores are in…  Technische Universität Berlin’s Robotics and Biology Laboratory using Barrett’s WAM arm in 1st place at 148 points followed, in 2nd place with 88 points, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using an ABB arm and a gripper with creative finger geometries.  The 3rd place finisher came in at 35 points.

Prof. Oliver Brock of TU-Berlin remarks: “This has been a fantastic team effort.  Every single member of our team contributed with enthusiasm and ingenuity, enabling us to produce a compelling showcase for mobile manipulation as a winning approach to industrial manipulation.”  Speaking to media, Townsend adds: “We are grateful that TU-Berlin won this competition, and of course especially grateful that they chose to use the WAM arm.  The WAM’s dexterity is world-class, the long-and-slender links allow the robot to reach easily in and around tight workspaces, and the WAM’s famed backdrivability enables deft interactions with the environment. While it’s a powerful combination of capabilities, the great creativity and dedication of the students and staff under Oliver’s leadership has been essential, and it has been an absolute pleasure supporting them.”

The WAM arm (shown with a BarrettHand).

To learn more about the team from the Technische Universität Berlin, go to

http://www.robotics.tu-berlin.de

Contact Prof. Alberto Rodriguez for more information about the MIT team, at

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~albertor

To read more about the 2015 Amazon Robotic Bin-Picking Challenge, go to

http://amazonpickingchallenge.org

For information on the IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation, go to

http://icra2015.org

As sales via online retailers steadily increase, so too does the speed with which customers want their goods delivered. Amazon, eBay, and Google all have massive and speedy warehousing operations attempting to meet those needs.

Amazon Robotics (previously Kiva Systems)

Amazon changed their warehouse pick and pack operations from man-to-goods to goods-to-man using robots in their attempt to speed up operations. Kiva Systems and their orange robot fleet had been thoroughly field tested and became a winner in Amazon’s eyes, so much so that in 2012 they paid $775 million to acquire the company. Since that time Kiva has been busy supporting Amazon’s growth with thousands of Kiva robots populating Amazon’s many new distribution centers.

Amazon recently announced three interesting items: (1) that Kiva Systems would be renamed to Amazon Robotics, (2) that it was soliciting to hire a Head of Robotics, and (3) that it was sponsoring a challenge to pick items one at a time and package them. It was not clear whether the new Head of Robotics would also head Amazon’s Prime Air operation or the winning pick and pack effort but the Boston-based Head of Robotics will lead Amazon’s largest research and development center which has been “growing faster than at any time in the company’s history, opening additional facilities and expanding our technology charter.”

Amazon’s challenge is to use computer-vision and machine deep-learning technologies to pick items one at a time and package them. This contest has about 30 teams from around the world taking part in the finals to be held at ICRA in Seattle May 26-30. “Participating robots will earn points by locating products sitting somewhere on a stack of shelves, retrieving them safely, and then packing them into cardboard shipping boxes. Robots that accidentally crush a cookie or drop a toy will have points deducted. The team whose robots earn the most points will win $25,000.”

Amazon isn’t the only game in town for picking and packing of business-to-business and consumer goods nor are Kiva’s orange shelf-moving robots the only methodology. There’s Gray Orange, Hi-tech Robotic Systemz, Swisslog, Grenzebach, CIM Corp, Vandrlande, Bastian, Dematic, Adept Technology and most recently Fetch Robotics.

Fetch Robotics

Just the other day Fetch Robotics announced that they will demonstrate their new Fetch and Freight robots at ICRA in Seattle May 26-30.

The San Jose-based startup comprises a team that has a colorful history first as a spinoff from Willow Garage called Unbounded Robotics charged with making a low-cost version of Willow Garage’s PR2 robot. They succeeded with an orange, white and gray one-armed mobile robot that they could build and sell for $35,000 compared to the PR2’s $250,000 cost. That operation failed to get agreeable funding terms and folded but the team went on to found FYS Systems (fetch your stuff) which they recently renamed to Fetch Robotics.

The Fetch Robotics system is comprised of a mobile base (called Freight) and an advanced mobile manipulator (called Fetch).  Fetch and Freight can autonomously find and use a charging dock for continuous operations. In addition, the system includes accompanying software to support the robots and integrate with the warehouse environment.  Both robots are built upon the open source robot operating system, ROS.

The robots are designed to work autonomously alongside workers, performing repetitive tasks such as warehouse delivery, pick and pack, and more.  Fetch and Freight used in tandem are capable of handling the vast majority of most items in a typical warehouse.

From their videos and press materials, Fetch robots fulfill the Amazon challenge requirements. If Fetch is able to match the build cost formula that enabled Unbounded Robotics to offer their robots at $35,000 and come up with a similarly competitive pricing scheme, they will soon become a formidable competitor in the fast-paced distribution center pick-and-pack race.

Swisslog, Grenzebach and Kuka

Swisslog’s CarryPick system is very similar to Kivas. It uses automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and mobile racking units feeding ergonomic workstations all running under Swisslog’s WarehouseManager control system. Like Kiva’s system, the CarryPick system is scalable and can quickly adjust to changing requirements.

The CarryPick AGV has four clamp-on devices to lift and move shelves unlike Kiva’s single screw-on mechanism. But similar to Kiva, which uses barcoded spots on the floor, the CarryPick AGVs follow white lines on the floor.

Swisslog is 96+% owned by KUKA AG, one of the big four of global robot manufacturers. Swisslog has two division, healthcare and materials handling. Both are mobility-based in their solutions. Their hospital vacuum-delivery tubes business has morphed into a focus on AGVs for material handling and medication management.

Grenzebach, a large family-owned industrial automation provider, used to own 25% of Swisslog and also 25% of KUKA. Although they have recently sold both holdings, some of their AGV products are very similar to Swisslog’s AGVs. Grenzebach’s Carry AGV can transport up to 1.2 tons at a speed of up to 60 meters per minute backwards and forwards and can also turn on the spot. Their Snox AGVs are much more heavy-duty and include AGV-forklift trucks and industrial-grade car-manufacturing tugs.

KUKA’s strategy regarding competing in the warehouse material handling space seems to be through acquisitions and trading-partner agreements such as those with Swisslog and Grezebach plus its normal industrial robot arms – arms which Amazon uses to move heavy goods between floors in their new multi-story distribution centers and heavy goods in their case-packing and skid container centers.

Gray Orange, Hi-tech Robotic Systemz, CIM Corp, Vanderlande, Bastian, Dematic, Adept Technology and others

Two Indian firms are just beginning to market products and systems very similar to Kiva’s. Gray Orange, a 2012 startup, has a factory and offices near Delhi and a team of 120 working on what they call a Butler System, i.e., a mobile robot which picks up and moves a portable shelving system to a Put Station where goods are assembled and packed. Hi-tech Robotic Systemz, an established systems integrator of industrial robots in India, had a booth at Promat showing their AGVs being used for picked-goods mobility. This is similar to Adept Technologies mobile transporters which are used for a variety of purposes including the delivery of goods and materials within dynamic environments. In 2010, Adept Technology acquired MobileRobots, an AGV platform provider that sold their AGVs to others who relabeled them as theirs (Swisslog was one of those firms).

There is another whole world of gantry robot technology for goods-to-man order picking and shuttle systems. CIMCORP is an established Finnish provider of everything from car assembly lines to postal automation. Their goods-to-man shuttle system creates stacks of goods from the receiving dock. “When a particular SKU is required to fulfill an order, a robot retrieves the corresponding tote and deposits it on the shuttle device. The shuttle travels along the gantry and transfers the tote to the outfeed conveyor, which then transports it to a conveyor line that feeds the picking stations. Once picking from a tote is complete, it is conveyed back to the entry point to the storage area.” Vanderlande is a similar company in The Netherlands. It’s automated order picking/fulfillment systems can handle pallets, cases, and totes. Dematic GmbH (not to be confused with Australian Demantic) also provides a structural mobility system to move totes from place to picking station and back.

Bastian Solutions is an integrator specializing in material handling solutions for automated storage and retrieval systems and represent many of the larger providers as distributor, reseller and integrator.

There are many other companies in this space. I apologize for not including as many as I could find but….

Software

Underlying all the hardware, robots and robotics is an amazing array of software: navigation software, collision avoidance software, software to control the robots, send them off to recharge, and software to integrate into product ordering and fulfillment systems, to name just a few.

Kiva Systems attributes much of its success to their complete material handling solution which not only handles, schedules and operates their orange robots but also includes a custom wireless network and a server-based back-end system to stock, restock and position their portable dynamic reconfigurable free-form shelving system.

eBay is working on a different solution: finding product close to customers in local stores and warehouses and then arranging to deliver things quickly without the costly automated distribution centers that Amazon operates.

Bottom Line

The Kiva concept of bringing the shelves to the picker packer, the goods-to-man concept, has been copied internationally and relentlessly with many similar systems already in the marketplace. Changes at the picker-packer station, using follow-me devices such as the new Fetch mobile base, and new picking methods based on the results of the Amazon Challenge culminating at ICRA at the end of May are sure to enhance the process. As the controlling software gets better and more comprehensive, the ever-improving equipment component will become less important than the overall capabilities of the software system.

In a 9-page legal letter, with 28 itemized conditions and limitations, the FAA issued an exemption to Amazon to enable Prime Air to test in US airspace.

The FAA letter, dated April 8th, was filled with pages of legalese, but still limits testing to VLOS (visual line of sight) instead of autonomous flight, and flight controlled by a human operator. Amazon’s drones can not fly faster than 100 miles per hour, fly higher than 400 feet above ground level, and can not weigh more than 55 pounds, according to the letter.

[In February, the FAA provided a very limiting exemption stating that operators would need to see the drone with “unaided vision,” and the drones couldn’t fly over people. As a result of this frustrating situation, Amazon leaked a story of their testing in more accomodating airspace in Canada.]

Interestingly, three insurance giants – AIG, State Farm and USAA – also received FAA exemptions to use drones to observe, catalogue and manage damage caused by natural disasters.

“The potential use of UAS provides us one more innovative tool to help State Farm customers recover from the unexpected as quickly and efficiently as possible,” said Wensley Herbert, a Vice President of Claims at State Farm, in a statement announcing the new regulatory permission.

 

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

• As drone use flourishes, the FAA waivers, and Amazon is forced offshore
• Matternet launches drone delivery platform
• Is package delivery using drones feasible?
• Does the Small UAV industry need its own coalition?

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

DroneDeploy, a San Francisco startup, just received $9 million in Series A funding adding to the $2 million in seed funding it received last September and an undisclosed amount of initial funding from AngelPad in 2013. DroneDeploy makes a cloud-based user-friendly and simplified app to control and manage drones for outdoor landscape mapping and agricultural monitoring and delivers processed data back to the user so that they can make meaningful decisions based on that data.

3D Robotics received $50 million in February to accelerate the pace of innovation in the burgeoning new drone industry.

Across the world, businesses of all types are finding value in the use of drones and the data resulting from their flights. According to the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems (AUVSI), the UAV market is estimated at $11 billion, and is expected to grow to $140 billion over the next 10 years. Hundreds of new startups dot the globe and venture money is flowing liberally. Commercial use of drones up until recently has been banned by the US Federal Aviation Agency. However, with a series of waivers, the FAA has tacitly agreed to commercial use under certain limitations. The principle restraint is that the drone always be in sight of the operator. But this doesn’t work for large farms and companies with rapid delivery plans like Amazon.

Back in December 2013, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made a surprise announcement in a 60 Minutes interview with Charlie Rose wherein Bezos revealed a secret R&D project to fly packages directly to buyer doorsteps in 30 minutes. It wasn’t idle talk – Charlie and the 60 Minutes cameras actually saw a Prime Air drone sitting on a tabletop.

In February 2015, the FAA responded to a waiver request from Amazon by granting a waiver limiting Amazon’s drones to line of sight. They said that operators of commercial unmanned aircraft would need to see the drone with “unaided vision,” nor could the drones fly over people. Amazon’s request was for the FAA to allow Amazon to conduct outdoor trials at a special site in Washington State.

A revealing story by The Guardian, a UK newspaper, described a British Columbia site where Amazon’s roboticists and engineers are now developing their unmanned delivery service.

Amazon is testing its drone delivery service at a secret site in Canada, following repeated warnings by the e-commerce giant that it would go outside the US to bypass what it sees as the US federal government’s lethargic approach to the new technology.

The largest internet retailer in the world is keeping the location of its new test site closely guarded. What can be revealed is that the company’s formidable team of roboticists, software engineers, aeronautics experts and pioneers in remote sensing – including a former Nasa astronaut and the designer of the wingtip of the Boeing 787 – are now operating in British Columbia.

The end goal is to utilise what Amazon sees as a slice of virgin airspace – above 200ft, where most buildings end, and below 500ft, where general aviation begins. Into that aerial slice the company plans to pour highly autonomous drones of less than 55lbs, flying through corridors 10 miles or longer at 50mph and carrying payloads of up to 5lbs that account for 86% of all the company’s packages.

The company’s decision to set up camp in Canada, after frustration in its attempts to persuade US regulators to allow it to launch its drones in Washington state, takes Amazon’s quarrel with the federal government to a new level. Last week a senior Amazon executive appeared before a US Senate subcommittee and warned that there would be consequences if federal regulators continued to act as a drag on its ambitions to launch a drone delivery service called Prime Air.

What Paul Misener, the company’s vice-president for global public policy, did not tell senators was that at the very moment he appeared before them, Amazon drones were buzzing in the skies just north of the border.

In another part of the extensive Guardian story, the reporter compared other aviation authorities to the US:

Traditionally, the US has been at the vanguard of both tech and aviation innovation, but the approach of the the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), a US regulatory body, has been markedly tentative so far compared with that of regulators in Canada and Europe.

The federal agency recently published its guidelines for commercial use of small drones. The new rules will take at least two years to come into effect, a delay which Amazon finds unacceptable.

The contrast between the relative rigidity of the FAA’s approach to drone testing and the relatively relaxed regulatory regime in Canada is startling. Under the Canadian system, Amazon has been granted a virtual carte blanche regarding its entire fleet of drones within its designated airspace, having gone through a licensing process that took just three weeks.

By comparison, it takes the FAA many months to grant approval. Sources familiar with the process told the Guardian the US regulator insists on an initial 23-page application, a review of 75 pages of further documentation and a four-hour presentation at FAA headquarters followed by a three-hour site visit, together with ongoing reporting and record-keeping obligations.

The US does have a complex airspace, but it’s no more complex than in Europe, where regulators do allow testing, and it’s certainly not complex beneath 500ft or in rural areas of Washington state where Amazon had planned to operate.

The numbers speak for themselves. The FAA has received more than 750 requests for outdoor drone testing licenses from American businesses, Amazon’s among them, but so far has granted just 48. Canada’s equivalent civil aviation authority, Transport Canada, released 1,672 commercial drone certificates last year alone.

The FAA has stated that at the present time it does not believe that drones can be flown safely under autonomous control, thereby insisting that humans must keep them in eyesight at all times. That doesn’t work for Prime Air, hence the serious ongoing lobbying effort by Amazon. This story will play out over time because Amazon isn’t the only company limited by the line of sight ruling. The question is whether the beneficiaries of the delay will be American consumers and businesses, or their offshore competitors.

• Commercial drone regulations: Canada vs. US
• How Canada handles beyond visual line-of-sight drone operations
• FAA regulations draw inspiration from Canada, but miss key aspect
• Amazon requests FAA permission to test delivery drones
•  Commercial opportunities to create more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs when FAA opens airspace to UAS

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

Amazon has 109 shipping centers around the world, of which 10 use the technology and robots acquired when Amazon purchased Kiva Systems in March, 2012. In these 10 fulfillment distribution centers, new vision systems enable the unloading and receipt of an entire trailer of inventory in as little as 30 minutes instead of hours. Amazon is hiring 80K (80K!) seasonal employees to fulfill customer orders this holiday season, a 14 percent increase over last year.

One of those 10 centers is in Tracy, California. It has 1.2 million square feet of space – massive by any standard. 3K of the orange robots briskly move around the warehouse carrying shelves full of Christmas goods to human pickers and packers near the truck doors – truly automated goods-to-man delivery – instead of humans having to run around the warehouse picking the goods and carrying them back to the shipping area.

Each of the robots slide under and then lift shelves that are up to four feet wide and hold up to 750 pounds of merchandise. At the pick and pack area, high-end graphically oriented computer systems are used to help human workers fulfill orders with goods brought to them by the Kiva robots.

Shelves are stacked dynamically and closely which means the warehouse can hold more goods. The Tracy center now holds about 20 million items, representing 3.5 million different products. It can ship 700K items in a day. Also, because the shelves are just a few feet high, the center doesn’t need to have high ceilings and costly ceiling-high storage racks and lift equipment.

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

• The robots behind your Internet shopping addiction: How your wallet is driving retail automation
• Amazon Picking Challenge
• The economics of Amazon’s delivery drones
• Amazon’s Echo: A point-of-sale even the kids can relate to

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

The black cylinder takes natural language input so you can just talk to it. After saying the wake-up word, “Alexa” you can tell it to play music, set alarms, look up answers to questions, and add things to your shopping list. Our science fiction future is nigh and it is clear that, be it Siri, Cortana, or Nina, personal assistants that employ Linguistic User Interfaces (or LUIs) will be used to gather and present our personal information. LUIs and virtual assistants can control systems around the house like the thermostat, lights, blinds, alarms and locks (with voice authentication, of course). They can be likable, little AI companions that provide healthcare advice, offer help with history, algebra, or play trivial pursuit games.

And Echo may be the hub for all that and much, much more.

http://youtu.be/KkOCeAtKHIc

But I don’t think that a cute li’l buddy for the kids – or an LUI for the home – is Amazon’s plan.

In January of 2013 Amazon purchased IVONA, a Polish company that had developed a solid suite of voice recognition and language processing tools. Since then, Amazon has upgraded IVONA’s tools and improved its code. Recorded utterances get segmented into words, phrases, and sentences. A database is then created that keeps track of pitch, duration, and tone, which is then compared to a chain of previous units. Gender, age, and other end-user data can be saved. Your mood can be measured from vocal data, as well as stress levels, sickness, and inebriation. I’m familiar with a half-dozen voice packages, such as Kaldi, or ReMeeting, that offer such services, so these features are now industry standard.

These functions are standard in the burgeoning voice recognition industry because knowing who is saying what is important, especially if you’re Echo trying to cross-reference family members. Since individual voiceprints are relatively simple to build, each person’s preference can then be managed and those can also be cross-referenced by who in the house likes what. This makes for a pretty solid sales bet for Amazon. Consider: if my wife likes peanut butter and I like jelly, then Amazon can bet we’ll want to buy bread. 

Echo is always listening; it has to so that it can listen for your command to wake up (and in the Echo FAQ they mention this). This means that all audio is being captured all the time, though of course you can turn the microphone off.

One of the fears that are expressed in media is that this system will invade our privacy, or siphon money in ways we don’t expect, such as convincing the kids to buy stuff while the parents are out of the house. Interestingly, Amazon’s track record is a little stronger on the former than the latter.

Let’s start with privacy. Circumventing browser controls and surprising users with unexpected snail-mail has been happening at Amazon since 2007. In 2008 Ariana Del Vecchio was using Amazon to buy pet-care products. A few months later she began receiving snail-mail from pet-care companies with whom she hadn’t done business. A few years later she joined in filing a class-action lawsuit, Del Vecchio et al vs. Amazon, claiming that Amazon had circumvented users’ privacy settings and sent cookies, even when cookies collecting personal information had been manually blocked in the browser. The complaint (which was amended several times) included claims under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Washington Consumer Protection Act, as well as several common law claims. Amazon filed three separate motions to dismiss but the third didn’t seem to go down too well with the judge, so they settled with the individual plaintiffs, avoiding the expensive class-action filing. The suit was settled out of court.

In so far as convincing the kids to buy stuff while the parents are out, in July of this year (2014) the Federal Trade Commission filed their second case against Amazon in federal court. According to the FTC, Amazon had billed account holders for millions of dollars in unauthorized in-app charges mostly made by kids without their parent’s approval. In December of 2011 Amazon employees said that allowing unlimited in-app charges without any password was “…clearly causing problems for a large percentage of our customers,” adding that the situation was a “near house on fire.” In March of 2012 Amazon updated this policy so that charges over $20 required an account owner password, (but kids could still make as many purchases as they wanted). It wasn’t until June of 2014, after thousands of parents had complained and the FTC got involved, that Amazon changed its framework to obtain account holders’ informed consent for in-app charges (on its newer mobile devices).

Amazon, a very big company, responds to customer demands if those number in the thousands and lawsuits are involved. This comes as a bit of a surprise since, according to Forbes, Amazon measures performance against roughly 500 measurable goals, 80% of them related to customer objectives. This robot springs from a company who’s CEO and Founder celebrates a “culture of metrics.”

Please note that the word “Alexa” is a surprising wake up command that is linked to metrics. Alexa Internet, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon, which they purchased in 1999. Alexa provides commercial web traffic data, collecting user behavior and transmitting that data to be analyzed. Alexa scoops up metrics on about 30 million websites. Oddly, you can’t delete an Alexa account that was created through a web interface, and no means of contacting the company is provided to account holders.

Thus we come back to the cylinder sitting in the house entertaining the kids. Should we be worried?

Privacy’s important. We already employ many devices in the home to help us maintain our privacy – blinds on the window, a front door with a lock, bathroom curtain, and pants.  We all, implicitly, have private parts.

And while we Americans say we like our privacy we’re concerned about losing it. According to recent research by the Pew Research Center more than 90% of Americans believe that consumers have lost control over how personal information is collected and used.

But we might be okay with losing our privacy.  As security high priest Bruce Schneier puts it, “We know that people are concerned about privacy but we also know that they don’t think about it when they are sharing data on Facebook because we have to socialize … People give Google their data and share on Facebook. Surveillance is the business model of the internet.”  Schneier considers this profiling and has some interesting documentation about its effects.

We should not be afraid of surveillant technologies, but we should be aware of their effects. Like drugs, we should be aware of the side-effects, the addictions, and the massive, futuristic benefits.  After all, it is not the technology at issue, it is how it is used. And that is up to us.

What, really, is the product? Is Amazon selling Echo, or is Echo selling us? And who makes the choice? 

For now, let’s wait and listen to what Echo’s Terms of Service has to say.

In September 2014 Amazon announced the Amazon Picking Challenge, a new robot manipulation contest as part of the ICRA robot challenges. The idea was to take a difficult problem from the warehouse order-fulfillment industry and see how far contestants can get applying innovative robotics research. The challenge is centered around a problem the robotics community has been chipping away at for decades: picking various, distinct items off of a shelf under uncertain conditions. The location of the item is only known within a few dozen centimeters, and only vague high-level information is known about the item itself. The challenge description has obvious roots in warehouse fulfillment, but this is clearly a generic task robots need to get better at to be useful in a variety of everyday contexts.

When inventory comes into an Amazon warehouse it is singulated (pulled apart into individual items a customer might purchase) and stocked into shelves, and the location of the item is tagged in a warehouse management system. Later, when the item is ordered, a person is directed to the shelf that contains this item and picks it off. Shelves are often stocked as densely as possible to maximize the value of the warehouse. In a system that handles millions of different products, it is economical to store a variety of items in the same space. The resulting mixed and cluttered bin is relatively easy for a human to work with, but poses a challenge for traditional automation systems.

We might have an idea of what the item ordinarily looks like beforehand, but perhaps this time the packaging has changed color, the manufacturer has added an extra plastic bag to protect it, or it is folded in half inside the bin. Products in an Amazon warehouse have a wide range of visual and physical properties. A real product is rarely just a simple brown cardboard box. It could be a large stuffed animal, a floppy bag of rice, a package of cookies (cookies are more appetizing in their un-crushed state), a necklace, or a small USB stick. The goal in creating this challenge was to clearly define a simplified but applicable version of the real world problem.

The ICRA challenge lists 27 different items that will be randomly stocked inside of a pre-defined shelf structure. The challenge carefully avoids putting constraints on the solution space. The goal of this first challenge year is not to drive toward any one specific software or hardware architecture, but to provide the robotics community with a difficult, real-world problem. The human arm has 7 degrees-of-freedom, but is this really the best configuration to complete such a task? Robot end-effector designs are undergoing a renaissance (as evidenced by the variety of new gripper companies appearing each year), but which design fits well in tight spaces? Perhaps calling this the ‘Picking’ challenge was misleading. Pick and place is a convenient categorization for robotics, but observation of human strategies in these tasks has shown that human manipulation is far more nuanced than the simple approach-grasp-retreat paradigm we traditionally see in a robot. Humans take advantage of many different environmental constraints to perform the task effectively.

The response from the community so far has been fantastic. Over 150 people have signed up for the contest email list, and three robot distributors have agreed to bring base platforms if necessary for teams that can’t bring their own bot (Rethink Robotics with the Baxter Research Robot, Clearpath Robotics with the PR2 Robot, and Olympus Controls with the UR5). We hope this is the beginning of a fun and fruitful event that helps bring together subdomains of robot manipulation to accomplish some very cool tasks. We look forward to seeing everyone at ICRA in 2015!

The first deadline for the challenge is to submit a video this year to receive free challenge supplies in the mail (items and a shelf). Learn more at: http://amazonpickingchallenge.org.

In addition to contending with the FAA, the group must also gain traction with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which manages the communication frequencies that drones would use, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which will be ruling on privacy issues. With multiple government bodies to lobby, Drobac believes it makes sense to work together in a concerted effort.

According to Drobac, there was already an appetite for a coalition among those in the small UAV business, whose needs differed somewhat from the larger UAV firms with aerospace and defence contracts. “The coalition members are all extremely consumer-focused,” he said, pointing out that the first priority of the group will be to lobby for clear safety and privacy guidelines, both of which are key concerns for consumers. The coalition has already filed several petitions for exemption with the FAA, and hopes to influence and educate policymakers and consumers about the commercial opportunities of small UAVs.

Patrick Egan from sUAS News thinks this consumer focus makes the coalition’s lobbying needs distinctly different from the needs of the UAV “old guard” of Department of Defence (DoD) vendors. “Previous lobbying efforts have been working to regulate 10-year-old aviation technology,” he says, pointing out that, by contrast, members of the Small UAV Coalition want to invest in new technology and new applications that haven’t even been discovered yet, and for that they will need extremely broad and inclusive regulatory definitions.

It therefor matters that they have their own representation. “If you’ve successfully lobbied to have the standards built around your product or business needs, you will have an edge,” says Egan, pointing out  that while current regulations tend to focus on the fixed wing products common to DoD vendors, the regulations don’t even consider the multirotor devices that are common to the small UAV industry right now.

Image is another factor that may be drawing the coalition together. “A lot of small UAV companies have avoided aligning themselves with DoD vendors because of their military focus,” says Egan. “They just don’t need the controversy.”

Amazon retained council from Akin Gump when it filed its petition for exemption with the FAA this past July to begin tests with drones that weigh less than 55 pounds and fly below 400 feet. In its letter to the FAA, Amazon said that so far it has only been able to test its drones inside its Seattle R&D lab or in other countries, but would “prefer to keep the focus, jobs, and investment of this important research and development initiative in the United States by conducting private research and development operations outdoors near Seattle – where our next generation R&D lab and distinguished team of engineers, scientists and aeronautical professionals are located.”

Earlier this week, the Economic Times rumored that Amazon will begin testing drone delivery in India. If true, Amazon is pulling all punches. The threat of losing talent, R&D and investment to other countries is one of the key arguments of commercial drone advocates in the US. Andra Keay of Silicon Valley Robotics says, “Going to India sends a strong message to the FAA, and it makes so much sense. India is well-known for the high calibre of their roboticists, engineers and developers. And yet parts of the country still have very rudimentary infrastructure, which actually makes it easier to do disruptive innovation there. It’s harder to patch existing legacy building and transport technologies than it is to start afresh.”

Drobac says that allowing private testing facilities is key to keeping UAV innovation in the US: “Sure the FAA has some test sites, but it’s much more pragmatic to have testing near to where your headquarters are.”

For companies that are pushing innovation in this space, distance is not the only issue with testing facilities. New technologies such as sense-and-avoid will need to be peer reviewed to meet (as-yet unspecified) safety regulations, and private companies like Amazon don’t want to go to public testing facilities. Says Egan: “Even though they might need an independent 3rd party to review their safety record, they still want to keep their proprietary data safe. We don’t know how safe that data is at a public site.”

The high cost of using the FAA testing sites (according to Egan, $5-10K per day) presents another obstacle. “I’m not sure that the FAA took into account how prohibitive these costs could be to a small company that is just getting off the ground,” said Egan. “This is really a hold-over from the days when most UAV operators were Department of Defence vendors.”

According to the US Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan organization that tracks lobbying expenditures in the US,  Amazon has significantly increased its lobbying expenditures in recent years (see chart). In the USA Today article, Chris Anderson from 3D Robotics was quoted as saying that Amazon’s interest “lets people realize how big it can be … They have a well-established presence in Washington and they were able to kick-start the mechanics of this coalition so we could quickly join and get moving.”

Egan agrees that the influence of a big player is critical to the future success of the coalition, saying that “Amazon has a lot of horsepower and the White House has now renewed its interest in the issue,” however he points out that in the longer term it could be difficult for companies with such different applications and financial resources to keep their interests aligned.

Drobac could not comment on the price of entry for joining the coalition, and would not speculate on how much money would have to be spent to smooth the way for the small UAV industry in the US. “It’s not about how much money will be required to change lawmakers’ minds, ” he said. “The question will come down to whether we can educate people about the tremendous benefits of UAVs to society, and we’re confident that we will because technology always wins.”

So far in 2014, Amazon has spent $40K on lobbying for Prime Air – a number that is likely to increase now that the coalition is official.

Whatever future challenges may exist between coalition members, Drobac insists that their focus will be on their common objective of opening up US airspace to small commercial UAVs: “If we can crack that door open, all boats will rise.”

“I just hope they don’t get frustrated at the pace the FAA operates at,” says Egan, who has been advocating for commercial UAVs for over ten years. “The movement towards the integration of US airspace has been slower than glacial.”

In April this year, Amazon.com issued a shareholder letter that stated: “The Prime Air team is already flight testing our 5th and 6th generation aerial vehicles…″ Fast forward three months to the first half of July, and the company is on its 9th generation of drones, which can fly up to 50 mph (~80 km/h) and carry up to 5 pounds (~2kg) of payload — enough for 86% of the products Amazon sells.

The rapid development of Amazon’s drones was facilitated by intense indoor testing, including test flights in their research lab in Seattle. Some of the features they were testing included agility, flight duration and redundancy. Most importantly, the company claims to have developed sense-and-avoid hardware and software that will allow its drones to automatically avoid collisions.

In order to progress further with development, outdoor testing in more realistic conditions is necessary. Since Congress gave the FAA power to grant innovators “expedited operational authorization”, Amazon is asking to be exempted from the lengthy and complex FAA approval process, citing innovation as a driving factor.

If the exemption is granted, that would allow the company to test Prime Air drones in its own backyard, “with additional safeguards that go far beyond those that of FAA”. One of the safeguards is geo-fencing, a technology that defines geographical boundaries within which drone flight must be confined and beyond which the drone is automatically deactivated. That technology is already available and used on many commercial drones, DJI Phantom being one of the first:

An exemption would also allow Amazon to test the safety, communication, and air traffic control of their drones outside the six testing sites where the FAA currently allows unmanned aerial vehicles to be operated.

If an exemption is not granted, dronologista predicts that Amazon will simply move its drone operations abroad. Canada is already very hospitable to commercial drone operators, for example.

The full text of Amazon’s Petition for Exemption can be found here. Detailed articles about the issue can be found at Forbes and Cnet.

Videos courtesy of Amazon and DJI Innovations.

At previous MODEX events – trade shows exhibiting the latest manufacturing and supply chain equipment and technologies – Kiva had their own boothes. Big boothes with lots of people marveling at their orange robots. Today at MODEX, those orange robots were moving to a different drummer.

Amazon was marketing their full-service distribution service – and also doing some recruiting. Kiva was in the background playing a support role – which is what Amazon was marketing.

At day 1 of MODEX, one could see lots of joint ventures involving robotics:

• Adept provides a mobile platform for Demantic’s AGVs
• Yale provides a driverless lift for Seegrid’s new autonomous forklift
• Seegrid provides the navigation and vision systems for Yale’s new autonomous forklift

Also shown were many products meant to ease ergonomic strain on human workers.

• Caster and wheel companies were showing new technologies to reduce push and pull strain
• Coiled vacuum lifts for lifting boxes onto tables or conveyors
• Forklift companies were adding rollers on their forks to reduce torque needed to squeeze under a skid

PS: This may help explain why Google acquired Holomni, the creator of high-tech powered casters for omnidirectional motion … mobile consumer products in the future?

What is one to make of this focus series … Big Deals: What It Means to Have the Giants Investing in Robotics … with the giants being Google, Amazon and Apple (as given in the preamble)? The assumption, of course, is that robotics investments by these companies represent a turning point in the evolution of robotics — perhaps something wholly different, outside the normal ebb and flow of robotics investments, acquisitions, and mergers. It is also assumed that the investments represent some type of trend, or at least have something in common.

The Google, Apple and Amazon robotics investments do share much.  First, each of these investing companies are considered large, particularly when measured by their market value. The market cap of Apple, Google and Amazon is approximately $468B, $409B and $164B, respectively. All three are Fortune 500 companies (For 2013, Apple 6, Amazon 49 and Google 55), and are listed on the Forbes Global 2000 (For 2013, Apple 15, Google 68 and Amazon 525).

Each of these large companies is also considered innovative and forward thinking, capabilities usually associated with smaller, entrepreneurial firms. But this can also be said of many other large enterprises, although “innovation” per se can be difficult to gauge (unlike market cap, sales revenue and profitability) and the ranking process is usually biased in some way. A comparison of the Forbes list of the world’s most innovative companies with that of Fast Company, and again with Thomson Reuters’ Top 100 Global Innovators (Amazon not even listed), demonstrates the difficulty of quantifying innovation, and provides a great example of expectation bias at work, especially on part of Fast Company.

There is no disagreement that Google, Apple and Amazon are some of the most recognized brands in the world (see here and here). It is on the strength of their respective brands … in a way a measure of their cultural standing … that the announcements of the companies’ robotics initiatives and acquisitions made such an impact. That each company has made a substantial investment in robotics technologies fired the imagination of the public and invigorated the robotics community (business and technology media outlets went positively orgasmic!). That’s a good thing — a very good thing — in ways too numerous to list here. At the very least (and this might be the most important aspect of the various deals) the Google, Amazon and Apple robotics initiatives have legitimized and substantiated robotics for businesses, entrepreneurs and investors in a way that Mars rovers and military drones cannot.

I would argue that the Google, Apple and Amazon investments do not herald a new robotics era, or even a new overarching trend. Instead, they are the logical consequence of robotics technologies becoming ever more powerful (even as they become less expensive), and being exploited by companies to further business aims. The investments also follow the typical usage progression for advanced technologies beginning with research, then moving on to the government/military, then on to business, and ending with consumers. Google, Apple and Amazon are not consumers in the general sense, but they are consumer-facing (mostly), which is another point of commonality.

Google, Apple and Amazon have very different business models, and their robotics acquisitions and initiatives reflect this and should be viewed in this light. Apple, as a designer and manufacturer of computers, tablets, and mobile phones, is investing in robotics to increase productivity during manufacturing, reduce costs and improve quality in the process. According to Apple’s annual 10-K report, the company anticipates using approximately $10.5B in capital expenditures (CapEx) for investments such as new tooling and manufacturing equipment, including assembly robots and high-precision milling machines. The technology will be installed in Chinese manufacturing companies such as Foxconn and Pegatron, as well as in facilities located in the US and elsewhere. In this way, Apple is using its vast cash holdings as a competitive weapon as it battles competitors (for example, Microsoft and Sony for tablets, and Samsung, LG, ZTE and Huawei for smartphones).

For ecommerce retailer Amazon, its purchase of Kiva Technologies for $775M in cash in April 2012 (almost two years ago, further eroding the trend argument), was also made to increase productivity and reduce costs, but in this case it was for fulfillment operations and not manufacturing. At the time of the acquisition, Amazon was cash rich, but fulfillment costs as a percentage of revenue were steadily increasing. The Kiva technology has proven to reduce the cost of pick-pack-ship operations and increase throughput at distribution centers, boosting profits in the process. Applied across Amazon’s many distribution and fulfillment centers, Kiva MPS would have a significant positive effect on the company’s profitability (something Amazon sorely lacks even as revenues increase).

Amazon was also in the news following an announcement on CBSs’ 60 Minutes program that the company was evaluating the use of drone to deliver packages to Amazon customers. The gadget press went wild, but the announcement should be seen for what it was… a swarmy bit of self-promotion and boosterism, which coincidently came just before the announcement of Google’s robotics acquisitions (see below).

Google generates the majority of its revenues selling Internet advertising, and is rapidly acquiring new companies and developing new technologies to broaden its offerings and reduce its dependence on a single revenue source. While not indicative of a general trend, Google’s announcement that it had acquired eight robotics and artificial intelligence technology start-ups as part of a major new robotics initiative was a watershed moment. Google purchased a total of eight privately held robotics companies for an undisclosed amount (estimated at only $80-$100M). These include Industrial Perception (IPI), Meka Robotics, Redwood Robotics, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss, Holomni, Schaft, and lastly, Boston Dynamics.

The initial robotics announcements were followed in quick succession by Google’s purchase of home automation maker Nest Labs and Deepmind, an artificial intelligence start-up. The Nest acquisition will immediately drive revenue, but near term contributions by the other acquisitions are not clear. In media outlets and the blogosphere speculation was rampant, and ranged from the well-founded, to the speculative, and on to the absurd (although great reads all).

What is known is that of the eight purchased companies (really only five), none were public or substantial in size (employees, revenues etc.). Also, none had developed commercial-class products, or delivered robotic solutions targeted to mainstream, sizable markets (research robots, prototypes only). What Google did purchase were pieces that can serve as the generative component of a larger robotics solutions stack. Google’s acquisitions laid the groundwork for the company to become a robotics platform provider and industry accelerant. Software, including Robot Operating System (ROS) and Android, is key. The capabilities required to create new applications and products, whether by Google or others, is more important than the recent robotics acquisitions themselves.

In summation, Google, Apple and Amazon’s robotics acquisitions and initiatives should not be seen as a turning point, but as part of a building wave of robotic technology proliferation into the workplace, public places and the home. This does not diminish the impact of the purchases and investments, and in fact increases their importance to the larger robotics community by continuing to normalize robotics technology.

As their brand strength indicates, Google, Apple and Amazon have a cultural impact that exceeds that of other large, innovative companies with substantial robotics investments (for example, Rio Tinto for mining, GE for the industrial Internet and Boeing for unmanned aerial vehicles etc.). Through their acquisition and initiatives, Google, Apple and Amazon have “blessed” robotics, and in the process dramatically increased the profile and legitimacy of robots and robotic technology in the eyes of the business and investment community, especially the legitimacy of robotics as an investment opportunity. The acquisitions themselves demonstrated a clean, quick exit strategy and software-like ROI to a financial community that is often hesitant to invest in far-horizon, hardware-centric robotics start-ups.

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[AK] With investments in two accelerators now (Bolt in US and Navigator Campus in Russia), as in well as a range of robotics companies, Grishin Robotics has a bird’s eye view of robot startups. What do you think about the recent high profile announcements about robotics investments … how will this impact the start-up scene? 

[VK] It’s definitely great news. Amazon, for example, announced in a very significant way their interest in robotics a few years ago when they bought Kiva for $775 million. So this isn’t the first time that big corporations not traditionally involved in robotics are starting to pay attention to the field. It really  begun at least in 2012, when Grishin started to invest into robotics startups as well.

However, this time it’s even more about perception. These high profile media announcements are getting picked up by the general public, investors, and entrepreneurs – they attract attention to the industry. No doubts, it is important from an entrepreneurial perspective – there should be more success stories for them, more ‘benchmarks’.

These days many talented mechanical and electrical engineering students and professionals (particularly in the Bay Area) are attracted by the large salaries being offered by big internet companies like Facebook and therefore decide to switch into software and postpone their startup, hardware and robotics dreams indefinitely.

But when they hear these big announcements about new products or M&As, they realize the market is actually happening and they begin to believe that they can start their own company … they don’t have to go work for a big corporation. They can continue to work in a profession that they like and have expertise in. So from that perspective, these announcements are very important.

From the investors’ perspective, it’s largely the same. They need inspiration, they need proof, they need exits, and they need public companies. Of course there are already public companies like iRobot , but still we don’t hear about robotics acquisitions or IPOs every day – not yet. The announcements of the Amazon drones and the Google acquisitions of Nest and other companies really attracted the attention of the venture and finance communities and reminded them that something big is happening. It forced them to pay attention … it forced them to think that maybe another one or two years is too long to wait to make their bet on this space. And that’s really great news.

Google have invested in quite an assortment of robot startups, particularly if you include their investments and resources in AI and NLP. What do you think their plans are?

Interesting question to speculate on. Google itself said that their primary interest at this point lies in the area of manufacturing. But the acquisition of Nest is definitely a consumer play. Frankly, at this point, I think, it may be not so much about any coherent behind-the-scenes grand strategy as much as that they are starting to feel like something big is going to happen to follow the revolutions that came with the personal computer, the internet and the smart phone. Many people are seeing signs that the next big revolution may be robotics.

For Google, Amazon etc. this may be more about announcing some kind of interest in this space and to jump into the game as early as possible. I think there’s a lot of R&D going on internally to figure out where and how exactly to go and approach it.

So while it’s definitely exciting times and more and more startups are launching with interesting ideas, there are still some unknown variables. It’s important for big corporations like Google to figure out the unknowns in this multi-billion dollar market as early as possible, and to do this before the competition does.

Do you see any down side to large companies getting involved in robotics?

Despite all these announcements the market is still at an early stage of development, so the really fierce competition is ahead. It’s not that the market is divided between big companies, after all these news – far from that. Just as a comparison … it’s difficult to launch another smart phone in the market today because the market is fairly mature and is divided between the big companies. But in the robotics market, and in the consumer robotics market specifically, it’s the opposite.

The barrier of entry for robotics startups has been getting lower and lower the last few years. And all these announcements lead to increased investor interest, which means more money for robotics and hardware startups … more investors ready to consider these kinds of companies in addition to the traditional Internet and mobile companies. I just can’t think of any significant downside – at least not at this point and not for the next two or three years.

Possible problems could include losing top talent, or losing access to components or research, or support for community and open source projects, which all have impact on research and startups …

All good points and let’s consider them one by one.

Regarding top talent, all these companies that were bought are fairly small. I deeply respect all these people and I know many of them, but I hope these acquisitions will inspire more robot students or engineers to go out there and start their robotics companies, or it will inspire younger students to select robotics when they pick their majors at universities. I think that the cumulative positive impact will be so much greater than the loss of these people to big corporations.

I also agree that it’s startups that are primarily innovating in new markets rather than the big companies … but it’s not like these people won’t continue to do research. And Google has a lot of money and resources and these people will continue their work with other talents they meet there. It’s very possible that these talented people will be able to accomplish more given the vast resources they’ll have access to inside these big companies. So I urge you consider not just the negative side of this, but the  positive sides as well – word ‘loss’ has too much of a negative connotation, in my opinion.

The second concern you mention is lack of access to components …

Yes, to components, ROS, research findings…

Not necessarily. When big company is buying component technology, of course, it often ceases to be open-source. Discussion of open-source ideals are wholly different topic, but my point is that it is not necessarily means decreased access – may be quite the opposite. Often there is an interest of a big company to make certain technology a dominant platform, therefore, great investments are made to attract more developers to it, improve it, explain benefits etc. And if it will turn out not to be the best platform – competitors or same open-source community will be quick to offer alternatives, especially, again, at this stage of market development, when barriers to entry are quite low.

If you could ask Andy Rubin any question what would it be?

One of the main challenges for consumer robotics market – whether we are talking about connected devices and the Internet of Things or more traditional consumer robotics like Roomba – it pretty much comes down to applications and business models. We can imagine some of the interesting applications or verticals where robotics could make a significant impact, but we can’t always imagine all the possible  areas and ways where robotics can be applied to make our lives better – there are just so many of them, and many are far from being obvious. So I would be interested to know how he thinks robotics can make our lives better in a significant fashion, beyond the usual suspects we already know about, like agriculture, drones etc.

And the same question about business models can be asked from a different perspective: at the moment hardware companies are selling hardware, but it’s getting commoditized … and you have to think about software and data and the cloud connectivity of the hardware components you are making. So, how can business models that are familiar to Google (like advertising, subscriptions, internet) be applied to robotics and consumer hardware companies? And of course, what kinds of new business models will emerge as a result?

We’ve talked about Google and Amazon. Who are the other big new players in the robotics space that are known for things other than robotics but are starting to have an impact in the field …

There may be many more than we are aware of. Like Tesla – of course it’s an automobile company but more and more its top management is starting to say that they are essentially an IT company, considering how connected the car is and how advanced the driving functions and so on. And the same goes with the other automobile companies that are working on self-driving cars.

And the problems they are solving, whether they are BMW or someone else, are very related to the problems the robotics industry in general is facing right now. The advancement of computer vision is basically what the whole robotics industry is reliant on in terms of future growth and potential. Also autonomous capabilities … We’re not talking about the holy grail of full autonomy any time in the foreseeable future, but the algorithms and the decision-making processes needed for these new (semi) autonomous cars may spill over into the startup world tomorrow. Eventually it will impact the whole market in a very significant and positive way.

Many of the big corporations today may essentially be involved in robotics already. For example Foxconn and other manufacturing companies are starting to use robots. And more and more companies in agriculture and mining are beginning to use unmanned vehicles. They are starting to understand that adopting these technologies earlier than their competitors is a necessity if they are going to survive. Robotic capabilities are becoming the basis of their long-term competitive advantage.

To make a comparison, almost everyone involved in physical commerce today is finding that their internet capabilities are getting closer and closer to the heart of their business. I think we will find the same thing happening with robotics. It’s not so much about the specific companies’ names we can come up with today … because in the future it will be almost everybody, just like how almost everybody these days is involved in the internet or is using software or computers.

What do you think are the most interesting recent robotics acquisitions?

It depends on how you define robotics. Is Nest as a robotics company? I for one define it as a consumer robotics company but I can imagine that many people will not agree with me. I believe everybody will eventually agree with this definition but not maybe today. I think the Deep Mind announcement is also very interesting. AI and related software is a very important enablers of robotics.

What do you think about Dyson’s announcement of the $8million (5 million pound) UK research facility specifically into home robots?

It’s an awesome announcement. Dyson himself is an iconic figure, as well as his company. They have been making products that we are used to seeing both in the home and the office, and they’ve been able to make them differently, both in terms of design and in terms of capability. And it’s great when such a company pays significant attention to robotics.

The thing is – it’s not enough to make a good-looking coffee maker or washing machine anymore because people are getting more and more used to smart devices in their homes and cars. Increasingly they are expecting smart capabilities for the same amount of money. And it is possible now to deliver a much smarter device – with Internet connectivity – for almost the same price as a so-called ‘dumb device’.

All this attention is just another confirmation that very soon the fact that you are making smart devices with robotic capabilities will stop to be the competitive advantage and will start becoming the threshold capability. I think Dyson is foreseeing this (probably somewhat ahead of their competitors) – but  eventually everyone will follow.

Grishin Robotics is investing in consumer robotics… Do the recent announcements change any of your plans? 

No. There are a lot of very interesting application areas and verticals in the robotics market, whether it’s health care, agriculture, or manufacturing, but Grishin focuses on consumer robotics simply because we see huge potential, both from the market perspective and from the perspective of having a positive impact on people’s lives. This potential is much greater when we’re talking about robotic products that the average person can buy for $100-$200, and when there are so many prospective customers out there. It’s really all about impact. Big corporations and governments have been benefiting from robotics for so long, but average people have yet to benefit. We think it’s time to change that.

You could say, then, that the recent announcements have validated Grishin Robotics’ interests …

Exactly. In June 2012, when Dmitry Grishin launched the firm, a fair number of people told us that we were absolutely crazy. When so many smart people are telling you that you’re crazy, you have to think that you may not necessarily be right, but at least you’re probably doing something interesting. But when in the end it turns out that you are even may be right … it does feel good.

 [Edited by Hallie Siegel]

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When you’re shopping for the best online deals you’re probably not thinking much about the massive distribution network required to bring that pair of shoes to your doorstep. Is your quest for the best possible deal helping to usher in the next wave of automation?

Internet giants like Amazon and Google have an obligation to stay competitive and are going head-to-head over the online shopping space. Customers choose to purchase the lowest priced product, without loyalty to any online e-tailer, and expect fast shipping and handling. Amazon and Google appear to have two strategies for staying competitive: improving their search experience and decreasing inefficiencies in their supply chain. For the latter strategy, both companies have publicized their interest in robotics – and have invested heavily.

The manufacturing sector has relied on robotics and automation for several decades. In many sectors, productivity has increased while employment levels diverged, leading many people to assume “robots kill jobs.” Technology has been displacing workers for the past century, but I have not heard of a customer who has voluntarily purchased a more expensive product in order to reward a company for their inefficient operations. Robotics and automation are the link between data and the physical world, and automation technology is required for the production of complex products, but the hypocrisy between “having our cake, and eating it too” has put robot companies in an awkward position: automation has advanced the human race with wonderful products, but many people say they would rather throw that productivity away in order to keep their jobs.

Humans live in a physical world: we touch, hold, and eat physical things – so society needs to accept that as long as we demand inexpensive goods and services, companies will choose to automate a process the moment a technology becomes available. This strive for efficiency is constant, ongoing, and cannot be stopped  – even if jobs are displaced in the process.

New robotics companies are finding it difficult to attract investors – especially if their robot can’t be put under a Christmas tree. The online storefronts that Silicon Valley investors have fallen for are subject to market commoditization, and the only way to compete is to make the physical world, production and distribution, more efficient. Due to rising wages and physical limitations on the human body, this cannot be achieved with pure manual labor. In my experience, investors have noticed Amazon’s acquisition of Kiva Systems and are beginning to realize that the backbone of internet shopping lies with automating factories and warehouses.

According to a recent New York Times article: “Google’s robotics effort is not something aimed at consumers. Instead, the company’s expected targets are in manufacturing — like electronics assembly, which is now largely manual — and competing with companies like Amazon in retailing, according to several people with specific knowledge of the project.” In fact, Google just announced a partnership with Foxconn for electronics assembly.

Fuel and labor costs are having a direct effect on Amazon Prime’s pricing, and Amazon announced a rise in prices that provoked a negative reaction by shareholders. I stretch to suggest a large percentage of customers who enjoy Amazon Prime’s free or inexpensive shipping also complain about robots taking jobs – a counter-productive opinion for a society that wants lower priced products but cannot accept the employment ramifications.

Amazon and Google are in competition and both will use robots for a more efficient supply chain. All companies will automate processes when the appropriate technology becomes available. Technical improvements are constantly sought after, manual labor is not, so companies will always demand robots as an alternative to having a less efficient workforce. Folks who choose to educate themselves and gain the necessary skills will always find a job. My wish for all people is they get to spend their lives instigating the projects they find most meaningful and do what people (not robots) are best at: imagining a better world, designing the future, and making amazing things happen.

Perhaps when Google and Amazon has elimiated shipping and handling costs, we can find some room in our wallet to donate $1 of every internet purchase back to our education system.

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

Recent eye-popping acquisitions of robotics technology companies by giants like Google and Amazon might suggest that the automated age is upon us. Is it? Why now? Are these the companies that will usher in the commercial robotics and drone era? And will the little guy continue to find a place in the new epoch? While the excitement surrounding all of this suggests that a huge movement is afoot, those in the community should be relieved that we are finally seeing any activity.

The investment situation in robotics has been abysmal for years, and the affirmation of momentum is real and inspiring. The natural perception is that the movement is real, but the market has much to prove. Of course robotics has a place in the future, but modern history has seen the bulk of activity within academia and professors chasing the next grant.  However, big companies positioning long term for the inevitable opportunity is far from unprecedented. For instance, as far back as 1998, Honda shocked the world by demonstrating ASIMO, a robot capable of advanced gait, climbing stairs, communicating, and more … with limited revenue positioning whatsoever. Seeking examples of large companies that have invested in robotics infrastructure is easy – look no further than KUKA, Yaskawa, FUNUC, Rethink, Sony, and Intuitive. The massive payoff for many of these investments has yet to arrive.

Perhaps that gives insight in the state of affairs at Google and Amazon with multiple robotics and drone acquisitions in the recent years. Understanding the emerging market opportunity is sci-fi easy. Recognizing when the market will hit is not, especially when so many companies have yet to capitalize despite decades of huge R&D costs. Recent acquisitions are coming from capital rich companies, and these companies are primed to build the infrastructure required and wait this lucrative market out. Google’s investment in Boston Dynamics has this quality. Amazon’s investment in Kiva had a dramatic infrastructure feel.

While I am hesitant to say that the robotics and drone commercial markets will affect the average person’s day-to-day activity tomorrow despite the renewed activity, the feel now is that the climate has noticeably improved for adoption. For instance, in the commercial drone sector, Amazon provided a great community service with its 60 Minutes showcase highlighting its proposed Prime Air delivery service. A year straight of negative privacy press was diluted when Amazon suggested a very tangible and real use of drones that the average person could digest – one that comes with a huge economic upside. While Amazon suggested they could have the system up in 3 – 4 years, I think most of us in the community expect a much more modest timeline. However, the good that came from the announcement has the community buzzing again after a relatively stagnant period of waiting for the air space for commercial drones to open. The last year of robotics activity seems to be in lock step with this changing drone perception.

Even if the tipping point for the commercial market for robotics and drones may yet take some time to arrive, the advancement to this moment is noticeably accelerated. For ubiquitous application, robotics and drones require significant infrastructure when considering use alongside people and existing systems.

Little has done more for the community then the evolution of layered robotics operating systems, SDKs, and applications that have contributed to the powerful offering available to the community so dependent on infrastructure and smart solutions. Sensors are also at the price point where robotics and drone systems can be competitively priced. Seemingly, the prerequisite ingredients for adoption have arrived, and companies recognize this. Perhaps this is another major reason that we are starting up the proverbial curve.

Rather than thinking that the big players are going to squeeze out the little ones, I expect the opposite. With so much infrastructure and so many markets soon to seek robotic and drone technology, the corporate acquisitions are probably just starting. Prospects are great for the small business providing a part of the overall solution. Positioning an offering in this community makes sense. Much change and adoption is ahead, and this will take time. But the time is probably right to get in if you are going to and have your offering be relevant when it counts.

In essence, the window is not completely wide open for commercial robotics and drones markets, but it is opening. And like anything, you need to get there early. I think the 5 AM alarm is going off.

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If the world outside the robotics community didn’t know about Boston Dynamics, Kiva and Nest, they do now. Recent robotics acquisitions and investments by major-league players like Google, Apple and Amazon have generated a blitz of headlines in the robotics world and beyond. Are we witnessing a power play in the making? What does it mean for the future of robotics? And is all the hype beneficial or harmful to the robotics community?

This month’s Robotics by Invitation will serve as a launch for Robohub’s newest focus series on how big time corporate attention effects the culture of robotics. In the coming weeks we will be bringing you insight from the likes of Steve Cousins, Dan Kara, Valery Komissarova, Avner Levin, Chad Partridge, Gill Pratt, Erin Rapacki, Frank Tobe, and Rob Wilson.

Today, RBI panelists Mark Stephen Meadows, AJung Moon and Alan Winfield weigh in …

Alan Winfield on “What does it mean to have giants like Google, Apple and Amazon investing in robotics?”

Judging by the levels of media coverage and frenzied speculation that has followed each acquisition, the short answer to what does it mean is: endless press exposure. I almost wrote ‘priceless exposure’ but then these are companies with very deep pockets; nevertheless the advertising value equivalent must be very high indeed. The coverage really illustrates the fact that these companies have achieved celebrity status …

Read more →

Mark Stephen Meadows on “What does it mean to have giants like Google, Apple and Amazon investing in robotics?”

Google, is the wild card for me.  With more acquisitions than Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft combined, the GOOG looks to be rigging up a kit that would offer excellent image recognition + navigation + mobility.   A robot that can roam around your home or maybe your city, and offer a helpful service. My bet is that these Googlebots (perhaps they will be cars) will have sharp eyes, simple yet helpful demeanors, and we’ll trade that robotic service for our personal info …

Read more →

AJung Moon on “What does it mean to have giants like Google, Apple and Amazon investing in robotics?”

It’s exciting for the robotics community that the giants (Google, Apple, and Amazon) are actively investing in robotics. Large scale investments by giant corporations, regardless of what their actual plans are, can have a positive impact on the job market for roboticists, increase competition between the giants and push robotics forward. But I began to feel uneasy when Google acquired Boston Dynamics …

Read more →

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Judging by the levels of media coverage and frenzied speculation that has followed each acquisition, the short answer to what does it mean is: endless press exposure. I almost wrote ‘priceless exposure’ but then these are companies with very deep pockets; nevertheless the advertising value equivalent must be very high indeed. The coverage really illustrates the fact that these companies have achieved celebrity status. They are the Justin Beibers of the corporate world. Whatever they do, whether it is truly significant or not, is met with punditry and analysis about what it means. A good example is Google’s recent acquisition of British company DeepMind. In other words: large AI Company buys small AI Company. Large companies buy small companies all the time but mostly they don’t make prime time news. It’s the Beiberisation of the corporate world.

But the question is about robotics, and to address it in more detail I think we need to think about the giants separately.

Take Amazon. We think of Amazon as an Internet company, but the web is just its shop window. Behind that shop window is a huge logistics operation with giant warehouses – Amazon’s distribution centres, so no one should be at all surprised by their acquisition of brilliant warehouse automation company Kiva Systems. Amazon’s recent stunt with the ‘delivery drone’ was I think just that – a stunt. Great press. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see more acquisitions toward further automation of Amazon’s distribution and delivery chain.

Apple is equally unsurprising. They are a manufacturing company with a justifiable reputation for super high quality products. As an electronics engineer who started his career by taking wirelesses and gramophones apart as a boy, I’m fascinated by the tear-downs that invariably follow each new product release. It’s obvious that each new generation of Apple devices is harder to manufacture than the last. Precision products need precision manufacture and it is no surprise that Apple is investing heavily in the machines needed to make its products.

Google is perhaps the least obvious candidate to invest in robotics. You could of course take the view that a company with more money than God can make whatever acquisitions it likes without needing a reason – that these are vanity acquisitions. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think Google has its eyes on the long term. It is an Internet company and the undisputed ruler of the Internet of Information. But computers are no longer the only things connected to the Internet. Real world devices are increasingly networked – the so-called Internet of Things. I think Google doesn’t want to be usurped by a new super company that emerges as the Google of real-world stuff. It’s not quite sure how the transition to the future Internet of Everything will pan out, but figures that mobile robots – as well as smart environments – will feature heavily in that future. I think Google is right. I think it’s buying into robotics because it wants to be a leader and shape the future of the Internet of Everything.

Read more answers →

Google, is the wild card for me.  With more acquisitions (DeepMind, Boston Dynamics, Redwood Robotics, Industrial Perception, Meka, Schaft, and others) than Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft combined, the GOOG looks to be rigging up a kit that would offer excellent image recognition + navigation + mobility.  A robot that can roam around your home or maybe your city, and offer a helpful service.  My bet is that these Googlebots (perhaps they will be cars) will have sharp eyes, simple yet helpful demeanors, and we’ll trade that robotic service for our personal info.  Then Google will sell that info to advertisers.  So the same Google formula the company has used with email, docs, voice, maps, and the others.

They want to communicate more accurately, resolve issues faster and with higher levels of satisfaction than at present. They also want to enable more complex communication. And they want to do it amiably. As we move toward the Internet of Things, more players will enter the fray – all having the same goal.

Google appears to be acquiring people and companies to build a better human interaction interface. This interface can be the front-end of search, IoT devices, robotics and voice systems. Even if Google keeps their algorithms private, the first to deploy complex communication modules that can understand and resolve queries is going to have a big winner on their hands.

Certainly Google is going all out in this endeavor:

• Ray Kurzweil has been at work at Google for over a year now to develop natural language understanding. If successful, Google’s computers will be able to pick up semantic meaning enabling people to ask more complex questions.
• Just last week Google acquired DeepMind, a British AI start-up with some high-profile investors and a whiz kid founder (Demis Hassabis). DeepMind’s forte appears to be smart recommendations for online commerce.
 
• Facebook attempted to buy the deep learning group within DeepMind but Google outbid them.
• Deep learning is AI that trains AI to recognize patterns within streams of data instead of programming immense decision trees. For example, DeepMind trained software to play an Atari video game without teaching it the rules. The software had to learn through trial, errors and low scores.
• Google has hired and bought up leading researchers in AI for years including Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig and Geoffrey Hinton.

In a recent New Yorker article by Gary Marcus, Hyping Artificial Intelligence, Yet Again, it was clear that AI has received a lot of enthusiastic press attention over the years but hasn’t delivered upon those promises. Perhaps Google is on the right track toward converting all that desire into reality.

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There is serious momentum in robotics these days, evidenced by recent news from Apple, Amazon and Google:

• Apple announced that they were investing $10.5 billion in supply chain robots and automation equipment and recently confirmed their acquisition of PrimeSense for $350 million (PrimeSense is the developer of the Kinnect 3D system used by MS Xbox)..
• Amazon, in a CBS 60 Minutes piece aired last Sunday, displayed a new concept delivery system using an octocopter. Remember that in 2012 Amazon spent $750 million to acquire Kiva Systems, the robot technology enabling robotically-delivered goods to a picker/packer.
• And now Google has set up a robotics division headed by the man behind the Android operating system, Andy Rubin. In Rubin’s first six months he has acquired seven robotic companies to jump start his new operation.
• UPDATE 12-14-13: Google confirms its eighth acquisition: Boston Dynamics. The new acquisition is an engineering company that specializes in building dynamic robots and software for human simulation. The acquisition adds 80+ technicians, engineers and scientists to the new Google Robots Division talent pool – plus a new location.

What does it all mean?

First, some details.

• From a NY Times article by John Markoff interviewing Google’s Andy Rubin:
  • Google acquired 7 tech companies in the last 6 months. Schaft, a Japanese start-up developing a humanoid robot; Industrial Perception, a Silicon Valley start-up that developed a computer vision system for loading and unloading trucks; Meka Robotics, a robot developer for academia; Redwood Robotics, a start-up intended to compete with the Baxter robot (and others) entering the small and medium-sized shop and factory marketplace; Bot & Dolly, a maker of robotic camera systems used for special effects such as in the movie “Gravity;” Autofuss, a design and marketing firm and a partner in Bot & Dolly; and Holomni, a maker of powered caster modules for omnidirectional vehicles.
  • Although Google won’t disclose their plans, the article suggests that the company’s initial market will be in manufacturing, e.g., electronics assembly, which is mostly done by hand. “Manufacturing and logistics markets not being served by today’s robotic technologies are clear opportunity markets,” said Rubin.
  • The article suggests that the new Google robots will be able to automate any or all of the processes from the supply chain to the distribution channels to the consumer’s front door thereby creating a massive opportunity.
  • Google is already experimenting with urban deliveries including making home deliveries for companies like Target, Walgreens and others.
  • According to Markoff, “Mr. Rubin said he had pondered the possibility of a commercial effort in robotics for more than a decade. He has only recently come to think that a range of technologies have matured to the point where new kinds of automated systems can be commercialized.”
• From The SFGate Tech Chronicles by James Temple:
  • Google is transforming itself in many ways including its new robotics division. Its constantly transforming its search engine into a sophisticated learning machine using artificial intelligence tools. Some of that AI talent is moving over to the new Robotics Division.
  • It’s been hiring super brains such as Ray Kurzweil and Peter Norvig and inhouse star Andy Rubin to head groups and divisions moving toward product development and even hardware manufacturing (remember that Google owns Motorola – a ready-made client for assembly and materials handling robots).
  • “Google’s move into robotics is likely to draw renewed attention and money into the space,” said Brian Gerkey in the article. “It’s a pretty exciting day for robotics when someone like Google makes an investment like that in robots, others are likely to follow suit. It can only spur investment and innovation.”
• From Bloomberg News by Adam Satariano:
  • Apple is investing $10.5 billion in new technologies and robotics to polish the new iPhone 5C’s colored plastic cover, to laser and CNC machines to carve the MacBook’s aluminum body, and for testing and inspection gear for iPhone and iPad lenses.
  • Apple invested $6.5 billion on similar robotics and factory automation equipment in their previous fiscal year.
  • Samsung has indicated it plans to spend $22 billion in capital expenditures this year but didn’t disclose any further details.
• For a review of the CBS 60 Minutes interview of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Charlie Rose, see my previous post, “Jeff Bezos Reaches for Tip of UAS Iceberg.”
• UPDATE 12-14-13: From a NY Times article by John Markoff about the Boston Dynamics acquisition:
• Markoff says: “The deal is also the clearest indication yet that Google is intent on building a new class of autonomous systems that might do anything from warehouse work to package delivery and even elder care.”
• Boston Dynamics, a 1992 spin-off from MIT, has been a great resource for youTube videos of wild robots. Their Big Dog video has been watched by more than 15 million viewers; their ATLAS robot video, the base robot given to the DARPA Robotics Challenge teams – a challenge to speed development of robotics technology for disaster response – has already passed the 2.5 million mark.
• This is not an insignificant acquisiton. An ongoing business employing 80+ highly paid engineers and scientists has to have cost Google a very high amount, perhaps in the low 9 figures.
• Boston Dynamic’s CEO and founder Marc Raibert was quoted in the article: “I am excited by Andy and Google’s ability to think very, very big, with the resources to make it happen.”

What does all this mean?

I think the yellow highlighted quote from Brian Gerkey sums up all these investments nicely: it’s a pretty exciting day for robotics when Google, Apple and Amazon ALL invest in robots and robotics. Others are likely to follow spurring further investment and innovation. Up until now, the big four of industrial robotics (KUKA, Fanuc, ABB and Yaskawa Motoman) were all foreign firms while two smaller American firms (iRobot and Intuitive Surgical) led the emerging service new-tech robotics sector. The remainder of this decade will be filled with amazing new robotics products from a variety of new providers — including Apple, Amazon and Google.

]]> https://robohub.org/forget-the-octocopter-lets-talk-about-kiva/ Tue, 10 Dec 2013 22:50:14 +0000 http://robohub.org/?p=24149 Given all the chatter on drones and automation, we thought it would be a good time to dive deeper into the Kiva opportunity and potential impact on leverage/margins. For the sake of our analysis, we take a look at what the Kiva margin impact could be if Kiva automation were to be integrated across all of AMZN’s NA fulfillment operations. In short, we estimate that Kiva could drive fulfillment cost savings in the $450-900M range or be 60-120 bps accretive to CSOI margin in NA alone – underscoring a bigger global opportunity.

Moreover, the secondary impact is the potential limitation of outside sales of Kiva to other key retailers and impact on existing Kiva customers over time. We continue to believe AMZN is poised for strong volume growth and market share gains (3P, Prime, digital, etc.) and believe margins should improve slightly in FY14. Our 3 key driver thesis of: 1) 30-40% volume growth, (2) service fee growth of 40-50%, and (3) expanding GM appears intact as AMZN cycles through easier unit comps. We reiterate our BUY rating and $425 FV based on 1.7x FY15 EV/Sales, as we believe AMZN is poised for strong unit growth and market share gains in FY14.

Key Points

Key commentary from Q3 – Kiva rollout begins. On 3/19/12, AMZN announced the $775M cash acquisition of Kiva Systems. The plan at the time of the acquisition was to incorporate Kiva’s fulfillment technology into AMZN’s FC’s; however, since then there was little commentary around integration until the Q3 earnings release, when CEO Jeff Bezos noted that they had “deployed 1,382 Kiva robots in three FCs”. Based on our previous work with Kiva and other covered eCommerce companies, and recent discussions with Fulfillment experts, we believe this could be a significant opportunity to drive higher operating efficiency across AMZN’s massive FC network.

Kiva can potentially drive 20-40% improvement in cost per order (CPO). Within a fulfillment center direct labor (pick, pack, sort) remains one of the most expensive tasks in fulfillment. Within that direct labor cost, travel time (i.e. moving around and picking items) will likely be the most expensive and largest cost component. The leverage that Kiva can provide lies in reducing the amount of product “touches” and pick times that a pick worker must perform, or going from multi-touch to single touch where pick rates can improve by 2x. Based on discussions with industry sources which have indicated that Kiva can reduce a company’s CPO by 20-40%+, we have constructed a CPO and Kiva efficiency analysis on the following pages to help quantify the potential margin impact.

Potential for $450-900M in cost savings or 60-120 bps accretive to CSOI margins. For our analysis, we focused on AMZN’s NA fulfillment operations which are further along in development and worked to isolate the direct labor component (see figure 1), or the costs associated with pick/pack/ship. By our math, we calculate AMZN’s NA CPO to be in the $3.50-3.75 range in FY13 (see figure 2), which we estimate has gone up given rapid FC build out. We believe this is fairly consistent based on discussions we’ve had with industry professionals who have commented that large scale fulfillment operations have CPO’s in the ~$3 range. Assuming a 20-40% reduction in our calculated CPO based on Kiva implementation (see figure 3), we estimate that Kiva could drive fulfillment cost savings in the $450-900M range or be 60-120 bps accretive to CSOI margin.
View the full report.

]]> https://robohub.org/jeff-bezos-reaches-for-tip-of-uas-iceberg/ Thu, 05 Dec 2013 16:19:00 +0000 http://robohub.org/?guid=e2eadcbe639784e88e8deb0a6d27a56b On Sunday, Charlie Rose from CBS News 60 Minutes, interviewed Jeff Bezos about what is next for Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer with more than 225 million customers.

Volume can reach 300 items a second on special sales days and that volume feeds the activities at 96 Amazon warehouse/distribution centers around the world. Amazon’s goal is to sell everything to everyone and their warehousing and shipping methods have been of constant interest because of their success at being able to deliver as promised. For robotics-interested people, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems and their robotic shelf-to-picker system for $750 million two years ago. Interestingly, in this 60 Minutes interview, no mention was made of Kiva or that method of pick and pack. [Why was that?]


Photo courtesy of CBS News.

“The secret is we are on our 7th generation of fulfillment centers – and we’ve gotten better every time,” Bezos said during the interview. An example of this type of improvement is that Amazon can now store twice as many goods in its centers as it did 5 years ago.

A portion of the 60 Minutes piece was about Amazon and its web services group AWS. Little known facts emerged from this part of the interview: AWS hosts Netflix and the CIA as well as providing the cloud for itself and other big enterprises and governmental institutions.

Bezos’ straight talk was evident throughout. Consider this example:

Charlie Rose: A lot of small book publishers and other smaller companies worry that the power of Amazon gives them no chance.

Jeff Bezos: You’ve got to earn your keep in this world. When you invent something new, if customers come to the party, it’s disruptive to the old way. The Internet is disrupting every media industry. People can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.


Photo courtesy of CBS News 60 Minutes.

In an Overtime piece one can also see the genius in Bezos when he described the process of moving so many goods through the system – including the new PrimeAir: “It’s a symphony of people, a symphony of software and … a symphony of robots.”

Amazon has a not-so-secret lab in Silicon Valley, Lab 126. Charlie Rose pressed Bezos for any big surprises that might be forthcoming and Bezos showed him their new concept delivery system using an octocopter. The robot aircraft could haul a package of up to 5 pounds (approximately 86% of Amazon’s sales fit this category) and autonomously deliver it within a 10-mile radius from the fulfillment center. Branded as Amazon PrimeAir, a video showing how it works has already been viewed by over 9.5 million youTube viewers.


Photo courtesy of CBS News 60 Minutes.

Media of all types had a field day with the 60 Minutes broadcast and the video of Amazon PrimeAir in action. Amongst the most prominent of the naysayers was CNN Money who didn’t see the bigger, long-term picture Bezos is planning for: “The world isn’t ready for Amazon drones. Besides being illegal, the sensor technology to avoid collisions isn’t there yet.”

Certainly the best one-liner came from a Tweet from a reporter at Bezos’ own Washington Post: “So basically free stuff from Amazon if you’re a good shot with a rifle.”

Most seemed to miss the point that concept cars, planes and… octocopters are needed ideas awaiting technologies to fill in the gaps which will turn the concept into economic reality and a feasible product.

Amongst the more informed, Michael Toscano, President of AUVSI, commented:

Amazon’s concept delivery system demonstrates the promise of unmanned aircraft systems. It underscores how this innovative technology will transform the way industries operate. Whether it is improving agriculture output, helping first responders, advancing scientific research, or making business more efficient, UAS are capable of saving time, money and lives.

While Amazon demonstrated that deliveries via UAS are technically feasible, the commercial use of UAS is currently prohibited in the United States. The FAA, however, is currently working to establish rules for commercial use. Even Amazon has acknowledged the regulatory framework needs to be in place before it can launch its service, and this is going to take until at least 2015.

Like many other companies and industries, Amazon is testing UAS now so that it can be ready to recognize the benefits of the technology once UAS are fully integrated into the U.S. airspace in the coming years.

The wider use of UAS will have a huge economic impact in the U.S. for both the public and commercial sectors. Our economic study released earlier this year found that the UAS industry will have an $82 billion economic impact and create more than 100,000 jobs in the first decade after integration.

Certainly there will be many technological, insurance and regulatory hurdles before we see a fleet of Amazon PrimeAir, or FedEx Today, or even Papa John Pizza Express. With the endorsement of Jeff Bezos, the tip of the iceberg has been reached and it’s all downhill from there. His optimistic viewpoint is that we’ll see Amazon PrimeAir in four to five years.

]]> https://robohub.org/amazon-announces-plans-for-drone-delivery-service-says-safety-will-be-key-priority/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 15:56:04 +0000 http://robohub.org/?p=23526

Amazon announced yesterday that it is developing a drone delivery service called Prime Air that will aim to get packages into customer’s hands within 30 minutes. They are planning to launch as soon as FAA regulations are lifted — as early as 2015. Amazon states that safety will be their top priority. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says, “Look, this thing can’t land on somebody’s head while they’re walking around their neighborhood.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98BIu9dpwHU

Amazon has not been shy when it comes to investing in novel delivery systems — their $775 million investment last year in Kiva Systems brought large-scale automation to their warehouse floors in an effort to improve efficiency.

Connect the dots:

Check out this new video by Mark Mueller out of Raffaello D’Andrea’s Flying Machine Arena at ETH Zurich, and note that D’Andrea is the tech wizard behind Kiva’s robotic warehouse — the video shows a novel failsafe algorithm that allows an unmanned aerial vehicle to recover and land safely following propeller loss. According to Mueller, the algorithm allows the vehicle to remain in flight despite the loss of one, two, or possibly even three propellers. (Full disclosure: I consult with D’Andrea’s lab on communications.)

See also:
Amazon Promises Package Delivery By Drone: Is It for Real? – Evan Ackerman on Automaton
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos looks to the future –  Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes
Amazon Prime Air: 5 Predictions About the Retailer’s Delivery Drones – Doug Aamoth on TIME
UPS researching delivery drones that could compete with Amazon’s – Ben Popper on The Verge

]]> https://robohub.org/robotics-year-in-review-top-10-stories-of-2012/ Wed, 26 Dec 2012 08:00:53 +0000 http://robotsindc.com/?p=331 Continue reading →]]> The past year was a watershed moment for robotics. From defense to exploration, startups to legislation, we saw products, laws, and investments that have shifted robotics out of the lab and into our lives. They have built on decades of basic and applied research, taking advantage of plummeting component costs and maturing core technologies such as batteries and communications. Below are the top 10 stories of 2012. And choosing only 10 from so many successes, research, and new products was extremely difficult. Perhaps that’s really the best story of the year.

10. Robot and Frank Film looks toward elderly care future

Among films like Real Steel and I, Robot, Robot & Frank emerged from the Sundance Film Festival as a refreshing film that offered roboticists a realistic vision for robots in elderly care.

9. First robotics ethics and law conference

The University of Miami School of Law hosted the first conferenceon legal and policy issues relating to robotics, a sign of things to come as unique enable robotics technologies raise new philosophical and legal concerns for lawyers and policymakers.

8. Baxter brings manufacturing robotics to small businesses

For four years, Rodney Brooks’ Heartland Robotics (now called Rethink Robotics) remained in stealth mode as many wondered what the acclaimed researcher and iRobot co-founder was plotting for the “manufacturing” domain. Finally, we met Baxter, a two-armed robot that can be programmed by demonstration to perform pick-and-place tasks. But it’s the small $20,000 price tag that is turning heads.

7. Amazon acquires Kiva for $775M

Amazon shocked the robotics world with its $775 million acquisition of Kiva Systems, maker of the automated warehouse logistics robots. It may not be a price we’ll see again any time soon, but the purchase signals a maturation of mobile robots that have become an integral part of business logistics.

6. Robonaut, Curiosity pave the way in space, WAVE glider robot traverses Pacific

With recent news in Washington considering the future of NASA, 2012 was a great year for the agency’s robotics program. First, Robonaut aboard the International Space Station began the year with an iconic handshake with the ISS commander. Since then, it has performed a variety of tasks in flipping switches, turning knobs, and grabbing handrails. b. Of course there was the “terrifying” Mars landing of the Curiosity rover in July. Armed with an arsenal of tools and laboratory equipment, Curiosity is turning out to be a successful robotic explorer. And just this month we learned that an autonomous wave glider robot from Liquid Robotics completed its one-year, 9000-mile Pacific voyage from California to Australia.

5. U.S. Government flexes muscle with DARPA ROBOTICS challenge and NRI

Back in 2004 when DARPA announced its first Grand Challenge in robotics, a reliable driverless car was a dream. Now, well, see the #4 story of the year below. The blue sky agency is at it again with the Robotics Challenge, a $34 million effort with the goal of producing a capable humanoid robot for disaster response scenarios. An added innovation to the challenge is an open-source simulator being developed by the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), which will serve as a contribution to the community but also permit a software-only team to earn a humanoid hardware platform and advance to the second phase of the challenge.

A year after the Obama Administration announced the National Robotics Initiative, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced $50 million in funding toward collaborative robots. While the amount is small compared to programs in Europe, Japan, and South Korea, the NRI is the first coordinated research funding focus in the U.S. for non-military robotic applications. For that, U.S. efforts come in at number five.

4. Driverless car legislation becomes law

The Google self-driving car has racked up 300,000 miles on the road as California, Florida and Nevada (last year) passed legislation setting up the procedures and requirements that will be needed for commercial driverless products. Several others, including D.C., are reviewing bills. With car manufacturers now introducing advanced sensors and increasing autonomy features in upcoming models, the legislation is ahead of the technological curve for once.

3. ROS turns 5

The Robot Operating System from Willow Garage. There’s not much more to say than I already have in previous posts. But a five-year anniversary for an open-source robotics software framework that continues to grow is a significant achievement. How fast has it grown? According to Tully Foote’s blog post at ros.org, there are 3699 public ROS packages (up from 1600 three years ago), 90 community-supported robot platforms (up from 50), and people are using ROS on all seven (yes, seven) continents. The recently launched Open Source Robotics Foundation is also a good sign for a sustainable movement.

2. Maker and start-up culture pushes robotics

In the same year that the iRobot Roomba celebrated 10 years on the market, we saw an acceleration of viable robotics businesses and products. For years many said that venture capitalists wanted nothing to do with hardware startups; they were too risky and required upfront capital, manufacturing, and inventory. That has clearly changed now, with increasing investments in robotics startups and entrepreneurs figuring out how to create products and solutions using robotics technology. The prestigious Y Combinator program funded Double Robotics and their price-shattering telepresence robot. Dmitry Grishin, a Russian investor, launched Grishin Robotics with $25 million of his own funds to invest in personal robotics companies. As of this writing, he’s invested in Double and the RobotAppStore. Furthermore, The Robot Report’s detailed map of nearly 1000 companies indicates 173 startups, 89 in the U.S. alone (not including many others still in stealth mode). And lest we forget the crowdfunding movement, which has spawned several robotics products and dozens more related “Internet of Things” devices. Some of our favorites: Romo, Hexy the Hexapod, OpenROV, and Autom.

Feeding into this hardware movement has been the growing maker culture, with a combination of 3D printers, hacker spaces, and inexpensive microcontrollers like the Arduino reducing the barrier to tinkering, building, and experimenting. Similarly, the Do-It-Yourself drone community has taken off with Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson leaving his post to take over 3D Robotics full-time.

1. Drones take center stage

It seems a week didn’t go by without a major story involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as they continue to be used in warzones in Afghanistan and shadow campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and the horn of Africa. Regardless of the ethics, sovereignty concerns, and the like, drones have saturated the national discourse and are here to stay on the battlefield, and there is little doubt we will begin to see remote-controlled and semi-autonomous UAVs in domestic surveillance and commercial applications as soon as 2015 in the United States. For these reasons, they take the number one spot.

Have another top story we didn’t list? We’d love to hear them! Let us know in the comments section.

]]> https://robohub.org/distribution-centers-an-emerging-robotics-frontier/ Wed, 03 Oct 2012 04:46:00 +0000 http://robohub.org/?guid=679b41bffdd61f6804a722e7adb686f4 Distribution centers (DCs) are massive warehouses that receive, inspect and store goods for later picking, packing and shipping to end-users, re-distributors or retail outlets. Products can be everything from books, pharmacy goods, clothing, office goods, food, drinks, shoes, produce, household items and pet supplies to diapers. And quantities can be one or two individual units to 20-100+ cases.

Driving the expansion and change in DCs are (1) online sales and consumer expectations of speedy delivery, (2) enhanced data manipulation capabilities, multidimensional processing and integration of new-tech mobile robotics into material handling, (3) proof that goods-to-man methods saves money, reduces labor and increases productivity, and (4) a current need to develop more cost-efficient centers (caused by delays and skittishness to make capital investments during the economic crisis). E-commerce sales are growing at an annual compounded growth rate of 8.5% – double that of supercenters, club and dollar stores. Supermarkets and convenience stores are growing as well. The quantity of materials that are moved daily through DCs is staggering as are the streams of data and algorithm considerations. [Source: Nielsen TDLinx & Nielsen Analytics] 

The immensity and complexity of the supply process can be seen in this video showing how a Giant Eagle supermarket is resupplied from its regional distribution center:

Amazon has and continues to lead e-commerce-driven distribution with their pick-to-cart method (otherwise known as man-to-goods) and their promise of speedy economical delivery. Workers run around and fill carts and deliver them to conveyors where they are transported to packing stations where individual shipments are processed and staged for pickup by FedEx, UPS, etc.. The metrics for this are 160 picks per hour. The video below shows that process.

http://youtu.be/i6H7nfHjHtY

Kiva Systems disrupted those metrics and increased worker productivity by reversing the man-to-goods process. This method brings the goods to the packer (goods-to-man). As Kiva’s success became proven in the field, Amazon acquired Kiva for $775 million and is beginning to install Kiva systems in their new warehouses. It is estimated that the new Kiva metric for Amazon consumer goods is 600 items per hour.

These metrics translate into fewer employees and lower warehouse costs, which include not only the structure but the inside storage and material handling equipment as well. Steve Banker, a consultant at ARC Advisory Group, recently wrote in Logistics Viewpoints:

If you conduct a Google search on “Amazon distribution center,” you come across announcements over the past year for DCs in Virginia, New Jersey, and South Carolina. According to these articles, warehouses costing roughly $50-65 million will employ 1,500 to 2,000 workers.

But then I came across an article about a new Indiana DC. This DC is costing $150 million and the company is only promising 1,000 new workers. Could this be one of the new warehouses that will be using Kiva? The employment numbers seem to add up. This DC will employ at least one third fewer workers.

European DCs tend to be smaller than those in the US where massive centers for Wallmart and Amazon often exceed 1 million sq ft. Amazon has said that it will be filling its new 1 million sq ft distribution centers with Kiva robots. According to their financial reports, they are opening 12 new Kiva-equipped centers in 2012 with more planned for 2013. That is a lot of Kiva mobile robots, and this demand will surely keep them busy building and integrating those devices and their related software systems into Amazon’s distribution scheme. In fact, Kiva has already laid off most of their sales and marketing staff but has increased their support staff to assist their new owner (and biggest client). As Amazon leads the consumer products industry to same day delivery, Kiva robots help give them that flexibility. [One-day turnaround isn’t unique to Amazon; it is often a necessity. Think produce: vegetables, fruits, baked goods. These goods regularly move in and out of DCs within 24 hours.]

Kiva’s acquisition by Amazon has created a void in innovative material handling technology just at the time when companies that had put off building or improving their DCs because of the economic crisis are now ready to invest again. Kiva’s low cost for warehouse shelving and speed of installation in bare-boned facilities are far cheaper and faster than any other method offered.

However, Kiva-equipped distribution centers aren’t the only methods available for handling robotic-assisted fulfillment. There are many new technologies as well as older-style methods now augmented with various robotics to handle the myriad types of warehoused goods. Amazon, Zappos and other consumer sales companies warehouse and ship small-quantity consumer items. Food distribution and intra-company distribution centers process on the case level. One east coast DC for a chain of groceries regularly processes 20 million cases per week. DCs not only focus on getting their goods in and out of the system but also concentrate on maximizing productivity and keeping their labor costs as low as possible.

Handling, distribution, transport and delivery – and the amortization of DC setup charges – often represent more cost than raw materials and manufacturing combined.  Consequently, warehousing and material handling are a big business for hundreds of different types of companies: conveyors, rollers, racks, vision systems, hoists, shelving, electric motors, slides, barcode readers, printers, ladders, gantries, tugs, forklifts, autonomous lifts and tugs, skids, totes, carts, and software systems of all types, to name just a few. Big players in the field include Intelligrated, Egemin Automation, Fromm, Daifuku Webb, Adept, Frog AGV Systems, Seegrid, Fuji, Edict, Omega Lift, Nordock, Interlake Mecalux, Automated Packaging, Itoh Denki, etc. Most of these vendors augment the man-to-goods model.

There are three companies transitioning to offer goods-to-man functionality: Symbotic, Swisslog and Dematic. The latter two have been in the material handling business for quite some time and have introduced many new robotic solutions. Swisslog is publicly-traded (SLOG:SW); the other two are privately held. All three of these vendors emphasize maximizing warehouse density which can be seen by level upon level (multiple vertical rows) of floor to ceiling racks.

Symbotic

Symbotic’s Matrix Rover travels along shelf rows picking and restocking as required but can also operate autonomously on warehouse floors.

Symbotic, previously named CasePick Systems, is a recent spin-off from C&S Wholesale Grocers, the largest grocery supply company in the US. For the past seven years C&S has been the test bed for the development of Symbotic’s line of products which include floor to ceiling high-density shelving and racks, storage and retrieval software, hardware systems, palletizer robots and robotic rovers. Now, as a separate company, they are a provider to C&S as well as other companies.

Symbotic focuses on handling skids and cases rather than on open-box or individual items. In an automated case/pallet warehouse, utilizing available storage area, including height as efficiently as possible, is the goal. Symbotic attempts to maximize usable space by providing and/or integrating all of the shelving, conveyors, stackers, robotic systems, robotic rovers and software, often reaching 17 rows high with the number of aisles limited only by the square footage of the warehouse. It’s like multi-level chess except on 17 levels! 

Guided by extraordinarily complex software, rovers speed along their row to pick or replenish cases of goods. Once a case is grabbed, the rovers take their goods to a Symbotic-invented device which enables the transfer of cases from multiple rovers at all levels of the shelving structure simultaneously, to a device for getting them down to floor level and then to a conveyor/tug system. The material is then moved to a station where Symbotic integrates heavy-duty Fanuc robotic arms in a palletizing process which then stacks the goods for shipment.

Swisslog

Left to right: Swisslog’s AutoStore drop-down rovers, Tornado lifts and SmartCarriers.

Swisslog builds modularized conveyors, stacker cranes, row rovers (called carriers) and autonomous tugs as well as their new AutoStore robots. Swisslog can handle open-case light goods and pallet/case systems. Swisslog provides European style material handling often characterized by high capital and operating costs and lots of mechanical devices. They enjoy very high productivity and space utilization in return.

Swisslog’s new AutoStore rovers race along the top of modular aluminum storage racks which are located just below ceiling level. The rovers reach down to get bins of targeted goods which are vertically stacked on top of each other. Then they race to a lift/crane which drops the goods down and conveys them to pick and pack stations and/or pallets for shipment. Once the bins have been picked, they are returned to the stack in the same manner.

Swisslog, as its name implies, is European and as such, must always be able to handle unique existing space considerations, often having to adapt to some very unique building configurations. Swisslog claims that their methods maximizes both vertical and horizontal space enabling them to process up to 1,000 picks per hour.

Dematic

Dematic goods-to-person shuttles are located at every level in all aisles and are serviced by high-speed elevators where material is lowered down to processing stations.

Dematic, headquartered in Luxembourg, is an established European style provider and integrator of logistics and material handling solutions. They offer almost every type of storage solution imaginable and provide distribution and handling for B2B and B2C as well as grocery, apparel, food and beverage and general merchandise.

Dematic provides conveyors, tugs, sorters, lifts and a variety of software for warehouse management, order fulfillment, RFID and SAP solutions and transport maximization. They use all of the different picking methods: pick by voice, pick by light, RF picking, etc.

Their most recent product addition is their row Multishuttle, a robotic rover that travels each row in each aisle in the warehouse picking orders and delivering them to a lift which sends them onward to a packing station.

Software

As is the case in most robotics, smart software is critical to its success. Imagine the algorithms involved in resource allocation to determine which product goes in which bin; which order gets assigned to which station; which pod comes to which station; which robot should get which pod. Then compound that with the problems of integrating that solution into a SAP, IBM, Oracle, Manhattan Associates, or Red Prairie fulfillment system. Then add customized delivery optimization solutions (such as sequencing skids in a truck to delivery routes and sequencing the contents of skids to how they are offloaded in the store) to the mix and you have some really complex software packages.

All of the companies mentioned in this article (Amazon, Kiva, Symbotic, C&S, Dematic and Swisslog) blend techniques from AI, controls systems, machine learning, operations research and other software and engineering disciplines into their mobile robotic platform. All are focused on transforming fulfillment to the goods-to-man methodology because of the increased productivity gains and all are pioneering as they go because goods-to-man is new territory, software-wise.

Summary

This article originated as a profile of one company as they began to robotically augment distribution centers. But, as I gathered information, the story has morphed into a review of why Kiva Systems’ innovative methods – the goods-to-man methodology – is far superior to other older styles of fulfillment. These older style man-to-goods methods are characterized by serious labor costs, heavy turnover, high cost shelving, conveyors, lifts, and transport and other systems to get targeted materials to a picker/packer or palletizing operation. Robotics, if used at all, is used to augment the worker’s reach, mobility and lifting. The new-tech companies profiled above (Swisslog, Symbotic and Dematic) have begun to implement goods-to-mansystems incorporating old and new style racks and shelving and all seem to be doing the same thing: building multi-layer shelving upon which rovers troll the levels and aisles picking their stuff and shuttling it off to an elevator which sends it via conveyors or otherwise to pick/pack or palletizing stations, all controlled by colossally-complex proprietary software.

]]> https://robohub.org/why-robot-startups-now-part-2/ Fri, 11 May 2012 00:58:55 +0000 http://www.robotlaunch.com/?p=330 2. Broader Financial Climate

A positive indicator for robotics startups is the improving financial climate. There are signs that the US housing market is stabilizing. Fannie Mae, the government backed mortgage company, has posted a profit for the first time since 2007 without needing a government bailout. The decline in home prices is slowing, as are mortgage delinquency rates and the rate of American home purchasing is on the rise again.

“We expect our financial results for 2012 to be significantly better than 2011,” Susan R. McFarland, Fannie Mae’s chief financial officer, said in a statement. “As our serious delinquency rate declines and home prices stabilize, we expect to reduce our reserves, which combined with revenue from our high-quality new book of business will drive our future results.” [1]

While not everyone is getting rich yet, the overall financial indicators show that the U.S. economy has rebounded faster than predicted. The stock market has doubled since 2009, corporate profits are surging and the U.S. economy is growing at 3% pa. As financial journalist Daniel Gross puts it:

“Like the world’s first bionic man, the U.S. economy has come back—better, stronger, and faster than most analysts expected, and than most of its peers.” [2]

While this is a U.S. centric view and some of Europe is still in financial crisis, nonetheless China and S.E.Asia are surging and many African economies are showing very promising proportional growth rates. There are other sources that describe the current world economic status but it’s no longer a bad time for a capital intensive industry like robotics to grow. Particularly if business models lower the risk by utilizing lease models or the rapid cheap trial and error methods of startups.

Where Defense budgets are tightening on traditional robotics, like unmanned systems, the Whitehouse is committing spending towards other newer robotics growth areas. All this indicates that robotics is ready to support itself as an industry, rather than be supported as a research project. Legislation is being passed allowing the introduction of driverless cars and by 2015 we may see changes permitting the commercial use of small drones in U.S. airspace.

3. Maturity of Robotics Technology

Rodney Brooks, founder of iRobot and current CEO of Heartland Robotics, is one of many expressing the view that robotics has progressed beyond a cool new research area and into the world of robot products. While making new discoveries is exciting, there isn’t enough effort going in to using those same exciting new technologies in everyday applications.

 ”Users just want to get a task done. They don’t care if it’s a cool robot. You may, but they may not care if it’s a robot at all,” [3]

So, the question now isn’t what robots can we build, it’s what can we do with the ones we’ve built already. The robots that are successful products seem simple and boring, eg. industrial arms, vacuum cleaners, cars. But when applied to the right problem, even simple robots are transformative. The first successful consumer robot was of course iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner with more than 7 million sold worldwide. But the biggest acquisition of a robotics company was Amazon buying Kiva in March 2012 for $775 million.

Kiva’s system relies on small orange turtle like robots that move shelves around in warehouses. The brains are largely on servers. The robots aren’t ‘cool or exciting’. They are barely even robots. But they solve the problem that sank WebVan, one of the most spectacular e-commerce failures. You can only do half your e-commerce in the cloud. Somewhere real products have to be shipped to real places.

Kiva founder Mick Mountz is an MIT engineer who worked at WebVan. “We decided products that could walk and talk on their own would be the best way to solve the problem,” he laughs. [4]

Think of Kiva bots as the hands and feet of the Cloud.  They are not autonomous Star-Trek-like agents, but are wirelessly connected to and controlled by the Cloud in real-time. [5]

Amazon, like WebVan, has to ship product. Reportedly, phsyical order fulfilment cost nearly 9 percent of Amazon’s $40 billion global revenues. This is a big enough pain point for some companies to be willing to trial the Kiva System in a few locations, especially smaller retailers, like Staples in 2004, who faced increasing competition in cloud commerce.

Kiva’s robots today are processing millions of orders a year in retailers’ warehouses across the United States, the UK, and Europe, quietly driving Kiva’s startling 80 percent annual growth. On the distant horizon is a plan to bring Kiva’s approach to the manufacturing sector. [6]

Jeff Bezos from Amazon is also investing heavily in Heartland Robotics. Brooks has a vision of transforming the workplace by making robots that can be safely worked with, shifting robots out of sterile, safe factory environments and bringing them alongside people. His analogy is with mainframe computer systems in the 1960s to the personal computer of the 1980s.

“Originally ordinary people couldn’t touch computers. Now they can. What if ordinary people could touch robots?” [7]

The future of robotics is exciting, but we’ve barely begun to fully explore the potential of the simple robots we already have.

next post: Increasing modularity & commonality plus decreasing component costs

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/business/fannie-mae-profit-signals-a-stabilizing-housing-market.html
2. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/29/myth-of-decline-u-s-is-stronger-and-faster-than-anywhere-else.html
3. http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57391570-76/robots-still-lack-the-human-touch/
4. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markpmills/2012/03/23/amazons-kiva-robot-acquisition-is-bullish-for-both-amazon-and-american-jobs/
5. http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2012/march/innovation-mountz.html
6. http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2012/march/innovation-mountz.html
7. http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2012/05/heartland_robotics_will_unveil.html
]]> https://robohub.org/another-big-robot-acquisition-amazon-buys-kiva-systems/ Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:42:00 +0000 http://www.therobotreport.com/index.php/blog/post/another_big_robot_acquisition_amazon_buys_kiva_systems/ … Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) will acquire privately-held Kiva Systems for approximately $775 million!
… Kiva’s novel warehousing system uses robots to bring the shelves to the picker and packer instead of vice versa.
… The acquisition is expected to close next quarter.
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