Source: Waymo

Waymo (Google) has announced a pilot project in Phoenix offering a full ride service in their new minivans. Members of the public can sign up — the link is sure to be overwhelmed with applicants, but it has videos and more details — and some families are already participating. There’s also a Waymo Blog post. I was in Phoenix this morning as it turns out, but to tell real estate developers about robocars; not for this.

There are several things notable about Waymo’s pilot:

1. They are attempting to cover a large area — they claim twice the size of San Francisco or 90 square miles. That’s a lot. It’s enough to cover the vast majority of trips for some pilot users. In other words, this is the first pilot which can test what it’s like to offer a “car replacement.”
2. They are pushing at families, which means children, including those not of driving age. The mother in the video expects to use it to send some children to activities. While I am sure there will be safety drivers watching over things, trusting children to the vehicles is a big milestone. Google’s safety record, with safety drivers, suggests this is actually a very safe choice for the parents, but there is emotion over trusting children to robots (other than the ones that go up and down shafts in buildings.)
3. In the videos, they are acting like there are no safety drivers but there surely are, for legal reasons as well as safety.
4. They are using the Pacifia minivans. The Firefly bubble cars are too slow for anything but neighbourhood operation. The minivans feature motorized doors, a feature that, although minor and commonplace, meets the image of what you want from a self-driving car.

Apple is in the game

There has been speculation recently because of some departures from Apple’s car team that they had given up. In fact, last week they applied for self-driving car test plates for California. I never thought they had left the game.

The big step is that once they test in California on public streets they will lose a lot of their stealth. Too many people in California (especially around Apple) know what to look for and we’ll see photos of these cars in the wild before too long. Which is good. I have never understood Apple’s deep culture of secrecy.

Waymo has reportedly bought a large test track in Nevada to expand their testing. Others are announcing pilot projects including Baidu, fitting surprisingly well with the schedule I have been telling people for the last few years. Namely that by late 2010 — pilots, until tech, regulatory and business kinks are worked out. Then by 2020 — first commercial deployments of taxi services. Mid-2020 — land rush as companies with working products rush to be the first to conquer individual city markets.

Uber/Waymo suit heats up

The Uber/Waymo lawsuit has become a soap opera. Because I have friends on both sides of the fight, I have not been commenting. Recent efforts include an attempt by Waymo to entirely shut down the Uber/Otto project or to force Anthony Levandowski to leave. This would be bad for Uber, especially the full shutdown, but as I wrote earlier Uber has a special advantage. Even if their project is shut down, they still have the number 1 brand and position for selling rides. Uber doesn’t own or control their cars now. If they have to buy somebody else’s robocars it is not nearly as strong a position as they might like, but it is not a failure.

Flying cars take off

I have been writing recently more about flying cars. Yesterday, my friends Larry Page and Sebastian Thrun revealed Kitty Hawk — a prototype flying car. You can see the cool video of it:

This is yet another piece of evidence that making a personal flying drone is certainly doable and going to happen. I even think the air traffic control problems can be solved. Four big questions remain:

1. How will we get enough energy in the vehicle to get a decent range? Not with today’s lithium-ion.
2. How will we get it quiet enough that you will tolerate regular takeoff and landing near you? (I am quoted in the NYT article on Kitty Hawk on this point.)
3. How will we get it energy efficient enough to not make our transportation less sustainable? Not with pure multirotors, though perhaps with ones that convert to fixed-wing flight. Or perhaps with electricity that’s so clean, we don’t care.
4. Will we tolerate skies packed full of (possibly noisy) flying drones?

Tesla settles suit

Telsa had been suing the startup founded by Stirling Anderson, who had been key in their autopilot project, and Chris Urmson, who for most of its existence ran Google’s project (and who I worked for while there.) The two are a powerhouse so their startup will be one to watch and the settlement will clear funding hurdles for them, even if it ended up being costly — but we don’t know many details.

Imagine an assistant that knows your schedule, contacts, interests and location, and that can communicate with you to help you stay informed, connected and on top of your game. This is more personalized than your PC, tablet or smartphone and, depending on whether physical or virtual, is in a pleasing, personal and compatible form. If these assistants catch on, they will begin anticipating and handling many of the little decisions that fill our days. The potential for this form of artificial intelligence has tech companies vying to lead the pack.

Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, Facebook, and Baidu are all in various states of pursuing virtual assistants. But JIBO, Pepper, Cubic, EmoSpark and others are just now coming to market and are offering a physical component – a robotic presence – which they hope will enhance the experience.

2015 is the year physical products will be coming to market and available for experimentation and testing. Pepper ships in the summer in Japan, JIBO ships preorders in Q3 as does Cubic in the fall and EmoSpark in the summer.

These types of personal assistants rely on multiple activities including: speech recognition to determine and parse through spoken commands; predictive technology to anticipate what a user will likely do next; and determining and using contextual data (biographic data and situational information, e.g.: location, time and date). Apple, Google and Baidu – all of which attempt to provide this service – want their intelligent interface to fit all front ends, to be the universal contact point. They see a plentiful revenue stream if they are successful. Others want Apple and Google to redirect users to company sites with apps that understand their own content better, e.g.: directing requests for pizza to Dom, the digital front-end for taking Dominos Pizza orders.

Many are waiting to see how the competition plays out. Car companies and other smart product providers, fearing a variety of consequences outside of their control, aren’t enamored of letting Apple or Google (or any of the others) run their voice-powered front-end systems … thus their current intense race for in-house and startup development. But if Google or Apple or ??? gets to market first with a true digital assistant that people embrace and buy – one that can be virtual or physical – car companies may need to make their systems adapt to that system because it’s what everyone wants to use.

The key to the outcome of this race is whether a general purpose AI will be able to steer people through their digital world, or whether users would rather navigate to applications that are specialists (such as American Airlines or Dominos Pizza).

Natural language recognition – and the ability to analyze user desires from that language – is a very competitive science these days. Nuance, the biggest provider of voice and language solutions to the auto industry and a collaborator with IBM up until recently, is now competing with IBM’s Watson team and also Apple, which is rumored to be working on their own language processing system instead of using Nuance. A look at the What’s Next section of Nuance’s website is, to quote them, “The intersection of Science Fiction, super-pi, and technology innovation.” But a more descriptive quote from that page seems more appropriate: “Intelligent self-service delivers a better customer experience.” That’s what this race is all about.

• The second wave of social robots is here
• Amazon’s Echo: A point-of-sale even the kids can relate to
• The next era of conversational technology
• The death of search (or, My dysfunctional relationship with Siri)

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

Here’s a video of the vehicle driving around the East Bay (50 miles from Cupertino), but they have also been seen in New York.

We don’t see the front of the vehicle, but it sure has plenty of sensors. On the front and back you can see two Velodyne 32E Lidars. These are 32 plane LIDARS that cost about $30K. You can also see two GPS antennas and what appears to be cameras in all directions. Unfortunately, you can’t see the front of the vehicle in these pictures, which is where the most interesting sensors will be.

So is this a robocar, or is this just a fancy mapping car? Rumours about Apple working on a car have been swirling for a while, but the absence of sightings of cars like this call them into question. You can’t have an active program without also testing cars on roads. There are ways to hide LIDARS and even cameras to a degree (and Apple is super secretive, so they might), but this vehicle hides little.

Most curious are the Velodynes. They are tilted down significantly. The 32E unit sees from about 10 degrees up to 30 degrees down. Tilting them this much means you don’t see out horizontally, which is not at all what you want if this is for a self-driving car. These LIDARs are densely scanning the road area close to the car, and higher items in the opposite direction. The rear LIDAR will be seeing out horizontally, but it’s placed just where you wouldn’t place it to see what’s in front of you. A GPS antenna is blocking the direct forward view, so if the goal of the rear LIDAR is to see ahead, it makes no sense.

We don’t see the front, so there might be another LIDAR up there, along with radars (often hidden in the grille) and these would be pretty important for any research car.

For mapping, these strange angles and blind spots are not an issue. You are trying to build a 3D and visible light scan of the world. What you don’t see from one point, you might see from another. For street mapping, what’s directly in front and behind is generally the road, and not especially interesting. But what’s to the side could be really interesting.

The car also has an accurate encoder on its wheel to give improved odemetry. Both robocars and mapping cars are interested in precise position information.

Evidence that this is a robocar:

• The Velodynes are expensive, high-end and more than you need for mapping (though if cost is no object, they are a decent choice).
• Apple knows it’s being watched, and might try to make their robocar look like a mapping car.
• There are other sensors that we can’t see

Evidence that this is a mapping car:

• As noted, the Velodynes are titled in a way that really suggests mapping. (Ford uses tilted ones, but paired with horizontal ones.)
• The cameras are aimed at the corners, not forward.
• They are driving in remote locations, which eventually you want to do, but initially you are more likely to get to the first stage close to home. Google has not done serious testing outside the Bay Area in spite of their large project.
• The lack of streetview is a major advantage Google has over Apple, so it is not surprising they might make their own.

I can’t make a firm conclusion, but the evidence so far leans toward it being a mapping car. Seeing the front (which I am sure will happen soon) will tell us more. Another option is that it could be a mapping car building advanced maps for a different, secret, self-driving car.

MacRumors has done a roundup of iPhone 6 rumors, and reported that the new phone will come in two models: 4.7” and 5.5”, and will be released starting this September.

The new phone will be faster¹, lighter, and thinner than the iPhone 5S. Other features may include image stabilization for the camera, support for the faster 802.11ac wifi standard, and fingerprint sensors. And Foxconn will utilize at least 10,000 robots in the manufacturing process.

MacDailyNews reports that “Foxconn parent company Hon Hai is set to deploy an army of 10,000 assembly-line robots to help meet the demands of producing the iPhone 6 … Hon Hai CEO Terry Gou revealed in a recent shareholder meeting that Apple would be the very first customer of Foxconn’s latest robots . . . Named ‘Foxbots,’ each robot will be able to assemble an average of 30,000 devices and costs anywhere from $20,000 to $25,000 to make. Gou stated that the assembly devices are undergoing their final testing phase.”

“Robots are going to enhance and speed up the manufacturing process,” said Tim Bajarin, CEO of market research firm Creative Strategies in an interview in The Week.” The really big issue here is that the demand for the iPhone continues to grow. It’s grown every quarter since it came out. From a business standpoint, it makes sense. When you are dealing with creating millions of smart phones per month, efficiency is critical. Robotics gives you that level of efficiency, which in the end, is very important for the bottom line.”

________________________

¹ The CPU chip won’t be manufactured by Samsung. Instead, it will likely be a 20-nanometer A8 chip from TSMC with an expected 30+% improvement over the iPhone 5S chip.

Voice recognition is a timely science not only because of all the human-automobile communication offered by car companies, but also by smart devices and their growing use of voice interfaces. It won’t be long until we operate many of our appliances by voice command.

Most present-day offerings require you to follow a menu, a convoluted non-intuitive form of communication. Few have the technology to enable consumers to ask for information quickly, easily, and without needing time-consuming complicated dialogues – but many companies are working on solving these problems.

Apple and Siri are at the forefront of handling free form conversational speech – and Apple’s acquisition of Novauris, a UK speech recognition company – will help in that pursuit. Terms and amount paid for the transaction – which occurred late last year – are unknown, but Novauris’ co-founder Melvyn Hunt confirmed the sale to a TechCrunch analyst.

Talent in this field is scarce and many companies have chosen to acquire that talent – and their software, patents and intellectual property (IP) libraries – for their various voice recognition quests.

These are a few of the companies developing and offering all sorts of consumer conversation recognition systems and context understanding systems from which instructions and responses are developed:

• Nuance (which recently acquired Vlingo)
• Evi by TrueKnowledge (which was acquired by Amazon)
• Alfred (which was acquired and then shut down by Google)
• Cue (which was acquired and then shut down by Apple)
• Novauris Technologies (acquired by Apple)
• Siri (which uses Apple and Nuance technology)
• Okay Google by Google

Notice the pattern? Apple, Google, Amazon and Nuance appear to be hot on the trail of being able to capture conversational instructions, convert the words into context, determine the instructions required, and then process those instructions. Speed is helped by experience, and Apple, Google, Amazon and Nuance are gathering that experience and processing hundreds of millions of spoken words every day.

It really won’t be long until you and your refrigerator are having a meaningful conversation.

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.

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

• Facebook plans to offer Internet service using aerial robots
• Google’s robot and artificial intelligence acquisitions are anything but scary
• Individual investors: Take a cue from corporate capital … the time is right for robotics
• Will companies like Google and Amazon usher in a new era for robotics?
• Big deals: What it means to have the giants investing in robotics

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

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 →

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

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

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.

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

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• Apple, Amazon and now Google: It’s a pretty exciting day for robotics!
• What were the top stories in robotics from 2013?
• Forget the octocopter, let’s talk about Kiva

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

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/the-future-of-chinese-manufactured-apple-products/ Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:37:00 +0000 http://robohub.org/?guid=d07c7c70e67e091e981d908a9cb24345


China’s economic miracle has lifted countless millions of supremely poor people out of poverty. But this progress has come at a price. The Apple Corporation’s experience in manufacturing its popular iPhones, iPods and iPads in China – recently described in the N.Y. Times – has subjected many of those making Apple products to unsafe and unfair working conditions.



Apple has been good for China. It has provided hundreds of thousands of jobs for the 300 to 400 million Chinese anxious to leave their rural, impoverished existence and move to a city where they can get a paying job. When these migrant workers get that job they send home 30-50% of their earnings, and then they and their families back home buy, amongst other things, electronic consumer products like cellphones, smartphones and iPods.

Many of these jobs have been created by the Apple phenomenon whereby Apple keeps making trend-setting products through new and novel uses of technological achievement.People want to buy their iPhones and iPads. Apple just had it’s biggest ever quarter: 37M iPhones, 15M iPads, $46 billionrevenue. Plus, as the economy has started to improve, people have more disposable income and are willing to spend even more for Apple products – 60% of which are manufactured and assembled in China, much of that by one large contract manufacturer: Foxconn.



Foxconn – whose parent company is Hon Hai Precision Electronics, a publicly traded Taiwanese company (TPE:2317) – is the hub in the center of this wheel of motion. It is in their factories in China where some of the components are built and much of the final assembly takes place. As recently reported by the New York Times, CBS, NPR, various watchdog groups and even an off-Broadway play, these factories are havens for worker mistreatment, suicides, unsafe conditions, low pay, and even child labor.

Suicides reached a peak in 2010 and Foxconn implemented solutions, including protective barriers, hotlines and counseling to help prevent further incidents. No suicides were reported in 2011.

Unsafe factory conditions, particularly working with toxins (polishing resins and cleaners) and dusts from metal shavings and other materials were cited as another example. Two serious explosions involving improperly ventilated aluminum shavings occurred in 2011 killing 20 and injuring 50. Subsequently, better ventilation systems and the replacement of workers with robotic polishing, sanding and spraying machines is beginning to take place.

Pay has raced to keep up with discontent and has risen from $0.25 per hour to $0.50 and then $1.00 and now, in many cases, $2.00 per hour. But in this excerpt from a report by a labor rights group, China Labor Watch, one can see the underlying problems:

The minimum wage in many factories does not meet the living costs of its workers. Workers cannot earn a living wage from normal working hours alone, and must work excessive overtime hours in order to earn enough money to survive. At one factory [not Foxconn] for example, workers’ minimum monthly wage was $138 in October 2010. There was a $6 deduction for dormitory accommodations, a $40.50 deduction for food and utilities fees, and a $15.30 deduction for social insurance, which left $76.20. If workers have other expenses or financial responsibilities, such as vocational classes or financial support of their parents (one of the main reasons migrant workers seek work in cities), it would be impossible to meet their living costs with only $76.20. In this situation, workers find themselves with no other option but to work excessive overtime.

 

Furthermore, many factories require workers to complete a fixed term of employment before they become eligible for a salary increase. Some factories required workers to complete at least a three month probation period and an additional three month evaluation before becoming eligible for a salary increase. Other factories require a year or longer before workers are eligible for an annual bonus. The difficulty, lengthy terms, and sometimes unpredictability involved in gaining a salary increase and bonus further reinforces workers’ dependence on overtime in order to earn a living wage.

Interviews by the press and various workers rights groups indicate that the main form of discontentis pressure and punishment from long hours at monotonous but intricate work in less than ergonomically friendly postures. 60-72 hour  6-day work weeks are the norm. The pressure comes from the demands to produce more, work more and complain less with punishment for infringements meted out in the form of financial fines, push-ups, public humiliation and attitudinal retraining classes.

Crowded dormitories, cafeterias, long and regimented lines, low pay and condescending contracts, have all contributed to a high turnover — 20-30% at last report. This perpetuates the cycle of employing unskilled migrants, training them in factory work, housing them, and getting them onto the factory floor and assembly line as quickly as possible.

Apple CEO Tim Cook was outraged at the N.Y. Times. Two recent stories in the N.Y. Times were followed by pieces on NPR and CBS: (1) In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad and (2) How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work. He considered the articles to be an offensive pseudo exposé. In an internal e-mail message to select Apple employes, Cook wrote:

We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern. Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are.

 

For the many hundreds of you who are based at our suppliers’ manufacturing sites around the world, or spend long stretches working there away from your families, I know you are as outraged by this as I am.

Foxconn, like many of the other suppliers, has denied many of the accusations and responded to periodic audits by saying that they’ve made or are implementing the legal changes suggested.

To be fair, one must keep in mind that China’s internal labor laws are newly emerging and are different from ours – their minimum age and wage are different too. Their management style is significantly different as well.

The N.Y Times articles failed to note what may be Foxconn’s most important long-term remedy to problems with its workforce: its plans to deploy one million robots. Foxconn appears to actually be ahead of the news cycle in this instance. Early in 2010 they realized that there would be increased demand for their products and services – particularly Apple products – and that they just couldn’t handle more workers. Instead, they decided to deploy 1 million robots as part of their solution. Mid-2011 they launched an R&D facility and robot manufacturing factory in Taiwan to design, develop and produce those 1 million factory robots. Recently they confirmed their intentions to replace but not necessarily lay off 500,000 workers with those 1 million robots thereby moving those workers up the skill-level ladder to more experienced and higher paying jobs.

By any reasonable definition of product liability law, Apple products are Apple’s products regardless of whether Apple subcontracts some or much of the effort. Apple is liable for any product failures that injure buyers. Consequently Apple is responsible for the actions of their suppliers to the extent that they are working on Apple’s products. Thus it comes down to this: what can and should Apple and other companies do when their sub-contractors are not holding to acceptable Western standards?

Here are my two suggestions:

1. Apple could insist that dull, dirty and dangerous tasks be automated with robotics and other processes that eliminate these jobs and, more importantly, reduce the areas where injury and discontent are likely to occur.
2. The N.Y. Times articles implied that Apple monitors its contractors’ costs and squeezes their profit margins to the lowest level possible and, when that happens, it becomes a major factor in these contractors subjecting their employees to unsafe and unfair working conditions in order to meet Apple’s price. If, on the other hand, Apple provided additional profits to their suppliers but stipulated that those profits be passed down to their workers in the form of additional funds for safety, better work-hours, automation and higher pay, everyone would benefit and the Apple culture would be preserved. Some might argue that this solution doesn’t address the competitive pressures of the marketplace. Apple’s recent quarterly 28% net profit results – and their $92 billion cash hoard – suggest that, regardless of market pressures, Apple does have some ability to share their profits where they will do the most good for long-term growth, the welfare of their sub-contract workers, shareholder value, AND global public relations.
And a solution from the folks at Change.org – a petition to Apple to protect workers making iPhones in Chinese factories. As of this posting there are already 157,000 signatures!

]]> https://robohub.org/the-future-of-chinese-manufactured-apple-products-3/ Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:37:00 +0000 https://robohub.org/?guid=d07c7c70e67e091e981d908a9cb24345


China’s economic miracle has lifted countless millions of supremely poor people out of poverty. But this progress has come at a price. The Apple Corporation’s experience in manufacturing its popular iPhones, iPods and iPads in China – recently described in the N.Y. Times – has subjected many of those making Apple products to unsafe and unfair working conditions.



Apple has been good for China. It has provided hundreds of thousands of jobs for the 300 to 400 million Chinese anxious to leave their rural, impoverished existence and move to a city where they can get a paying job. When these migrant workers get that job they send home 30-50% of their earnings, and then they and their families back home buy, amongst other things, electronic consumer products like cellphones, smartphones and iPods.

Many of these jobs have been created by the Apple phenomenon whereby Apple keeps making trend-setting products through new and novel uses of technological achievement.
People want to buy their iPhones and iPads. Apple just had it’s biggest ever quarter: 37M iPhones, 15M iPads, $46 billion revenue. Plus, as the economy has started to improve, people have more disposable income and are willing to spend even more for Apple products – 60% of which are manufactured and assembled in China, much of that by one large contract manufacturer: Foxconn.


Foxconn – whose parent company is Hon Hai Precision Electronics, a publicly traded Taiwanese company (TPE:2317) – is the hub in the center of this wheel of motion. It is in their factories in China where some of the components are built and much of the final assembly takes place. As recently reported by the New York Times, CBS, NPR, various watchdog groups and even an off-Broadway play, these factories are havens for worker mistreatment, suicides, unsafe conditions, low pay, and even child labor.

Suicides reached a peak in 2010 and Foxconn implemented solutions, including protective barriers, hotlines and counseling to help prevent further incidents. No suicides were reported in 2011.

Unsafe factory conditions, particularly working with toxins (polishing resins and cleaners) and dusts from metal shavings and other materials were cited as another example. Two serious explosions involving improperly ventilated aluminum shavings occurred in 2011 killing 20 and injuring 50. Subsequently, better ventilation systems and the replacement of workers with robotic polishing, sanding and spraying machines is beginning to take place.

Pay has raced to keep up with discontent and has risen from $0.25 per hour to $0.50 and then $1.00 and now, in many cases, $2.00 per hour. But in this excerpt from a report by a labor rights group, China Labor Watch, one can see the underlying problems:

The minimum wage in many factories does not meet the living costs of its workers. Workers cannot earn a living wage from normal working hours alone, and must work excessive overtime hours in order to earn enough money to survive. At one factory [not Foxconn] for example, workers’ minimum monthly wage was $138 in October 2010. There was a $6 deduction for dormitory accommodations, a $40.50 deduction for food and utilities fees, and a $15.30 deduction for social insurance, which left $76.20. If workers have other expenses or financial responsibilities, such as vocational classes or financial support of their parents (one of the main reasons migrant workers seek work in cities), it would be impossible to meet their living costs with only $76.20. In this situation, workers find themselves with no other option but to work excessive overtime. 

Furthermore, many factories require workers to complete a fixed term of employment before they become eligible for a salary increase. Some factories required workers to complete at least a three month probation period and an additional three month evaluation before becoming eligible for a salary increase. Other factories require a year or longer before workers are eligible for an annual bonus. The difficulty, lengthy terms, and sometimes unpredictability involved in gaining a salary increase and bonus further reinforces workers’ dependence on overtime in order to earn a living wage.

Interviews by the press and various workers rights groups indicate that the main form of discontent is pressure and punishment from long hours at monotonous but intricate work in less than ergonomically friendly postures. 60-72 hour  6-day work weeks are the norm. The pressure comes from the demands to produce more, work more and complain less with punishment for infringements meted out in the form of financial fines, push-ups, public humiliation and attitudinal retraining classes.

Crowded dormitories, cafeterias, long and regimented lines, low pay and condescending contracts, have all contributed to a high turnover — 20-30% at last report. This perpetuates the cycle of employing unskilled migrants, training them in factory work, housing them, and getting them onto the factory floor and assembly line as quickly as possible.

Apple CEO Tim Cook was outraged at the N.Y. Times. Two recent stories in the N.Y. Times were followed by pieces on NPR and CBS: (1) In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad and (2) How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work. He considered the articles to be an offensive pseudo exposé. In an internal e-mail message to select Apple employes, Cook wrote:

We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern. Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are. 

For the many hundreds of you who are based at our suppliers’ manufacturing sites around the world, or spend long stretches working there away from your families, I know you are as outraged by this as I am.

Foxconn, like many of the other suppliers, has denied many of the accusations and responded to periodic audits by saying that they’ve made or are implementing the legal changes suggested.

To be fair, one must keep in mind that China’s internal labor laws are newly emerging and are different from ours – their minimum age and wage are different too. Their management style is significantly different as well.

The N.Y Times articles failed to note what may be Foxconn’s most important long-term remedy to problems with its workforce: its plans to deploy one million robots. Foxconn appears to actually be ahead of the news cycle in this instance. Early in 2010 they realized that there would be increased demand for their products and services – particularly Apple products – and that they just couldn’t handle more workers. Instead, they decided to deploy 1 million robots as part of their solution. Mid-2011 they launched an R&D facility and robot manufacturing factory in Taiwan to design, develop and produce those 1 million factory robots. Recently they confirmed their intentions to replace but not necessarily lay off 500,000 workers with those 1 million robots thereby moving those workers up the skill-level ladder to more experienced and higher paying jobs.

By any reasonable definition of product liability law, Apple products are Apple’s products regardless of whether Apple subcontracts some or much of the effort. Apple is liable for any product failures that injure buyers. Consequently Apple is responsible for the actions of their suppliers to the extent that they are working on Apple’s products. Thus it comes down to this: what can and should Apple and other companies do when their sub-contractors are not holding to acceptable Western standards?

Here are my two suggestions:

1. Apple could insist that dull, dirty and dangerous tasks be automated with robotics and other processes that eliminate these jobs and, more importantly, reduce the areas where injury and discontent are likely to occur.
2. The N.Y. Times articles implied that Apple monitors its contractors’ costs and squeezes their profit margins to the lowest level possible and, when that happens, it becomes a major factor in these contractors subjecting their employees to unsafe and unfair working conditions in order to meet Apple’s price. If, on the other hand, Apple provided additional profits to their suppliers but stipulated that those profits be passed down to their workers in the form of additional funds for safety, better work-hours, automation and higher pay, everyone would benefit and the Apple culture would be preserved. Some might argue that this solution doesn’t address the competitive pressures of the marketplace. Apple’s recent quarterly 28% net profit results – and their $92 billion cash hoard – suggest that, regardless of market pressures, Apple does have some ability to share their profits where they will do the most good for long-term growth, the welfare of their sub-contract workers, shareholder value, AND global public relations.

And a solution from the folks at Change.org – a petition to Apple to protect workers making iPhones in Chinese factories. As of this posting there are already 157,000 signatures!

]]> https://robohub.org/googles-response-to-apples-siri-buy-cleversense/ Mon, 19 Dec 2011 01:28:00 +0000 http://www.therobotreport.com/index.php/blog/post/googles_response_to_apples_siri_buy_cleversense/ … Cleversense, a learning AI with a natural language processing front-end – and the developer of the popular Alfred personal assistant app – has been sold to Google for an undisclosed amount.
… Fear that Apple’s Siri “could provide a new paradigm for searching the Web that circumvents Google’s search engine and ads” may be the reason.
… The first language processing front-end made available to developers by either Apple or Google will be a windfall for human-robot communication systems development.
]]> https://robohub.org/10-billion-downloads-from-apple-app-store/ Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:37:00 +0000 http://www.therobotreport.com/index.php/blog/post/10_billion_downloads_from_apple_app_store/ … Apple App Store phenomena continues beyond iPhones, iPads and iPods with apps for all Apple products.
… App Store concept being introduced to robotics – because it’s the right way to customize to user needs.
]]> https://robohub.org/autism-robotics-and-apples-ipad/ Thu, 28 Oct 2010 15:43:00 +0000 http://www.therobotreport.com/index.php/blog/post/autism_robotics_and_apples_ipad/ … An unintended consequence of the versatility, ease of use, size and colorfulness of Apple’s new iPad is its emerging use of with autistic children to help them communicate. One software app in particular is providing very innovative assistance: Proloque2go.
… The San Francisco SFWeekly did an very informative story on the subject.
… Kaspar, a portable, small robot developed in the UK to help low-end-of-spectrum autistic children become socialized, complements the mix of tools, software and therapies to help our disabled children.
]]> https://robohub.org/the-application-of-elegance-to-machine-behavior/ https://robohub.org/the-application-of-elegance-to-machine-behavior/#respond Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:55:00 +0000 http://robohub.org/?p=4231 We all have some idea of what elegance means, whether our notion of it is tied up with silky evening dresses, polished wood and brass, chandeliers and stained glass windows, exotic carpets, and expensive sports cars, or with youthful bodies that are tanned and fit, knowing the local language well enough to use it sparingly with assurance, being appropriately dressed for the weather, good posture, fluid movement, a varied diet of moderate proportions, giving every task as much time as it requires, and so on.

 

Applying the notion of elegance to machine behavior may resonate for some and not for others. What could it possibly mean, elegant machine behavior, wouldn’t that be a contradiction in terms?

 

In this piece on another blog, I suggest that Apple should get into robotics, partly because to fail to do so would be to leave the largest looming growth market to others, and partly because I believe the company has something to contribute, something relating to elegance. I think Apple would set a high standard for machine behavior, and then exceed it, providing a tangible example of first-order elegance.

 

I say “first-order elegance” to suggest that there is also a “second-order” or “meta-elegance” that looks beyond present behavior to its ultimate effects. For example, formality may appear elegant, but if children are subjected to it all the time they may fail to develop emotional intelligence, an inelegant result.

 

As applied here, it is second-order or meta-elegance that is more important. It matters far less whether machines that tend land appear deft in their actions than whether the result of those actions appears more garden or desert-like. That’s not to say that first-order elegance is unimportant. Efficient movement, of the entire machine and of its parts, is an important aspect of cost-effectiveness, but efficiently producing a undesirable result gains nothing.

 

I believe that second-order elegance is achievable in this context, that machines can be programmed to understand complex living systems and nurture them, while raising food and fiber for market in their midst. If I didn’t believe that I would never have bothered trying to explain this vision of a greener future founded on robotics.

 

Reposted from Cultibotics.

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