Exhibiting at big events takes both time and money. Is it worth it for a robotics startup to invest in big expos like CES?  We asked Bill Culley of Empire Robotics – the company behind the VERSABALL soft ball gripper – to share his perspective. 

Why is Empire Robotics at CES?

We are at CES to show people that industrial robots are entering a new age – an age where it is safe to interact with them, they are easy to use, and they have capabilities beyond the old hard coded, do the same thing a million times with no error tolerance. Our robot gripper is soft, safe to work around, easy to program, and highly adaptable to a changing environment.

What is exciting at CES this year?

Well, there are certainly some very innovative technologies and product unveilings at the show this year. Plenty of connected and wearable devices, and of course the new Tesla Model X. And believe it or not, our little 10’x10’ booth has managed to garner coverage on par with some of these other high profile releases. People seem to be interested in robots, so we created a demo for people to come challenge a robot to a game of beer pong, and it’s gained attention beyond our expectations.

What’s the value for you given that CES is consumer facing and your product falls more into the industrial use category? 

This is not our target market (electronics consumers vs. industrial manufacturing engineers), so we don’t expect to meet customers at this show. But, we have found that a lot of our customers find us by reading an article on a tech blog, or seeing a posting on facebook in a engineering gadgets group. So we figure if we create a demo of our technology that can grab attention, the story will make its way to our target audience through second and third degree sharing from one interested engineer to the next.

Was it worth it?  

Yes. We have participated in trade shows, large and small, in the past and they always end up being worth it. Making one good connection often pays for the cost of the event, and we learn a lot by talking about our technology and answering hundreds of questions that reveal patterns in customer mindset. CES in particular … we have gotten great exposure in articles around the web already, and our video of the demo just hit 250,000 views. We’ve already had a few new customers contact us after they saw the beer pong demo, so it seems to be working.

What other conferences does a startup go to? 

Industrial trade shows are the best for us. We get to learn about our partners in the market, our competition, and our customers in a very focused place. It’s a great place to build relationships with other industry players by seeing the same people at different shows. And it seems to build customer confidence in our company when they see us at a few different trade shows – we start to blend in with the established names in the industry.

What advice can you offer other startups that are thinking of exhibiting at an expo?

Have a demo that grabs attention from a distance. Many of our customers cruise through an expo in half a day to see if there is anything new, then head back to their office. If they can’t see our grippers doing something they’ve never seen before from ten feet away, they’ll pass right by us.

Empire Robotics specializes in flexible robotic end-effectors that leverage the jamming phase transition of granular materials. You can learn more about the technology behind their VERSABALL gripper here. 

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The unveiling of the long sleek Mercedes Benz F 015 at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES 2015) in Las Vegas was quite something. It was amazing. Mercedes told us that they have been developing autonomous vehicles (AVs) for over 30 years and that the F 015 is a product of all of that time and investment. It left me covering the full spectrum of amazed, from ‘great!’ to ‘why?’

Setting the Scene

Key comments from Dr. Zetsche at the unveiling:

This is the re-definition of automotive luxury.

…exclusive cocoons on wheels.

…space, time and privacy.

…luxury in motion.

By 2025 the world’s automotive market will have grown by almost 30% to sales of 100 million passenger cars per year. This translates to 270,000 new cars each and every day.

Technology

The F 015 is a huge 17 feet long limo-esque futuristic dream, absolutely brimming with technology and features that you would expect to see in a sci-fi movie. It has external LED lights that change colour to let you know if the car is in control. The car interacts with pedestrians and other road users. A pedestrian crossing in front of the vehicle will see the front lights acknowledging their presence whilst the back lights display the pedestrians motion to warn following drivers. Great!

The vehicle even laser-projects a virtual crosswalk onto the road in front and informs pedestrians that it is safe to cross. Great!… but, why? This is something that the road safety professional in me finds very scary in a world where human drivers regularly manage to kill and injure pedestrians on permanently marked and signalized crosswalks. If humans don’t stop at known permanent crosswalks, why will they stop at temporary ones? (temporary ones that don’t comply with any regulations or standards that currently exist). But this is a concept car, and it is expected to push the boundaries. In this instance it needn’t push any more.

Interior

The vehicle interior is even more mesmerizing. The front windscreen has a head-up-display and each of the side windows is actually a digital screen that each of the four passengers can gesture-control as they wish – even overlaying different scenery than is actually being driven through. Why? With our own smart devices and wearable technology advancing so rapidly that we can replace and upgrade at very frequent intervals, why would we want permanent and expensive technology like this in the vehicle? At the luxury end of the market this concept probably makes sense, but upgradability may still prove to be an asset.

Take control

The F 015 will eventually be autonomous sometime next decade, but Mercedes say that there will ‘obviously be times when the F 015 owner wants to take control and drive themselves’, so a ‘floating’ steering and control mechanism is available that can reach any of the four seating positions. Why? Why do we want a de-skilled driver taking back control just to have fun when he/she doesn’t have the capability to drive sufficiently safely anymore? Why do we expect people to continue to own a vehicle when a much more efficient and sustainable use of the world’s resources would be to just hire the type of autonomous vehicle that we need for any particular journey? Mercedes did very briefly address this latter point when they talked about making their shared Car2Go vehicles autonomous, but it is clear that they make lower profit margins from selling small fleet vehicles than selling luxurious privately owned vehicles.

Expensive play-thing

The F 015 is an amazing vehicle. But it looks like it is going to be a very expensive play-thing for the rich. There is no harm in that, but it does seem that we will need other concepts to fully grasp the amazing socio-economic benefits that fully autonomous vehicles offer. It definitely is moving in the right direction by pushing autonomous boundaries, but seems too mired in the personal ownership paradigm to be of much use to the vast majority.

Sustainable?

Growth of passenger car sales to 100 million per year sounds like fantastic news for automotive sector shareholders, but how reliable is this forecast? Is this forecast sufficiently sustainable? We currently need 1.5 earths to provide the resources we use and to absorb our waste. By 2025 we will need 2.0 earths. With vehicles being such a huge resource-sink perhaps we should be looking much more carefully at the direction that our planet needs vehicle ownership to take?

‘Dreaming of a game-changer’

The autonomous vehicle concept that I dream of will make the roads safer, provide better and equitable access for on-demand and door-to-door transport for everyone (including many that are seniors, disabled, too poor, too young, un-licensed etc.) and be much more efficient, sustainable and environmentally friendly than the current vehicle ownership and use paradigm. Now a vehicle that satisfies that concept truly would be amazing, and be a game-changer.

In a future post I will scan the horizon to see if there is reason to hope for a more accessible autonomous vehicle solution that might just transform the world.

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A BMW stops on its own when the driver tries, full throttle, to drive it into the obstacle. It also won’t let you sideswipe obstacles. I have been in cars that do this before; this one seemed to stop more gently. Photo credit: Brad Templeton.

Day 3 at CES started with a visit to BMW’s demo. They were mostly test driving new cars like the i3 and M series cars, but for a demo, they made the i3 deliver itself along a planned corridor. It was a mostly stock i3 electric car with ultrasonic sensors — and the traffic jam assist disabled. When one test driver dropped off the car, they scanned it, and then a BMW staffer at the other end of a walled course used a watch interface to summon that car. It drove empty along the line waiting for test drives, and then a staffer got in to finish the drive to the parking spot where the test driver would actually get in, unfortunately.

Also on display were BMW’s collision avoidance systems in a much more equipped research car with LIDARs, Radar etc. This car has some nice collision avoidance. It has obstacle detection — the demo was to deliberately drive into an obstacle, but the vehicle hits the brakes for you. More gently than the Volvo I did this in a couple of years ago.

More novel is detection of objects you might hit from the side or back in low speed operations. If it looks like you might sideswipe or back into a parking column or another car, the vehicle hits the brakes on you (harder) to stop it from happening.

Insurers will like this — low speed collisions in parking lots are getting to be a much larger fraction of insurance claims. The high speed crashes get all the attention, but a lot of the payout is in low speed.

These roller skates capture energy in one part of your stroke and give it back to you in another lo let you go faster. Photo credit: Brad Templeton.

I concluded with a visit to my favourite section of CES — Eureka Park, where companies get small lower cost booths, with a focus on new technology. Also in the Sands were robotics, 3D printing, health, wearables and more — never enough time to see it all.

I have added 12 more photos to my gallery, with captions — check the last part out for notes on cool products I saw, from self-tightening belts and regenerating roller skates to phone-charging camping pots.

Delphi’s car bristling with sensors — 6 LIDARS and even more radars. Photo credit: Brad Templeton.

After a short day looking at robocars at CES, a more full day was full of the usual equipment — cameras, TVs, audio and the like and visits to several car booths.

I’ve expanded my gallery of notable things with captions with cars and other technology.

Lots of people were making demonstrations of traffic jam assist at CES — simple self-driving at low speeds among other cars. All the demos were of a supervised traffic jam assist. This style of product (as well as supervised highway cruising) is the first thing that car companies are delivering (though they are also delivering various parking assist and valet parking systems).

This makes sense as it’s an easy problem to solve. So easy, in fact, that many of them now admit they are working on making a real traffic jam assist, which will drive the jam for you while you do e-mail or read a book. This is a readily solvable problem today — you really just have to follow the other cars, and you are going slow enough that, short of a catastrophic error like going full throttle, you aren’t going to hurt people no matter what you do … at least on a highway where there are no pedestrians or cyclists. As such, a full auto traffic jam assist should be the first product we see form car companies.

None of them will say when they might do this. The barrier is not so much technological as corporate — concern about liability and image. It’s a shame, because frankly the supervised cruise and traffic jam assist products are just in the “pleasant extra feature” category. They may help you relax a bit (if you trust them) as cruise control does, but they give you little else. A “read a book” level system would give people back time, and signal the true dawn of robocars. It would probably sell for lots more money, too.

The most impressive car is Delphi’s, a collaboration with folks out of CMU. The Delphi car, a modified Audi SUV, has no fewer than 6 4-plane LIDARs and an even larger number of radars. It helps if you make the radars, as otherwise this is an expensive bill of materials. With all the radars, the vehicle can look left and right, and back left and back right, as well as forward, which is what you need for dealing with intersections where cross traffic doesn’t stop, and for changing lanes at high speed.

As a refresher: Radar gives you great information, including speed on moving objects, and sucks on stationary ones. It goes very far and sees through all weather. It has terrible resolution. LIDAR has more resolution but does not see as far, and does not directly give you speed. Together they do great stuff.

For notes and photos, browse the gallery.

A version of this article originally appeared on robocars.com.

The vehicle has a long wheelbase design to allow it to have a very large passenger compartment, which features just four bucket seats, the front two of which can rotate to create face to face seating. (In addition, they can rotate to make it easier to get into the car.) We’ve seen a number of face to face concepts and designs and I’ve been interested in the idea from the start: the idea of making car travel more social and better for both families and co-workers. As a plus, rear facing seats, though less comfortable for some fraction of the population, are going to be safer in a front end collision.

The vehicle features a bevy of giant touchscreens. We see a lot of this, but I will note that we don’t have this at our desks or in our homes. I suspect passengers in robocars will prefer the tablets they already have, though there is the issue that looking down at a tablet generates motion sickness sometimes.

The interior has an odd mix of carpet and hardwood, perhaps trying to be more like a living room.

More interesting, though not on display, are the vehicle’s systems for communicating with pedestrians and other road users. These include LEDs that can indicate if the car is self-driving (boring, and something I pushed to have removed from the Nevada law,) but more interesting are indicators that help to tell pedestrians the vehicle has seen them. In one feature, which only is likely to work at night, a laser projects a crosswalk in front of the vehicle when it stops, in order to tell a pedestrian it sees them and is expecting them to cross in front. It can also make LED words at the back for other cars (something that is I think illegal in some jurisdictions).

Also interesting has been the press reaction. WIRED thinks it’s bonkers and not designed very well. The bonkers part is because the writer thinks it de-emphasizes driving too much. Of course, those of that stripe are quite upset at Google’s car with no controls. Other writers have liked the design, and find it quite superior to Google’s non-threatening design, suggesting the Google design is for regulators and the Mercedes design is for customers. Google plans to get approval for their car and operate it, while Mercedes is just using the F105 as a concept.

I have a gallery of several pictures of the car that I will add to during the week. In the gallery you will also see:

Audio Piloted Driving prototype

Audi drove one of their cars from the Bay Area to CES, letting the press take 100 mile stints. It also helped them learn things about different conditions. One prototype is in the booth, and I will go out to see the real car outdoors tomorrow.

TRW

TRW was showing off their technology with a transparent model showing where they had put an array of radars to make 360 degree radar and camera coverage. No LIDAR, but they will probably get one eventually. Radar’s resolution is low, but they believe that by fusing the radar and the camera views they can get very good perception of the road.

Others

There are more for me to see tomorrow. Ford showed more of their ADAS systems and also their Focus, which has 4 of the 32 plane velodyne LIDARs on it. Toyota showed only a hydrogen fuel cell car. Valeo has some interesting demos I will want to see — they have promised doing a good traffic jam assist. While they have not said so, I think the most interesting car company robocar function will be a traffic jam assist that does not require supervision — ie. you can read.

While no car company is ready to have the driver out of the loop at high speeds, do so at traffic jam speeds is much easier, mainly because you just have to follow the other cars, and you stop self-driving if the jam opens up. Several companies are working on a product like this and I suspect it will be the first real robocar product to reach the market that is actually practical. The “super cruise” products that drive while you watch are pleasant, but not much more world-changing than adaptive cruise control. When a car can give people time back, even if only traffic jam time, something interesting starts happening. 

A version of this article originally appeared on robocars.com.

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Winners chosen in UK competition

Four cities in the UK have been chosen for testing and development of robcars using the £10 million funding contest. As expected, Milton Keynes was chosen along with Coventry, and also Greenwich and Bristol. The BBC has more.

Chinese competition has another round

Many don’t know it, but China has been running its own “DARPA Grand Challenge” style race for 6 years now. The entrants are mostly academic, and not super far along, but the rest of the world stopped having contests long ago, much to its detriment. I was recently in Beijing giving a talk about robocars for guests of Baidu — my venue was none other than the Forbidden City — and the Chinese energy is very high. Many, however, thought that an announcement that Baidu would provide map data for BMW car research meant that Baidu was doing a project the way Google is. It isn’t, at least for now.

LA Mayor wants the cars

I’ve seen lots of calls from cities and regions that robocars come there first. In the fall, the mayor of Los Angeles made such a call. What makes this interesting is that LA is indeed a good early target city, with nice wide and simple roads, lots of freeways, and relatively well-behaved drivers compared to the rest of the world. And it’s in California, which is where a lot of the best development is happening, although that’s all in the SF Bay Area.

Concept designs for CES and beyond

More interesting concept cars are arising, as designers realize what they can do when freed of having a driver’s seat that faces forward and has all the controls, and as electric drivetrains allow you to move around where the drivetrain goes. Our friends at the design firm IDEO came up with some concepts that are probably not realistic but illustrate worthwhile principles. In particular, their vision of the delivery robot is quite at odds with mine. I see delivery robots as being very small, just suitcase sized boxes on wheels, except for the few that are built for very large cargo like furniture and industrial deliveries. Delivery robots will come to you on your schedule, not on the delivery company’s schedule. There will be larger robots with compartments when you can service a group of people who live together, but there is a limit to how many you can serve and still deliver at exactly the right time that people expect.

Everybody is also interested to see what Daimler will unveil at the Consumer Electronics Show. They showed off an interior with face-to-face seating and everybody wearing a VR headset, and have been testing a car under wraps.

It’s interesting to think about the VR headset. A lot of people would get sick if jostled in a car while wearing a VR headset. However, it might be possible to have the VR headset deliberately bounce the environment it’s showing you, so that it looks like you’re riding a car in that environment that’s bumping just the way you are. Or even walking.

Here (Nokia/Navteq) builds a big library of HD maps

Robocars work better if they get a really detailed map of their environment to drive with. Google’s project is heavily based on maps, and they have mapped out all the roads they test near Google HQ. Nokia’s “Here” division has decided to enter this in a big way. Nokia calls its projects “HD Maps,” which is a good name because you want to make it clear that these are quite unlike the navigation maps we are used to from Google, Here and other companies. These maps track every lane and path a car could take on the road, but also every lane marker, every curb, every tree — anything that might be seen by the cameras and 3D sensors.

Nokia makes the remarkable claim to have produced 1.2 million miles of HD Maps in 30 countries in the last 15 months. That’s remarkable because Google declared that one of their unsolved problems was that the cost of producing maps, and they were working to bring that cost down. Either Nokia/Here has made great strides in reducing that cost, or their HD Maps are not quite at the level of accuracy and detail that might be needed.

Nonetheless, the cost of the mapping will come down. In fact, many people express surprise when they learn that the cars rely so heavily on maps, as they expect a vehicle that, like a human being, can easily drive on a road they’ve never seen before, with no map. Humans can do that, but a car that could do that is also a car that could build the sort of map we’re talking about, in real time. Making the map ahead of time has several advantages, and is easier to do than doing it in real time. Perhaps some day that real-time map builder (what roboticists call Simultaneous localization and mapping) will arise, but for now, pre-mapping is the way to go.

510 Systems story told (sort of.)

There was recently press about the kept-quiet acquisition by Google of 510 Systems. I was at Google at the time, and it involves friends of mine, so I will have to say there are some significant errors in the story, but it’s interesting to see it come out. It wasn’t really that secret. What Anthony did with PriBot was hardly secret — he was on multiple TV shows for his work — and that he was at Google working at first on Streetview and later on the car was also far from secret. But it wasn’t announced so nobody picked up on it.

A version of this article originally appeared on robocars.com.

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