In this episode, Abate flew to Denver, Colorado, to get a behind-the-scenes look at the future of recycling with Joe Castagneri, the head of AI at Amp Robotics. With Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) processing a staggering 25 tons of trash per hour, robotic sorting is the clear long-term solution.

Recycling is a for-profit industry. When the margins don’t make sense, the items will not be recycled. This is why Amp’s mission to use robotics and AI to bring down the cost of recycling and increase the number of items that can be sorted for recycling is so impactful.

Joe Castagneri
Joe Castagneri graduated with his Master of Science in Applied Mathematics, with an undergrad degree in Physics. While still in university, he first joined the team at Amp Robotics in 2016 where he worked on Machine Learning models to identify recyclables in video streams of Trash in Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs). Today, he is the Head of AI at Amp Robotics where he is changing the economics of recycling through automation.

Nico, Emil, and Moritz founded ReRun with the mission of making powerful visualization tools free and easily accessible for roboticists. Nico and Emil talk about how these powerful tools help debug the complex problem scopes faced by roboticists. Tune in for more.

Nikolaus West
Co-Founder and CEO
Niko is a second-time founder and software engineer with a computer vision background from Stanford. He’s fanatic about bringing great computer vision and robotics products to the physical world.

Emil Ernerfeldt
Co-Founder and CTO
Emil fell in love with coding over 20 years ago and hasn’t looked back since. He’s the creator of egui, an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI in Rust, that we’re using to build Rerun. He brings a strong perspective from the gaming industry, with a focus on great and blazing fast tools.

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Many people associate prosthetic limbs with nude-colored imitations of human limbs. Something built to blend into a society where people have all of their limbs while serving functional use cases. On the other end of the spectrum are the highly optimized prosthetics used by Athletes, built for speed, low weight, and appearing nothing like a human limb.

As a child under 12 years old, neither of these categories of prosthetics particularly speaks to you. Open Bionics, founded by Joel Gibbard and Samantha Payne, was started to create a third category of prosthetics. One that targets the fun, imaginative side of children, while still providing the daily functional requirements.

Through partnerships with Disney and Lucasfilms, Open Bionics has built an array of imagination-capturing prosthetic limbs that are straight-up cool.

Joel Gibbard dives into why they founded Open Bionics, and why you should invest in their company as they are getting ready to let the general public invest in them for the first time.

Joel Gibbard

Joel Gibbard lives in Bristol, UK and graduated with a first-class honors degree in Robotics from the University of Plymouth, UK.

He co-founded Open Bionics alongside Samantha Payne with the goal of bringing advanced, accessible bionic arms to the market. Open Bionics offers the Hero Arm, which is available in the UK, USA, France, Australia, and New Zealand. Open Bionics is revolutionizing the prosthetics industry through its line of inspiration-capturing products.

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Dr. Tyler Reid, co-founder and CTO of Xona Space Systems, discusses a new type of global navigation satellite system (GNSS). Xona Space Systems plans to provide centimeter-level positioning accuracy and will serve the emerging autonomous vehicle community, where precise navigation is key. Reid discusses the advantages and technical challenges of a low Earth orbit (LEO) solution.

Tyler Reid

Tyler Reid is co-founder and CTO of Xona Space Systems. Previously, Tyler worked as a Research Engineer at the Ford Motor Company in localization and mapping for self-driving cars. He has also worked as an engineer at Google and as a lecturer at Stanford University, where he co-taught the GPS course. Tyler received his PhD (2017) and MSc (2012) in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford and B.Eng. (’10) in Mechanical Engineering from McGill.

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The Recycling Industry in the United States is a for-profit industry. They profit from taking recyclable material, refining it, and reselling it to companies at a cheaper price than producing the material from scratch.

Supply and Demand in Recycling

If you look at the demand side of the recycling industry, an array of multi-billion dollar companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are incentivized to buy recycled goods and reduce their materials costs.

On the supply side, ~300 million tons of trash are generated annually in the United States. Estimates suggest that up to 75% of that is recyclable.

On paper, it seems clear that maximizing the amount of trash the US recycles is in everyone’s interest. One issue though, less than a third of the trash ends up recycled.

Areeb, co-founder of Glacier, breaks down the multi-layered reasoning behind why the Recycling industry cannot handle this volume of trash, and what Glacier is doing to address this.

Areeb Malik

Areeb Malik is the Co-Founder of Glacier, and he is on a personal mission to fight climate change and extract value from the $123B worth of recyclables that fill the landfills and oceans. Before founding Glacier, Areeb was a Software Engineer at Facebook, where he used Machine Learning and Computer Vision to build out new product features.

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The team at Retrocausal built a computer vision platform that allows any manufacturer to rapidly set up an activity recognition pipeline to assist with manual assemblies. Using any standard camera pointed at an assembly station, the system can learn the assembly procedure and give real-time feedback.

Deci:

At Deci, they are tackling the problem of taking a Machine Learning model optimized for a single hardware platform and adapting it to work on a different hardware platform.

When developing an ML model running on the edge, a time-consuming development cycle is made to optimize the model to run at peak capacity. However, over time hardware platforms get updated and companies need to make the decision of whether or not to update their hardware and dedicate engineering resources to manually tweak a multitude of settings.

Deci allows companies to upload their models to the cloud, then automatically optimize them for running on a variety of different hardware platforms that they own in their facilities.

StegAI:

Dr. Eric Wengrowski co-founded StegAI after publishing a paper in CVPR 2019 on embedding “fingerprints” that are embedded in images and videos that are invisible to the human eye, but detectable by their software.

Their product modulates the pixels in an image in such a way that even after compressing, resizing, or printing out the images, their deep learning algorithms will still be able to detect the origin of the image.

This powerful tool is used by social media firms to protect against potential copyright infringement when users upload content to their platforms

At ICRA 2022, the researchers weren’t the only ones working with cutting-edge technology. We spoke to the exhibitors to get real-life demos of their products.

Tangram Vision

Tangram Vision is a hardware-agnostic sensor fusion platform. It streamlines the development and deployment of critical sensor infrastructure like calibration, fusion, and monitoring for any number of cameras, depth sensors, LiDAR, radar, and IMU. Their co-founder, Adam Rodnitzky, walks us through their sensor fusion platform.

FLX Solutions

Matt Bilsky, Founder and CEO of FLX Solutions gives us a live demo of their robot, the FLX BOT. Matt Bilsky applied his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering to create a novel, highly compact robot that is designed to reach and inspect parts of a building that a human cannot reach. The FLX BOT is one inch in diameter and is made of modular links that can be attached one after the other to extend the reach and degrees of freedom of the robot.

Exyn Technologies

Exyn Technologies specializes in aerial robotics, drone swarms, multi-modal sensor fusion, 3D mapping, obstacle avoidance, and autonomous navigation & planning.

Exyn’s focus is on developing software for aerial robots so they can operate in GPS-denied environments, without human control, prior information, or pre-existing infrastructure (e.g. no motion capture system).

Pollen Robotics

Pollen Robotics developed the robot, Reachy, an open-source humanoid robot with a quirky appearance. Reachy’s primary userbase is researchers studying fields such as teleoperation. Using mixed autonomy, Reachy is able to be teleoperated by humans, while still having onboard intelligence to autonomously infer the actions you want it to do.

Brandon Gilles, Founder and CEO of Luxonis, tells us his story about how Luxonis designed one of the most versatile perception platforms on the market.

Brandon took the lessons learned from his time at Ubiquiti, which transformed networking with network-on-a-chip architectures, and applied the mastery of embedded hardware and software to the OAK-D camera and the broader OAK line of products.

To refer to the OAK-D as a stereovision camera tells only part of the story. Aside from depth sensing, the OAK-D leverages the Intel Myriad X to perform perception computations directly on the camera in a highly power-efficient architecture.

Customers can also instantly leverage a wide array of open-source computer vision and AI packages that are pre-calibrated to the optics system.

Additionally, by leveraging a system-on-a-module design, the Luxonis team easily churns out a multitude of variations of the hardware platform to fit the wide variety of customer use cases. Tune in for more.

Brandon Gilles

Brandon Gilles is the Founder and CEO of Luxonis, maker of the OAK-D line of cameras. Brandon comes from a background in Electrical and RF Engineering. He spent his early career as a UniFi Lead at Ubiquiti, where his team helped bring Ubiquiti’s highly performant and power-efficient Unifi products to market.

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In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to Dan O’Mara, who is the founder and COO of Circuit Launch and Mechlabs. Circuit Launch is a space for hardware entrepreneurs to work in Oakland, California, and Mechlabs is a project-based course to learn robotics. This interview is mostly about Mechlabs, but talks about the origins of Circuit Launch, including how it is not a maker or coworking space and its business model. For Mechlabs, we talk about several of its aspects that make it different than a university education in robotics, including how there are mentors not instructors, how projects are scoped, and how people are invited to work on what is most interesting to them. We also talk about the future of Mechlabs and how it fits with current universities.

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Diligent Robotics, founded by Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu, develops socially intelligent automation solutions for hospitals. Moxi, their flagship robot, delivers items like medications and wound dressings between departments to save the clinical staff’s time. Diligent has just closed their Series B funding round with $30 million. 

We sat down with Dr. Thomaz to talk about Moxi, how to manage people’s expectations about robots, and advice for young people and women in robotics. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Andrea Thomaz with Diligent’s flagship robot Moxi.

What kinds of problems are you trying to solve with Moxi?

We are building Moxi to help hospitals with the massive workforce shortage that they’re seeing now more than ever. We actually started the company with the same intention several years ago before there was a worldwide pandemic, and it really has just gotten to be an even bigger problem for hospitals. I feel really strongly that robots have a place to play in teamwork environments, and hospitals are a great example of that. There’s no one person’s job in a hospital that you would actually want to give over to automation or robots, but there are tiny little bits of a lot of people’s jobs that are absolutely able to be automated and that we can give over to delivery robots in particular like Moxi. [The main problem we’re trying to solve with Moxi is] point to point delivery, where we’re fetching and gathering things and taking them from one area of the hospital to another. 

Hospitals have a lot of stuff that’s moving around every day. Every person in the hospital is going to have certain medications that need to be delivered to them, certain lab samples that need to be taken and delivered to the central lab, certain supplies that need to come up to them, food and nutrition every day. You have a lot of stuff that’s coming and going between patient units and all these different support departments. 

Every one of these support departments has a process in place for getting the stuff moved around, but no matter what, there’s stuff that happens every single day that requires ad-hoc [deliveries] to happen between all of these departments and different nursing units. So sometimes that’s going to be a nurse that just needs to get something for their patient and they want that to happen as soon as possible. They’re trying to discharge their patient, they need a particular wound dressing kit, they’re going to run down and get it because they want to help their patient get out. Or if there’s something that needs to be hand carried because the regular rounding of medications has already happened, a lot of times you’ll have a pharmacy technician stop what they’re doing and go and run some infusion meds for a cancer patient, for example. It sort of falls between these departments. There’s different people that would be involved but a lot of times it does fall on the nursing units themselves. A nurse explained to us one time that nurses are the last line of defense in patient care.

Moxi performing a delivery for a clinical staff member.

What is changing with this most recent round of funding?

Over the last 6-12 months, the demand has really skyrocketed such that we’re barely keeping up with the demand for people wanting to implement robots in their hospitals. That’s the reason why we’re raising this round of funding, expanding the team, and expanding our ability to capitalize on that demand. A couple of years ago, if we were working with a hospital it was because they had some special funds set aside for innovation or they had a CTO or a CIO that had a background in robotics, but it certainly wasn’t the first thing that every hospital CIO was thinking about. Now that has completely changed. We’re getting cold outreach on our website from CIOs of hospitals saying “I need to develop a robotic strategy for our hospital and I want to learn about your solution.” Through the pandemic, I think everyone has seen that the workforce shortage in hospitals is only getting worse in the near term. Everybody wants to plan for the future and do everything they can to take small tasks off of the plates of their clinical teams. It’s been really exciting to be part of that market change and see that shift to where everybody is really really open to automation. Before we had to say “No no no, this is not the future, I promise it’s not scifi, I promise these really work.” Now [the climate has] really shifted to people understanding “This is actually something that can impact my teams.”

[Two of our investors are hospitals, and] that’s been one of our most exciting parts of this round. It’s always great to have a successful funding round, but to have strategic partners like Cedars-Sinai and Shannon Healthcare coming in and saying “Yeah, we actually want to build this alongside you” — it’s pretty exciting to have customers like that. 

What kinds of technical problems did you run into when you were either building Moxi or deploying it in a hospital environment? How did you solve those problems? 

One that was almost surprising in how often it came up, and really impacted our ability [to run Moxi in the hospital environment] because we have a software-based robotic solution that is connecting at a regular basis to cloud services, [was that] we had no clue how terrible hospital WiFi was going to be. We actually spent quite a while building in backup systems to be able to use WiFi, backup to LTE if we have to, but be smart about that so we’re not spending a whole bunch of money on LTE data. That was a problem that seemed very specific to hospitals in particular.

Another one was security and compliance. We just didn’t know what some of the different requirements were for hospitals until we actually got into the environments and started interacting with customers and understanding what they wanted to use Moxi for. When we were first doing research trials in 2018 or 2019, we had a version of the robot that was a little bit different than the one we have today. It had lots of open containers so you could just put whatever you wanted to on the robot and send it over to another location. We quickly learned that that limited what the robot was allowed to carry, because so much of what [the customers] wanted was to understand who pulled something out of the robot. So now we have an RF badge reader on the robot that is connected to locking storage containers that are only going to open if you’re the kind of person that is allowed to open the robot. That was an interesting technical challenge that we didn’t know about until after we got out there. 

Moxi’s locking storage containers.

How did you work with nurses and the other healthcare professionals you were working with to figure out what would be the most helpful robot for them? 

My background, and my co-founder Vivian Chu’s background, is in human-robot interaction so we knew that we didn’t know enough about nursing or the hospital environment. We spent the first 9 months of the company in 2018 building out our research prototype. It looked a lot like what Moxi looks like today. Under the hood it was completely different than what we have today in terms of the reliability and robustness of the hardware and software, but it was enough to get that platform out and have it deployed with nursing units. We embedded ourselves with four different nursing units across Texas over a year-long period. We would spend about 6-8 weeks with a nursing department, and we were just there — engineers, product people, and everybody in the company was cycling in and out a week or two at a time. 

We would ask those nurses: “What would you actually want a robot like this to do?” Part of this that was really important was they didn’t have good ideas about what they would want the robot to do until they saw the robot. It was a very participatory design, where they had to see and get a sense for the robot before they would have good ideas of what they would want the robot to do. Then we would take those ideas [to the company] and come back and say “Yes we can do that,” or “No we can’t do that.” We came out of that whole process with a really great idea. We like to say that’s where we found our product market fit — that’s where we really understood that what was going to be most valuable for the robot to do was connecting the nursing units to these other departments. We can help a nurse with supply management and getting things from place to place within their department, or we can help them with things that are coming from really far away. [The second one] was actually impacting their time way way more.

Because the capabilities of robotic systems are usually misinterpreted, it can be really hard to manage the relationship with stakeholders and customers and set appropriate expectations. How did you manage that relationship?

We do a lot of demonstrations, but still with almost every single implementation you get questions about some robot in Hollywood, [and you have to say] “No, that’s the movies” and explain exactly what Moxi does. 

From a design perspective, we also limit the English phrases that come out of Moxi’s mouth just because we don’t want to communicate a really high level of intelligence. There are lots of canned phrases and interactions on the iPad instead of via voice, and a lot of times the robot will just make meeps and beeps and flash lights and things like that. 

Before starting the company, I had a lab, and one of the big research topics that we had for a number of years was embodied dialogue — how robots could have a real conversation with people. I had a very good appreciation for how hard that problem is, and also for just how much people want it. People come up to a robot, and they want it to be able to talk to them. How you can [set expectations] with the design and behavior of the robot has been a focus of mine since before we started the company. We purposefully don’t make the robot look very human-like because we don’t want there to be android human-level expectations, but [the robot does have a face and eyes so it can] communicate “I’m looking at that thing” and “I’m about to manipulate that thing,” which we think is important. It’s really about striking that balance. 

What would you say is one lesson that you’ve learned from your work at Diligent so far and how are you looking to apply this lesson moving forward?

The difference between research and practice. On the one hand, the motivation and reason for starting a company is that you want to see the kinds of things that you’ve done in the research lab really make it out into the world and start to impact real people and their work. That’s been one of the most fascinating, impactful, and inspiring things about starting Diligent: Being able to go and see nurses when Moxi is doing work for them. They are so thankful! If you just hang back and watch Moxi come and do a delivery, almost always people are super excited to see the robot. They get their delivery and they’re like, “Oh, thank you Moxi!” That feels like we’re really making a difference in a way that you just don’t get with just research contributions that don’t make it all the way out into the world. 

That being said though, there is a long tail of things that you have to solve from an engineering perspective beyond [developing a feature]. My VP of engineering Starr Corbin has this great way of putting it: The research team will get a certain thing on the product to be feature complete, where we’ve demonstrated that this feature works and it’s a good solution, but then there’s this whole phase that has to happen after that to get the feature to be production ready. I would say my biggest lesson is probably everything that it takes, and the entire team of people it takes, to get something from being feature complete to production ready. I have a deep appreciation for that. How fast we can move things out into the world is really dictated by some of that. 

Andrea Thomaz (left) and Vivian Chu with Moxi.

What advice would you give young women in robotics? 

If I put my professor hat on, I always had advice that I liked to give women in robotics, in academia, and just kind of pursuing things in general. Imposter syndrome is real, and everybody feels it. All you can do to combat it is not underestimate yourself. Speak up and know that you deserve a seat at the table. It’s all about hard work, but also making sure that your voice is heard. Some of the mentorship that I gave to a lot of my women grad students when I was a professor was around speaking engagements, speaking styles, and communication. It can be really uncomfortable when you’re the only anything in the room to stand up and feel like you deserve to be the one speaking, and so the more that you practice doing that, the more comfortable it can feel, the more confident you’ll feel in yourself and your voice. I think finding that confident voice is a really important skill that you have to develop early on in your career. 

What’s one piece of advice you’ve received that you always turn to when things are tough? 

There are two mentors that I’ve had who are women in AI and robotics. [In my] first year as a faculty member [the first mentor] came and gave a research seminar talk. I for some reason got to take her out to lunch by myself, so we had this amazing one-on-one. We talked a little bit about her talk, probably half of the lunch we talked about technical things, and then she just kind of turned the conversation [around] and said “Andrea, don’t forget to have a family.” Like, don’t forget to focus on that part of your life — it’s the most important thing. She got on a soapbox and said “You have to have a work life balance it’s so important. Don’t forget to focus on building a family for yourself, whatever that looks like.” That really stuck with me, especially as [when you’re] early in your career you’re worried about nothing but success. It was really powerful to have somebody strong and influential like that telling you “No, no, this is important and you need to focus on this.” 

The other person that’s always been an inspiration and mentor for me that I’ll highlight [was the professor teaching a class I TA’d for at MIT]. I had found a bug in one of her homework problems, and she was like, “Oh, fascinating.” She was so excited that I had found a question that she didn’t know the answer to. She [just said], “Oh my gosh I don’t know, let’s go find out!” I remember her being this great professor at MIT, and she was excited to find something that she didn’t know and go and learn about it together as opposed to being embarrassed that she didn’t know something. I learned a lot from that interaction: That it’s fun to not know something because then you get to go and find the answer, and no matter who you are, you’re never expected to know everything.

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to Dayo McIntosh, who is the founder of Yateou; Yateou is an early-stage startup that makes wellness products and has a customer facing robot, ADE, that personalizes customer orders. Dayo speaks about what motivated her to start Yateou, how she uses the robot arm, ADE, and about her plans for Yateou’s future.

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ApexAI is driving advances in ROS2 to make it viable for use in autonomous vehicles. The changes they are implementing are bridging the gap between the automotive world and robotics.

Joe Speed, VP of Product at ApexAI, dives into the current multi-year development process of bringing a car to market, and how ApexAI will transform this process into the shorter development time we see with modern technology. This technology was showcased at the Indy Autonomous Challenge where million-dollar autonomous cars raced each other on a track.

Apex.OS is a certified software framework and SDK for autonomous systems that enable software developers to write safe and certified autonomous driving applications compatible with ROS 2.

Joe Speed

Joe Speed is VP of Product & Chief Evangelist at Apex.AI. Prior to joining Apex.AI, Joe was a member of Open Robotics ROS 2 TSC, Autoware Foundation TSC, Eclipse OpenADx SC, and ADLINK Technology’s Field CTO driving robotics and autonomy.

Joe has spent his career developing and advocating open-source at organizations including Linux Foundation and IBM where he launched IBM IoT and co-founded the IBM AutoLAB automotive incubator. Joe helped make MQTT, IoT protocol, open-source and convinced the automakers to adopt it.

Joe is working to do the same for Apex.AI’s safe ROS 2 distribution and ROS middleware. Joe has developed a dozen advanced technology vehicles but is most proud of helping develop an accessible autonomous bus for older adults and people with disabilities.

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In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to Helen Greiner, CEO at Tertill, which makes a small solar powered weeding robot for vegetable gardens. The conversation begins with an overview of Helen’s previous robotics experience, including at as a student at MIT, Co-founder at iRobot, Founder and CEO at CyPhyWorks, and in advising government research in robotics, AI, and machine learning. From there, Helen explains the design of the Tertill robot, how it works, and her high hopes for this simple robot: to help reduce the environmental impact of the agriculture industry by helping people to grow their own food. In the last part of the conversation, Helen speaks broadly about her experience in robotics startups, the robotics industry, and the future of robotics.

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Suma Reddy, CEO of Future Acres, talks about her company which is focused on creating smart farming tools to reduce labor demand and increase efficiency. Suma introduces her journey into agriculture technology and the issues in current farming practices that can benefit from robotic solutions. Future Acres’s robotic harvest companion, Carry, autonomously transports crops within the farms and collects valuable data. Suma also discusses the impact of their technology and their visions for the future of agricultural technology.

 Suma Reddy is Co-founder and CEO of Future Acres, an AgTech startup building advanced mobility and AI solutions for farms to increase production efficiency, farmworker safety and provide real-time data and analytics. She is a three-times AgTech + ClimateTech founder (vertical farming, organic waste-to-energy, renewable energy), is on the advisory board of Scale for ClimateTech, a Board Member of GrainPro, and teaches Entrepreneurship for Sustainability and Resilience at the NYC School of Visual Arts. Suma is passionate about sustainable solutions and the disruptive technology that will help advance a better environment and more resilient world forward.

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Oleg Shipitko, Chief Technical Director of Evocargo, an integrated logistics service company using autonomous vehicles speaks with Kate. Oleg talks about the need for automating operational logistics inside enclosed facilities centers and how their autonomous vehicles and other operational services can greatly improve the current way we transport goods within facilities such as ports, warehouses and factories. Oleg also discusses the sensing choices for the specific use cases of these autonomous vehicles.

Oleg Shipitko

Oleg Shipitko is the Chief Technical Director of Evocargo. He has a bachelors and masters degree in autonomous information and control systems (bachelors: 4.96/5.0, masters: 5.0/5.0), and a PhD in Space Science and Technology with focus in Mathematical modeling, numerical methods and program complexes.

Oleg has received numerous awards including: Best paper awarded at 32nd European Conference on Modeling and Simulation (ECMS-2018): Ground Vehicle Localization With Particle Filter Based On Simulated Road Marking Image and Best paper awarded at IV International Conference on Information Technology and Nanotechnology (ITNT-2018): Gaussian filtering for FPGA based image processing with High-Level Synthesis tools.

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Torrey Smith, Co-Founder of Endiatx, is changing the reputation endoscopies have for being uncomfortable. At Endiatx, they are developing a pill-sized robot that you swallow, which will then livestream your digestive system for a doctor to view. Our interviewer Abate dives in.

Torrey Smith
Torrey Smith is the Co-Founder & CEO of Endiatx, a medical robotics company that manufactures tiny robotic pills capable of active movement inside the human stomach with control over internet protocol. Prior to launching Endiatx, he developed medical devices in the areas of endometrial ablation, atherectomy, therapeutic hypothermia, sleep apnea, and vascular closure.

An aerospace engineer by training, he takes a keen interest in the deep tech sector and is a proud mentor of up-and-coming founders at the Founder Institute. He is also the principal founder of the international arts collective known as Sextant, and he has had his art featured in the Smithsonian.

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In this episode, our interviewer Lilly speaks to Alex Wallar, co-founder and CTO of The Routing Company. Wallar shares his background in multi-robot path-planning and optimization, and his research on scheduling and routing algorithms for high-capacity ride-sharing. They discuss how The Routing Company helps cities meet the needs of their people, the technical ins and outs of their dispatcher and assignment system, and the importance of public transit to cities and their economics.

Alex Wallar

Alex Wallar is Co-founder and CTO of the Routing Company, an on-demand vehicle routing and management platform that partners with cities to power the future of public transit. Previously he was pursuing a PhD in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, conducting research on mathematical optimization for high-capacity ride-sharing.

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In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Ryan Gariepy, Chief Technology Officer of both Clearpath Robotics and OTTO Motors. Ryan speaks about the origin of Clearpath, how Clearpath focuses on making reliable robots, and the future of robotics.

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Anthony DiMare and Charles Chiau deep dive into how Bedrock Ocean is innovating in the world of Marine Surveys. At Bedrock Ocean, they are developing an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that is able to map the seafloor autonomously and at a high resolution. They are also developing a data platform to access, process, and visualize data captured from other companies at the seafloor.

Bedrock Ocean is solving two problems in the industry of Marine Surveying.
1. The vast majority of the seafloor is completely unmapped
2. The data that is captured from the seafloor is not standardized or centralized.

Seafloor data conducted by two different companies with the same or different hardware to capture the data can vary significantly in the calculated seafloor profile

Anthony DiMare
Anthony previously founded Nautilus Labs, a leading maritime technology company advancing the efficiency of ocean commerce through artificial intelligence. While at Nautilus, Anthony helped global companies solve challenges with distributed, siloed maritime data systems and built the early team that launched Nautilus Platform into large publicly listed shipping companies.

Charles Chiau
Charles, Bedrock’s CTO, was previously at SpaceX where he helped design the avionics systems for Crew Dragon. He also was a system integration engineer at Reliable Robotics working on their autonomous aviation system and was the CTO of DeepFlight where he worked on manned submersibles including ones for Tom Perkins, Richard Branson, and Steve Fossett.

Links

• Download mp3 (48.0 MB)
• Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify
• Support us on Patreon

Abate talks to Maxime Gariel, CTO of Xwing about the autonomous flight technology they are developing.

At Xwing, they are converting traditional aircraft into remotely operated aircraft. They do this by retrofitting planes with multiple sensors including cameras, radar, and lidar, and by developing sensor fusion algorithms to allow their planes to understand the world around them, using highly accurate perception algorithms.

Xwing’s autonomous flight technology allows a plane to taxi in the airport, takeoff, fly to a destination, avoid airborne and ground threats, and land, all without any human input. This technology not only enables autonomous flight but may also enhance the safety of manned aircraft by improving a plane’s ability to understand its surroundings.

Maxime Gariel

Maxime Gariel is the CTO of Xwing, a San Francisco based startup whose mission is to dramatically increase human mobility using fully autonomous aerial vehicles. Xwing is developing a Detect-And-Avoid system for unmanned and remotely piloted vehicles. Maxime is a pilot but he is passionate about making airplanes fly themselves.

Maxime joined Xwing from Rockwell Collins where he was a Principal GNC Engineer. He worked on autonomous aircraft projects including DARPA Gremlins and the AgustaWestland SW4 Solo autonomous helicopter. Before becoming Chief Engineer of the SW4 Solo’s flight control system, he was in charge of the system architecture, redundancy, and safety for the project.

Before Rockwell Collins, he worked on ADS-B based conflict detection as a postdoc at MIT and on autoland systems for airliners at Thales. Maxime earned his MS and PhD in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech and his BS from ISAE-Supaéro (France).

Links

• Download mp3 (21.2 MB)
• Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify
• Support us on Patreon

Matt Bilsky, founder and CEO of FLX Solutions, discusses the snake-like robot he invented called the FLX BOT. The FLX BOT consists of modular links, each with a joint that can extend and rotate to get into tight spaces. Each link includes sensors including inertial measurement units and a camera. The robot is used to navigate and work in challenging environments, such as above ceilings and within walls. Matt discusses the key innovations of his product as well as his academic and entrepreneurial journey that led him to the FLX BOT.

Matt Bilksy

Matt Bilsky, PhD, PE is the inventor of the FLX BOT, a licensed Professional Engineer, a Mechanical Engineering professor at Lehigh University, and a former repair/maintenance contractor. In 2017, he was awarded with the Lehigh University Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year. Matt has a Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. from Lehigh University focused on smart product design, Technical Entrepreneurship, and mechatronics. He holds two additional Lehigh degrees: a BS in Mechanical Engineering with an Electrical Engineering minor and a Master of Engineering degree also in Mechanical Engineering. Since he was a child Matt has been an innovator. In his basement shop he designed and built numerous electronic gadgets. In 2003 he started his first company, Mattcomp Services LLC, offering computer repair, networking, home theater, and handyman services. He also created a web hosting company in 2005, Mattcomp Hosting, including all necessary back-end components on dedicated servers.

Links

• Download mp3 (25.1MB)
• FLX Solutions
• FLX Youtube channel
• Matt’s Portfolio
• Matt’s Youtube channel

Abate interviews Tessa Lau on her startup Dusty Robotics which is innovating in the field of construction.

At Dusty Robotics, they developed a robot to automate the laying of floor plans on the floors in construction sites. Typically, this is done manually using a tape measure and reading printed out plans. This difficult task can often take a team of two a week to complete. Time-consuming tasks like this are incredibly expensive on a construction site where multiple different teams are waiting on this task to complete. Any errors in this process are even more time-consuming to fix. By using a robot to automatically convert 3d models of building plans into markings on the floors, the amount of time and errors are dramatically reduced.

Dr. Tessa Lau

Dr. Tessa Lau is an experienced entrepreneur with expertise in AI, machine learning, and robotics. She is currently Founder/CEO at Dusty Robotics, a construction robotics company building robot-powered tools for the modern construction workforce. Prior to Dusty, she was CTO/co-founder at Savioke, where she orchestrated the deployment of 75+ delivery robots into hotels and high-rises. Previously, Dr. Lau was a Research Scientist at Willow Garage, where she developed simple interfaces for personal robots. She also spent 11 years at IBM Research working in business process automation and knowledge capture. More generally, Dr. Lau is interested in technology that gives people super-powers, and building businesses that bring that technology into people’s lives. Dr. Lau was recognized as one of the Top 5 Innovative Women to Watch in Robotics by Inc. in 2018 and one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in 2015. Dr. Lau holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

Links

• Download mp3 (20.9 MB)
• Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify
• Support us on Patreon

Image credit: Techcouver

In this episode, Lilly interviews Afshin Doust, CEO of Advanced Intelligent Systems. Doust explains the company’s modular, robots-as-a-service subscription business model. They discuss robotic solutions for the agricultural industry, disinfecting robots to combat COVID19, and other exciting new developments at AIS.

Afshin Doust

Afshin Doust is the Chief Executive Officer of Advanced Intelligent Systems (AIS). He is a seasoned entrepreneur with professional experience in finance, sales, business consulting, and strategic management with a keen interest in assembling teams to resolve business challenges.  Afshin took the role of CEO at AIS in 2016, with the goal to lead the team towards the vision of creating innovations in autonomous robotic solutions for a wide range of applications.

Links

• AIS Press: COVID-19 Robots
• Download mp3 (16.0 MB)
• Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify
• Support us on Patreon

In this podcast series of episodes we are going to explain how to create a robotics startup step by step.

We are going to learn how to select your co-founders, your team, how to look for investors, how to test your ideas, how to get customers, how to reach your market, how to build your product… Starting from zero, how to build a successful robotics startup.

I’m Ricardo Tellez, CEO and co-founder of The Construct startup, a robotics startup at which we deliver the best learning experience to become a ROS Developer, that is, to learn how to program robots with ROS.

Our company is already 5 years long, we are a team of 10 people working around the world. We have more than 100.000 students, and tens of Universities around the world use our online academy to provide the teaching environment to their students.

We have bootstrapped our startup, but we also (unsuccessfully) tried getting investors. We have done a few pivots and finally ended at the point that we are right now.

With all this experience, I’m going to teach you how to build your own startup. And we are going to go through the process by creating ourselves another startup, so you can see in the path how to create your own. So you are going to witness the creation of such robotics startup.

This episode is about deciding the product your startup will produce.

Related links

• Why robotics startups fail, document made by Fresh
• Jibo robot
• Cozmo robot
• Baxter robot

Subscribe to the podcast using any of the following methods

• ROS Developers Podcast on iTunes
• ROS Developers Podcast on Stitcher
• ROS Developers Podcast on Spotify

Or watch the video

The post 89. How to build a robotics startup: the product idea appeared first on The Construct.

In this episode, Abate follows up with Benjamin Pietro Filardo, founder of Pliant Energy Systems and NACROM, the North American Consortium for Responsible Ocean Mining. Pietro talks about the deep sea mining industry, an untapped market with a massive potential for growth. Pietro discusses the current proposed solutions for deep sea mining which are environmentally destructive, and he offers an alternative solution using swarm robots which could mine the depths of the ocean while creating minimal disturbance to this mysterious habitat.

Benjamin “Pietro” Filardo
After several years in the architectural profession, Pietro founded Pliant Energy Systems to explore renewable energy concepts he first pondered while earning his first degree in marine biology and oceanography. With funding from four federal agencies he has broadened the application of these concepts into marine propulsion and a highly novel robotics platform.

Links

• Download mp3 (20.4 MB)
• Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify
• Support us on Patreon

Abate interviews Benjamin “Pietro” Filardo, CEO and founder of Pliant Energy Systems. At PES, they developed a novel form of actuation using two undulating fins on a robot. These fins present multiple benefits over traditional propeller systems including excellent energy efficiency, low water turbulence, and an ability to maneuver in water, land, and ice. Aside from its benefits on a robot, Pietro also talks about its advantages for harnessing energy from moving water.

Watch this episode on YouTube

Benjamin “Pietro” Filardo
After several years in the architectural profession, Pietro founded Pliant Energy Systems to explore renewable energy concepts he first pondered while earning his first degree in marine biology and oceanography. With funding from four federal agencies he has broadened the application of these concepts into marine propulsion and a highly novel robotics platform.

Links

• Download mp3 (16.1 MB)
• Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify
• Support us on Patreon

In this episode, Abate interviews Josh Lessing, co-founder and CEO of Root AI. At Root AI they are developing a system that tracks data on the farm and autonomously harvests crops using delicate grippers and computer vision. Lessing talks about the path they took to build a product with good market fit and how they brought a venture capital backed startup to market.

Josh Lessing

Josh is one of the world’s leading minds on developing robotics and AI systems for the food industry, previously serving as the Director of R&D at Soft Robotics Inc. His current venture, Root AI, is integrating advanced robotics, vision systems and machine perception to automate agriculture. Josh was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Materials Science & Robotics at Harvard University, having earned his Ph.D. studying Biophysics & Physical Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received an Sc.B. in Chemistry from Brown University.

Links

• Download mp3 (16.0 MB)
• Listen to this episode on Spotify
• Subscribe to Robohub using iTunes, RSS, or Spotify
• Support us on Patreon

In this episode, Lilly interviews Dr. William Crowe, CEO of High Earth Orbit (HEO) Robotics. The mission of HEO Robotics is to provide high quality imagery of satellites, space-debris and resource-rich asteroids. Crowe discusses the technical challenges which make robotics and satellites similar like computer vision and controls, and those where traditional robotics approaches aren’t suitable like localization and mobility. He explains new trends in the satellite industry, and the need for high quality imagery.

William Crowe

William Crowe is CEO of High Earth Orbit Robotics, a company that performs health checks on satellites by assessing data on images they take from other satellites. He has a PhD in Astrodynamics, where his research focused on the use of swarms to characterize asteroids, especially those that fly closer than the Moon. William sees a future where we use the resources of space in space to better our Earth.

Links

• Download mp3 (13.9 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
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• Support us on Patreon

In this episode, Lilly interviews Juxi Leitner, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Queensland University of Technology and Co-Founder/CEO of LYRO Robotics. LYRO spun out of the 2017 win of the Amazon Robotics Challenge by Team ACRV. Here Juxi discusses deep learning, computer vision, intent in grasping and manipulation, and bridging the gap between abstract and low-level understandings of the world. He also discusses why robotics is really an integration field, the Amazon and other robotics challenges, and what’s important to consider when spinning an idea into a company.

Juxi Leitner

Juxi Leitner is co-founder of LYRO Robotics, a deep-tech startup based in Brisbane, Australia, creating robotic picking and packing solutions. LYRO is a spin-out of the Australian Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision (ACRV), where Juxi is the research lead for the manipulation research stream (previously Vision and Action project). His research focus is on integrating Robotics, Computer Vision and Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence (AI) for robust grasping and manipulation in real-world scenarios. In 2017 his team won the Amazon Robotics Challenge. Juxi is active in the local Brisbane deep-tech ecosystem and started Brisbane.AI and the Brisbane robotics interest group.

Links

• Download mp3 (17.3MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
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• Support us on Patreon

Welcome to the 300th episode of the Robohub podcast! You might not know that the podcast has been going in one form or another for 14 years. Originally called “Talking Robots,” the podcast was started in 2006 by Dario Floreano and several of his PhD students at EPFL, in Switzerland, including Sabine Hauert, Peter Dürr, and Markus Waibel, who are all still involved in Robohub today.  Since then, the podcast team has become international, with most of its interviewers in the United States and Europe, and all of its members being volunteers.

To celebrate 300 episodes of our podcast, we thought we would catch up with some of our former, as well as current, volunteers from around the world to find out why and how they got involved in the podcast, how their involvement impacted on their lives and careers, and what they’re doing in their day jobs now.

First up, Sabine Hauert, one of Professor Floreano’s former students, now, Assistant Professor in the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at the University of Bristol in the UK. Sabine, whose work focuses on swarm robotics, is also acting President and Co-founder of Robohub.org. She spoke to our interviewer Lilly.

Next, our interviewer and current podcast President Audrow caught up with Peter Dürr, who now leads a team in Switzerland focused on Computer Vision research, whilst remaining active with the podcast by editing all of our episodes.

And last, but definitely not least, Andra Keay, Managing Director of non-profit industry group Silicon Valley Robotics, and long standing member of Robohub, spoke to our interviewer Lauren about her company, and women in robotics.

Links

• Download mp3 (16.0 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Support us on Patreon

In this episode, Ron Vanderkley interviews Mark Pivac, Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of FBR (formerly Fastbrick Robotics) about the world’s first end-to-end autonomous bricklaying robot, ‘Hadrian X’. Three years after his first interview, we catch up with Pivac to see how FBR has expanded its operation and chat about their latest commercial prototype, ‘Hadrian X’, as well as the future of the robotic construction industry.

Mark Pivac is the primary inventor of FBR’s automated bricklaying technology. He is an aeronautical and mechanical engineer with over 25 years’ experience working on the development of high technology equipment ranging from lightweight aircraft to heavy off-road equipment. He has 20 years’ experience working with pro/engineer 3D CAD software as well as high-level mathematics, including matrix mathematics, robot transformations and vector mathematics for machine motion. Mark has also worked extensively with design, commissioning and fault finding on servo controlled motion systems achieving very high dynamic performance.

Links

• FBR Website
• Marc Pivac Profile Page
• Hadrian X in action (Video)
• Download mp3 (13.3 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Support us on Patreon

In this episode, join our interviewer Andrew Vaziri at Promat 2019, the largest expo for manufacturing and supply chain professionals in North and South America. Andrew interviews a handful of companies which provide warehouse fulfillment robots that can autonomous pick and place items. Our guests explain how advances in AI have made autonomous picking possible. They also talk about the unique technologies they use to stand out in a crowded field of competing products.

The guests in the order they appear are:
Vince Martinelli, Head of Product and Marketing, RightHand Robotics
Jim Liefer, CEO, Kindred
Pete Blair, VP of Marketing, Berkshire Grey
Sean Davis, Technical Product Manager, Osaro
Erik Nieves, CEO, Plus One Robotics

See video of each robot picking items on our YouTube page:

Links

• Download mp3 (11.7 MB)
• Righthand Robotics Website
• Kindred Website
• Berkshire Grey’s Website
• Osaro’s Website
• PlusOne Robotics’ Website
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
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• Support us on Patreon

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Bernt Børnich, CEO, CTO, and Co-founder of Halodi Robotics, about Eve (EVEr3), a general purpose full-size humanoid robot, capable of a wide variety of tasks.  Børnich discusses how Eve can be used in research, how Eve’s motors have been designed to be safe around humans (including why they use a low gear ratio), how they do direct force control and the benefits of this approach, and how they use machine learning to reduce cogging in their motors.  Børnich also discusses the longterm goal of Halodi Robotics and how they plan to support researchers using Eve.

Below are two videos of Eve. The first is a video of how Eve can be used as a platform to address several research questions.  The second shows Eve moving a box and dancing.

Bernt Børnich

Photographer: Tonje Kornelie

Bernt Børnich is the CEO and CTO of Halodi Robotics, and the inventor of their Revo1 motors. He holds a bachelor of robotics and nano-electronics from the University of Oslo.

Links

• Download mp3 (16.4 MB)
• Halodi’s homepage
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Support us on Patreon

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Ian Bernstein, Founder and Head of Product at Misty Robotics, about a robotics platform designed for developers called Misty II.  Bernstein discusses the motivation behind making a robotics platform for developers (relating it to personal computers), Misty II’s hardware extensibility and software “skills,” and the future direction of Misty Robotics.

A video introducing the Misty II platform:

Ian Bernstein

Ian Bernstein is Founder and Head of Product at Misty Robotics, a spin-off company from Sphero, Inc. focused on building personal robots for the home and office. In this role, Bernstein leads Misty Robotics’ product development and design. Prior to Misty Robotics, Bernstein served as Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Sphero, Inc. that has shipped more than 3 million robots to date. Bernstein joined TechStars in 2010 with Sphero co-founder Adam Wilson and created Sphero, the original app-enabled robotic ball. Bernstein has had a lifelong passion for robotics and creation and has been building robots since he was 12. Ian holds a BS in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Colorado State University.

Links

• Download mp3 (13.8 MB)
• Misty Robotics’ homepage
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
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• Support us on Patreon

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Dor Skuler, CEO and co-founder of Intuition Robotics, about a socially assistive robot for older adults named ElliQ. Skuler discusses the motivation for ElliQ, how it infers context and changes its behavior accordingly, and how ElliQ adapts its behavior over time.

Below is a video that shows what interactions with ElliQ look like.

Dor Skuler

Dor Skuler has co-founded five ventures, the most recent being Intuition Robotics. Skuler holds an MBA and Master’s of Science in Marketing from Temple University, has co-authored ‘Cloud Computing: Business Trends and Technologies’ published by Wiley in 2016 and holds board level advisory and director roles for several telecoms, cyber security and tech-led social impact ventures.

Links

• Download mp3 (17.1 MB)
• ElliQ’s webpage
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Support us on Patreon

In this interview, Audrow Nash interviews Ryan Gariepy, Lars Grimstad, and Péter Fankhauser.

Ryan Gariepy, Chief Technology Officer of ClearPath and Otto Motors in Canada, speaks about Boxer, a robust research platform that has been used extensively in an industrial context over many years. Gariepy discusses how Boxer can be used in investigating human-robot interaction questions because of its expressive lighting, including for autonomous cars.

Lars Grimstad, Chief Technology Office of Saga Robotics in Norway, discusses a lego-like agriculture platform. He speaks about the platform’s design, including its power systems and communication protocol. Grimstad also talks about a project using this platform to pick hanging strawberries.

Péter Fankhauser, Chief Business Development Officer and Co-founder of ANYbotics in Switzerland, speaks about ANYmal, a quadrupedal robot. Fankhauer discusses going from research to industry, using ANYmal for inspection, and the future of ANYbotics.

Links

• Download mp3 (11.9 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
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• Support us on Patreon

In this interview, Audrow Nash interviews Kristoffer Richardsson, Michael Zillich, and Paulo Alvito.

Kristoffer Richardsson, Developer at Bitcraze in Sweden, speaks about small open-source unmanned aerial vehicle and different ways of localizing them.

Michael Zillich, CTO of Blue Danube Robotics in Austria, discusses a robotics platform for picking up toys, called Kenny. Zillich talks about Kenny’s design, including sensors and its robotic arm. He discusses how children can show the robot where to put specific toys, about how this large European project was coordinated, and about possibly commercializing this platform.

Paulo Alvito, CEO and CTO and Co-founder of IDMind in Portugal, discusses remote inspection robot for sewers. Alvito discusses what it means to be remotely autonomous, the design of the robot, and how these robots communicate data.

Links

• Download mp3 (17.3 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
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• Support us on Patreon

In this interview, Audrow Nash interviews Gabriel Lopes, Robot and Control Scientist at Robot Care Systems, and Bernt Børnich, CEO and Co-founder of Halodi Robotics.

Gabriel Lopes speaks about an assistive walker with additional functionality.  Lopes discusses how the walker can be used, including driving up to the person, helping them stand up, exercise, and make video calls.  He also discusses building a software language for non-technical people that work with older adults. Lopes also speaks about the future of their company.

Bernt Børnich speaks about the humanoid platform at Halodi Robotics. Børnich’s long-term goal is to create an affordable home robot. He discusses the design and form factor of this robot. This includes the custom motor designed for high torque, and how the robot can “lean in” from a joint at its ankle. Børnich discusses the timeline, speculated cost, and working with investors on the long term goal of building an affordable humanoid robot.

Links

• Download mp3 (13.6 MB)
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• Support us on Patreon

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Jonathan W. Hurst, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Oregon State University and CTO and co-founder of Agility Robotics, about legged locomotion, about a bipedal robot, called “Cassie.” Hurst discusses Cassie’s design, what types of research questions Cassie should allow, and applications of walking robots, including package delivery. 

Below is a video of Cassie walking in several environments.

Jonathan W. Hurst

Jonathan W. Hurst is Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Agility Robotics, as well as an Associate Professor of Robotics and College of Engineering Dean’s Professor at Oregon State University. He holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering and an M.S. and Ph.D. in robotics, all from Carnegie Mellon University. His university research focuses on understanding the fundamental science and engineering best practices for legged locomotion. Investigations range from numerical studies and analysis of animal data, to simulation studies of theoretical models, to designing, constructing, and experimenting with legged robots for walking and running. Agility Robotics is taking this research to commercial applications for robotic legged mobility, working towards a day when robots can go where people go, generate greater productivity across the economy, and improve quality of life for all.

Links

• Dynamic Robotics Laboratory
• Agility Robotics
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
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• Support us on Patreon
• Download MP3 (23.8 MB)

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Maja Matarić, a professor at the University of Southern California and the Chief Science Officer of Embodied, about socially assistive robotics. Socially assistive robotics aims to endow robots with the ability to help people through individual non-contact assistance in convalescence, rehabilitation, training, and education. For example, a robot could help a child on the autism spectrum to connect to more neurotypical children and could help to motivate a stroke victim to follow their exercise routine for rehabilitation (see the videos below). In this interview, Matarić discusses the care gap in health care, how her work leverages research in psychology to make robots engaging, and opportunities in socially assistive robotics for entrepreneurship.

A short video about how personalized robots might act as a “social bridge” between a child on the autism spectrum and a more neurotypical child.

A short video about how a robot could assist stroke victims in their recovery.

Maja Matarić

Maja Matarić is professor and Chan Soon-Shiong chair in Computer Science Department, Neuroscience Program, and the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California, founding director of the USC Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center (RASC), co-director of the USC Robotics Research Lab and Vice Dean for Research in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. She received her PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from MIT, MS in Computer Science from MIT, and BS in Computer Science from the University of Kansas. 

Links

• Interaction Lab
• Embodied
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
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• Support us on Patreon
• Download MP3 (13.7 MB)

In this episode Abate talks with Zhe Zhang from Perceptin where they are building embedded platforms for robots to do Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms in real time. Zhe explains the methods they incorporate such as sensor fusion and hardware synchronization to make a highly accurate SLAM platform for IOT, consumer, and automotive grade robots.

Zhe Zhang

Zhe is the co-founder and CEO of PerceptIn. Prior to founding PerceptIn, he worked at Magic Leap in Silicon Valley and prior to that he worked for five years at Microsoft. Zhang has a PhD in Robotics from the State University of New York and an undergraduate degree from Tsinghua University.

Further research recommended by Zhe:

1. Probabilistic Data Association for Semantic SLAM
2. A Comparative Analysis of Tightly-coupled Monocular, Binocular, and Stereo VINS
3. Computer Vision for Autonomous Vehicles: Problems, Datasets and State-of-the-Art

Links

• Perceptin Website
• Zhe’s personal website
• Download mp3 (17.0 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
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• Support us on Patreon

Image: ICRA 2017

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews several companies at the International Conference for Robotics and Automation (ICRA). ICRA is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s biggest conference and one of the leading international forums for robotics researchers to present their work.

Interviews:

Howard Michel, Chief Technology Officer of UBTECH Education, on a humanoid robot for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education for a range of ages. (Begins at 1m 20s.)

Li Bingbing, Software Engineer and Cofounder of Transforma in Singapore, on a robot for painting tall buildings. (Begins at 10m 25s.)

Xianbao Chen, Associate Researcher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, on a hexapod robot for large parts machining. (Begins at 17m 5s.)

Lester Teh Chee Onn, Environmental Engineer at Advisian, on a watercraft for environmental monitoring. (Begins at 27m.)

Links

• Download mp3 (18.8 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
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• Support us on Patreon

In this episode, MeiXing Dong interviews Matthias Vanoni, co-founder and CEO of Biowatch. Vanoni speaks about Biowatch, a wrist-veins biometric reader that functions as a security solution for mobile payments and smart devices. They discuss the technical challenges of building a miniaturized wrist-vein reader and how this device changes the usual user authentication process.

Matthias Vanoni

Prior to being the CEO and co-founder of Biowatch SA, Matthias Vanoni (31) was a PhD student at EPFL and IDIAP Research Institute, specialised in biometric authentication and a former captain in French Gendarmerie. His Life is now dedicated to entrepreneurship, his wife and their little boy.

Links

• Download mp3 (14.7 MB)
• Biowatch Website
• Biowatch Video
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

In this episode, Audrow Nash and Christina Brester conduct interviews at the 2016 International Association of Science Parks and Areas of Innovation conference in Moscow, Russia. They speak with Roman Luchin, CEO of CyberTech Labs., about a robotics development platform called Trik. Trik is intended to be an intermediate step when learning about robotics between Lego Mindstorms and programming on an embedded platform. Trik allows users to program with a graphical interface by ordering blocks. These blocks contain code in several common programming languages (python, F#, Pascal, etc.) and the code can be modified directly.

This is the second of three interviews from the conference.

Roman Luchin

Roman Luchin is Founder of TRIK and CEO of CyberTech Labs in Russia. He started as a researcher in a laboratory of theoretical cybernetics in Saint Petersburg State University, where he developed multi-agent control systems. Faced with two challenges in Russian robotics, young professionals and outdated approaches, he decided to devote himself to the improvement of STEM education through robotics and the creation of new educational tools. As a result, he developed a unified cybernetic platform for education, research, and robotics projects called TRIK. There is a continuously growing community around TRIK, including universities, researchers, prototyping labs, and creative teams working to provide everyone with the opportunity to create modern intelligent robots that can “see”, “hear” and collaborate.

Links

• Download mp3 (16.5 MB)
• IASP 2016 conference website
• Skolkovo’s robotics page
• Trik’s homepage
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Roland Siegwart and Matthias Hüni about Kickstart Accelerator, a Swiss Startup Accelerator. Siegwart leads the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zürich and is one of the initiators of Kickstart Accelerator. Hüni is the vertical lead of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at Kickstart Accelerator and is involved in the program’s operations. Kickstart Accelerator seeks to provide international entrepreneurs with an inlet to the Swiss ecosystem, including connections to industry and academia.

Roland Siegwart

Roland Siegwart is a Professor of Autonomous Systems at ETH Zurich since July 2006 and Founding Co-Director of the Wyss Zurich. From January 2010 to December 2014 he took office as Vice President Research and Corporate Relations in the Executive Board. Roland Siegwart’s research interests are in the design and control of systems operating in complex and highly dynamical environments. His major goal is to find new ways to deal with uncertainties and enable the design of highly interactive and adaptive systems. Prominent application examples are personal and service robots, autonomous micro-aircrafts, walking and swimming robots and driver assistant systems.

Matthias Hüni

Matthias is a software engineer by profession and a maker by passion. At Impact Hub Zurich, he works for Kickstart Accelerator, taking care of the Robotics and Intelligent Systems vertical. Before Kickstart, he helped setting up the makerZspace at Impact Hub Colab, leveraging his experience from FabLab Zurich – both digital (and analog) fabrication workshops for startups and individuals to rapidly prototype and materialize their ideas and projects. His professional background covers several years in software architecture and IT project management at fundinfo.com before he started his own company sporttrip.ch, a online marketing and consulting services provider for the travel industry and beyond.

Links

• Kickstart Accelerator’s website
• Download mp3 (13.2 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

Transcript has been edited for clarity.

Audrow:
Hi, welcome to Robots Podcast.

Roland:
Hello.

Matt:
Hello.

Audrow:
Would you introduce yourselves?

Roland:
I’m Roland Siegwart. I’m a professor on robotics at ETH Zurich. Also, I am one of the initiator of the Kickstart Accelerator here in Zurich.

Matt:
My name is Matthias Hüni, I go by Matt. I am the vertical lead for smart and connected machines vertical at Kickstart Accelerator, so I’m the counterpart of Roland in the operations of the program.

Audrow:
Now, would you tell me what Kickstart Accelerator is, Roland?

Roland:
Kickstart Accelerator is, as the name says, an accelerator program for young entrepreneurs.

Roland:
With a special focus on topics, I will come back to this, and also on the goals. So, what do you want to actually to offer the Swiss ecosystem to people mainly from abroad to benefit from having contacts through industry, but also to universities in specific fields.

Roland:
This makes it actually also special that we selected different verticals we call them, on topics where a student has to add something, or has to offer something. For example, new fintech, or smart and connecting machines where

Audrow:
And fintech is financial technology, right?

Roland:
Yes, exactly.

Audrow:
Okay, so analyzing markets and this kind of thing?

Roland:
Yes.

Audrow:
Okay. So you’re working within these verticals and you’re trying to develop accelerator, to help entrepreneurs in these areas, right? Would you tell me a bit about the areas? So fintech you mentioned, robotics is one of them.

Roland:
Yes, we have an additional one which is food, which is everything which is linked with food from production to up to the point where you sell food, where we offer them a vertical. Then we had one, which is was very generic, which was about the future of emerging technologies. We both remained in both this vertical on smart and connected machines, which is everything about machines which are connected through the network and offer new services to humans, toward our society, and of course robotics perfectly falls into this field.

Audrow:
So how are you involved with the Kickstart Accelerator?

Roland:
I myself, as mentioned I was involved in setting up the whole thing. So we came up with this idea that we should have something additionally in Switzerland about two years ago. Then I was involved in the definition on this verticals-

Roland:
And then really Kickstart Accelerator, I was somewhat involved as an expert. I was interacting with the different teachers selected to come to Zurich to give them support, to connect them to companies, but also connect them to lead with structural effects, at ETH to show that really benefit from the environment.

Audrow:
So how is this related to your role as a professor at ETH?

Roland:
So in principle, it probably has not a very direct connection, but of course I was always also very interested in not only doing research, but also bringing this to its market to really make something out of the wonderful research. My people do it here at ETH. We had ourselves a couple of first spinoffs already which are doing pretty well.

Roland:
So I am always excited to see young people really coming up with ideas and bringing them to the market. This is more or less a private initiative, which I think is very valuable for Switzerland and for young people.

Audrow:
Okay. And Matt, would you tell me how you’re involved as a vertical lead?

Matt:
Yeah, sure. I’m more like let’s say the ground troops in the vertical. I took care of onboarding all the startups. I also took care of the selection process where Roland was involved as an expert and lots of other people from our partners involved.

Matt:
My job is to facilitate the selection of the onboarding of the startups, the whole program, the access of the startups to our partners.

Matt:
As well as, generally, everything where the startups are stuck or they need help. Also, it’s a mixture in between event management, but also my background as observe engineer, helps me a lot in kind of understanding their technical issues and startup issues being part of the startup for the last 10 years.

Matt:
I would say it’s really a very generic, but also very specific ground work role that I’m taking care of.

Audrow:
I see. Now can you tell me about some of the companies that you have in the smart and connected machines domain, or vertical?

Matt:
Yeah, sure. I think it’s a very broad application. For example, there is one startup called Rooftop. They are developing sensor technologies to work sensor technologies on a very, let’s say affordable level, where they make robotics in the mass production market more sensible, or sensitive. There is a robotics startup, I would call it a robotics startup, it’s Teal. It’s a robotic building blocks for kids, it’s an Aztec education technology startup. They’re working close with Google Education now. They’re also involved with Roland. We have another startup with the name of Miscopic, they’re in a completely different field. They are doing field service technician support with a software that integrates into this new field of augmented reality. So you have to use Microsoft photo lenses for example, where Miscopic tries to take these devices into the field service technicians work.

Matt:
So they are at the machine and they can use this augmented reality applications. We had a selfie drone startup. Drones, of course, always have to be part of accelerators because everybody knows about drones and everybody wants to have drones. Their goal was to have a drone that you can get rid of your selfie stick, basically.

Matt:
What else did we have? I at least missed two startups.

Audrow:
Yes, I see six.

Roland:
Yes. We had, for example, one which a double ops a unit, which allows to track precisely stuff which is delivered. For example, where they are, but mainly also the temperature they go through, the humidity they go through, so that in logistics you have a precise track of what happened with the goods. This is especially for example, interesting for medicine, where you have to never go above a certain temperature.

Matt:
They were also Marvin, the future emersion technologies, vertical. Then the Remember Mind Books, which is also a very interesting combination of the simple metric attach storage thing where you just need to store data and you want to be sure that your data is safely stored.

Matt:
They are combining it with block chain technology as a, let’s say as a distributed cloud. Private cloud, where you store your data not only on your device, but also on other devices that are within your ear.

Matt:
It’s encrypted and you do the whole storage accounting stuff. So you use storage on all those machines and you pay for it using Bitcoin.

Audrow:
Oh, cool.

Matt:
They pay for their use of your space because they’re distributing their 1,000 new machines as well.

Matt:
So that’s a very interesting combination of this big new thing called block chain.

Audrow:
Yes. Okay. Now how many startups do you have total, between all of the verticals?

Matt:
There are 30 startups.

Audrow:
Yes.

Matt:
10 in the think tank section, six in the smart and connected machine section, or verticals as we call it.

Audrow:
Okay.

Matt:
Also six in the future and emerging technologies, and seven startups in the foods vertical. That doesn’t add up to 30, but 31, but one of the food startups was an entrepreneur team. That’s another possibility of participating in this accelerator, so if you’re part of an entrepreneurial team of one of our partners, you can participate in this program.

Audrow:
Okay. Now can you tell me a bit about the program that you offer entrepreneurs? Roland, if you want to describe this.

Roland:
Yes, first of all we have a wonderful space where we have all this startups together for roughly three months. They are not only accumulate together, but are also hosted in a youth hostel where they live more or less during night there, which is an important element. They interact, they challenge each other, there is some peer pressure.

Roland:
Then there is of course a very precise photo ops. So every week they have to report on their progress. The most important part is, of course, to connect them to potential clients, and to potential technology providers and supporters, so they can really nicely benefit from the Swiss ecosystem. So this was also then reflected in the outcome that we have. Most of these startups, we’ve spent three months in Switzerland, had then also pilot studies with companies around Switzerland, where they can actually test their ideas and visions, and really go and interact with potential clients and markets.

Audrow:
Okay. And what stage are these startups typically when they come to you for this accelerator?

Roland:
The selection criteria for us are at least an MVP, a minimum value product.

Roland:
So if your product isn’t ready yet, I think it’s too early to participate in this program.

Roland:
You also should have a sound team. So if you’re just, let’s say, a couple of friends having a good idea and you kind of clicked together a prototype, but you kind of, let’s say, lack the whole business expertise-

Audrow:
Acumen.

Roland:
You should have a business plan that it doesn’t need to be sound until the next 10 years, but you should know what you’re talking about, what numbers you’re talking about, and what you are hungry for in the end.

Audrow:
So you mean defining a market, in this sense?

Roland:
Yes. Exactly. You need to have a team, you need to have some traction, this is your minimum value product, and you of course need to convince us that you have potential. That this is a thing that’s not only born out of an idea you have, but out of a necessity and out of a problem that you are trying to solve.

Audrow:
Okay. So what does the program look like over the three months? You mentioned that all of the students, or all of the people live together. All of the entrepreneurs live in a hostel together and how there’s a competition there. But then, what does it look like with the mentoring and what do they have access to? Do they have access to good machine shops and perhaps information they wouldn’t have otherwise? What kind of things?

Roland:
It depends a little bit on, generally speaking, the startups are working together also, so they live in the same place during the night, or when they leave in the evening they go to the youth hostel where most of the startups live, except the ones who are from Zurich, of course.

Audrow:
And yes, they go home.

Roland:
Yes. They work in the same place as well. It’s an old transformer building in the middle of the city of Zurich.

Audrow:
Oh, cool.

Roland:
Just been converted into a co-working space. I highly recommend the listeners of this podcast to visit our webpage and have a glimpse at the pictures, it’s really nice.

Audrow:
And it will be included with the blog post for the episode.

Roland:
Very cool. Very cool. There we also try to always mingle the startups with each other, so they have the exchange there in the program. We have the format of master classes, so our partners provide master classes on certain topics, entrepreneurial, funding, technical topics, team project management, you name it, and of course investment. They get pitch training of course, because they will be pitching in front of investors-

Roland:
At midterm demo day and also at the final demo day.

Roland:
We have the format of so called one-on-one sessions with the partners as well, where you as a startup have the chance to meet experts from all our partners to kind of challenge you on your idea.

Roland:
If there is a match, or if there is at least interest, to have the possibility to work closer with this partner, and maybe possibly end up with a pilot/POC, as it’s called proof of concept, where you are in the end maybe implementing your product with one of the partners.

Audrow:
Okay. Oh, go ahead.

Roland:
You mentioned mentoring so I think that’s one thing that really distincts us from other projects or programs. The kickstart mentor you have is an entrepreneurial mentor, is somebody who has an entrepreneurial background. Usually, he has already founded several startups and failed and didn’t fail. Both hopefully.

Audrow:
Yes.

Roland:
He’s kind of your big brother and he takes you by the hand through the program and takes care of your entrepreneurial progress.

Roland:
That’s a very important aspect of this program because I think that most of the accelerators, they have several mentors for startup in different phases, and we make sure that you have one mentor. He takes you through the whole program and also the feedback from the startups was very positive on this side. The feedback from the mentors, of course.

Audrow:
Yes. I would imagine. Now, can you tell me about the seed funding for each startup and then what kind of stakes this Kickstart Accelerator has in each startup after they complete the program?

Roland:
If you are being selected for the program we grant you 10,000 francs, as a kind of start, or as a means of you will have expenses for your company. We also have this so called founder’s stipend, where each of the founders that are participating in the program, that’s up to three people, will get a stipend for the day-to-day expenses. Like, you want to eat something, for sure.

Audrow:
Yes.

Roland:
You want to have some party, hopefully, as well. We are not covering everything, but we can make sure that you kind of have enough money to keep you alive and keep you healthy in Zurich during these three months.

Roland:
In the end of the program, you’re able to winning up to 15,000 francs, so that ends up for your company not as the stipend, but as seed funding for your company in the end up to 25,000 K, if you make the first place at the end of the program.

Audrow:
So how many companies are in a batch over the three month period that compete for this 15,000 franc prize?

Roland:
This is verticalized, so you have-

Audrow:
Okay, per domain? Okay.

Roland:
Exactly. Per vertical, you have these 25. That means in the fintech vertical where you have 10 startups, it will be five startups getting more than these 10,000 francs.

Roland:
In the smart and connected machines, this year it was only six startups, so it was the upper half of the startups usually can get more than the 10,000, but the 10,000 they are granted if you’re being selected for the program.

Audrow:
Okay. Now, you have quite a collaboration here. There are many companies, and supporting partners, can you tell me a bit about who are your partners? I’d like to learn about setting this process up. Roland, would you talk a bit about your partners in this endeavor?

Roland:
Yes. In principle it’s at the moment, mainly big corporates in Switzerland, like the big Swiss banks. Also companies from food sectors, or the two big retailers for food, it’s with Migros and Coop. Then also the universities, ETH, University of Zurich, and Epath File of the Future are involved as more or less a technology provider. There are some industrial companies also. So for the next three years we are really pushing that we have more industrial companies also involved, which are probably more important, especially for smart and connected machines vertical. It’s somewhat of course an important and hard job to convince companies to invest in this to support young people, and then also to show them that it’s profitable for the whole ecosystem to generate new innovation and to [inaudible 00:27:40]. But also a high potential for themselves as probably bringing new ideas and having new technologies, which they can use for that product.

Audrow:
Okay. One of the selling points I saw on the website was that the Kickstart Accelerator can connect entrepreneurs to a European market. You mentioned global before, but probably more specifically the European market that you’re connecting with, and this comes from the partners that you have, correct? How do you connect them to the European market and then global market from there?

Roland:
Yes. I think it’s mainly through the partners. Of course, universities involved are international and a lot of network, but also the companies. There are probably companies which are a little bit more Switzerland-centric, like the retailer Migros and Coop, but the bigger companies are in finance they are very international. Also industrial partners like Maxon we had in which is well known in robotics community as world leading company for small and high performance motors. They actually open up to their network to and give them access to international collections. This is not the primary goal, so I think what we can offer you in the three months is to connect mainly to these companies and to the universities.

Roland:
Then, of course, the next step is that they continue to work with them, exchange with them, and then also have perfect access to different fields internationally.

Matt:
I might jump in here.

Audrow:
Yes, of course.

Matt:
In terms of partners, or to answer your question in terms of market access, if you look at the partner’s page, or it’s on the home page in the lower section, you’ll see all these logos.

Audrow:
Yes.

Matt:
You’ll see all these competitors, basically. So you have UBS and Credit Swiss, you have Migros and Coop, you have PWCX and EY, we call it the co-O petition thing. They work together still yet they are competitors.

Matt:
For example, all the consulting companies they bring you this really European and also worldwide access to other companies as they are consulting big corporations, small corporations all over the world.

Matt:
Also, lets say, ADP, all these partners, in the end they’re rooted in the Europe area, but they’re also rooted in different parts of the world. So this I will say is an outstanding opportunity and it’s really unique to have access to such big and such interesting companies.

Audrow:
Can you tell me a bit about the process of getting all of these companies to support the Kickstart Accelerator or be partners in some way?

Matt:
Yes, so there is one element also behind which had to be mentioned, it’s called Initial Switzerland. This is an association where with a vision around, big corporate actually initiated this, it’s a vision really to help to move Switzerland even faster on everything which is this new opportunities. Which digitalization is a great thing to our daily life, but also in companies. With this we had only a natural seed grant for getting these companies that a part of the association to also support us on the Kickstart acceleration. The Kickstart Accelerator is one of the programs, currently the biggest program in this association, in which really is focused on accelerating not only companies, but in general, Switzerland, in this process of new opportunities in digital abroad.

Audrow:
Okay. How many batches of companies has the program had so far? How many three month groups have gone through?

Matt:
There’s only one, up til now. So the-

Audrow:
First one?

Matt:
Yes. Now we will send out to call soon for the second batch which will be end of summer next year. So, typically from the middle of August to November.

Audrow:
What do you hope from this program? Where do you hope it is in five years?

Roland:
I think there is a couple of elements, which hopefully is probable agreement, and we had very good experience over this year. Alongside, I think it really should Switzerland, speed up in general in this innovation and progression field. Switzerland is already pretty well set up, but you should never sleep in. You should really push forward. That’s one element. Of course, probably the most important element is also to have, to bring science, politics, big corporates, and startups together. This was I think, a wonderful experience and the beginning we hoped, and we have seen that it works. So we have really the CEOs and CTOs from big companies coming to this place where these young and crazy young people work on their ideas. They mingle together, they network together, they dabble up visions together, and I think this should be even stronger next year and hopefully be the unique selling point for the kickstart accelerator in Switzerland.

Of course, we would like also to convince some young people with great ideas to probably then continue to work in Switzerland, or incorporate their companies in Switzerland, or at least have a strong link with Switzerland. Also, this vision we had in the beginning was really moving extremely nicely forward so we have the clear majority of the whole startups we had in the Kickstart Accelerator will continue to have a footprint in Switzerland. Some of them are now incorporating Switzerland, others have started a second branch in Switzerland, and the other group has at least very strong collaboration now already with Swiss companies.

Audrow:
Matt, do you have anything to add for where you hope to be in five years?

Matt:
I hope to be still here in five years, so that’s always … It depends on our work. That this program is there in five years, so I hope to deliver the next four years. For us, it’s really improving every year, I’m just coming from several feedback calls. I hope to be on a position where I can, where we are not only on the same level, but really on a higher level than both of the accelerators that exist right now. That we really have proven our approach is the right one. There is no right approach but it’s a very good approach. Let’s put it that way.

Audrow:
Okay. Thank you.

Roland:
Thanks.

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Torsten Oelkes, Executive Chairman of CUBE, about the CUBE Tech Fair. The CUBE Tech Fair is a conference that takes place in Berlin in May that seeks to facilitate connections between companies. The Tech Fair also features a start up competition where the winner will be awarded €1,000,000 without exchange of equity or debt. In this interview, Toresten talks about CUBE’s business model, the robotic companies they’re affiliated with, the CUBE Tech Fair, and the €1,000,000 prize.

Torsten Oelke

For the past 15 years Dr. Torsten Oelke has been an active player in the German digital economy. As a businessman, he built up companies and incubators. Besides his business activities, he serves as advisor to the German Minister of Economic Affairs.

Torsten is the Executive Chairman of CUBE , a global ecosystem to connect startups with leading industry players. He has assembled a team of international experts with extensive experience with industry and startups. CUBE is backed by several board members of global corporates across industries.

Links

• CUBE’s website
• Tech Fair website
• Download mp3 (28.1 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Bradley Knox, founder of bots_alive. Knox speaks about an add-on to a Hexbug, a six-legged robotic toy, that makes the bot behave more like a character. They discuss the novel way Knox uses machine learning to create a sense character. They also discuss the limitation of technology to emulate living creatures, and how the bots_alive robot was built within these limitations.

Brad Knox

Dr. Bradley Knox is the founder of bots_alive. He researched human-robot interaction, interactive machine learning, and artificial intelligence at the MIT Media Lab and at UT Austin. At MIT, he designed and taught Interactive Machine Learning. He has won two best paper awards at major robotics and AI conferences, was awarded best dissertation from UT Austin’s Computer Science Department, and was named to IEEE’s AI’s 10 to Watch in 2013.

Links

• bots_alive Kickstarter page
• Download mp3 (16.8 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

In this episode, Audrow Nash and Christina Brester conduct interviews at the 2016 International Association of Science Parks and Areas of Innovation conference in Moscow, Russia. They speak with Albert Efimov, Chief Roboticist at Skolkovo, about creating an innovation cluster for robotics companies; Anastasia Uryasheva, CEO of Tsuru, about a waterproof unmanned aerial vehicle; and Borris Rozman, General Director of GNOM, about underwater vehicles.

This is the first of three interviews from the conference.

Links

• Download mp3 (16.5 MB)
• IASP 2016 conference website
• Skolkovo’s robotics page
• Tsuru’s homepage
• GNOM homepage
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

2016 was a busy and abundant year for seed, crowd, series A,B,C,D and VC funding of robotics-related startups. 128 companies got funded, some multiple times. $1.95 billion, 50% more than 2015 which was also a phenomenal year with over $1.32 billion  funded.

Velodyne LiDAR got the most money in 2016, $150 million, with Zymergen and UBTech also getting over $100 million each.

In monthly recaps by The Robot Report, fundings grew until they peaked in August and then dipped in December. August was the month when Velodyne got their $150 million and Quanergy got $90 million. The next highest in August was $35 million for FormLabs.

The colorful chart on the left recaps the number of companies receiving funding by application area. 25 unmanned aerial systems companies got the biggest number of fundings followed by 15 agricultural robotics startups, service robotics for businesses, service robots for personal use, vision systems providers, self-driving systems and mobile robotics and AGVs companies, plus a whole bunch of smaller categories. Investments in robotic solutions for the ag industry were noted by Rob Leclerc of AgFunder who said:

“The number of deals grew 7% year-over-year, as we recorded 307 deals this half compared to 286 during the first half of 2015. The number of investors coming into the sector climbed 52% from 280 in the first half of 2015 compared with 425 in the first half of 2016, which suggests that investors are getting more comfortable with the sector.”

The list of 128 companies funded in 2016

The following companies were also funded but didn’t provide details: Raptor Maps, OnFarm, Appolo Shield, Aarav Unmanned Systems, AIO Robotics, Aloi Material Handling, Aurora Flight Sciences, Kimera Systems, NVBots, OPS-Ingersoll, OptoForce and Square Robot.

If you have information about robotics-related fundings, or corrections or additions to that which is reported above, please email it to info@therobotreport.com.

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

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Hasier Larrea, Founder and CEO of Ori Systems and MSc candidate at the MIT Media Lab, about robotics used to transform personal spaces. Larrea discusses how the world is urbanizing and how new space paradigms are needed to accommodate this shift. He proposes robotic furniture that allows for what is not being used to be hidden, such as a desk or a bed. Larrea discusses the robotic systems, how these systems will be integrated into existing infrastructure, and the future or Ori Systems.

Below is Larrea’s TEDxCambridge talk:

Hasier Larrea
Hasier Larrea is an engineer and designer at the MIT Media Lab. He holds a Bachelors and Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering. Hasier leads the Architectural Robotics research area at the Media Lab, which focuses on creating a new generation of hyper efficient and responsive urban spaces. His team is developing the robotic tools that allow traditional architectural and furniture elements to transform and intelligently connect to the world around us. His work on the CityHome and CityOffice has been featured in The New York Times, Time, Fast Company, Wired, and TechCrunch among others. His creative and entrepreneurial interests help translate the Lab’s envisioning, inventing, and designing approach into manifesting the ideal smart city from researchers’ minds to the streets of tomorrow.

Links

• Download mp3 (15.4 MB)
• Ori Systems’s homepage
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Ekaterina Bereziy, Founder and CEO of ExoAtlet, about exoskeletons for the disabled and for rehabilitation.

Transcript below.

The ExoAtlet Exoskeleton assists people with full or partial lower body paralysis, as well as people with muscle weakness to perform a walking gait. This has been shown to improve blood pressure, decrease muscles and bone degeneration, and prevent urological diseases and disorders. In addition to walking, the ExoAtlet exoskeleton can be used to go up and down stairs. Lastly, ExoAtlet is experimenting with using electrodes to stimulate the contraction of people’s muscles as a way of improving their fitness.

ExoAtlet is one of many robotics companies working with Skolkovo, an innovation cluster based in Moscow, Russia. Skolkovo provides these companies with resources and expertise to encourage their success.

Below is the video of a man walking down the aisle to be married in an ExoAtlet Exoskeleton.

Ekaterina Bereziy

Ekaterina Bereziy is the Founder and CEO of ExoAtlet. She studied Mechanics and Mathematics at Lomonosov Moscow State University and has a Master’s in Business Administration from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.

Links:

• Download mp3 (15.9 MB)
• Link ExoAtlet’s webpage
• Link to Skolkovo’s Robotics webpage
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Audrow: Hi, welcome to Robots Podcast, can you introduce yourself?

Ekaterina: My name is Ekaterina Berez. I am the co-founder of ExoAtlet, an exoskeleton for rehabilitation.

Audrow: Can you tell me a bit about ExoAtlet?

Ekaterina: ExoAtlet started at 2014. We developed our project for 2 years, but that is not the only time that we had together. The team joined with this type of development 15 years ago. ExoAtlet is the result of our investigations from 15 years. Now, we have the first version of the exoskeleton that provides the rehabilitation for people with their injuries. The next generation of ExoAtlet will provide the possibility to work for people after strokes.

Audrow: You mentioned the team has been working for 15 years. Where has this taken place?

Ekaterina: In the Damascus State University laboratory, a mechanical and robotic laboratory. We developed a lot of different kind of robots, and they started up the World Festival of Robotics for students and for PhDs. They worked for different kind of system controls for wheels robots and for walking robots. The exoskeleton was one of the ideas that they had for this for years. As the technical solutions have been providing good for making the kind of provides so the ideas to develop the exoskeleton for this exact idea (like rehabilitation) has been implemented and we started the company and conducting it like a commercial product.

Audrow: What stage of development are you currently at? Do you have users?

Ekaterina: We finished the certification process in the Russian market, so it means that we have the certified product that we start to sell 2 months ago. It’s the first product that we developed, but we have the second one that is on R&D stage. It will be more complicated or with the more complicated system control that provides the initiation of the movement. When the person can initiate by his own leg, the movement of the ExoAtlet. It provides the help only to make a step. The person controls it by his own muscles. It’s a great idea, and I mean that it’s a great implementation of an idea. The solution is very interesting. We will implement the control of the power of engines. It means that we will provide MDs to control-

Audrow: What is NMD?

Ekaterina: MD, just medical doctors. We will provide for medical doctors through their implication that we will help them to decrease their assistance of the ExoAtlet for the patients who can work, who can already make steps by themselves. To provide them less help. Then to make them work during the training.

Audrow: Almost like an exercise or rehabilitation. Now, about Skolkovo, how you are related to them?

Ekaterina: Skolkovo Foundation is the government fund that provides help for startups. We started to the member of Skolkovo in 2014 as we started up the company. We are working on this Skolkovo robotic sensor now in the territory of this center.

Audrow: That territory is basically a campus that startups work at?

Ekaterina: Yeah, it looks like a campus and the robotics startups have facilities to make engineering product types, and work with equipment to try and prove some concepts. Also, Skolkovo has their IP center that helps us a lot with our intellectual property and to issue patents. Skolkovo provides a lot of services for startups.

Now they have good infrastructure for the kind of startups who has a great idea, but not a lot of stuff to have goods or to have the specialist for each kind of idea, for implementation. I mean, for example, the PR support is one of the most important things for startups, because it’s necessary to get feedback from the market, and to involve the development process from the market, people who are close for example, in order to implement this idea in real life.

The PR solutions are really cool. And for us it was helpful. Some key medical doctors work with us now, and who made very important clinical trials for us. We have a connection with them, because of the PR support of Skolkovo team. Also, we need funding. It’s investors who can provide their investments for developing the product. Skolkovo has their own Skolkovo fund that is government money. It’s a grant money that they can provide the startups to support some ideas that are very innovative. Maybe too much innovative for the venture capitalist. Skolkovo provides the grant money for the first stage of development to prove this kind of concepts, and next step is to invest. It’s great support.

Audrow: Would you describe the ExoAtlet exoskeleton?

Ekaterina: The first version of ExoAtlet is the exoskeleton for rehabilitation people with the spinal cord injury. We make clinical trials with different kinds of level of spinal cord injury even with very high level. It works. Now, we have 2 models. There is one for hospitals, and for working for medical doctors with the patients, with the different kind of patients. I mean with the height of 160 centimeters.

Audrow: Okay, so about 5’2 to 6’2.

Ekaterina: The weight is about 100 kilos, maybe up to 120 kilos of the patient for hospitals to use. Another model is for personal using at home. The ExoAtlet is adjustable, it’s easy to fix the exact lenses of the part of legs.

Audrow: What does it look like, before we talk about adjusting legs.

Ekaterina: It’s just like the external skeleton. External metal parts that fixes to the legs and to the upper part of the body. With the cells that you can put in your shoes and the person can put it on in a sitting position.

Audrow: It has rigid components that go along with the legs on the outside of the leg?

Ekaterina: Yes, exactly.

Audrow: Then a foot insert that goes into the sole or goes with the sole of your shoe. There is a component that the user wears that’s sitting about at their lower back?

Ekaterina: Yes.

Audrow: They are strapped in by various straps that you pull? Kind of like snowboard boot straps.

Ekaterina: Yes, it looks like the snowboard boot straps. It’s very easy to strap it and fix it.

Audrow: You mentioned adjustable.

Ekaterina: Yes. It’s adjustable. We have a lot of adjustments because all people have different measurements.

Audrow: How does this exoskeleton compare to the exoskeletons of similar companies?

Ekaterina: Most of the skeleton for rehabilitation tried to solve the same problem. It’s to give an easy way to stand up, to start the walking movement, and provide walking steps to speed up the rehabilitation process. The differences in engineering solution, in some plugins, and in that way the exoskeleton works. I mean some of them, for example, have the initiation of the movement. It means that the patient with the not completely damaged spinal cord can initiate the moment. Or, for example, some of the exoskeletons can’t help with standing up to a totally disabled person. It means that they don’t have good parts, or good motors to help the person to stand.

They can make movements and make steps when the person is already in vertical position. Most of the exoskeleton needs crutches. It’s because the patient using the exoskeleton needs to keep their balance. The only way to keep their balance is to have the third points that you can get with a crutch.

Audrow: In our conversation earlier you mentioned you can use your exoskeleton on stairs?

Ekaterina: Yes. Normally in the rehabilitation process medical doctors don’t use stairs, but if we see or if we talk about the people of the stroke, for them they are going up and down stairs. It’s one of the exercises that improves and speeds up the rehabilitation process. Also for the person using it we need to go up and down the stairs because we have a lot of stairs in our surroundings. Normally to go out of the apartment you need to go down the stairs. If we talk about the personal use for people who, for example, has a totally damaged spinal cord, it means that it’s rather difficult to have a hope to reconstruct to start working by themselves.

It means that this kind of exoskeleton will provide them help in walking. Of course, we need to go up and down the stairs and stairs are different with the different heights of the steps, and it means that you should adjust the height of the step according to the stairs. It’s a very important thing.

Audrow: Is this something that the user needs to adjust or is there any sensing onboard that tells how high the steps are by itself, and then adjusts how large of the step it will have to take?

Ekaterina: Now it has sensors, but it works with the stairs, but sometimes you need just to step towards the obstacle. It means there are different kinds of obstacles, and sometimes you need to set up yourself like a pilot, the exact height to make a step. The situations are different. We have a variety of possible adjustments.

Audrow: The step parts and those types of things. To step higher or lower, further, shorter.

Ekaterina: Yeah. Of course, different people have different ways of walking. Some of us have very high steps. For example, normally for us to make high steps, but others make very short and low steps. We can adjust it, and not with the program is plug in the computer and do it once and for years. Now you can adjust exact minutes just by changing parameters in the application.

Audrow: Now, what kind of actuators are on the exoskeleton? It has electric motors?

Ekaterina: Yes.

Audrow: Where are they? Tell me a bit about them.

Ekaterina: They are in the upper parts of the leg.

Audrow: They are at the hip and the knee, correct?

Ekaterina: The knee yes, but they’re just a little bit higher. It works, yes. It moves with the knee joint and the hip joint, so 4 of them, because we have 4 joints. It works with batteries that are set up also onboard. It’s about 6 hours that you can walk.

Audrow: That is a long time. About 6 hours of regular use?

Ekaterina: Yes. Just walking on the normal surfaces. If of course if you will stand up and sit down for 6 hours batteries needs more taxing. You need to charge it.

Audrow: Yes. For sure. What kind of sensors does the exoskeleton have?

Ekaterina: It’s a lot of sensors that helps to get diverse composition.

Audrow: Skill accelerometers and gyroscopes to do some sort of status on this?

Ekaterina: Yeah. We have all of them, and we have some sensors for initiation to get information that it will be initiation of movement by their leg.

Audrow: Would that force sensors?

Ekaterina: It’s force sensors and mind sensors.

Audrow: The mind sensors are very interesting, but the force sensors, where are they in the exoskeleton? Is it on the feet?

Ekaterina: It’s on the feet, yes. It’s on the strips.

Audrow: On the strips; what do you mean?

Ekaterina: I mean that it’s onboard of the ExoAtlet.

Audrow: It’s on the component like along the legs? Sensing the amount twerk at the motor, at each joint basically? So what do you use that information for?

Ekaterina: For system control. To make more comfortable for a person, because when you wear anything that provides some movement you need to be comfortable. It’s one of the great problem how to provide comfort for person that can’t do specific moments. It’s huge that should fit well to make the comfortable moments.

Audrow: You also use the 4 sensors, so the ones in the feet in this kind of thing or the ones in the feet to help the user to walk by themselves, correct? You determine where the weight is loaded and then you decided if you can step or not? Is this the approach?

Ekaterina: It works like this. We have mind stimulation system also.

Audrow: I want to get to that after, but just to see if I understand the force sensors it’s basically if I have my weight on my right leg then I know I can move my left leg kind of thing. The force sensor would determine that I have my weight on my right leg, so then my left leg moves. Is this how it works?

Ekaterina: One of the solutions can be like this. We have a little bit different solution. It does matter. This kind of technical details they are very our specifics. This kind of idea can work. It means that you need to make the system control, but will provide the most natural pattern of walking. From bio-mechanical point of view you can do it like a normal person. This is the goal. There are different kinds of system controls that use their data from sensors, from their voice sensors, from their food on these trips, on the different points of the leg, because it means that the angles and so on. You can get the exact information of the movement that is in the second, and provide by the drives the next phase of movement.

Audrow: Electromyogram sensors sense the electric potential on the skin, and this potential increases when things like a muscle flexes. If I flex my muscle we can detect this with an electromyogram, a myogram sensor on it. You are using this for control of the exoskeleton as well?

Ekaterina: No, we use the myostimulation systems. It’s a multiple control system. It’s for stimulating, for additional stimulation of muscles. For example, who have the people who have damaged spinal, completely damaged spinal cord, we can provide them walking, but we can’t make their muscles work during this process, because their spinal cord is completely damaged, and there is no signal. It means that we can stimulate their legs muscles, and it’s like the stimulation of the normal walking process of muscles during the walking.

Audrow: Are you electrocuting the muscle in order to stimulate it?

Ekaterina: Yeah. We put on the skin the electrodes, and we will provide their electrical nodes to the muscles through the skin. It makes muscles work.

Audrow: It’s like when you are shocked. When you get shocked somehow, and all of your muscles contract. It’s like that kind of thing, but you are using those deliberately to help the user to walk?

Ekaterina: Yeah. It doesn’t help to the walking process, but it helps muscles to reconstruct their function, because we provide the signal, the electro stimulation signal to exact muscle that must work on this phase of walking.

Audrow: How much voltage are you applying to the, I mean is it allowed? Does it hurt?

Ekaterina: No. It doesn’t hurt. It can be just from the very low that you as a normal person would never feel, but the muscle will be on the strong physical condition. It’s adjustable. It’s there. It’s one of the very complicated parts of physical therapy. It’s normally implemented during physical therapy programs. Now medical doctors use it in the position when the person laid on the sofa for example, and they do this kind of mind stimulation without movements. We implemented to the exoskeleton, and combined it with the steps. We use the information of the angles from the joints and provide to the system, the control mind stimulation and elector signals.

Audrow: Has this approach been proven to be beneficial to do the steps in combination with the electrical stimulation? Is it proven or have you found that the results of doing these 2 things is better than the result of doing either separate?

Ekaterina: Now we have a big investigation. We have the clinical trials that the results of it will be comparing between the ExoAtlet with mind stimulation system. It will be interesting result.

Audrow: What was the second one?

Ekaterina: Local Mob. It’s their rehabilitation. They are very big and very famous rehabilitation equipment. It’s very expensive, so it costs about some hundred thousands dollars. Normally it’s on the rehabilitation centers, because it’s for the big one. It’s with the treadmill and their exoskeleton implemented in this system. It’s proved, and they were a lot of researches and clinical trials that proved this kind of robotic mechanical therapy. In Russian market we have about 75 such kind of machines. Now we have the clinical trials. The idea is to compare their results of 2 weeks of training for patients who can walk a little bit, who can do some steps.

It’s not the people with the completely damaged spinal cord, but it’s the spinal cord damaged injury people who feel their legs, and who can do some steps. We will measure the differences of improvements.

Audrow: I see, and use that to determine the validity of the method. That makes sense. What are the future steps for ExoAtlet?

Ekaterina: We will develop the next version. We are working on it. We are on R&D process, the ExoAtlet for people of the stroke. Then the cerebral palsy is one of the biggest problems that is around the world. We will provide to different exoskeletons to the market.

Audrow: What would you think would be a timeline for this?

Ekaterina: We plan to make a presentation of the ExoAtlet for people of the stroke next summer. It will be summer of 2017. For children with the cerebral palsy it will be the next generation maybe in 2 or 3 years.

Audrow: Do you have any stories or anecdotes of people using your exoskeletons?

Ekaterina: We have one exoskeleton that has been implemented in hospital in the north city of Russia. There is one patient who walks with it almost every day and use it almost every day. One of the really interesting stories that it was his own idea. It wasn’t like a PR idea. He decided to marry, and for him it was very important to stand, but not to sit during this process. He entered the church with his future wife wearing the ExoAtlet and using the ExoAtlet. He made steps with this kind of sound … It’s really so cool. That Saturday morning was very interesting, because he came to his wife, and he provided her his hand and she supported him a little bit, but it was really impressive.

Audrow: Thank you!

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Hugh Herr, Director of the Biomechatronics Group at MIT. Herr talks about the accident that led to the amputation of both of his legs below the knee and how this shaped his rock climbing and academic career. Herr also discusses orthoses and exoskeletons developed by his research group, as well as the future of bionic technology.

Transcript below.

Among topics discussed is the lower-body exoskeleton below. This exoskeleton is the first lower-body exoskeleton to decreases the user’s energy expenditure when walking (measured by oxygen consumption). It works by assisting the calf muscle and using the body’s joints, rather than heavy mechanical joints. Hugh Herr says, “Subjects noticed that their legs felt heavier and awkward when they took the exoskeleton off.”

Below is a TED talk Hugh Herr gave in 2014. In this talk, Herr describes disability as a failure of technology, he discusses the design of his own prostheses and his lab’s research, and there is a dance performance by Christian Lightner and Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost her lower left leg in the Boston Marathon bombings.

Hugh Herr

His research program seeks to advance technologies that promise to accelerate the merging of body and machine, including device architectures that resemble the body’s musculoskeletal design, actuator technologies that behave like muscle, and control methodologies that exploit principles of biological movement. His methods encompass a diverse set of scientific and technological disciplines, from the science of biomechanics and biological movement control to the design of biomedical devices for the treatment of human physical disability.

His research accomplishments in science and technology have already made a significant impact on physically challenged people. The Transfemoral Quasipassive Knee Prosthesis has been commercialized by Össur Inc., and is now benefiting amputees throughhttp://biomech.media.mit.edu/people-hugh-herr/out the world.  In 2006, he founded the company iWalk Inc. to commercialize the Powered Ankle-Foot Prosthesis and other bionic leg devices.  Professor Herr’s work impacts a number of academic communities. He has given numerous invited and plenary lectures at international conferences and colloquia, including the IVth World Congress of Biomechanics, the International Conference on Advanced Prosthetics, the National Assembly of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, World Economic Forum, Google Zeitgeist, Digital Life Design, and the TEDMED Conference. He is Associate Editor for the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, and has served as a reviewer for the Journal of Experimental Biology, the International Journal of Robotics Research, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences. He has been invited to participate in joint funding proposals from other universities and corporations, and has served on research review panels including the National Institute of Health, the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2007, He was presented with the 13th Annual Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment. His work has been featured by various national and international media, including Scientific American Frontiers, Technology Review, National Geographic, the History Channel, and CNN.

Links:

• Download mp3 (18.3 MB)
• Link to the Biomechatronics Group’s webpage
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

The transcript is edited for clarity.

Hugh Herr:
My name is Hugh Herr and I’m a professor at MIT. I co-direct the Center for Extreme Bionics. I also am the founder of a company called BionX Medical Technologies.

Audrow Nash:
Can you tell me a bit about how you have lost your legs from the knee down?

Hugh Herr:
I was an avid mountain climber. I started mountain climbing when I was seven years old. When I was in my early teenage years I was considered a child prodigy in climbing. When I was seventeen I was out with my climbing partner at the time. Our goal was to climb Mt. Washington in the winter by ascending Huntington’s Ravine, which is about an eight hundred foot, very steep ice wall. We ascended very quickly the eight hundred foot wall, and then decided to continue towards the summit. The weather conditions got worse and worse. Even though we went just five minutes above the head-wall of Huntington Ravine, we were not able to retrace our tracks and we descended the mountain.

By the time we got to tree line it was clear that we had gone off course, but we were stuck at that point. We really didn’t have the rational choice of retracing our tracks and going towards the summit. At that point, wind speeds were so high that one could not even stand. We were forced to go down this ravine system, it’s called the Great Gulf Region. It’s the wilderness side of Mt. Washington. It was there that we spent several days in most extreme bushwhacking that one can imagine. The average depth of snow was to the waist. Sometimes it was to the chest. We were just simply trapped in a white maze.

We dug in when we were not able to move any more out of exhaustion by creating kind of these snow caves. During the day we would walk. We would probably make two miles of progress in a complete kind of marathon effort in the deep snow. We made it within a few miles of the roadway and then couldn’t walk anymore because of severe frostbite. We were later discovered, or found by a person out snowshoeing for the day, and we were plucked from the mountain via helicopter and then treated for severe frostbite and hypothermia.

Audrow Nash:
Then, so from there because of the severe frostbite you had both of your legs amputated from the knee down?

Hugh Herr:
That’s right. After a few months of effort by my medical team to “save” my biological limbs, they were amputated. We were on the mountain late January. My legs were amputated mid-March.

Audrow Nash:
Afterwards, you wanted to return to rock climbing. You were told otherwise, though.

Hugh Herr:
Yeah. I didn’t know what I would be able to do with my new body, and my father said, “If you want to climb, you should climb.” I really had no clear examples of what life would be using prostheses. My limbs are amputated. I went through about a month or two of healing, and then I was fitted with my first pair of artificial limbs. I was shocked at their lack of technological sophistication. They were actually made of plaster of Paris and it was recommended that I not walk without canes or crutches because the limbs might actually break. They were kind of these crazy trainer limbs. The first weekend I went home from the rehabilitation center they didn’t allow me to take my legs because they knew what I was capable of. The next weekend they were stupid enough to allow me to take my legs and I went climbing with my brother, Tony.

Audrow Nash:
How did you begin to adjust your prosthetic limbs for climbing and various purposes?

Hugh Herr:
I quickly abandoned the notion that the limbs needed to look human, and I quickly focused on function. I thought to myself what would be optimal designs for the vertical world of rock and ice climbing. What emerged was a series of different feet for rock and ice surfaces, so feet that could stand on small rock edges the width of a coin, feet that could wedge into rock fissures even where the human foot could not penetrate, feet that could penetrate ice walls. I made my legs exceedingly lightweight to increase my strength to weight ratio. Through design, I was able to etch out a few advantages. There were disadvantages, but I gained enough advantages that it was only twelve months after my limbs were amputated that I was climbing better with artificial limbs than I’d ever achieved with normal biological limbs before the accident.

Audrow Nash:
How did you transition into academia from this, and how did you know that that is the way you should pursue, or continue?

Hugh Herr:
To be honest, the men in my family, my father and brothers and grandfathers, were in the business of construction. Given how uncomfortable artificial limbs were at the time, I couldn’t imagine being on a construction site for the rest of my life. I also couldn’t imagine being on the construction site for the rest of my life. I decided to go to college, which I’d never plan to do. My intent was to be the best climber in the world before the accident. I went to college and I signed up for very basic math courses and computer science courses. I developed an extraordinary passion for the topics and couldn’t stop studying. I just absolutely loved the material. It’s interesting because science and a passion for science and math actually replaced somewhat my passion for climbing mountains.

Audrow Nash:
Then you began to apply what you were learning to your own prostheses with what you were learning? When did you start doing that?

Hugh Herr:
I did have the goal of continuing to design prostheses. The experience of designing new climbing legs and succeeding so wildly beyond everyone’s expectation, including my own, was very inspirational for me. I realized the power of technology to heal, to rehabilitate, even to extend human capability beyond innate capabilities. That was also a clear motivation in my acquisition of knowledge and going back to school. My first patent was obtained, issued very close to the time when I was graduating from undergraduate school in physics. It was on the mechanical interface between the residuum and the artificial limb. The idea was to use fluid bladders in certain configurations. I later proposed to my future MIT advisor that I would build this interface and have actuation pumps and pressure sensing and continually modulate the pressure field around the residuum.

Audrow Nash:
On the spot where the prosthetic limb interfaces with the residual limb is what you’re talking about?

Hugh Herr:
Yes.

Audrow Nash:
So you would use some sort of fluid to make a vacuum so that it would stay very well attached?

Hugh Herr:
Yes, a vacuum offering suspension, but also offering loading support.

Audrow Nash:
Loading support.

Hugh Herr:
A pressure field that would be very comfortable around the end of the limb, enabling a person to walk without discomfort.

Audrow Nash:
Can you tell me a bit about the prostheses that you’re wearing now?

Hugh Herr:
I’m wearing two bionic legs. Both legs have three microprocessors and twelve sensors. The microprocessors are brains, if you will. The devices control a muscle-like actuator that moves and stiffens and powers my synthetic ankles.

Audrow Nash:
What sensors are on board?

Hugh Herr:
The sensors measure position, speed, acceleration, force and temperature, as well as joint position and speed.

Audrow Nash:
What sensing are you doing, contact with the ground?

Hugh Herr:
No. The device has tendon-like series springs, and also a parallel elasticity. The torque sensing is of the torque that the series elastic actuator sees and the parallel spring sees.

Audrow Nash:
I see.

Hugh Herr:
Either one can produce net torque on a joint.

Audrow Nash:
Can you describe how they look a little bit?

Hugh Herr:
They look interesting. There’s two black batteries that sit on top, and there’s black anodized metal shields coming around the ankle. Then inside those shields are all the electronics and then the motor system. Then attached to that is a synthetic foot made of again, black carbon composite.

Audrow Nash:
What kind of grip on the bottom?

Hugh Herr:
I wear the carbon foot, and glued to that carbon foot is a typical rubber that you’d find on the bottom of a shoe.

Audrow Nash:
What kind of battery life?

Hugh Herr:
We get a few thousand fast walking steps. For me and my lifestyle, that’s fine to get through the day. If one wants to walk say, ten thousand steps, one would just take a spare battery or two. The batteries are modular. You just snap them in like a power tool.

Audrow Nash:
I see. How does this compare to other prostheses?

Hugh Herr:
All other foot/ankle prostheses in the world are human powered, meaning the energy of the human attached to them drives the movement. The legs that I’m wearing are bionic. They inject mechanical energy into a person’s stride in a way that’s similar to what the muscles used to do that were lost on amputation.

Audrow Nash:
Can you talk a bit about how they are fit to your residual limbs?

Hugh Herr:
At MIT I have a team of people thinking about fit. What is the nature of comfort? What are the mathematics of comfort? What is the science of comfort? We build mathematical descriptions of the tissues of the ends of the residuum and theories of how the shape of the structure that comes around the residuum and the stiffness of that shape to optimize comfort. Basically, the end of my limb goes into a cup-like device that supports my weight, and so the shape of that cup is critically important to comfort. We mathematically derive that shape, and then we 3D print the structure.

Audrow Nash:
You’re identifying where there are hard and soft spots in the residual limb so that you can match them or match them with their complement, so soft to hard, hard to soft so that it’s more comfortable?

Hugh Herr:
Yeah. Then what’s very complex is the shape, the equilibrium shape of the synthetic skin, if you will. That’s based on tissue, how compliant the tissues are, that shape. Mathematically we understand the compliance of the tissues in all the regions.

Audrow Nash:
What do you mean, compliance of the tissue?

Hugh Herr:
How soft or how stiff they are.

Audrow Nash:
Okay. What about stretch of say, the skin? Does that apply as well?

Hugh Herr:
In a different way. I wear a second skin silicone liner, so the design of that second skin relates to the skin’s strain field, or the amount of stretch in the skin.

Audrow Nash:
I see. Are they attached by this vacuum principle or how would you attach them to the residual limb?

Hugh Herr:
There’s a number of ways to attach. You can have a pin and a lock at the base of the limb. You can have suction. You can have a sleeve that spans from the biological leg across the socket. There’s a number of ways to hold it on.

Audrow Nash:
What have been some challenges in designing this?

Hugh Herr:
The interface. If you ask a thousand persons with limb amputation what’s the number one problem they want solved, probably all thousand would say the mechanical interface, the mechanical attachment. Why? Because it’s uncomfortable. It’s a very, very important problem. It’s a very complex problem because no one understands what comfort is for any device, or there’d be a shoe or a prosthesis. We’re developing that science, and it’s very exciting. We want to be able to produce sockets that are comfortable. We want to produce them fast at low cost.

Audrow Nash:
What are a means of doing this? You 3D print the part. How do you model the residual limb?

Hugh Herr:
We take an MRI image of the limb, and that tells us where the shape of the bones and where the skin is and where the muscles are. We then use robotic palpation tools to compress the tissues and measure displacement speeds and forces, which tell us the fundamental constants of the tissues. We then build a continuum mechanical model. If you have a mathematical description of the biological segment, you can then apply pressure fields. The model will tell you how the tissues deform. Then we define particular tissue deformations that are healthy and comfortable.

Audrow Nash:
Is the goal is to make this cheap and replicable for the general person?

Hugh Herr:
Yeah. My vision of the future is that each human individual will have a digital representation of their body. When they need any type of a bionic device, that digital body will be used to compute an optimal personalized bionic device for the human.

Audrow Nash:
This can refer to clothing as well.

Hugh Herr:
Correct. Clothing, shoes, bras, bike seats, bionic limbs, exoskeletons, neural implants that go inside the body. Everything will be personalized.

Audrow Nash:
Everything is optimized, and this relies heavily on 3D printing or additive manufacturing?

Hugh Herr:
3D printing is a tool. It’s not the dominant science. That is to say, one could build these interfaces with molding processes and not using digital fabrication. Digital fabrication is sometimes nice because it reduces the fabrication frequency, but it’s not necessary. It’s not the secret sauce.

Audrow Nash:
What’s the role of industry and academia in producing these prostheses?

Hugh Herr:
As stated, I’m a professor. The typical model of a professor in the US is they receive some type of grant monies and they conduct research with a team comprising both staff and students. There are inventions. Patents are filed. Patents are owned by the university. The university then licenses the intellectual property to founders of a company. Those founders can be the professors and students that invented, and often that’s the model, the most successful model of translation. In my case that’s exactly what happened. There was patents generated. I’m the inventor. My students are the inventors. A company’s established and then there’s a contractual relationship between the company and the university, licensing the IP within a certain domain of use. That’s what was done with my company, BionX Medical Technologies.

Audrow Nash:
What role does the company play in developing the technology?

Hugh Herr:
At university we do science. We do research that’s publishing. We test hypotheses. We do things that have never been done before, never been tested before. At the company, basically crude prototypes that we build at the university are commercialized. What that means is getting them light enough, most important strong enough, durable enough, manufacturable, at the right price point. Then all the sales and clinical services necessary to distribute that product globally.

Audrow Nash:
What does it look like when someone puts on the BiOM ankle for the first time?

Hugh Herr:
The design in the ankle is biomimetic, inspired by nature, by the human body. The algorithms that are running on these small computers on the ankles control the motor as if the motor were made of muscles and tendon and the whole structure was bone and whatnot. The whole thing moves as if it was made of flesh and bone, even though it’s made of synthetics. Because of that, when it’s fit to a human, the human is used to those dynamics, so there’s little to no training required. Often in minutes the person is saying things like they have their life back, they have their leg back, and they’re either crying out of happiness or laughing out of happiness. It’s fun to go to these fittings, actually.

Audrow Nash:
I’d like to move into talking about exoskeletons. First, would you define what an exoskeleton is and then tell us how it relates to your work with prostheses.

Hugh Herr:
My definition of an exoskeleton is a device that attaches to the body, intimately to the body, that augments physicality. What I mean by augments, it enables a human being to do something that’s beyond natural capability for an innate, healthy body. The word orthoses is a medical term for a robot that attaches to the body that enables a person with a disability or some condition to move more naturally. Exoskeletons are wearable robots that augment.

Audrow Nash:
Can you tell me a bit about metabolic cost as a parameter for designing exoskeletons?

Hugh Herr:
One goal in exoskeletal design is to augment a human by pedal locomotion. An excellent metric of evaluation is the amount of food energy a person requires when using the exoskeleton versus not using the exoskeleton. Why? My view is that if the exoskeleton increases energy levels of the human, the human won’t want to use it. It won’t have sufficient value. It’s a very important metric of evaluation.

Audrow Nash:
Basically they’ll discard it and not use it if the metabolic cost is higher than the task, or higher than it would be to accomplish otherwise?

Hugh Herr:
You know, unless they want to get exercise. If they want to actually be augmented and enhance physicality, no they won’t use it.

Audrow Nash:
How do you measure this?

Hugh Herr:
Typically for aerobic exercise it’s measured by monitoring how much oxygen a person uses when they breathe and how much carbon dioxide is expelled. With those two rates one can compute the calories burned per unit of time.

Audrow Nash:
Would you describe the exoskeleton used to decrease metabolic costs for walking?

Hugh Herr:
The first exoskeleton that was envisioned and published in the world that I’m aware of was in the nineteenth century, over a hundred years ago. It was a Russian inventor called Jagen. His dream was to augment the Russian Army, Russian soldiers. It wasn’t until 2014 that someone succeeded in building an exoskeleton that augments walking and running. My group was the first to accomplish that goal. It’s an exoskeleton that spans the foot and comes up about mid-calf, just below the knee. Fundamentally it’s an artificial calf muscle. The calf muscle is the most important muscle in bi-pedal walking. It supplies about eighty percent of the power to walk. It’s where humans are most inefficient, so the exoskeleton adds an artificial calf muscle and injects energy into the gait like a calf muscle to reduce the metabolic cost of the biological calf.

Audrow Nash:
What does it look like and what kind of actuators are you using?

Hugh Herr:
The actuators are electric based. It looks very interesting. It’s like, this crazy structure, this crazy shoe that goes higher than is normal and has these springy struts that go up on the side of the leg, and then a motor that sits on kind of a shin guard that pulls on that strut and powers movement.

Audrow Nash:
Yes, and so it’s using some sort of tether and you’re pulling that, and that’s how you flex the calf to augment walking?

Hugh Herr:
Flex the ankle, yes.

Audrow Nash:
You’re using the body as its own joint for this. Correct?

Hugh Herr:
It’s very important that exoskeletons are very, very, very light weight. Whenever you add weight to the legs, metabolic cost increases. In an effort to reduce the weight or the mass of the device, we actually use the body’s joints as the bearing instead of putting a synthetic bearing in the device.

Audrow Nash:
What kind of sensing is done with the device?

Hugh Herr:
All the electronics are up high by design so you can walk through a deep, deep puddle of water and not affect the system. We measure positions and speeds and accelerations, essentially. Then from those data we can compute torques, forces, given a model of the structure.

Audrow Nash:
You can infer where the person is in their gait and then determine if you should pull to assist the gap?

Hugh Herr:
Essentially.

Audrow Nash:
Why did you choose to revolve around the ankle?

Hugh Herr:
Again because the calf muscle is the most important muscle in walking.

Audrow Nash:
Are there other advantages to it as well, being that there’s not so much squishy …

Hugh Herr:
Yeah. The shin bone is where the leg is most stiff, most rigid, and it’s a tremendous plate of bone to apply forces on from an exoskeleton.

Audrow Nash:
Can you only use this for walking? Could someone use it for running or other activities?

Hugh Herr:
The device is very versatile. It’s powered, it has smart computation, so yes you can walk, run up and down hills, whatever you want to do. It’s as versatile as the human leg itself.

Audrow Nash:
What kind of efficiency gains are we getting?

Hugh Herr:
There’s a number of peer-reviewed manuscripts. Again, we were the first in 2014 to augment the human in a peer review publication. That first publication, the human subjects were wearing a twenty-three kilogram backpack and we augmented by eight percent. We later conducted a separate study on unloaded humans, just regular walking, and augmented by an average ten percent. The variation is huge, so you have N subjects. Some subjects are as high as almost thirty percent, some are low, and everything in between.

Audrow Nash:
What do you believe creates that variation?

Hugh Herr:
It’s a really interesting question. No one really knows, but everyone in the field has observed this phenomenon, that when you put a single exoskeletal design on N people, you get huge variation. My belief is you take ten people and you could distribute them in terms of athletic capability. Some people have a very smart spinal cord and they can exploit any tool or device very, very quickly. Others are clueless. That’s a possibility where training may be effective to mitigate that variance.

Audrow Nash:
Now, people that use it, what do they say it feels like?

Hugh Herr:
The human body is extraordinary, so a person begins to use it, they very quickly … Initially they feel the energy that it provides, but very quickly the human body gets used to it. Then you take it off and you kind of stumble, and your own biological normal legs feel heavy, awkward and slow. This tells us that wearing bionic structures will just be commonplace in the future, and innate, normal bodies will just be boring.

Audrow Nash:
Now, what kind of upper limit do you think we can get on efficiency with this device?

Hugh Herr:
With the foot/ankle device it’s not known. I would say at least twenty-five percent, but it may be even higher, which is very, very exciting.

Audrow Nash:
Then will you benefit, you think, from augmenting other muscles or other movements?

Hugh Herr:
We don’t know. What’s intriguing is our recent paper on the device. What’s intriguing is when you add exoskeletal torque and power at the ankle, not only do you reduce the power requirements of the biological ankle, but also you reduce the power requirements of the knee and hip. Even though the exoskeleton doesn’t span the knee and hip we nonetheless, reduce muscular effort at those joints tremendously. It begs the question do you really need an exoskeleton that spans the whole leg, or is the foot/ankle sufficient?

Audrow Nash:
Why would you think that it decreases the expenditure at those muscles?

Hugh Herr:
It’s just the dynamics of the system. The body, when you give it power, it uses that power distributively across the entire leg in an optimal way. It’s a new gait. It’s a different gait … than normal.

Audrow Nash:
How does it look compared to normal?

Hugh Herr:
It looks normal to an untrained eye. It doesn’t look like a bizarre walk. It is a distinctly new gait. You give the human energy from a bionic structure and the body quickly figures out how to ultimately use that energy to minimize its own metabolic food energy. That’s what humans are really good at. We’re inherently lazy and we minimize energy really, really well. We’re terrible at detecting high stress levels and probabilities of injury. We injure our knee and we’re surprised. We injure our hip and we’re surprised. An incredible value of exoskeletons is to give the human something that they’re bad at. One class of exoskeletons in the future will be exoskeletons that enable us to do athletic performances without a threat of injury.

Audrow Nash:
How would those work?

Hugh Herr:
I don’t know, but they would have to detect high levels of stress and fatigue in biological structures and then tell the human to stop or to move in a different way. Imagine a world where our top athletes never injure. Imagine the impact to human athletic performance. Performance would just go through the roof, because often what mitigates top performance is injury and recovering from injury and not training harder because you might injure, yada, yada, yada.

Audrow Nash:
What other future applications of exoskeletons do you see?

Hugh Herr:
Another form of augmentation is maintaining one’s inherent physicality independent of age. Imagine a world when you run your best marathon time when you’re sixty, and you’ve been running marathons since the age of fifteen. Why? Because you’re a more skilled athlete. As you age, technology eliminates the impact of age related degeneration by neural implants, maybe by regenerative medicine, maybe by exoskeletons or various forms of augmentation. That’s a very palpable form of augmentation. Most people ethically would be fine with that and most people would be excited about maintaining quality of life as they age.

Audrow Nash:
What are some bottlenecks in exoskeletons? What technological bottlenecks are there?

Hugh Herr:
I’m not sure there are technological bottlenecks. I think that largely the components are sufficient. It’s really a problem with design and architecture. The human machine interaction is something that’s unknown, so putting a bionic structure on a human and adapting its control in real time in a kind of human machine optimization is critically important to the future of this area of design. Imagine putting on a device and you just starting to walk and run and it adjusts its behavior to optimize its performance with you in a collaborative effort.

Audrow Nash:
Is this one of your research interests moving forward?

Hugh Herr:
Absolutely.

Audrow Nash:
What are some of your near-term research goals?

Hugh Herr:
I want to do three things first and foremost. One is I want to advance better muscle-like actuators. Perhaps actuators that are better than biological ones, kind of the engine of BionX. I want to understand electrical interface between the peripheral human nervous system and devices, so how to talk to nerve endings, essentially. I also want to understand how to attach machines to the body mechanically in a comfortable way. Those three innovations will really define bionics in this century. If you solve all three, you’re more or less done. You’ve solved bionics, limb bionics that is.

Audrow Nash:
Thanks for being on Robots Podcast.

Hugh Herr:
Thank you.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Fredrik Gustafsson, Professor in Sensor Informatics at Department of Electrical Engineering in Linköping University, about an initiative to reduce poaching in a rhino sanctuary in Ngulia, Kenya. Gustafsson discusses how he first became involved in this project, how he has worked with the rangers to develop solutions, and the future of this work.

Fredrik Gustafsson

Fredrik Gustafsson is professor in Sensor Informatics at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University, since 2005. He received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering 1988 and the Ph.D. degree in Automatic Control, 1992, both from Linköping University. His research interests are in stochastic signal processing, adaptive filtering and change detection, with applications to communication, vehicular, airborne, and audio systems. His work in the sensor fusion area involves design and implementation of nonlinear filtering algorithms for localization, navigation and tracking of all kind of platforms, including cars, aircraft, spacecraft, UAV’s, surface and underwater vessels, cell phones and film cameras for augmented reality. He is a co-founder of the companies NIRA Dynamics (automotive safety, including tire pressure monitoring systems found in more than 20 million, here), Softube (plug-ins for music studios and software solutions for Marshall and Fender), and Senionlab (leading manufacturer of indoor navigation solutions for sm, here).

Links:

• Download mp3 (16.9 MB)
• Project Ngulia website
• A PDF overview of Project Ngulia
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Karl Iagnemma, a Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the CEO of nuTonomy, about autonomous vehicles in urban environments. Iagnemma discusses the market for autonomous cars, why nuTonomy is being developed and, at least initially, deployed in Singapore, and the technology of autonomous cars.

A video of nuTonomy’s autonomous vehicle is below.

Karl Iagnemma

Karl Iagnemma is a principal research scientist in the Mechanical Engineering department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the Robotic Mobility Group. He holds a B.S. from the University of Michigan, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from MIT, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. He has performed postdoctoral research at MIT, and has been a visiting researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Technical University of Athens (Greece). Karl is also co- founder and CEO of nuTonomy, a venture-backed startup company focused on developing software for fully autonomous passenger vehicles.

Links:

• Download mp3 (17.6 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

This is the second of two episodes where Audrow Nash interviews several companies at the International Conference for Robotics and Automation (ICRA). ICRA is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s biggest conference and one of the leading international forums for robotics researchers to present their work. The 2016 conference was May 16-21 in Stockholm, Sweden.

Interviews include the following:

Greg Burman, Engineer at iniLabs, explains a novel, high frequency camera that senses differences in illumination at each pixel.

Dave Rollinson, Co-Founder of HEBI robotics, talks about on a modular system for constructing robots.

Tony Prescott, Director of Research at Consequential Robotics, discusses work on a companion robot.

Xavier Carpentier, Phoenix Technologies, on motion tracker used on the International Space Station.

Links:

• Download mp3 (17.4 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS

Most of D’Andrea’s work shown at this latest demonstration is dedicated to pushing the boundary of what can be achieved with autonomous flight. One key ingredient is localization: To function autonomously, robots need to know where they are in space. Previously his team has relied on an external high-precision motion capture system available in his Flying Machine Arena at ETH Zurich for positioning. In his previous TED talk on robot athletes for example, you can clearly see the reflective markers required by the motion capture system. This meant that most algorithms were difficult to demonstrate outside the lab. It also meant that the system had a single point of failure (SPOF) in the centralized server of the mocap system — a highly problematic point for any safety critical system.

In another world first, Raff and his team are now showing a newly developed, doubly redundant localization technology from Verity Studios, a spin-off from his lab, which gives flying machines, and robots in general, new levels of autonomy. For the live demonstrations, all flying machines use on-board sensors to determine where they are in space and on-board computation to determine what their actions should be. There are no external cameras. The only remote commands the flying robots receive are high level ones, such as “take-off” or “land”.

The nature of this performance was also unprecedented in that it did not use safety nets to separate the audience from the action, and in that it even saw dozens of vehicles fly directly above the audience.

The performance included demonstrations of various safety systems for flying machines, including a large, high-performance quadcopter that is fully redundant and that utilizes a state-of-the-art failsafe algorithm (see previous Robohub article) among its many other onboard and offboard safety features.

Following extensive technical discussions on the various failure modes of the positioning system and of each flying machine as well as on the systems’ numerous redundancies and safety features, the organizers of TED had full faith in the systems’ safety and reliability. So much so that they decided to indemnify the venue against any lawsuits to overcome its ban on drones.

Here is the video:

And here is a more in-depth breakdown of what you are seeing, based on a transcript of the presentation and information from Raff D’Andrea’s team:

Intro video – Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control (IDSC), ETH Zurich

The video shows some of the previous work of D’Andrea’s group on aerial construction: A 6-meter tall tower built out of 1500 foam bricks by four autonomous quadcopters over a three day period in front of a live audience and a rope bridge built by three autonomous quadcopters in the Flying Machine Arena.

Live demo 1: Tail-Sitter – IDSC, ETH Zurich

The Tail-sitter. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

“This is a so-called tail-sitter. It’s an aircraft that tries to have its cake and eat it: Like other fixed wing aircraft, it is efficient in forward flight, much more so than helicopters and variations thereof. Unlike most other fixed wing aircraft, however, it can hover, which has huge advantages for take-off, landing, and general versatility. There is no free lunch, unfortunately, and one of the challenges with this type of aircraft is its susceptibility to disturbances, such as wind-gusts, while hovering. We are developing control architectures and algorithms that address this limitation. [Pushes the vehicle, then grabs it and throws it] The idea is to allow the aircraft to autonomously recover no matter what situation it finds itself in. [Second throw] And through practice, improve its performance over time. [Third throw, violently spinning the vehicle]”

Demo 2 (video of demo the night before): Monospinner – IDSC, ETH Zurich

The Monospinner. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

“When doing research we often ask ourselves abstract, fundamental questions that try to get at the heart of a matter. One such question: What is the minimum number of moving parts necessary for controlled flight? This line of exploration may have practical ramifications; take helicopters, for example, which are affectionately known as “machines with over 1000 moving parts all conspiring to cause bodily harm”. Turns out that decades ago skilled pilots were flying RC airplanes with only 2 moving parts: a propeller and a tail rudder. We recently discovered that it could be done with only 1.”

“This is the monospinner, the world’s mechanically simplest, controllable flying machine, invented just a few months ago. It has only one moving part, a propeller. There are no flaps or hinges, no control surfaces or valves, no other actuators. Just one propeller. Even though it is mechanically simple, there is a lot going on in its electronic brain to keep it stable and move through space in a controllable fashion. Even so, it does not yet have the recovery algorithms of the tail-sitter, which is why I have to throw it just right.”

Live demo 3: Omnicopter – IDSC, ETH Zurich:

The Omnicopter. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

“If the monospinner is an exercise in frugality, this machine here, the omnicopter, with its 8 propellers, is an exercise in excess. What can you do with this surplus? The thing to notice is that it is highly symmetric, and as a result it is ambivalent to orientation. This gives it an unprecedented capability: It can move anywhere in space, independently of where it is facing, and even of how it is rotating. It has its own complexities, mainly due to the complex, interacting flows of its 8 propellers. Some of this can be modeled, while the rest can be learned on the fly. [Omnicopter takes off, manoeuvres around the stage, lands]”

Live demo 4: Fully redundant multicopter – Verity Studios

Fully redundant quadcopter. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

“If flying machines are going to find their way into our daily lives, they will need to become extremely safe. This machine here is a prototype being developed by Verity Studios. It actually consists of two separate, two propeller flying machines, each capable of controlled flight. One wants to rotate clockwise, the other one counter clockwise. When all systems are operational, it behaves like a high-performance, 4 propeller quadrocopter. [Quadcopter takes off and flies an arc across the stage] If anything fails, however – propeller, motor, electronics, even a battery pack – it is still able to fly, albeit in a degraded way [One half of the quad is de-activated, the quadrocopter starts to spin and fall, the failsafe mode kicks in and the quadrocopter recovers, flies to the back of the stage, and performs a controlled landing at the takeoff spot].”

Live demo 5: Synthetic swarm, 33 small flying machines – Verity Studios

Photo: Bret Hartman / TED

“This last demonstration is an exploration of synthetic swarms. The large number of coordinated autonomous entities offers a radically new palette for aesthetic expression. We have taken commercially available micro-quadrocopters, each weighing less than a slice of bread, and equipped them with our localization technology and custom algorithms. Because each unit knows where it is in space and is self-controlled, there really is no limit to their number. [Swarm performance]”

Raffaello D’Andrea wrapped up with: “Hopefully these demonstrations will motivate you to dream up new revolutionary roles for flying machines. For example, the ultra-safe flying machine [points to the fully redundant multicopter] has aspirations to become a flying lampshade on Broadway. The reality is that it is difficult to predict the impact of nascent technology. And for folks like us, the real reward is the journey, and act of creation. It is also a continual reminder of how wonderful and magical the universe we live in is; that it permits clever, creative creatures to sculpt it in such spectacular ways. The fact that this technology has huge commercial potential is just icing on the cake.”

More photos for your viewing pleasure:

Photo: Bret Hartman / Ryan Lash / TED

Photo: Bret Hartman / Ryan Lash / TED

Photo: Bret Hartman / Ryan Lash / TED

Photo: Steven Rosenbaum / Waywire

Transcript below.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Simone Schürle, advisor and co-founder of MagnebotiX, about using small robots to harvest crystals. These crystals can be used to infer atomic structure. An example application is in drug development to see if protein binding has occurred.

Below is a video that demonstrates the technology discussed in the interview.

https://youtu.be/yL9VtAN8jiI

Simone Schürle

Simone graduated in 2009 from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, with a diploma (German equivalent to M.S.) in Industrial Engineering and Management. During her studies, she specialised in Micro/Nano Systems and Material Science and was enrolled in two international student projects abroad. She was researching at University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in the field of Biomedical Engineering and at the University of Kyoto, Japan, in the field of carbon nanotube based nano sensors which was sponsored by the Heinrich Hertz fellowship and a German state funding. She subsequently joined the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, directed by Prof. Brad Nelson, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where she focused on magnetic manipulation techniques for wireless microrobot control in biomedical applications. She was awarded with a Swiss National Foundation fellowship to pursue her postdoctoral studies and joined the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in June 2014. Simone is now interested in applying microrobotic control strategies in cancer treatment, specifically in locally enhancing nanoparticle transport.

Links:

• Download mp3 (13.4 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Magnebotix’ Website

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Audrow: Welcome to the Robots Podcast. Can you introduce yourself to our listeners?

Simone: I’m Simone Schürle and my background is in magnetic manipulation of micro nanostructures. I’m a postdoc at MIT and co-founder for MagnebotiX , a start-up company. I work on calibration and performance measurements, optimising electromagnetic systems for micro-nano manipulation.

Audrow: What is the application of this technology?

Simone: You can use the system in an inverted microscope or an upright microscope – any tiny objects you want to maneuver with areas you need to interact with on a small scale, such as cells. You would use this technology if you want to understand how small structures move, or to explore completely new areas, like the low Reynolds number machine.

Dynamics change when moving from large to small. Let’s say you want to manoeuvre tiny objects in crystallography and extract crystals then blast them with x-rays to get the fractal structure so you can get to the atomic structure. These are extremely tiny objects. Here is where you can be guided from our technology in magnetic micro work.

Audrow: Before discussing crystallography I’d like to understand the system and its parts. Firstly, there’s a magnet microscope. Then induction coils … is that how you control a magnetic robot?

Simone: Correct! On the one hand to visualize the robot, we need vision feedback. So first you need a microscope. Then you’ll need a magnetic control system consisting of eight electro magnets arranged in a single hemisphere. We control the current from each of these eight coils.
Then you have a defined work space where you place your robot. It could be a dish, tank or a 96 well PCR plate, whatever.

Audrow: What does the robot look like? Can you give me an idea of its size?

Simone: You can work with any piece of magnetic material. It could be a cylinder, a sphere or a flake of magnetic material. I know you are probably thinking: okay, is that really a robot? The robotics is really a system that generates magnetic fields from the outside to control it. You can also use different oscillating magnetic fields, rotating magnetic fields and dynamic fields that introduce different kinds of motion. You would not pull on a magnetic object where you apply field gradients to make it move, like how a magnet attracts other magnets.

If you have a magnetic helix and apply a rotating magnetic field it will propel forward. This concept is inspired by bacteria called flagella that have a helix and have rotational forward propulsion. You can apply this to magnetic helixes to get a cork screw-like motion. So this is one example.

Another example is a robot developed by a colleague in my former lab called “magmites.” These use a hammering motion – an impact driven motion – based on the oscillating magnetic field, where the magnets are connected through a spring and one hammers against the other to push itself forward. So this is one example of how you can build a surface walker: you just need a cylinder and to apply a rotating magnetic field and it can tumble over a surface.

Audrow: Can you tell me what is being done in crystallography? Why is this important?

Simone: Crystallography is an old technique, over 100 years old. It’s about x-raying fractal patterns of structures. We use crystallography to figure out new structures, understand what they are composed of and what they look like.

Crystals in our body are composed of all kinds of protein arrangements, and one thing we would like to do target specific proteins for research. But first we need to understand the structure of the protein and then the interaction of a potential ligand to bind to that target protein. Then we extract and grow protein crystals externally, adding a ligand, send to a synchrotron, blast it with x-rays and collect the experiment fractal pattern data to figure out if binding occurred and what the structure looks like. This is important to track development.

Audrow: Tell me about your system and how it relates to crystallography.

Simone: In academia we are in the process right now of trying to target certain proteins, and the pharma industry is searching among these huge libraries of potential ligands to find ones that could bind to these proteins.

Audrow: What exactly is a ligand?

Simone: It’s an interaction, another molecule instructed to bind to the protein.

One thing you can do is to model this kind of interaction so that you can knock out potential candidates, and then you conduct the experiment to grow the crystals. Much has been automated: hundreds of crystals can be grown at the same time and they are manipulated by robotic arms to different stations. They’re very finicky because you have to maintain them at different temperatures, and they have to be shaken all the time.

After weeks of growing them, they’re still in this process chain before you can send them off to the synchrotron. Every two weeks most pharma companies book a full day slot where all their crystals will be analysed.
Until recently, one of the steps in this process – harvesting the crystal – has been manual. This step involves taking the crystals out of their growth solution, where they are sitting in little droplets. Previously, this has been done by highly trained physicists using a nanoloop underneath a microscope, trying to fish out crystals that are the size of the root of your hair. These crystals are extremely fragile as they contain up to 90% water; they break very easily, and they like to grow at cold temperatures, so people must work in cold rooms for hours to fish them out.

Clearly, this is an error-prone and unpleasant process. We saw the need for automation and clearly a micro-robot could do this finicky job. We designed a robot called the “rodbot”: it is essentially a polymer rod with soft magnetic posts in it. We can magnetize it in such a way that when you apply a rotational magnetic field to it, you can make it roll.

Audrow: How large are these robots?

Simone: The robot is about the size of the crystal; it’s 60 micrometre in width and up to 300 micrometre long.

Audrow: Can you give me an idea of scale?

Simone: Your hair is about 80 micrometres in width, so it’s about the width of your hair.

Audrow: Looking at the rodbots it looks like there are holes. Are those magnets?

Simone: These are the magnets.

Audrow: So there are several magnets placed along its length and it’s a rectangular prism?

Simone: Correct. We have these posts perpendicular to its length to get the magnetization direction perpendicular to its axis so it can roll on the surface in the way we needed exactly. So initially we thought we could just approach the crystal and push it. In reality, we don’t even touch it because of fluid dynamics due to its size. There’s a vortex generated as soon as we come close to the crystal.

Audrow: A vortex? Like a whirlpool?

Simone: Yes, and that lifts the crystal on top. We have a non-contact manipulation technique, which is very nice for these fragile crystals. They get trapped in this whirlpool.

Audrow: It rides on top of your rodbot because of the whirl of vortex? Where do you bring it?

Simone: Correct. So the rodbot comes in through these crystallography loops which are like fishing nets. It drops the crystals in that net, like a basketball. This net is taken out; the crystal is cooled, and then sent off to be prepared for the crystallography of the x-ray.

Audrow: The rest of the process is automated?

Simone: Yes, our vision for the whole process to be integrated. You could have computer vision to identify your target crystal, automated path planning to approach the crystal, the rodbot to get the crystals, and a robot arm to remove it prior to cooling.

Audrow: From there you can analyse the crystals, check what has bonded, and then use that for drug development?

Simone: Yes.

Audrow: How do you control the crystal? I know you’re using magnetic fields to move it. Is an operator sitting with a joy stick. You also mentioned computer vision, is it automated?

Simone: This is the ultimate goal of true automation: that you don’t need to have an operator anymore. There are already established computer vision algorithms to detect the crystal. It’s not an easy environment where they grow. However, we can improve environmental conditions and growth conditions.
We can identify the crystals and identify the rodbot, that’s easy. The difficulty is going under an object and finding the shortest path to it.

Audrow: The rodbots are single use micro-robots. Why are they only single use when the don’t come into contact with anything?

Simone: When the operator conducted this manually, the loop used to fish it out was a single use item. What we do is combine the single use item with the rodbot. When this crystal has been finished you have to go to a new drop and introduce a new loop anyway. That’s why the rodbot is single use.

However as this can be batch fabricated, the process of making these rodbots uses microsystems fabrication, and you can generate thousands of them at a time, so they are extremely cheap.

Audrow: So you sell the system for “moving” the rodbot? And you sell 100s or millions of rodbots, and those are used for the crystallography?

Simone: Correct. Crystallography suppliers sell the nylon loops that fish the crystals out, and they also loops that have been preloaded with a rodbot.

Audrow: What have been the major challenges to developing this technology? Or turning it into a product?

Simone: One thing you can ask is: why hasn’t this been automated yet? It’s a complex environment, and there’s no commercial solution available. There are different physical manipulation techniques that have been suggested, such as using robotic arms, but so far this environment is too complex to accomplish it that way.

Audrow: Why is that? Is it too small?

Simone: Because of the dexterity that’s required, as well as the size and fragility of the crystal. Classic robotics usually uses contact, but this can damage the crystal. For us the hurdle when you go so small is that you have to deal with capillary forces and other forces that makes things stick, and this can be a problem.

Audrow: If you could go back and give your 20-year-old self one thing, what would it be?

Simone: Learn one thing really well. Have a solid background in one thing, and then branch out and be diverse. Learn as much as you can and try combining these new ideas with your solid background you’ve mastered.

Audrow: Thank you.

Simone: Thanks very much.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

3D printing is revolutionizing the way objects are created, from plastic toys to ceramic dental crowns. But the seemingly boundless possibilities of 3D printing technology have one major limitation—the printers themselves, which are large, bulky, and stationary.

Robert Flitsch didn’t like being constrained by the boxy shape of the 3D printer he used while he was a student at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. So this mechanical engineering concentrator developed a wheeled additive manufacturing machine that can literally run (or drive) circles around a traditional 3D printer. He recently launched a startup named Addibots (a portmanteau of additive manufacturing and robots), to develop and market his mobile 3D printing robots.

“By making the additive manufacturing components completely mobile, you break free of all the workspace limitations of 3D printing,” Flitsch said. “But Addibots also greatly opens the field to many new application spaces for additive manufacturing.”

An Addibot^TM is a mobile robot, either remote-controlled or autonomous, that holds an array of additive manufacturing printheads on its undercarriage. These high-resolution printheads enable the robot to 3D-print using different materials as it drives along a surface.

Ice was the surface Flitsch had in mind when he initially developed the concept. A lifelong hockey player, he conceived the additive manufacturing robot as an efficient tool to resurface an ice rink that has been chipped up by skates. For his senior project in Engineering Sciences 100, he built a prototype of an additive manufacturing robot that was able to extrude ice onto the surface of an uneven skating rink.

“I soon realized that the best thing about this technology is that it is really only limited by what you can think up,” he said.

After brainstorming other applications for Addibots, Flitsch decided to focus on road resurfacing.

He is currently prototyping an Addibot that would be able to move along a road at a constant speed, using a specialized injector array to resurface the road with a combination of different materials. The machine’s ability to streamline resurfacing work could help public works departments across the nation meet the massive demand for new and better roads.

He doesn’t see Addibots as a replacement for human workers, but rather as a way to improve roadwork and enable municipalities to perform routine maintenance, rather than spending additional time and tax dollars reactively filling potholes.

“Road resurfacing Addibots would also be a great way to move caustic materials, like tar, farther away from the people who would be working on the roads,” Flitsch said.

By incorporating different printheads into the injector array, the Addibot could easily augment resurfacing material with specialized elements, such as carbon nanotubes, which would improve road durability, Flitsch said. Eventually, the technology could even “print” sensors into the road surface that would be used by traveling autonomous vehicles.

Flitsch, who is currently seeking funding sources to advance his prototyping efforts, is hoping to bring an Addibot to market within one to three years. And he is considering other applications for mobile additive manufacturing robots.

“Once you get rid of that confined workspace and you make the world your workspace, there is no telling what you can do,” he said.

ArtiMinds is redefining how we program robots with their intuitive and semi-automatic interface for controlling complex industrial robot tasks , including sensor-adaptive motions. (Germany)

Blue Frog Robotics is the company behind the open-source BUDDY companion robot , whose crowdfunding campaign recently ended with over 6 times their original funding ask. (France)

https://youtu.be/51yGC3iytbY

CleverPet has built a smart dog feeder that lets you play, teach, and connect with your pet all day. (USA)

Erle Robotics creates artificial brains for robots and drones that run on Linux and are based on ROS. (Spain)

GaitTronics is helping patients recover more quickly and with their rehabilitative robot walker , which makes early mobility therapy safe and secure for both patients and caregivers. (Canada)

Mimetics is the company behind the Jade, a fully-developed educational robot designed to engage and excite the next generation of scientists and engineers. (Canada)

Luvozo is developing SAM, a robot-based concierge for senior living communities to supplement staff with non-medical tasks and activities. (USA)

https://youtu.be/7b3dVHYzeR4

Mecademic has built an exceptionally compact and accurate tabletop collaborative robot arm for education and research. (Canada)

https://youtu.be/aKMpMYWniA8

Mobotech is the company behind the Mobot, a light and compact all-electric smart forklift for maneuvering in tight places and preventing workplace injuries. (New Zealand)

https://youtu.be/KSPOKlBv9a4?list=UUCMzA9Kphlgs1jeqH_weRDA

MUSE Robotics enables developers to build custom robots with less time and money using their complete package of plug and play actuators, motor control and sensory modules . (formerly SkyRobotics of Greece; USA)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sXlsH6PaNg

Redtree Hydra lets developers easily connect sensors, actuators, components and other parts to the robot without all the hassle of complicated circuits, specialized hardware or device drivers. (Canada)

Scannable are reinventing LiDAR so that low cost ground and aerial vehicles can avoid obstacles and create precise maps . (USA)

https://youtu.be/y3HL0IcbfPk

The Construct lets developers run simulations in the cloud and share them with colleagues via web interface. (Spain/USA)

Zyro Robot Therapy System is building a personalized robot coach that addresses a variety of educational, social and therapeutic needs. (USA)

PLUS a stealth female-led startup (USA) that we will share with you after the finals!! TBA!!

***

“These are all high quality early stage robotics startups, and that’s about all they have in common!” says competition organizer Andra Keay (Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics). “They address all areas of robotics … This an incredibly positive signal for investors and the robotics industry as a whole.”

The finalists will pitch to an audience of investors and robotics entrepreneurs on September 18 at WilmerHale in Palo Alto, CA. The winners will receive around $100,000 in prizes and services tailored specifically for robotics companies, from sponsors that include CSIRO, Siemens, Amazon, WilmerHale, SMBC, iRobot and Robolution Capital.

Judges include Shahin Farshschi (Lux Capital), Rich Mahoney (SRI International), Peter Kambouris (CSIRO), Glenn Luinenburg (WilmerHale), Hanns Anders (iRobot) and Carolin Funk (Siemens).

Providing global reach to local tech clusters

The Robot Launch global startup competition is co-organized by Silicon Valley Robotics, a regional robotics cluster, and Robohub.org, a global robotics research and community news network. Both are not-for-profit organizations supporting innovation in robotics, and together they form a strong bridge between robotics innovation and entrepreneurship.

“Silicon Valley is ideally positioned to connect robotics startups to investors, and the global robotics research community is producing some exciting new business ideas. But while there is now more money flowing towards early stage startups, robotics and hardware entrepreneurs need to be incredibly focused in how they move from prototype to beta customer and business model,” says Keay.

“Robot Launch connects clusters of robotics innovation at the critical early seed stage, and showcases the best new robotics businesses from around the world.”

Meaningful prizes for robotics startups

Robot Launch prizes are geared toward providing real business acceleration for the winners, such as:

A series of regional awards for best US, Canadian, Australian and European startups are geared toward developing local partnerships between tech clusters and mentors who can provide regional business, legal or investment support. For example, the law firms WilmerHale and LaBarge Weinstein will provide the regional US and Canadian winners (respectively) with free legal startup services; the regional Australian winner will get business mentoring from QUTBluebox ; and Robolution Capital will provide pitch coaching to the best European startup. Awards such as these help get more robotics startups onto the global stage while supporting entrepreneurship locally.

Siemens is offering the winning industrial robotics startups membership into their new Frontier Program, which includes access to Siemens’ PLM software suite and mentorship with industrial manufacturing partner companies. Robotics is a new area in the Frontier Program, which was initially only for 3D printing startups. The first robotics startup in the Frontier Program was Clearpath Robotics (Canada), who is also an award sponsor in the Robot Launch competition. Learn more.

Clearpath Robotics  is sponsoring the Robot Launch ROS Award to the startup best using the Robot Operating System. The availability of the open source Robot Operating System ROS has played an important role in speeding up the growth of startups (including Clearpath Robotics), and more than 1/3rd of the Robot Launch startups use ROS in some way. Clearpath will be providing 10 hours of ROS consulting to the winner.

The Olander Company and KRTKL are also providing custom hardware for robotics startups in the finals of Robot Launch, showcasing how even early-stage robotics companies can help each other get to market faster.

The Robohub Readers Pick award celebrates the crowd favorite through online voting. Now that crowdfunding can play a significant role in the pathway for many startups, success in attracting votes here sends a strong signal of support to CEOs and potential investors.

Key Info

The finals will take place online and in person on September 18, 2015 at WilmerHale in Palo Alto, CA. Videos from the event will be available on Robohub, data and time TBA. See Twitter hashtag  #RobotLaunch2015 for details.

***

About Silicon Valley Robotics

Silicon Valley Robotics (SVR) is the not-for-profit organization supporting innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies in Silicon Valley. SVR organizes investor and startup events, networking and a job board for robotics companies, and strategic reports on the robotics ecosystem.

http://svrobo.org

About Robohub

Robohub is a non-profit online communication network for the international robotics community. With over 70K unique visitors each month, Robohub features news and opinion from experts in all facets of robotics, including research, ethics, law, start-ups, business, arts and education.

http://robohub.org/

Follow Robot Launch on Twitter  

#RobotLaunch2015 https://twitter.com/hashtag/RobotLaunch2015

@svrobo https://twitter.com/svrobo

@Robohub https://twitter.com/robohub

Established in Berlin in 1847, and with a presence in Silicon Valley since the 1950s, Siemens invests more than $1B in the US each year for research and development. Now their Technology to Business team (TTB) has launched the Frontier Partner program, which aims to give startups in robotics and 3D printing a head start by providing them with software and resources to accelerate the development and manufacturing of their products. We spoke with Director of Strategy for Siemens PLM Software, Andy Swiecki, about why Siemens is focusing on robotics right now, and what startups can expect to get out of the Frontiers program.

[AK] Hi Andy, could you introduce yourself and tell us about Siemens Frontier Program? 

[AS] Hi my name is Andy Swiecki, I’m with Siemens PLM Software. I’m part of our strategy division and I work with a lot of our third party software and technology partners. One of the programs I work with is the Frontier Program, which is set up to support startup companies working in technology areas that are of interest to Siemens.

Two of the initial technology areas are additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, and robotics. We rolled out the Frontier Program at the end of 2014. We have a fair number of 3D printing companies that are part of the program – startup companies that are looking at new innovative technologies – and we’ve recently expanded it to include robotics. We are looking forward to getting more companies that are in the startup stage to join the program and work with Siemens technologies as they develop their company and their technologies.

Siemens has been looking at startup innovation for more than 15 years with the TTB program. What is the driving motivation to look at robotics, and what sort of robotics are you looking at?

Siemens is a large global company. I’m with the Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Division; we develop software that supports companies that are developing products and developing manufacturing processes. Siemens Technology to Business, or TTB, is another organization within Siemens, and we’re collaborating together on the Frontier Program.

Siemens Technology To Business focuses on supporting startups and startup technology areas, innovation, and understanding how that innovation relates to Siemens.

Siemens has as long history in manufacturing technologies, in manufacturing automation technologies, and in lots of areas in the field of robotics. We’re looking forward to working with startups, and working with new innovations in robotics, to understand our own technology better, and to understand new technologies that are being developed.

Siemens is sponsoring the 2015 Robot Launch “Industrial Robotics Award”, offering the winners developer licenses for a broad range of Siemens’ product lifecycle management (PLM) software, access to its technology partner program, and other development resources valued at over $150K.

What advantages will startups gain working with Siemens in the Frontier Program?

Startups can really focus on rapid product development that’s enabled by developing on top of the Siemens PLM Software components and platform technologies. The access to the partner ecosystem and the extensive market reach to the installed base of Siemens PLM Software users help them to accelerate the go-to-market.

Through the collaboration with Siemens Technology To Business and Siemens PLM Software, they’ll be able to take advantage of some of the expertise in each of the organizations. Siemens PLM Software has a platform of software technologies that are being made available to the startups through the program, so one of the advantages is access to that technology.

They’ll also be members of the formal Siemens PLM Software Solution Partner Program, so they’ll get the benefit of that program along with the ability to collaborate with other members of that program – people developing technologies at different stages of their company lifecycles.

And they’ll be able to work with Siemens Technology To Business and the startup and innovation programs that Siemens TTB has.

So as well as gaining access to Siemens technology, you’re gaining access to a whole network of business expertise, mentorship and the partnerships that Siemens is developing?

Exactly. Through Siemens TTB there are a great deal of mentorship possibilities, and through the Siemens PLM Solution Program there are hundreds of software and technology partners that are part of the program and available for networking and consultation.

What are some of the companies that have joined Siemens Frontier Program to date?

The initial roll out of the program was in the area of additive manufacturing. Authentise is one example of the kind of company that has joined the program. They are innovating in the area of 3D printing. We’ve had some joint activities with them and have talked about the technologies they’re developing in a fair amount of detail.

Since we began rolling out into the field of robotics, we’ve had a number of interested companies, and one that we’ve already begun working with is Clearpath Robotics. They are looking at the Siemens PLM platform as one of the ways to expand their products.

How do robotics startups go about accessing the Siemens Frontier Program?

There’s an application on the Siemens Technology To Business website. If you go to www.ttb.siemens.com/frontier you can it, as well as a description of the program. You can also find a link to the Frontier Program on the Siemens PLM Partner area.

If you apply you’ll be contacted by people within Siemens so that we can better understand what you’re doing, and your application will be reviewed by a technology team. From there, if your interests align with Siemens’ interests, then we can start working together.

It’s great that Siemens is offering a prize in the Robot Launch competition. What do you think about the startups that have entered?

Of course! We’re looking forward to participating in the competition, and to offering a prize, which is a membership in the Frontier Program. Siemens TTB will be directly involved in looking at all the startups and we’re looking forward to being part of it!

Is there anything you’d like to say in conclusion?

We are excited to work in these new areas, and we are excited to work with the robotics community. We’re looking forward to seeing what new technologies innovative startups have and to sharing the technologies that Siemens PLM Software has.

https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/about_us/newsroom/press/press_release.cfm?Component=238716&ComponentTemplate=822

Transcript included.

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Sergei Lupashin about Perspective Robotics’ tethered flying camera, the Fotokite Phi, which is currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo. The Phi is a portable light weight GoPro-carrying quadrocopter that flies without a vision system or GPS, and instead uses the tension on the retractable tether to determine where it is in space. According to Lupashin, the tethered leash provides a natural, easy-to-learn and accountable interface for controlling the Phi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aglTWdI-4Bo

Sergei Lupashin

Sergei Lupashin is the founder of Perspective Robotics, the Swiss company behind the Fotokite. Previous to that he worked in aerospace and participated in robotics competitions such as the DARPA Grand+Urban Challenges (autonomous cars). He was chief architect for the ETH Flying Machine Arena, where he enjoyed torturing little quadrocopters until they learned to do flips. He holds a BS in Elec & Comp Engineering from Cornell, an MSc + PhD in Mechanical Engineering from ETH Zurich (topic: aerial robotics) and is a TED Fellow. Sergei is passionate about building devices that are usable and useful in the real world.

Links:

• Download mp3 (14.3 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Link to Fotokite Phi Indiegogo campaign

Transcript

Audrow Nash: Hi welcome to the Robots Podcast. Can you introduce yourself to our listeners?

Sergei Lupashin: I’m the founder of Perspective Robotics, a company based in Zurich, Switzerland that is behind the Fotokite, the Fotokite Pro and the Fotokite Phi.

Audrow Nash: Fotokite Phi is currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo. Can you tell me a bit about the campaign and its goal?

Sergei Lupashin: This is our first attempt at building a product for consumers. We started off by building the Fotokite Pro, which is a specialized, more expensive product designed to be used for broadcast. With the Fotokite Phi we have tried to make something much more accessible both in terms of price and usability. It’s extremely portable and it can be used in lots of different situations.

We are trying to raise a minimum of US $300,000 … It’s a hardware product, so you have to build critical mass to make it accessible for a wider audience. It’s a very exciting step for us.

Audrow Nash: Can you describe the Phi?

Sergei Lupashin: I’m holding one in my hands right now … It’s a small quadrocopter that holds a GoPro, and it weighs only 12 ounces – about the weight of a small can of soda.

What’s unique about it is that you control it via tether. You hold onto what is essentially a glorified dog leash with some electronics, and you launch the Phi just by turning it on, giving the quadrocopter a twist, and letting it fly.

Audrow Nash: This doesn’t have the same sensors as most drones. Of course it has an IMU, but you’ve removed GPS, correct?

It’s a different experience from traditional drones because the interface is so physical: you feel pretty much the smallest motions of the Fotokite in the air through the string.

Sergei Lupashin: Exactly. One of the things we use the tether for is to figure out where the Phi is relative to the user. A normal drone does that by having a GPS receiver or having some sort of machine vision to figure out where it is. In our case, we use a tether that is kept under tension at all times. By calculating where that tension force points, the Fotokite actually knows where it is relative to you.

This changes the dynamics of the system because it’s completely self-contained and the whole experience exists around the user. If you are walking down the street, hiking in the mountains or walking down a trail with this thing attached to you, it will naturally follow with you without any special algorithms.

Audrow Nash: Can you tell me a bit about the leash, how it works, how it keeps constant tension?

Sergei Lupashin: When it’s hovering it doesn’t fly straight up; it flies at a small angle and it stays not above you but to the side. The leash is spring-loaded, so the Fotokite produces a bit of extra force to keep the tether under tension.

You can just point the Fotokite in the direction you want to launch it, but once it’s flying, how do you tell it to turn? How do you tell it to move around? We wanted to get away from the concept of having to use a joystick or your smart phone to do that. Inside the leash are electronics that connect to the Fotokite while it’s flying; to control it you hold down the button on the side of the leash and you rotate your wrist. That motion of your wrist – that motion of the leash – is translated into a command for the Fotokite.

Audrow Nash: What kind of commands can you give? Can you have it rotate to look around?

Sergei Lupashin: Yes. Right now there are just two modes of interface. One mode is in-phase rotation. For example, if I want to take a panorama, I would launch the Fotokite straight up and then I would hold down the first button and rotate my wrist. The Fotokite would then rotate in place and capture the full 360 panorama. The other mode lets you control the position of the Fotokite relative to you.

Audrow Nash: The angle?

Sergei Lupashin: Exactly. We usually speak in terms of ‘elevation’ and ‘orbit’. For example, if you look at the stars in the sky, a star has a certain elevation above the horizon. To control the elevation in our case, holding down a button while you move your wrist up and down will move the Fotokite either from a horizontal position to a vertical one (relative to you), or vice versa. It basically controls the vertical angle where it flies.

Moving your wrist in the horizontal plane will cause the Fotokite to orbit, meaning that it will slowly reorient itself around you. If you keep doing this motion, the Fotokite will complete a circle around you at a given elevation.

You can get really neat matrix-style shots of yourself. Or you can use it to do sophisticated shots, using the Fotokite like a flying steady-cam.

Audrow Nash: How long does it take to train someone to use the Fotokite?

The beauty of the system is that there is nothing active in this tether, so you can attach any string to the Fotokite and it will still work just fine.

Sergei Lupashin: It’s a different experience from traditional drones because the interface is so physical: you feel pretty much the smallest motions of the Fotokite in the air through the string.

We did a number of demos for both expert drone users and people who haven’t touched one before. Getting it to fly is surprisingly straightforward: you show someone how to do it, they’ll repeat the motions, and it will work immediately.

To get really unique shots and smooth video requires a bit of skill. The nice thing is, with the tether, you can use your own physical movements to control it and to keep it from crashing into things. It’s a lower stress experience than what you see with traditional drones.

Audrow Nash: Speaking of crashing into things, what happens if it bumps into an object? Or if someone runs into the tether, the tether becomes taught in a different direction, and that tension is released suddenly?

Sergei Lupashin: In terms of bumping into things, we have protective coverings that extend past the motors, so most of the time an object would bump into the protective coverings first. That helps to prevent crashes, and it also helps to give the user confidence in being around the Phi.

In terms of the tether getting caught in things, the beauty of the system is that there is nothing active in this tether, so you can attach any string to the Fotokite and it will still work just fine.

For example, if you’re filming the rooftop of your house and you’re trying to get over to the other side of it, you can actually fly the Fotokite over the rooftop and then get it such that the tether touches the edge so you can sling-shot it over. It will simply use that new fixed point as the new reference point, and this happens naturally.

Explained in words it sounds weird, but just imagine flying a kite where the lift is generated by the kite itself: if you grab the kite string, and someone pulls it away, it will still fly at the same angle – but relative to that new point.

Audrow Nash: Does this mean that you don’t really need the smart leash? Is it just for controlling the Fotokite, so that it rotates and you can change the vertical angle?

Sergei Lupashin: The smart leash is there to make the system complete. Most folks just want to use the system to capture a picture or video. We didn’t want to make them have to go find a string.

The leash is a convenience: it’s nicely built, it has a spring, and it has electronics that allow control.

The Phi’s arms fold up with the propellers on the inside so that you can put it into its tube-shaped carrying case. It’s about the size of a thermos, and you fit it into your backpack.

I should also mention that the Fotokite Phi folds, because in real life, transportation is a major issue. The Phi is pretty unique in that it has a lock mechanism that makes a satisfying click when it locks. And when you unlock it, the arms fold up with the propellers on the inside so that you can put it into its tube-shaped carrying case. It’s about the size of a thermos, and you fit it into your backpack.

Audrow Nash: And everything fits in there?

Sergei Lupashin: Yes, the leash and everything.

Audrow Nash: The tether is very nice from the perspective of controlling the drone. What are some other advantages of using tethers?

Sergei Lupashin: The tether wasn’t actually the original idea.

I was finishing my PhD and looking at different schemes for aerial systems. This was in Raff D’Andrea’s lab – he has been on your podcast as well. We were exploring some different approaches using gestures – with Kinnect for example. But all of these systems were based on machine vision, which is incredibly sensitive to the conditions you are operating in. Sunrise, lens flare, darkness, water – all of these things confuse the system.

The tether completely changed the dynamics of the conversation between the operator, the vehicle and the public. It makes this device much more acceptable in public.

So the question was: how do we get localization and interaction in the most robust way possible? That’s where the idea of the tether came from: it was originally a technical solution to let a flying vehicle figure out precisely where it is relative to you, without relying on sensitive systems like GPS or machine vision etc.

Then, when we made the first demo, it turned out to be a really elegant way to interact with the system. The tether completely changed the dynamics of the conversation between the operator, the vehicle and the public. I think this was actually one of the most exciting moments of this process, because as a technologist you don’t foresee it; you see the tether as a technical solution and nothing else. But then it turns out to also have all of these facets that are not technical, but rather about the experience, and how people see the product.

In the end, the tether changes the Fotokite from being another drone into something that is more of a companion flying device. It’s a very personal device … it’s more like a kite, and people treat it that way.

One parallel is to imagine being at the park and having your dog on a leash versus not on a leash: for some people it’s fine, but other people just get freaked out by dogs that are not leashed. I think we see some of that with drones from a privacy perspective. What we found is that having a tether changes the conversation and makes this device much more acceptable in public.

Audrow Nash: There’s accountability because you can see where the operator is?

Anyone – no technical background required – intuitively understands the chain of responsibility with this device.

Sergei Lupashin: Exactly. Anyone – no technical background required – intuitively understands the chain of responsibility with this device.

Audrow Nash: Can you tell me a bit about how this and similar technology has been used in journalism, for example the Fotokite Pro?

Sergei Lupashin: The original inspiration for the Fotokite came from aerial footage of the Bolotnaya Square demonstrations in Russia in 2011. It was after the federal elections, and it was a big demonstration right in the center of Moscow. The footage was captured pretty much by pure chance from a drone – quite a big drone with an SLR camera. There was this one image, a panorama really … it’s amazing how well it transmitted the scale and atmosphere of the event.

The people who took that footage were very lucky that they happened to have the right equipment; they were professionals so they could do it safely, and they happened to have the right permissions. But we’ve seen many other examples where people haven’t been able to get these perspectives and cover events like this as well as they could have been covered. For example, in Ferguson, Missouri where there was a no fly zone was imposed, which many believe was done to keep the media out.

We also found out that having a physical connection usually changes the regulatory aspect. For example, in Switzerland and France, after some conversation with the regulators we were able to get special rules for tethered devices that are much more permissive than traditional drones. From a regulatory perspective, the usual thought process is focused on safety, whereas privacy is more universal and not usually what they are basing rules on. From a safety perspective, in Zurich for example, it was prohibited for a while to fly drones commercially. The Fotokite was allowed based on the tether and specifically based on the idea that the tether restricts the height of the device.

Many regulators think of how much energy would be dissipated if the device falls in an uncontrollable fall, and there is a magic number of 66 joules … if you fall and it dissipates 66 joules then you are magically unsafe.

Audrow Nash: How much is 66 joules?

Sergei Lupashin: This is potential energy, so it’s Mass X Gravity X Height. Imagine a 6 kg bowling ball falling from about a meter …

It’s a safety margin. With the Fotokite’s tether you can restrict the length of the tether and thus the height, so you can guarantee that under no conditions are you going to exceed that safety limit.

Audrow Nash: So you can only extend to the length of the tether unless you can’t get high enough to possibly generate 66 joules on complete impact?

Sergei Lupashin: Yes, that’s right.

There are other aspects they look at, too, like system robustness. For example, how many subsystems or how many components do you have in your critical loop? How many subsystems are there such that if one of them fails you have an uncontrolled system or a catastrophic failure? In a traditional drone, GPS is usually in that critical loop, as is your radio system, and if you lose your GPS or radio you will crash into something. With the Fotokite, there is no GPS and if the radio cuts out, it will just fly in the same position.

Audrow Nash: How does it look for other countries with these exemptions? For example, do you believe the US will permit tethered drones to fly? Do you think they will give exemptions similar to Switzerland and France?

Sergei Lupashin: It’s very hard to predict which way the US regulations are going to go right now. If you look at the history of it, just over the past few months regulations were proposed that were extremely lenient and permissive. Most recently there has been a massive push over certain events … you’ve probably heard of the person shooting drones down over their property. So it’s really hard to predict.

It’s a challenge since all of this technology is new and people don’t quite know how to differentiate it. For example, what is a tethered drone? If you attach a fishing line to a DJI, is it now tethered? I kid you not that there are commercial products out there for sale that offer exactly this, and they promise to get you around regulations.

We are trying to be proactive and come up with commonsense and observable definitions of what it means to be tethered.

We are trying to be proactive and come up with commonsense and observable definitions of what it means to be tethered. For example, I really believe that the tether has to be loadbearing, meaning that under typical flight it should actually be under tension, and it should be rated for some sort of tension that responds to the vehicle.

Audrow Nash: For a hobbyist or someone that just wants to use the Fotokite Phi to take pictures of themselves, do these regulations mean anything outside of countries that have exemptions for tethered drones? Or is it only for commercial use and journalism that the regulations apply?

Sergei Lupashin: Regulations generally apply to commercial use, but there are exceptions specifically generally cities, populated centers, and in the US national parks. If you go for a hike to the Yosemite or Yellowstone National Park in the US, for example, you can’t use a drone right now. These are the kind of the frontlines where we’re going to see how consumer drones get regulated in the future.

Audrow Nash: Going back to the Phi, how does the tether affect battery life?

Sergei Lupashin: In the Pro we use the tether to supply power, so we can fly forever. In the Phi we couldn’t do that because of cost and complexity, so we use a standard one-port battery. The trick there is that, since you’re producing extra tension to keep the tether taut, you are wasting a tiny bit of battery life, but on the other hand, if you imagine how a kite actually uses the wind, you could be using a less than normal power to stay afloat.

The current prototypes fly for around 7-10 minutes. For the production units, we are aiming for 15 minutes of typical flight time. The battery is swappable in the field, so you always have the option of replacing it.

Audrow Nash: How did you decide to move from a journalism drone – the Fotokite Pro – to a consumer drone with Fotokite Phi?

Sergei Lupashin: With the Fotokite Pro we realized after talking to existing drone users that the tether has a unique advantage especially in the niche of live reporting. In journalism you typically want to operate next to people and next to something that’s happening, and you don’t want to add tension to that situation. It’s a very unique niche where the tether makes a huge difference. The powered tether is important because journalists can keep the device afloat and not worry about battery life.

But we always wanted to build something a wider reach, and a few months ago we finally decided it’s now or never, because everything is developing very quickly. The Phi is is a big experiment for us to see how well we can use the tether to build a new user experience.

A lot of people see the Phi for the first time and they think it’s just a quadrocopter on a string, but the deeper story is to look at the engineering behind it, using the tether as a different interface approach.

A lot of people see the Phi for the first time and they think it’s just a quadrocopter on a string, but the deeper story is to look at the engineering behind it, using the tether as a different interface approach.

Audrow Nash: Is this a way of addressing the interaction bottleneck with robotics technology?

Sergei Lupashin: That’s right. Have you tried reprogramming your alarm clock lately? [laughs]

In robotics labs we tend to come up with ridiculously complex systems. I’m sure they can do a lot in principle, but they are very difficult to interact with. I think this somehow echoes with many robotics products that have already come out. An example of that is in Japan when the Fukushima incident happened. Arguably Japan has some of the most advanced robotics, especially for search and rescue, anywhere in the world. But they really struggled to make a difference in that situation. And I think a lot of problems are because of interaction, because of training, and because of the complexity of the systems.

The inspiration for the Phi is really to try to cut across that and come up with a smooth and low-friction user experience, where even someone who has never touched robotics could be shown how to use this device and they could naturally take it, use it themselves, and feel confident and empowered by it.

Audrow Nash: Thank you.

Sergei Lupashin: Thank you.

All audio interviews are transcribed and edited for clarity with great care, however, we cannot assume responsibility for their accuracy.

The campaign has also unlocked 12 stretch goals including:

• Kids programming environment
• Special Kids pack (i.e Autism)
• Side tray accessory with USB charging
• Expressions pack
• Elder pack
• Hackathon
• Black color
• Memory extension to 32 GB
• Air quality sensing module
• Easypath application to create your own smart applications
• IBM Watson integration

And Blue Frog Robotics has also announced some accessories including:

• Standard motorized arms
• Pico Projector Arm
• Docking station for charging

Developed by the French company Blue Frog Robotics, BUDDY beat his crowdfunding goal ($100,000) in a day, and has been filmed and written about across the world.

BUDDY has a new (second) home

BUDDY enjoyed an enthusiastic welcome on his first visit to the US in August to meet press, investors and fans. He’ll be a regular visitor as Blue Frog Robotics announced the opening of its North American offices in Boston and San Francisco .

Videos

“Buddy is a really, really, ridiculously cute family robot” – Lucas Matney, TechCrunch

“Buddy the robot protector looks like R2-D2’s first cousin” – Stephen Beacham, CNET TV

“With Jibo and now Buddy, Boston is becoming a social-robot mecca”  – David Harris, Boston Business Journal

“Meet Buddy: the Stars Wars-Inspired Robot”< – CRN

“Robot pet-sitters?”  – Scott Kirsner, The Boston Globe

“Buddy robot snubs creator” – Dan Simmons, BBC news

“Buddy the robot is ‘more useful than an iPhone’”
– Anthony Cuthbertson, International Business Times

Articles

“BUDDY, A Crowdfunded Robot And Platform” – Hubert Nguyen – Ubergizmo

“Buddy whisks around on wheels and casters while JIBO, another social robot option, swivels harmlessly on your desk or floor” – Dominic Basulto, The Washington Post

“Buddy marks an advance in the progression of agents from Siri to Amazon Echo, as it moves and interacts proactively” – Ross Rubin, Venture Beat

“Downloading apps on your own personal robot may become as common as downloading apps on your smartphone”  – Cadie Thompson, Business Insider

“Rolling Buddy robot may just kill you with cuteness”  – Lance Ulanoff, Mashable

Rodolphe Hasselvander, creator of BUDDY, says: “We are incredibly overwhelmed and thankful for the love and support BUDDY has received over the past month. The reaction from people is beyond even my wildest of expectations.”

Launched in 2009 by a group of Waterloo engineering students, Clearpath‘s unmistakeable bright yellow and black robots have become synonymous with unmanned vehicle research in university research labs around the world. Now, as the field of robotics matures, Clearpath is forging into industrial applications, too. We caught up with CTO Ryan Gariepy at the 2015 Field and Service Robotics conference (FSR), to talk about their roots in research, the role of ROS and open source in their business model, and the challenges and opportunities of launching a robotics startup in Canada.

[HS] You got your start in the business of robotics while you were still a student at Waterloo. What made you decide to launch a robotics company at that time? Did you have a specific project or technology you were developing that made you think, “Hey, this could actually be useful out there!” …? Or was it that you saw the potential in the field more generally?

[RG] We started Clearpath right out of university in 2009 as we finished our undergraduate degrees – I did my Masters at the same time as we were getting off the ground, which is generally regarded to be a bad idea in terms of stress levels. It’s hard to believe that we just celebrated our sixth anniversary this year.

Starting the company was less about the technology and more about the potential … we just looked at everything around us and said, “Why do we have to shovel snow? This can be automated. Why do we have to do any work that does not require human creativity?” There are a lot of dangerous jobs out there that most people don’t realize are performed on a daily basis by tens of thousands of people in order to keep society going, like mining, farming, construction, stocking warehouses. And yet we need fuel and food and buildings, and we want our same-day deliveries from the Internet. There is a demand for this kind of work to take place.

Around the time we were starting out, Google Maps was getting off the ground. The concept of having information available at your fingertips was also becoming compelling and valuable to people, and the best way to get information about the world on a constant basis is to involve robotics or automation in some form. At the same time, sensors and the cost of sensing were improving due to the rapid uptake in smart phones; we were seeing advances in laptops, smartphones, and electric and hybrid vehicles driving down costs and improving battery density.

People now accept that robotics, automation, and intelligent systems can actually solve some of their problems.

All of this was coming together and we felt that autonomous robotics was possible at a relatively high reliability and low cost, especially when compared with what had been done before.

What would you say have been the biggest changes that you’ve seen in the field of robotics since then?

I think one of the biggest changes is simply that people now accept that robotics, automation, and intelligent systems can actually solve some of their problems.

This recognition means that there are a lot of opportunities out there, both in terms of hardware and software. In some industries – ones that have been around for a long time – they already know how to build solid hardware that could be made robotic, but they need the right parts and the right software to automate it. Then there are other industries that need full solutions. There are a lot of pieces starting to come together now.

Your early customer base was made up of mainly universities and research labs. Do you find yourself getting pulled into a different direction now that you’re expanding more into industry?

The research market is definitely maturing and our product development cycle within that side of the business is very well understood. We’ve released two completely different platforms in the last eight months alone.

Now we are in a position where we can leverage the experience we gained from the R&D market to address challenges in industry. We are actively pushing the development of full robotic solutions (including software), and will soon be releasing a new platform along these lines.

How do you manage the problem of building in more than one direction at the same time?

One of our biggest challenges is that there is no one single clear challenge, especially at the scale we’re at right now. At this stage there are many things that need to be focused on: sales, operations, quality assurance, new features, understanding where the market’s going, product management, marketing … so the challenge is more about managing the priorities of any given department.

How do I provide guidance to the team so that they can spend their time on the right tasks? How do we remain dynamic as a startup? How do we remain flexible enough to change direction quickly if we need to, but still be stable enough to stick to our core values? These are the kinds of questions we are dealing with.

Speaking of core values, Clearpath took a chance from the beginning by focusing on open source and ROS. Does open source make for a good business model?

Why open source? No matter how large a company we become, there will always be more smart people who can build and program robots outside our company than within it.

One of the reasons we looked at open source was the philosophy that no matter how large a company we become, there will always be more smart people who can build and program robots outside our company than within it. So it’s only logical that we work with whatever the community ends up creating around open source robotics, both to reinforce the community, and to hire from it.

That said, from a business model perspective it is more complicated. There are many companies that succeed with open source, but there is still no clear-cut model for building an open source company – and that tends to make people nervous. And yet by now we’ve seen several companies build on open source, including Google and Facebook, and it’s the same thing as building a startup on a LAMP stack: yes, you use open source and you may push back some code to open source, but you still have value you’re bringing on your own.

Earlier on we sold only hardware, which is easier to protect. Now that we’re getting into software sales, open source creates additional considerations for us, but it still hasn’t been an issue. Building on open source makes us more effective, and it certainly helps us engage much more with the robotics community.

Now that you’ve done all the legwork of developing the product and proving the market, do you have any concerns that another company with more resources could just come along and say, “We know who their buyers are, and we know what their markets are, and we can imitate their products …”?

Clearpath is sponsoring the 2015 Robot Launch “Open Source Robotics” Award, offering 10 hours of ROS consulting services to the winner.

ROS is open source and we contribute a lot back to it. We test a lot, we support people, we contribute drivers, and we contribute utilities back. However, the work that we do on autonomy and in controls –planning, mapping localization, interfacing, vehicle management – is not open source. We may open source parts of it in the future as we advance our state of the art, but the ‘secret sauce’ is still closed, even though it’s built on ROS middleware.

Could it make life easier for our competitors in some cases? Yes, but by the same token nobody makes money on having a better robot-logging framework, for example, and everybody saves money by having a good free robot-logging framework. If a better logging framework is your only competitive advantage, it’s not really an advantage, is it? Personally, I’d rather not spend money on a logging framework, and spend more to compete on the actual value that we bring to our clients.

You mentioned snow shoveling as one of your inspirations, which is a stereotypically Canadian problem. Did the Canadian climate and landscape figure into your business plan from the beginning? Is that why you wound up in field and service robotics, as opposed to some other application area?

Of course our robots can survive the winter – we’re Canadian!

One of our competitive advantages is the terrible weather we have in Canada. We have harsh winters, we have a lot of forestry, a lot of primary resources to mine and harvest, and we have a lot of space that is sparsely populated, which makes it easier to do testing. We also happen to have a very well developed technology ecosystem here. When you put those things together, it’s natural to lean towards field robotics.

When we started there were very few platforms out there that could actually do field robotics, and so we set that as our first niche.

How is the Canadian business landscape for robotics?

Many of our first customers were Canadian universities, some of which are leading the way in robotics integration and research. Meanwhile, Industry Canada is looking at how robotics technology can be adapted to existing manufacturing clusters in Southwestern Ontario, like the auto sector, which took a hit when the North American auto industry had a downturn. Canada also has strengths such as communications and optics, which naturally extend into robotics. It also helps when we can do business with Canadian suppliers; we get our GPS’ from NovAtel, which is based in Calgary, for example.

That said, as a Canadian company you’re forced to go multinational almost instantly because there isn’t enough of a robotics market in Canada to stay Canadian for long. We recently announced that we’ll be expanding office space into Silicon Valley and a primary reason for that is because of the opportunity that is available in the US market. Regardless, the Waterloo Region will continue to be Clearpath’s ‘home base’ for the foreseeable future.

People now refer to Waterloo as ‘Silicon Valley North’. What’s changed in the incubation space where Clearpath grew up since you launched?

It used to be that investors would demand that you move to the area where their office was, which was typically Boston or New York City or Silicon Valley, but that’s not always the case anymore.

It used to be that investors and venture capitalists would demand that you move to the area where their office was, which was typically Boston or New York City or Silicon Valley, but that’s not always the case anymore. Investors are starting to recognize that there are also benefits to being in other locations, especially for startups. Waterloo has a very dynamic tech community. It’s also a quarter of the price to buy a house here than in some of those larger US cities, and the time it takes me to get to work is 10 minutes, which makes it pretty livable and affordable compared to Silicon Valley. We found that VCs are now willing to accept that good ideas and businesses can grow and thrive in other areas as long as these areas have the right attitude – and Waterloo certainly has that.

Take the displacement of BlackBerry employees for instance – quite a few very smart people who were working at Blackberry have moved on to bring their skills and experience to other industries. We’ve hired a number of them, and a number of them have gone off to launch their own startups.

On top that is the continual increase in the brand of the Waterloo Region, and specifically the University of Waterloo (UW), as the place to go for getting a great education and practical experience that can lead to entrepreneurship. YCombinator’s Paul Graham has noted that UW has a fantastic record for turning out very strong companies, specifically hardware companies.

The other change worth mentioning is that Clearpath isn’t alone. The first group of startups that came out of UW includes Pebble, Vidyard, and more recently Thalmic Labs. These are all people who have graduated from UW’s engineering program within a few years of each other.

Does that help, too? Having a cluster that’s grown up together?

It certainly does.

Take recruiting, for example. When you’re hiring someone it helps prospective employees to know that there are other options. Clearpath has hired quite a few people from outside the region and if you’re taking a risk and moving a few thousand kilometers to join us, it’s good to know that there are other companies around, whether it’s for future growth opportunities, shared interests, or participating in knowledge transfer. For prospective employees, knowing that you can get back on your feet if you need to, or that your partner can find a job in the region, is very useful.

There is also something to be said for being part of a startup community. We all know each other, and we try to mentor each other. Even if you’re not working in exactly the same market, you can look at other startups and see them succeeding – and this is evidence that you can do it too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51yGC3iytbY

Built on open source

The brainchild of Rodolphe Hasselvander (CEO and Co-founder of Blue Frog Robotics, and former Executive Director of the CRIIF (Robotics Lab)), BUDDY is built on an open-source technology platform so that developers can easily collaborate to build hardware and software for it.

BUDDY was purposely built on an open-source technology platform using popular development tools, such as OpenCV and Unity3D, to allow as many developers as possible to build applications for it. BUDDY’s industry standard platform includes the most popular programming languages and the Android mobile operating system.

Specs

BUDDY is 22-inches/56cm tall, 5 kg in weight and with a battery life of 8-10 hours.

He features an Android-based, Intel Atom-based tablet (also the hub for BUDDY’s brains) that sits in a rotatable head and can slide back and forth on his body.

Fully mobile, BUDDY rolls around on three wheels (two large ones in the front and a caster-style wheel in the back) and has a plethora of sensors allowing him to travel, learn and interact with the world around him. He is also equipped with state of the art Artificial Intelligence technology, including face and object detection, recognition and tracking.

The campaign

We have chosen crowdfunding as the route to market for BUDDY as we want to give early adopters the chance to test BUDDY before it hits the mass market. We also want to cultivate a thriving community of developers. We’re keen on working with talented and innovative developers, as they will help us design and augment BUDDY before bringing it to mass market.

• Super Early Bird backers can purchase their own Classic BUDDY from as little as $499*, and Developer Edition BUDDY for $599*. (SOLD OUT)
• Early Bird backers can purchase their own Classic BUDDY from as little as $549*, and Developer Edition BUDDY for $649*.
• After Early Bird, prices will be set at $649* and $749* for Classic BUDDY and Developer Edition BUDDY, respectively.
• BUDDY “Special Needs” Early Bird Pack for $799 uses specialized software and content to help children with autism learn, communicate, and be more autonomous.
• For $849*, backers can purchase the BUDDY Premium Pack, which includes a projector arm and docking station. The accessories are now for sale separately.
• Buy 2 Classic BUDDY’s for $999*.
• VIP option. For $4,999*, design your BUDDY with us to create a totally unique BUDDY, signed and engraved by the whole team. As a VIP, you’ll also receive a dinner in your honour with the CEO & BUDDY team, travel and accommodation to Paris, a BUDDY premium pack and a private demo.
• Academics BUDDY Developer Pack priced at $6,490 includes 12 robots for the price of 10.

*Plus shipping costs of $50 for one BUDDY and $100 for two BUDDYs

Blue Frog Robotics has also just launched a referral program to bring BUDDY to more homes and families. Indiegogo backers can earn $65 credit towards BUDDY’s campaign every time one of their referrals purchases a BUDDY from $549.

The team behind BUDDY

Rodolphe Hasselvander, Co-Founder & CEO – A pioneer in professional and personal service robotics, Rodolphe spent ten years of his career as Executive Director at CRIIF, a robotics research laboratory.

Franck de Visme, Co-Founder & COO – An entrepreneur by nature, Franck co-founded Hanakai, and is the former CEO of both Tetraedge and Earthlings. He is also a skilled mentor for innovative startups (NUMA).

Jean-Michel Mourier, CTO – Jean-Michel is a passionate robotics engineer with expertise in autonomous navigation, vision, electronic architecture and intelligence. Previously, he worked on several high profile robotics projects in both industry and the lab.

Maud Verraes, CMO – Maud is a marketing leader with extensive experience in developing innovative and high-tech products and solutions, including personal robots. Formerly, she worked with NEC.

Alan Turing animatronic robot. Source: Skolkovo

Tho startups from the robotics cluster at Skolkovo — Nanosemantics and Lexy — teamed up with the Russian Neurobotics, to recreate a robotic version of the British computer science pioneer Alan Turing. The robot, which recognizes natural speech and has nine degrees of freedom for its facial animatronics, made its debut at the 2015 Startup Village event Skolkovo’s Hypercube last month. Check out the video of Alan interacting with the public. 

https://youtu.be/1wCLLoDO-7M

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to several robotics companies at the company showcase at RoboBusiness 2014, which took place in Boston, Massachusetts.

The following is an ordered list of the people interviewed.

1. Norm Domholt (1m 40s), CEO of NPC Robotics,  talks about their modular remote operate vehicle Black Dog.
2. Annemarie Laudanski (6m 20s), Lead Field Applications Engineer at Xsens, demos their inertial motion capture system.
3. Carl Vause (9m 14s), CEO of Soft Robotics, speaks about the capability of the soft robotic manipulators, which can be used to pick fruit, among other applications.
4. Konrad Fagertun (13m 56s), COO of NLinks, tells about their new robot which drills holes in ceilings – a laborious and difficult task for humans.
5. Asim Ikram (15m 51s), CEO of Neo Robotics, discusses the market for robots in the Gulf Cooperation Council region.
6. Harri Valpola (21m 40s), Head of Technology at Zen Robotics, talks about the companies waste sorting robotic system.
7. Dick Zhang (26m 15s), CEO of Identified Technology, speaks about their self-piloting aerial drone systems for automated energy, mining, and construction site monitoring, surveying, and mapping.

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Transcript

Norm Domholt (1m 40s), CEO of NPC Robotics:

Audrow Nash: Hi, can you introduce yourself and your company?

Norm Domholt: Yes, thank you. My name is Norm Domholt and I’m president of NPC Robotics. Today, at the show, we’re featuring and debuting our latest invention. We’ve been working on it for three years and it’s called the Black Dog.

Audrow Nash: Now, you have the Black Dog here. Can you describe it?

Norm Domholt: Black Dog is a remote control mobile platform. It’s designed modularly, so that it can be repaired in the field without probing with any sort of instruments and with the use of one particular tool – a quarter inch hex wrench. All the parts can be taken apart and replaced in minutes.

Audrow Nash: Can you tell me a bit more about how it’s modular?

Norm Domholt: We realized, through our experience with Battle Box, that the teams that seemed to win were the teams that designed their robots to be repaired quickly and without the need to take apart wiring.

It’s something that can be plugged in and replaced quickly. So, we decided that there should be around eight components in here that can be replaced with the use of this one tool and they should all be modular. There are no internal wires that you have to worry about, so everything unplugs and plugs together very quickly.

Audrow Nash:  So it’s a trunk-treaded robot that has two motors driving everything and it’s three feet long, a foot tall and two feet wide?

Norm Domholt: Yes, 42 inches long, 22 inches wide and 12 inches tall. It weighs 200 pounds and it goes four miles an hour. It’s got a lot of torque. Each motor is two-and-a-half horsepower – that’s a 24volt lithium battery.

Audrow Nash: Can you give me some examples of how it could be fitted with different components in the field?

Norm Domholt: Yes. Let’s say a SWAT team buys our robot power base; there are many different applications and mission-specific needs that they could have throughout a day. For example, they go to a house with something suspicious going on inside. They can put a telescoping camera, called RibbonLift, on the robot, within – say – ten seconds. They can then maneuver it to the building from a safe distance. If they hear shots fired and see there’s no need for the camera, they can pull the robot back within seconds, take their camera off and put a 300 pound bullet-proof shield on instead. Then, a SWAT person could operate this with a thumb throttle, while crouching behind the shield, and approach the house from a safe position. He can direct it to come back and hurl a teargas canister through the window. It could be adapted to any particular use very quickly.

Audrow Nash: Very good, and can you tell me at what stage of production your company is?

Norm Domholt: We’re debuting this today. We were hoping it would be a little further along and we could operate it. Some of the electronics are not completed yet; the mechanics are almost done and the modularity is complete. The technology that’s going in is already in place and, in another two months, we’ll be testing at facilities – breaking down doors, going through hallways, up and down stairs. We’ll be testing to see how far – wirelessly – this thing can go into a building.

Audrow Nash: Who would be interested in this product?

Norm Domholt: The same people who would be interested in a multi-purpose tool. Police can use it, the home-owner… Who would use a power-base? SWAT, the oil industry, hazardous waste…

Audrow Nash: So, lots of applications?

Norm Domholt: A lot of applications, yes.

Audrow Nash: Thank you.

Norm Domholt: You’re welcome, thank you.

Annemarie Laudanski (6m 20s), Lead Field Applications Engineer at Xsens:

Audrow Nash: Hi, can you introduce yourself and tell me about your company?

Annemarie Laudanski: Hi, my name is Annemarie Laudanski and I work for Xsens, we do animation promotion capture.

Audrow Nash: Can you tell me about what you have set up at this booth and describe it?

Annemarie Laudanski: Today we’re trying out our inertial motion capture system. It’s a full body- measure-capture system built of 17 inertial sensors. In each of these, there are 3-D accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers. They’re used to measure the movement of arms and legs and send information wirelessly to the computer, where it’s translated into a bio-chemical model. So, we can measure exactly what someone is doing and portray that on our software.

Audrow Nash: At the booth you have a dancer?

Annemarie Laudanski: We do, yes. We hired Ashley. She’s the cheerleader for the Boston Celtics and she’s with us during the conference to showcase the use of our system.

Audrow Nash: You mentioned you were using exonorometers, gyroscopes and Megnatometers. So, it doesn’t require any external visual system to track them? You’re just taking the raw data from all of these sensors, running that through, and then feeding it to a model, to develop a person?

Annemarie Laudanski: That’s right. The exonorometers measure how fast each limb segment is moving, the gyroscopes measure the rate of turn of the limb and then we use the megnatometers to correct the drift in the other sensors. A fusion of these three sets of sensor data is sent wirelessly to the computer where it’s combined with our calibration procedure to build a human model. The calibration takes an average reading from the sensors, while the subject is standing still for five-seconds. This is a known position for taking sensor data, that then informs each of the trackers, so that the model is built correctly.

Audrow Nash: I see. As the dancer moves, it’s happening in real time.

Annemarie Laudanski: Yes, all of it is done in real time so all of the sensors are sending data at 30 bites per second to the computer and everything is shown with a latency of, at most, ten milliseconds, which is mostly due to the Microsoft operating system we are working with.

Audrow Nash: What are some applications?

Annemarie Laudanski: The applications are really wide for this type of technology. They go from entertainment purposes, where people are using it for movie and game design, to movement science, where it’s used for sport, rehabilitation or ergonomics and also human-robot interaction. So, you can even have someone in the system and driving a robot, or building up a database of human movements that can be used to program one and allow it to move like a human would.

Audrow Nash: Thank you.

Annemarie Laudanski: Thank you.

Carl Vause (9m 14s), CEO of Soft Robotics:

Audrow Nash: Hi, can you introduce yourself and the company?

Carl Vause: I’m Carl Vause and this is Soft Robotics Incorporated. We’re a Boston-based company that got spun out as a research group at Harvard about a year ago. We’re taking soft robotics technology and making it real, producing commercial products to solve new problems across a variety of markets.

Audrow Nash: Can you tell me about what you’ve displayed at the booth?

Carl Vause: At the booth today we have two soft hands: A very large hand for handling pumpkins, shoe bags and objects of very weighty geometry, and a small-handed, or short, robotic arm. What we wanted to show here is that, currently, there are a lot of problems with robotic manipulation. Manipulators don’t do well with soft, curvy, easily damaged objects and they don’t do well in unstructured gripping scenarios.

What we have solved using soft actuators is the ability to pick up anything with this arm, from a prickly cactus, which you would never pick up with your bare hand, to a racket ball or a cupcake. We want to show that, with almost no control system, building a very clever, soft actuator can solve a problem that has been vexing robotics: How to develop a gripper that is as adaptable and conformal as a human hand. People are spending millions of dollars to solve this problem using traditional hard robotics.

Audrow Nash: Can you describe the hand and the smaller robotic arm?

Carl Vause: One is a four-finger hand. It’s based on proprietary actuator geometry. We use vacuum to curl the fingers out of the way and they pressurize to create a grasp. We have a three-finger gripper as well. It actually has fingernails, so it can access a low profile object like a circuit board.

Audrow Nash: Can you tell me some potential applications of these soft hands? I know there are a lot.

Carl Vause: A lot, but how do you interface a robot with something that has an unknown shape? Or when the position is unknown? Or something easily damaged? Agricultural processing is interesting. Picking lettuces heads, for example. There’s a danger of introducing E. coli into the food chain, so washing and cleaning lettuce. Robotics companies and the US Food and Drug Administration want to automate that task. But robots today can’t handle lettuce, because their heads vary in size, shape and weight, and they are delicate objects. So, one of the things that we really wanted to do with our soft robotic technology is unlock that market for automation, and automate data handling.

They can even work in wet conditions; there are no electrical connections here. You can sterilize them and wash them down with bleach at the end of the day. It really does bring automation into the agricultural process. It makes it a reality.

There’s also a light-weight version for working side-by-side with a human collaborator. In a lab, for example where you need to be careful what you touch. A manipulator can pick up a range of lab instruments, or tools, and hand them safely to you. It has the credentials of collaboration.

Audrow Nash: The ones that you have on display are on open feedback loops. As in, they don’t sense what they’re picking up, they just actuate. You’ve talked a little bit about embedding sensors into the fingers in the hands. Can you tell me more about that?

Carl Vause: We can easily embed sensors to give an object grasp detection. We can embed it in our proprietary manufacturing process, in simple off-the-shelf sensors and feed them back into something very basic. If you want it very simple, take an Arduino and provide passive grasp detection. That’s very simple.

Audrow Nash: Thank you.

Carl Vause: Alright.

Konrad Fagertun (13m 56s), COO of NLinks:

Audrow Nash: Hi, can you introduce yourself and tell me about your company?

Konrad Fagertun: Yes, my name is Konrad Fagertun. I’m a co-founder of NLink Robotics. We’ve come all the way from Norway to Boston, to showcase the world’s first mobile drilling robot. We’re excited to be here at Robobusiness, showing what we’ve been working on for the last two years.

Audrow Nash: Can you describe the robot to me?

Konrad Fagertun: Yes. The challenge in the construction industry is hard labor – manual work – and the hardest of all is drilling holes in concrete ceilings. So, we made a mobile drilling robot. It comprises a mobile lift – that can drive around – and, on top of that, is a robotic arm holding a rotary hammer drill. It thrusts that up to the ceiling and can drill holes wherever you want. It uses lasers and cameras to position itself, so it can drill to a millimeter’s precision. This can be done hundreds of thousands of times, say for a large shopping mall or an office building. It’s repetitive work.

The robot is a little bit bigger than a man, and can reach several feet high, so you don’t have to get up on scaffolding or stairs to do the work; the operator can stand on the ground, safely at a distance. But, if he wants to get close, no problem, the robot is certified to work with humans, so it doesn’t matter if it crashes into your arm, it won’t hurt you and it’ll stop. It’s useful for electrical contractors, plumbers, mechanical engineers…

Audrow Nash: Thank you.

Konrad Fagertun: Thanks.

Asim Ikram (15m 51s), CEO of Neo Robotics:

Audrow Nash: Can you introduce yourself and your company?

Asim Ikram: Yes, my name is Asim Ikram and I’m the CEO of Neo Robotics in Dubai.

Audrow Nash: What do you guys do?

Asim Ikram: We’re a new start up in Dubai, not limited to robotics. In that region, they are not exposed to robots at the moment. We are starting at the lower level, to introduce smart apps and ICT, Information Communication Technologies. Then, we want to switch to robots, because the customers are the same.

Audrow Nash: So, basically you’re acting as a liaison between companies in the US and outside for bringing robots into Dubai?

Asim Ikram: Into the GCC region – the Gulf Cooperating Countries. There are six of them in the Middle East:  Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Emirates and Qatar. They have a strong focus on technology, they’re teaching robotics and megatronics and have labs at almost every university. The industry will develop but, at the moment, there’s no pull from for robots.

Audrow Nash: What are some of the more popular technologies that are being brought to Dubai?

Asim Ikram: Not so much industrial robotics, but there are new production lines coming up that have industrial robots in the blueprint. Those lines should start operating in six months. The financing and planning is already done. Healthcare and education, that’s much further ahead. On the education side, there’s big competition between the private schools that are teaching things like systems programming. Now they’re also trying to get robots into the classrooms and teach with them. There’s a lot of movement there.

Audrow Nash: What robotics opportunities do you think there are in Dubai for engineers and entrepreneurs from the rest of the world?

Asim Ikram: There’s a lot of work in real-world drone applications. Already, highway police are using drones. They’ve also started making some national identity card deliveries with drones. Real applications of technology are moving fast. On the security side, I’ve seen a lot of civil defense robots for bomb disposal.

Audrow Nash: How did you decide to take this opportunity and form a company?

Asim Ikram: I’ve been working in this market for some time and I’ve been seeing a lot of pull in different areas. Healthcare and education are moving very fast and the industrial side will come up in the next one or two years. There are a few robotics service companies, but not many locally so I found a gap. It’s a good time to start something.

Harri Valpola(21m 40s), Head of Technology at Zen Robotics:

Audrow Nash: Can you introduce yourself and your company?

Harri Valpola: Yes, hello. I’m Harri Holopainen. I’m one of the founders of Zen Robotics Company in Helsinki, Finland. Currently, our main application is robots that have learnt to pick up waste. A little bit like WALL-E…

Audrow Nash: It looks a little different than WALL-E. Can you describe the robotic system you have?

Harri Valpola: Whereas WALL-E is cute, a small Hollywood robot, our robot is more like an large industrial scale model. It doesn’t look like a human; it’s not cute, but it works very efficiently. It’s powerful. It can lift and throw objects that weigh up to 20 kilos – 40 pounds – like they were nothing.

Audrow Nash: It looks like a conveyor belt and has robotic arms that move around and pick objects off of the conveyor belt and throw them to sort them. Am I correct?

Harri Valpola: Yes. It works in a similar way to human hands. All around the waist is a conveyor belt. The robot recognizes the objects and sorts them, exactly as a human would do, but faster. It’s also stronger and it doesn’t break.

Audrow Nash: What kind of sensors are you using to identify the material? What waste are you sorting now?

Harri Valpola: We are currently focused on construction and demolition waste. The sensors we are using are tailored for that particular waste. The most important material we’re sorting is  wood, followed by mineral-based parts and metal. We’re using sensors that can discriminate between these. They include metal detectors and spectrometers.

Audrow Nash: Where have you implemented the system and what sort of feedback are you getting from customers?

Harri Valpola: Currently, we have three customers in Europe; two in Finland and one in Holland. We’ve been developing this system for two years and now it’s working and customers are happy. We’re ready to scale up, now we have the product, so that other customers can start making use of this solution.

Audrow Nash: What’s the benefit of sorting the waste?

Harri Valpola: In Europe, at least, there are many companies that are floating in waste. Population densities are so high, there’s no place to put it. The only real option is to sort the waste. There are many valuable raw materials there. Sorting stones is not important but there are valuable metals, like copper and aluminum, and also wood. That’s particularly useful in Holland because they don’t have forests, and it can be recycled and used as a construction material.

Audrow Nash: Thank you.

Harri Valpola: Thank you.

Dick Zhang (26m 15s), CEO of Identified Technology:

Audrow Nash: Interviewer:  Can you introduce yourself and tell me about your company?

Dick Zhang: My name is Dick Zhang from Identified Technologies. We build and scale drones for commercial data capture. We work with construction and energy industry clients and help deliver data and insights. We get this information either by deploying robots on the ground, or by utilizing commercial planes and helicopters. It’s very expensive, it’s very dangerous and it’s very slow.

We deliver insights by collecting massive scale amounts of data on what has happened in the past, what’s going on now and what’s going to happen in the future, through predictive capabilities.

We collect the data via a three-part system: an autonomous drone, a dock station, that swaps batteries and uploads data, and a client dashboard that can be used to interact with and control the system from the cloud, from anywhere in real time.

We’ve been working with really exciting partners in energy and construction for the last six months. I run the business, look for exposure and develop partner and client relationships.

Audrow Nash: Can you tell me a bit about the demonstration – the drone, the quadcopter – you have on your booth?

Dick Zhang: The drone itself, everything inside, in terms of hardware, is really off-the-shelf components. Our dock station, that swaps batteries and outputs data, that’s all proprietary mechanical design and hardware. The software system is also proprietary. So a lot goes into flight control – safety checks, process checks, maintenance, things like that.

Audrow Nash: Swapping the batteries, is that automated?

Dick Zhang: Yes, that is automated. On the docking station, there’s a carrousel with six batteries that are always charged. It inserts another battery when the drone needs to fly.

To tell you a story, what inspired all of this was a talk with one of our clients. They run 5,000 job sites around the world. They bought an Internet tool but had no idea how they were going to train 1,500 people to use it. So I automated a system and made it self-operating and self-sufficient. We were able to employ 1,500 really rapidly across the country and across the world.

Audrow Nash: Is it totally self-sustaining?

Dick Zhang: Yes, right now all you need is a standard power plug. Future generations will evolve generators, solar panels and wind fans. But, apart from the source of power, everything happens on its own. It flies itself, captures data and swaps batteries.

Audrow Nash: What kind of navigation do you use on the drones?

Dick Zhang: Navigation in drone technology has become really sophisticated over the last couple of years. We have a combination of GPS and inertial sensors on board, so that, three or four hundred times every second, the drone is saying to itself: “I need to be in position XYZ. Right now I’m not there, but I’m close. Let me get there.” So, four hundred times every second, it’s making these corrections and adjustments so that it can fly along the path that the computer programmed.

Audrow Nash: Other than the IMU and the GPS, what other sensors do you use? Do you have a vision system for landing on the platform that swaps the batteries, and some other sensors?

Dick Zhang: Yes. Now we are working with cameras. We’ve done some early tests with our partners on infrared and gas effect. We do a lot of work in energy. As part of this start up growth, we’re going through a crafty process of crawl, walk and run. It’s the vision that enables the most capabilities, to help our clients right now, with the resources that we have. Now, to touch on how we land, that’s a huge problem. So, we built a proprietary vision system based on ultrasound. There’s a beacon and a dock and a transceiver, where you listen and triangulate.

Audrow Nash: Okay, so you use GPS to get it close enough…

Dick Zhang: Exactly.

Audrow Nash: Then the ultrasound takes over by localizing the sound somehow?

Dick Zhang: Yes, exactly.

Audrow Nash: Okay, thank you.

Dick Zhang: That was awesome. Thank you.

All audio interviews are transcribed and edited for clarity with great care, however, we cannot assume responsibility for their accuracy.

ECOPPIA

Ecoppia, a 2013 Israeli startup, is providing a robotic solar panel cleaning system to power companies with solar farms in the desert. Ecoppia recently installed and retrofitted five solar panel sites totaling more than 35MW. Their systems are cleaning about 5 million dusty panels every month.

“Desert regions are prime candidates for solar PV (photovoltaic) farms, aside from one glaring issue: soiling. Reports indicate this phenomenon can reduce overall energy generation by as much as 40 percent, which significantly eats into a system owner’s return on investment,” said Eran Meller, CEO of Ecoppia. “Three of the systems are located in the Arava desert, a region that suffers from frequent dust storms, with few rainy days to naturally wash the debris away. Prior to the Ecoppia installation, each system was cleaned manually, requiring tens of millions of liters of water and costly manpower resources. Ecoppia’s robotic, water-free cleaning solution performs daily cleaning to remove 99 percent of dust on each panel and ensure a higher output from each plant. Supported by real-time and forecasted data from The Weather Channel, the systems can be programmed with a customized cleaning schedule for optimal results.”

INSIGHT ROBOTICS

Hong Kong-based start-up and IBM SmartCamp Entrepreneur of the Year 2015 award winner Insight Robotics, uses an automated system that combines a high-precision, pan-tilt robot with thermal imaging sensors and advanced artificial intelligence vision technology to detect and protect forests. Insight systems are recording a 100% detection rate in multiple field trials and deployments. Their systems can detect and locate wood- or vegetation-based fires as small as 6′ by 3′ in size within a 3 mile radius, covering up to nearly 30 sq mi of forest and living area. The system then sends real-time images and the location of the fire to control centers for analysis. Armed with real-time image feeds, precise coordinates, microclimate data and alerts sent directly to any device, frontline centers can quickly respond with efficient firefighting plans much earlier than other methods, including smoke detection.

Insight’s early-warning system has been implemented in more than 10 forestry and local government agencies in five provinces and seven cities across the mainland and the company has set a $15 million marketing goal for 2015.

International Fire Fighter Magazine said, “The Insight Robotics Wildfire Detection System is the leading solution for long distance 24-hour wildfire detection. It is the first in the world to spot a heat source as small as a single 2m x 1m tree within a 5 km radius.”

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Todd Hylton, Senior Vice President at Brain Corporation, about neuromorphic computers. They discuss the robotics development board bStem, which approximates a neuromorphic computer, as well as the eyeRover: a small balancing robot that demonstrates how the bStem can be used in mobile robots.

youtu.be/uGcUB5MAVsY

Todd Hylton 

As Senior Vice President of Brain Corporation, Dr. Todd Hylton leads the development of business and technical strategies within the company. A scientist and co founder of a small semi-conductor equipment manufacturer, Hylton brings 25 years of experience in the semiconductor, optical communications, data storage and defense industries alongside a broad technical entrepreneurial background in research and development, small business, marketing and government programs.

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Transcript

Audrow Nash: Hi, welcome to robot’s podcast. Can you introduce yourself?

Todd Hylton: I’m the senior VP of Strategy at Brain Corporation. Brain Corporation is a technology startup located in San Diego, California working on computing hardware and software technology for robotics.

Audrow Nash: Can you tell me the goal and motivation behind the company?

Todd Hylton: The company’s mission is to provide computing technology – hardware, software and cloud-based or web-based services – for people who want to build robots, so that robots can become more a part of everyday life than they currently are.

I often ask people, “How many robots did you see today?” And usually the answer is “none” unless they have a [robot] vacuum cleaner at home. Our mission is to make it possible for many more robots to be created by providing some of the foundational technologies that are, frankly, quite challenging to produce if you’re building a robot from scratch.

Audrow Nash: To begin, can you give me an overview of neuromorphic computing and its advantages over using a CPU?

Todd Hylton: This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and certainly part of what Brain Corporation does.

Before working at Brain Corporation, I was at DARPA where I sponsored a project in neuromorphic computing called SyNAPSE. The goal for neuromorphic computing in general was to see if it was possible to build a different kind of computing architecture, one in which computing was massively distributed, and memory was embedded very near the computing elements. To draw inspiration from biology: very simple processing units (which you might think of as neurons) sending messages to other processing units (via things you might think of as spikes) with connections between them, which are the memory around the processors (what you might that of as synapses).

The goal for that project was to see if it was possible to build a large-scale neuromorphic computer and also to push boundaries in memory technology. You need a lot of memory on board to make a good neuromorphic computer, and [we wanted] to push our understanding of what we would be able to teach these chips to do, and how we would teach them by having synaptic modifications and neuronal dynamics built into the chips.

Though Brain Corportation is not building neuromorphic chips, many of the learning algorithms that we write for our robots have ideas like neurons and synapses underneath them, so we would very much like to be able to buy these neuromorphic chips when they become available because we think they will be a great enabler for our robotics packages.

To come back to your original question about CPU versus neuromorphic processor, CPU’s are great for general purpose computing. You can give them gigantic lists of instructions, they’re pretty simple to use, and that’s why we like them. But if you need to do a whole bunch of things in parallel – if you need to coordinate many different things in time and space – they’re not very efficient. It’s just too much energy wasted moving stuff back and forth in the chip.

Audrow Nash: An example of that is vision processing … ?

Todd Hylton: Yes, a good example of that is vision processing, which goes right back to robotics. One of the key things that robots need that they mostly don’t have are vision systems. There are different levels of vision system, and some are quite simple, but we envision at some point in the not too distant future a vision system that actually begins to learn the dynamics and the statistic of its environment in a spontaneous way. And that really needs a different kind of computer to do it well.

Audrow Nash: You guys have created bStem. Can you tell me a bit about it?

Todd Hylton: bStem does not include a neuromorphic processor – those neuromorphic processors are still in their very early phases of being built and the tools needed to make them are not commercially available yet. But bStem is the closest thing we can get right now.

We wanted a processor that was low power, low cost, but still with a lot of computational capacity, because you don’t have a lot of power and you need a lot of computation if you’ve got a mobile robot. bStem’s basic technology is derived from the mobile phone industry. Chips that are available for mobile phones provide lots of different computing capabilities: GPUs, CPUs, DSPs, various codecs for vision – all of these things are part of what we need. So we have taken state-of-the-art cell phone chipsets made by Qualcomm and repurposed them for robotics on this little board we called bStem. It also comes with sensors, drivers for various motors, and breakout boards for various motors that the robots may have.

Audrow Nash: Are there similar development boards out there?

Todd Hylton: I don’t know of any similar development boards that use state-of-the-art mobile phone technology for robotics. But there certainly are development boards that use mobile phone technology. If you want to build a phone or tablet you can get one of these boards. Unfortunately they’re a long way from what a roboticist really wants. With bStem, we closed the gap between those development boards built for phones and development boards built for robots. If get a bStem, it’s going to look and feel just like what you would expect it to be as a roboticist and not as a mobile phone developer.

Audrow Nash: What kind of reactions have you gotten from people who are using bStem?

Todd Hylton: We’ve given bStem to a handful of developers. The basic reaction is, “Wow I can’t believe it. I’ve got a whole Ubuntu package on this tiny little board, it takes about two watts to run it, I can develop my whole robotic controller on this board, I can do Gmail on it if I feel like it, plus it’s got a whole bunch of other tools and goodies that make it easy for me to write the controllers that I want.”

Audrow Nash: Can you tell me a bit about eyeRover?

Todd Hylton: As I said in the beginning we aspire to build the computing technology for people that want to build robots. We don’t plan to build and sell robots, but we built the eyeRover because we had to integrate the whole technology stack: the computer hardware, the software, put it on a robot, put the sensors on it and we wanted to be able to train the robots so it’s got a learning system that we put on it as well. It basically forced us to build the whole technology piece so that we could begin to show our potential partners what it is we can do.

Audrow Nash: Can you describe some of the sensors and actuators that eyeRover has?

Todd Hylton: eyeRover is a two-wheel balancing robot, sort of a Segway-type robot. It’s got two cameras and a relatively simple vision system with which it can see its environment. It has a bStem board, onboard IMUs, and magnetometers (which are used in some of the algorithms).

There are a lot of things on bStem that it doesn’t use because we didn’t need them for this particular robot, but other roboticists would probably like them. bStem also includes a user interface, which you can use to both remote control the robot and to train the robot in a behavior. That remote controller looks like a game pad/iPad combination. It’s sort of like a video game controller for the robot.

Audrow Nash: It looks to me like a PSP, the older kind.

Todd Hylton: Yeah, yeah.

Audrow Nash: Can you talk about eyeRover’s modes of learning and how you’ve been able to train him?

Todd Hylton: All of the learning modes on eyeRover are what we call ‘supervised learning’. Supervised learning is when you essentially show the robot what it is supposed to do; it learns to associate its sensory input with whatever it is you told it to do. For example, if the robot is supposed to turn right whenever it sees a green block on the left, I just show it that behavior a few times and it makes that association. It’s a well-known way of doing training.

We’ve built many different supervised learning algorithms, and the ones that we do on the eyeRover we’re doing primarily because we wanted to show navigation behaviors; we basically built our own special supervised algorithm that we thought was particularly effective and also didn’t require gigantic computational resources.

In the future, as we build out the learning piece – which we call the Brain Operating System, that’s the software stack that allows the robot to learn – it will also have what people generally think of as ‘unsupervised learning,’ where by exploring its environment the robot begins to learn the structure of its world. It will likely have some reinforcement learning as well, which is what I kind of think of as an impoverished supervised learning where instead of telling the robot exactly what it’s supposed to do, you just tell it “that was good” or “that was bad.”

Audrow Nash: Can you talk about some of your examples of actually training eyeRover?

Todd Hylton: We’ve trained it to do simple navigation around objects that may be on the floor, like around your desk, around your chair, around your trash can, do some loops and figure eights, go from point A to Point B. The way we train it is to show this behavior by remote control a few times, we show it a few loops around the path it’s supposed to do, and then we let it go. And if it’s correctly learned it, it does the same behavior. You can also train it incrementally, where you train it, you let it go, and you see if it’s doing what you want and you just give small corrections when it makes mistakes. Over time it does better at those areas where it was making mistakes. For the kinds of things that we’re doing now, it usually only takes a couple of minutes to train a path like the ones I just described.

We’ve also given it some simple gestures and it can learn to come to you or go away from you. On other robots we’ve trained them to play fetch and we can show them an object that they’re supposed to find: put the object out somewhere, it’ll go get the object and bring it back to a base, and it’s all trained.

The cool thing about that is it’s hard to write a piece of code that would just do that generically. You can’t foresee every environment even if they’re pretty simple, and you can’t really code it. So one of the key things we think robots need to be able to do to be part of everyday life is that they need to be able to adapt or be trained in the environments in which they’re going to perform because no coder can anticipate every single situation a robot’s going to see.

Audrow Nash: Will this bring the development of robots and their behaviors to the masses … because you can train the robot to behave as you want?

Todd Hylton: Exactly.

Audrow Nash: Is that the goal of Brain Corp?

Todd Hylton: That’s one of the goals, and I think it’ll go in stages. There will be some pre-training by the people who build the robots so that the thing doesn’t have to learn from scratch when you buy it from Best Buy and stick in your home. That way, when you get it in the home, it will be much more capable and much more useful, [especially] if you can give it additional training.

One of the challenges for us, though, is to come up with user interfaces so that people who aren’t roboticists or technologists can train a robot. There’s a big stack of things that we worry about, such as what can people actually do, how can we actually control the robot, how can we make it clear, how do you communicate the task to the robot … the AI pieces that try to put together what the robot senses and what it’s being told to do … all the computing hardware and then a whole cloud infrastructure so that you can get updates, you can upload brains, you can upload what the robot’s done so we can diagnose it if something bad has happened and it’s not performing the way it should be. We are doing all of those things.

Audrow Nash: Now that you’re using bStem, what are some of the other applications that you anticipate seeing from the user community?

Todd Hylton: That’s what we’re just now beginning to learn in detail. We were in hibernation for many years getting the technology together, and it’s only in the last month or so we’ve actually been telling people. We didn’t really want to start saying much until we had a platform on which we can demonstrate it, which is why the eyeRover exists. 

What I see in the robotics industry in general, like at this show – we’re at RoboBusiness now –it’s mostly very small companies in narrow niches. [Of course this is a] silly exaggeration, but it seems that most of the companies bring in gears and motors and sheet metal and plastic and a few chips and a loading dock, and a robot comes out the other end. Basically, they have to do the whole technology piece, which is really challenging.

What we’re doing took a gigantic amount of resources to actually accomplish. Our business proposition is that it doesn’t make sense for every company to do that; we’ll do it for you. Pretty much all the robots that I’ve seen at this meeting are simple robots that roll around on four wheels and see stuff, there are some that have grippers, there are some humanoid robots or some combinations of those things. I think all of those robots could benefit from the technologies that we’re developing.

Another thing that we would like to see happen in the robotics industry is for it to be much easier for new companies to form around building robots. There’s a huge economic barrier to get it going because the computing systems that you need mostly don’t exist and you have to build them from scratch. The people that really know robotics or who have some deep domain expertise in whatever the problem is they’re trying to solve – whether it’s drilling holes or sweeping floors or cleaning windows or whatever. There’s no reason they should have to know the entire software stack on a modern system on a chip – it’s crazy.

If we can get these technology pieces together and available – and that’s our plan of course – then I think there will be an explosion of new robotics companies. Two guys in a garage out of engineering school can build a robot, rapidly prototype it, show that it works, take it to an investor and validate that they can do what they say they want to do with very little investment. That will enable an explosion of robotic applications and different niches, and that’s the world as we see it in the future. Sort of what we have now, except it would be vastly larger.

And of course there will some big consumer plays where everybody’s got the robot that cleans the table, or whatever the killer application is, and we’re still talking to people about that.

Audrow Nash: In developing this technology, something like neuromorphic computing, what are some of the major challenges you’ve encountered and what is the lesson to learn from them?

Todd Hylton: The major challenges now and for the foreseeable future will be getting sufficient computational capacity on board small mobile robots. One of the ways we are working to mitigate is to try to shift part of the computation off into the cloud. That turns out to be a very complicated problem, too. It’s not as simple as saying, “There’s big computers in the cloud and we’ll just do it all there,” because there are all sorts of issues about moving data around and latency that it may make sense for some applications but not for others.

From my perspective, the biggest technical challenge is the computing capacity. If the neuromorphic computing technology matures rapidly, it would alleviate a great fraction of it. Most of the computation that we do now, even on eyeRover, is vision – vision algorithms of kind or another – and that’s a real sweet spot for neuromorphic computers.

I think the other challenge for us is that the industry structure needs to change, and I’m not sure how long that will take. As a business, you’ve got only so much capital to work with, and ou’ve got to become self-sustaining and profitable before you run out of money. That depends on the ability of the industry to adopt what we’re doing even if they maybe don’t think about it the way we do yet. So that’s a certainly a risk for us.

In terms of lessons learned, I would say it’s really challenging to take a state-of-the-art system on a chip built for a mobile phone and make it useful on a robotics platform. When we first started, we thought it was going to be a whole lot easier than it was. A lot of people talk about how mobile phone technology is going to enable robotics, and it will, but actually getting there from where we are now was a huge investment.

An additional lesson that we learned is in doing the learning algorithms; that there’s not one way to do them, there are many ways. There is no general-purpose learning algorithm out there – at least not yet. So you have to do some experimentation to figure out what the best ones are. I like to tell people that the work is the process of eliminating all the bad complicated ideas in favor of the simple ones that work. Sometimes, though, when you find a simple solution you kick yourself and wonder, “Why didn’t I think of that a long time ago?” but that’s just the way it is. The goal is to find a simple solution, and that takes a lot of work. Brain Corporation’s got some very capable people working for it, but we’re just a small group of people. There are all kinds of people who can write these kinds of algorithms, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t make it possible for them to do that.

So part of our strategy going forward, hopefully sometime next year, is to make our Brain OS system available with APIs so that if you are into AI, or a neural nets, or machine learning, you could start writing your own learning algorithms. You already have the whole robotic platform, all the infrastructure and so forth, and you can focus on that piece, because that’s a lot of work too. If I can multiplex that out into the world then I think there will be a much faster spread of the technology, and I think it’s a much better business strategy for us as well.

I think the other lesson I’ve learned is that it’s very challenging to try to build a new technology and build a new business model and into a new market at the same time. It forces us to make some educated guesses when it’s still quite unknown what the result will be. It takes a real leap of faith to say, “We’re going to build an eyeRover,” or “We’re going to spend a year building this little plastic robot that runs around so you can train it,” because if I don’t have it, I can’t show anybody what I’ve got. And then you say, “What if the eyeRover is the wrong sort of thing? What if nobody likes it?” or “What’s the application?” and so forth. You have a constant chicken and egg problem, but that’s also what makes it so exciting.

I have all these great people that want to work the hard technology problems, the business problems, and fortunately there’s an appetite for it now, so investors are interested and that enables us to do it.

Audrow Nash: For those that have less expertise, what would be some ways that they can get involved, learn more and eventually contribute to this technology?

Todd Hylton: Currently the eyeRover is in a closed beta program – we’ve just got a handful of people using it so we can get feedback on what we’ve got and shake out the bugs that we’ve missed. But sometime next year it’ll be possible to buy that computing system from us, the boards and the software and so forth. The eyeRover is mostly 3D printed, so we’ll just make those files and the parts list available, and you can buy the board and build your own. We’ll probably put a couple more robotic designs that are 3D printed like that. If people are enthusiastic about it and have access to some resources like a 3D printer (and of course you order 3D printed parts online), then that’s one easy way to get going. You still need some degree of expertise in computers and to use the board and change things on it. But it’s a Linux operating system; you basically turn it on, you plug the robot into your monitor and keyboard, and the screens come up. It looks just like your desktop, so it’s not nearly as intimidating as it used to be.

Audrow Nash: Fpr Brain Corp, what is your future direction and some of your future goals?

Todd Hylton: It’s pretty clear on the technical side what we’re doing for the next year, and it’s pretty ambitious. We’ve got lots of developments going on and new hardware, new learning algorithms, APIs for developers. On the business side we are just breaking out box, so we are talking to a lot of people, and we need to refine our business model. We were a technology vendor essentially, but there are different ways to do that. How do you capture it in such a way that you provide the best value to the customer, but you also make money on it? In order to do what we really want, we need to be someday a really big tech company. So we’ve got to figure out a business model that makes it possible for that to happen.

Audrow Nash: Wrapping up, what do you think is the future of robotics?

Todd Hylton: Robotics is always the technology that’s just around the corner and never quite gets here. That says to me that it’s hard. You can ask yourself whether now is the time or not, but there are certain things that suggest that maybe now is the time, and of course if I didn’t believe it I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. On the one hand there is the explosion in low cost computing hardware – it’s gotten really cheap thanks to Moore’s Law. And that’s going to continue for a while so we’re going to get better and cheaper computers, and maybe the neuromorphic stuff will come along, too, and that will be a big tech enabler.

There has been a huge amount of work in neural nets, AI, and machine learning over the past three decades. It really hasn’t had much of an impact on robotics yet, but a lot of people know how to do that now. There are a lot of tools out there, and people are trained in it so you can hire them. That’s a definite tech enabler for robotics, too, that in the past hasn’t been as prominent as it is now.

On the economics side are the big tech companies, the Intels and Qualcomms and Googles of the world. They’re looking for the next big thing and they can’t avoid robotics. Everybody says we’ve got to have robots to take care of old people, and I will be one soon enough. And it’s true. We really do need them. There is going to be a huge demand if we can get the technology and the industry structured appropriately in time. That’s why I’m bullish on it and I think it is a good time for robotics. Another important thing is that we’ve done a lot of work studying the brain lately, and although we are never going to put a mouse brain on a robot, knowing something about how brains work is really important for giving us inspiration for how to do it in a different kind of technology, like a computing technology. So that’s also why I think it’s a great time.

Audrow Nash: Thank you.

Todd Hylton: Thank you.

All audio interviews are transcribed and edited for clarity with great care, however, we cannot assume responsibility for their accuracy.

YouTube starlet and CBBC actress Kate Mandeville sports a Swarovski-crystal-adorned prosthetic at London’s Wearable Tech Show. Designed and 3D printed by Open Bionics, Mandeville’s bionic arm is a statement in fashion and personality.

The personalisation of healthcare devices has been a growing trend in the maker-sphere. From gold-plated hearing aids, neon walking sticks, and sparkling blade prosthetics to 3D printed arm casts, people with disabilities are no longer waiting for health services to catch up – they are dragging their medical devices into the future on their own.

These medical aids are getting a long-awaited makeover and today it’s the turn of the bionic hand with Open Bionics unveiling of their latest 3Dprinted prosthetic at London’s Wearable Tech Show.

Open Bionics, a startup of four based inside the Bristol Robotic’s Laboratory’s Technology Incubator, has 3D printed a custom-fitted bionic hand with enough sparkle to rival a disco ball for a woman born without a hand.

Grace Mandeville is a YouTube starlet and CBBC actress who applauds the growing popularity for diverse prosthetics.

Grace has taken to YouTube on multiple occasions to discuss diversity and her love of inventive prosthetics that can show off a bit of her vibrant personality.

Grace said: “This is my favourite thing about this whole topic. I really love fashion, and therefor dress to illustrate my personality, so being able to wear a creative prosthetic that shows who I am seems awesome – it’s like a one off accessory that nobody else can wear, basically like vintage Chanel.”

“You should be proud of what makes you different, and I think being able to wear a fun looking prosthetic is something to be proud of! You’re basically saying to the public “my arms cool and I know”.”

Open Bionics’ COO Samantha Payne said that the idea behind the Swarovski hand was to show off the possibilities for prosthetics within 3D printing.

Samantha said: “We printed Grace a socket and robotic hand in three days, and because 3D printing is so affordable we can add Swarovksi crystals and create something really eye-catching that will not break the bank. We also added four fibre optic wires to the socket so that whenever Grace closes her hand, a blue light would shoot up her 3D printed arm.”

“Prosthetics are entering the realms of fashion and we wanted to show how bionic prosthetics can be functional and fun.”

“We’ve been very experimental with Grace’s hand. This is a completely new socket design and this is the first time we’ve experimented with placing the EMG sensors above the elbow. Grace is actually controlling her hand by the muscle signals from her back.”

“The idea is to give hand amputees more option and a choice to have something they’d get some enjoyment out of wearing.”

“We’ve been told a lot by amputees that they want something that will get a compliment not a strange stare, something far away from a ‘flesh’ coloured prosthetic.”

Grace’s sister, Amelia Mandeville, said that having an attractive prosthetic could help turn something that is seen as ‘negative into a positive’. Amelia echoed her sister’s stance for having the option to stand out, asking “Who wants to be the same?”

As Grace eloquently puts it, “Why try to blend in, when you can have a piece of art as an arm instead?”

Grace was given a traditional cosmetic prosthetic when she was little and has one now but says, “I never wear it, I don’t like wearing it, it gets in the way.”

Grace said: “I love what Open Bionics is doing. So many people at the ‘Wearable Tech Show’ thought I had a hand and that I was wearing a fashionable sleeve, making some kind of fashion statement. I had to keep pulling my arm out and showing people that I wasn’t wearing some kind of glove but an actual bionic arm.”

“I found the hand really easy to operate, I tried it on for the first time Monday and I could control the hand straight away. I thought it was going to be really heavy but it wasn’t. I obviously still feel the difference, I was born with a foreshortened forearm so wearing anything is going to feel different and will always be an added weight.”

“I don’t ever wear prosthetics because I don’t feel like I need to. I would however absolutely love a bionic hand like this for events and evening’s out. I love fashion and this looks incredible.”

Open Bionics is still developing their robotic prosthetics and hope to be selling 3D printed hands within a year. They have won multiple awards for their open source 3D printed robotic hands and was recently named as one of the Top 50 international robotics companies to watch along with Google.

• This robotic prosthetic hand can be made for just $1000
• CES 2014 – Robotics on the Runway
• Robots: the “ables” of the next technology trend
• Designing Jibo: Subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful
•  Rehab robots, smart prostheses and exoskeletons to reach $1.8 billion by 2020

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

I began by teaching STEM using the traditional methods but quickly learned that the information retention rate and engagement level was sub-optimal. For example some students could not grasp the difference between while and for loops, and others struggled to understand the relationship between gear ratio and speed.

The decision to pivot to using robotics kits in lessons came after the realization that robotics covers every aspect of STEM. Even at the fundamental level, where student are simply driving the robots forward, for example, it is a lot easier to understand gear ratios when you can see the effects of your gear choices on the speed of your robot compared to that of your friend. Because robots have actual moving parts, flashing lights and sensors that can be combined and programmed, they generate countless hours of fun. I found that as my students’ creations came to life, they could have fun and be educated at the same time.

There is a term for this called edutainment, which as you can guess means combining education and entertainment. It’s a great concept, but edutainment has been perceived as a failure in the software games industry for several reasons. First, there is the belief that edutainment must out of necessity provide entertainment as a reward after education. Second, as observed by Carly Shuler in her paper ‘What in the World Happened to Carmen Sandiego’, some developers believe that it is fundamentally difficult to create great products that both educate and entertain.

Despite these criticisms, however, edutainment is now re-emerging in the robotics space:

• Orbotix and their SPRK education program, which has been adopted into the syllabi of 250 schools worldwide as of August 2014. They clearly place emphasis on fun and use play to teach; they have also provided an SDK for developers to use with roughly 30 Sphero apps released to date, creating more entertaining scenarios. I achieved similar results by making the gaming elements in my robotics lessons the primary focus; for example when I introduced racing and other forms of competition into the lessons, interest sky-rocketed and the information retention rate was much higher.
• Robocup and Robocup Junior. Founded in 1997, these annual international robotics competitions aim to promote robotics and AI research to people of all ages. They focus on traditional entertainment activities such as dancing and football (aka soccer) as the primary motivator to attract developers to these events. It is clearly working, as the number of participants has grown from 1,966 in 2007 to 3,033 in 2013.
• The FIRST Robotics Competition is also an international robotics competition. Aimed at high school students, their robots have to complete tasks such as hanging on bars, scoring balls and Frisbees into goals and much more. The games change every year to keep the competition fresh, but once again we can see play and entertainment themes taking centre stage.

As these projects become more popular, developers are learning that entertainment cannot be a secondary focus; it needs to come first.

Looking to the future, what if we combined robotics and gaming to make a new breed of products that can truly capture the imagination of generations to come, and serve the dual purpose of education and entertainment?

As a gamer myself, I believe we can learn a lot from the gaming industry, both in terms of improving retention and capturing imaginations. While the industry around tech toys and consumer robotics hasn’t seen significant change up to now, the gaming industry has undergone a massive transformation in the last two decades. For example, storylines and rewards are a big part of gaming, providing instant gratification after completing a quest or solving a problem; we can apply story lines and rewards to edutainment robots by allowing players to create or unlock new abilities and use them in competitive play with their friends.

A second example is the improvement in the graphical quality of games that have been released in the last 20 years. As hardware capabilities increase and better design software are released, developers are quick to take advantage and use them in creating more visually appealing games. And as consumers become increasingly more discerning, those of us who make consumer robots and toys can use these advancements to create better designed robots.

Another example is how gaming platforms have changed, beginning with standalone consoles, moving to PCs, and now onto mobile devices. We can harness the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets to offload computationally demanding processes from robotic gaming platforms, allowing us to create much better consumer robots.

At my start-up, Reach Robotics, we are looking at doing just that. Our gaming robots, called MechaMonsters, can be controlled via app on your smart phone to battle each other in real life; with each battle they level up, unlocking access to upgrades. These will be the first robots to bring role play gaming into the real world , literally turning the world around you into the playing field. But there is so much more to them than meets the eye: they represent a quantum leap forward for STEM education. With our robots, young people and adults alike will come face-to-face with the technology of the future while learning valuable skills in robotics, coding and mechanics.

For more information on our progress and developments you can follow our blog posts.

Robohub is an online platform that brings together leading communicators in robotics research, start-ups, business, and education from around the world. Learn more about us here. If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

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• Classroom robots: A great way to get young people started
• Drones for Schools

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

Transcript 

Andra: I’m talking today with Soft Robotics CEO, Carl Vause. Can you tell us about your work?

Carl: Our expertise is in the soft actuator, where we are able to make robotic actuators of completely elastomeric material – rubber, silicon rubbers, polyurethanes. It’s a really different aspect of making what you’re normally used to … rigid manipulators, or parallel bar linkages, or linear actuators … but we’re really doing it without any rigid components.

Andra: And what research has this come out of?

Carl: The company was actually spun out of Harvard.

In 2007 there was a DARPA project called ChemBots and Harvard was an awardee on that project. Professor George Whitesides in the chemistry department actually took up the challenge… [which was to] build an octopus. And instead of trying to build a mechatronic robot that we’re all familiar with, they developed the soft actuator … trying to replicate the tentacle. Out of that came the intellectual property that is called ‘pneumatic networks’ – and using pneumatic networks you can build all kinds of different actuators to make fingers, hands, joints and the like.

Harvard worked on this for about five to six years, and then there was a decision that the technology had matured to the point where it was no longer in the best interest to continue research. [Instead they began] commercializing the technology and using it to solve some well-understood problems, and so the company was put together in the late spring/early summer of 2013.

Andra: What are some of the problems and specific applications that you are looking at for Soft Robotics?

Carl: One of the things that’s really interesting about the technology is that it’s low cost, it’s conformal, and you can design the hands in an open loop system to apply just the right amount of force.

The example I use is picking a tomato off of a vine. This would be a very, very difficult problem for a traditional robotic manipulator to do with closed-loop feedback. We can design a soft hand with elastomeric fingers that will only operate at a force that is below the crush force of a tomato. And so you just simply visualize a tomato, you activate the gripper, and it will grab the tomato and pull it.

This really opens up what I like to think of as the future of robotics into collaborative robotics: having robotics being able to work side by side with people and factories, handing instruments and tools to workers on assembly lines … or automating areas that we haven’t been able to automate until now, such as produce processing and food processing. Right now it’s very hard to handle fruits and vegetables with robots, but we really feel that soft robotics will unlock this capability.

Andra: You’ve mentioned collaborative robotics – the ability to safely work alongside people – as one of the significant benefits. And you also mention the opening up new areas, for example handling food and agricultural products. Do you think this will also apply to some of the other areas that have not been so easy for robotic manipulation, like fabrics, textiles, other deformable materials?

Carl: Absolutely I do.

One of the big challenges in robotics is how do you handle these soft things. If you’re shipping a shirt from the shirt manufacturer to an outlet like The Gap, they come folded in a plastic wrap. Picking up a folded shirt in a plastic wrap is very difficult for a robotic manipulator, but we’ve actually shown [we can] handle these delicate highly unstructured objects, and we can do it with a lower complexity than is typically done today. And that same grasper we demonstrated handling a folded shirt can also pick up a bag of rice, or things as varied as children’s toys.

Andra: I find soft robotics a very interesting area because of these wide applications, but naturally there are some limitations as well. I assume there are tradeoffs in accuracy or perhaps in strength. Where do you feel the boundaries of the applications are?

Carl: The biggest feedback we get right now is lifespan.

Traditionally in the research environment, soft robotic devices have not had the best lifespan – they’ve had very low cycles – and if you are talking about automating things such as textile handling, produce handling or collaborative robotics, you need to have cyclic lifetimes that are similar to traditional hard graspers. This is a problem that we’ve really focused on solving, and right now in our lab we have one of our soft manipulators running on a lifetime test. As of this morning we are approaching three million cycles, so we feel like we’ve really bridged that lifecycle/lifetime problem that some soft robotics technologies have had.

The other challenge we have had and are working to address is speed of grasp. Sometimes in soft robotics you’re moving a fluid – whether it’s pneumatic or hydraulic – and it’s obviously at a slower rate than with an electrical motor. But we’ve also demonstrated grasp times in the hundred millisecond range. We feel that the current limitations are well known, but that they can be solved and that solving them is deterministic.

Andra: Are there some advantages as well, in terms of the cost and power-to-weight ratios?

Carl: Absolutely.

Right now we have a small gripper – a light-payload gripper – that can handle about 600 grams reliably. But it weighs only 100 grams, so when you put it on the end of a 1kg arm, you’ve got quite a bit more payload than a traditional device where you’re looking at maybe half of your end-of-arm payload taken up by the weight of the end-effector. We’re able to create very lightweight end-effectors, which make can collaborative arms much more productive in terms of payload capacity.

The other advantage that’s really been a powerful part of soft robotics is the cost. All of our cost goes into the engineering of the devices, but once we can get manufacturing a device, it’s really composed of proprietary design of the actuators, and then a light material such as polycarbonate and silicon elastomers. We’re not talking about an end-effector that’s got a lot of sensors and stepper motor and linkages in it. We believe that the standard cost for an adaptable end-effector can come down in price by an order of magnitude very easily, which is really important to opening up this new market of collaborative robotics.

Andra: You’re having to create a startup that’s going into unchartered waters, and I’m hoping you can tell me a little bit about the process. Soft Robotics has been in existence as a company for just over one year?

Carl: Since July of 2013.

Andra: How many people are there on your team?

Carl: Right now there are five of us. Two fulltime engineers, myself, and we use two consultants to keep the books and take care of our regulatory responsibilities.

Andra: Your background is not in robotics research so much as in business, and you’ve been doing medical devices before this. How did you come to join Soft Robotics?

Carl: My undergraduate degree was in electrical engineering and I worked on doing stepper motor control with 8-bit micro controllers. We were running assembly language at the time, and it was very miserable. I had forgotten all about that and was spending a lot of time with medical devices. I was introduced to [soft robotics] technology, and we were looking at various medical applications for it because of its soft conformal nature, obviously. The thing that makes soft robotics fantastic for handling tomatoes also makes it fantastic for handling human organs.

But when we got started, I remembered all the difficulties I had with control systems and feedback loops, and realized that we had a soft open-loop manipulator technology and that we should really spend time with the robotics community. And once we sat down with the robotics community, [their] feedback was, “This is the kind of thing we’ve had been waiting for! We’ve been trying to make the human hand, and that’s a very costly endeavor that takes a long time and a lot of effort … and you’ve created this highly dexterous, conformal, lightweight device in a short period of time!” With that initial feedback we decided to put all of our major efforts into focusing on the robotics opportunity.

Andra: Has this been supported through commercialization grants through the university, through the labs? What’s the process that has taken you this far, and what’s coming next?

Carl: It’s very difficult to run a hardware startup these days. We’re in the days of mobile apps and wonderful online portals that can access billions of people, but hardware startups require people and engineers and time.

We were lucky in that we did get some initial funding through the government, through two DARPA grants. DARPA had seen thetechnology in the university lab and asked us to push it forward. We’ve also been very lucky with angel investors. The company has been funded partially through government grants and the majority through angel investors who have seen the technology, done their fact checking with the robotics community, and who believe that this is something that will change robotics and will be very important going forward.

Andra: What I see is that angels are playing quite an important role in getting robotics startups closer to a large seed round or series A round, and it is a slower process than it is for many other startups. Certainly mobile and apps tend to give the impression of being cheap and easy to get off the ground, and it’s not totally the case. Whereas with hardware, it’s rarely the case that it’s cheap and easy.

Carl: It’s very interesting because in many of the discussions I have with investors, I try to help them understand that we need to buy materials, we need to fabricate things, we need to have access to a machine shop, and these are not things they’re accustomed to hearing from people working on software.

Andra: What do you think is coming up, that you’re facing?

Carl: The biggest obstacle in this is when you’re taking the technology out of university. The universities do very cutting edge early-stage research, and they’re not concerned about things like cost and manufacturability and scalability of a business process. That is what we spent the first nine months working on: could we get a good design space where we could build soft robotics in a 3D CAD system. That required a lot of work by our engineers. Second, we had to find vendors who could help us actually manufacture the parts in quantity, so that when we did start engaging companies we could sit down and say, “Look we’ve got a design space, we understand the design variables to solve these problems, and we have a manufacturing house that can make these in lots of 100 and lots of 1000 if desired.” That was a good nine months at the beginning of the company.

Now it’s really about understanding what the most important problem to solve is. We can do a lot of things with the soft gripper, and we’ve had suggestions for manipulating chickens and poultry processing, which is very interesting, but I know very little about poultry processing.

So we’ve been engaging the integrators, the end-users, and the robotics companies to really understand what problems they would like to see solved.

To circle back, the dominant themes really are realizing that dream of collaborative robotics, and automating industries (or parts of industries) that haven’t been conducive to robotics yet. But the feedback is, with soft robotics we could really bring automation to those new markets.

Andra: Are you going to tackle this one market at a time? For example, prove one out, and the add another? Or prove one out and then add ten or a hundred others?

Carl: I would say there’s maybe a third way.

What I’d like to do is to prove one out, focus on one market and really show that we can make a difference and then use the technology to go into new markets. And as early stage startup, focus really is important to our success.

As we are proving out these ‘one’ markets, one of the things we’ve been focused on is the unstructured warehousing environment: the ability to pack something that comes in a small electronics box, such as a phone or a tablet, or that shirt that’s wrapped in cellophane, or a football. Manipulating all these with the same system is very challenging and that’s a problem we believe we can solve.

But in that process, we have found that there are a lot of things that people would like us to focus on. Textiles is a good example, produce is a good example. So to bring it back to your original question, we are focusing on single markets at a time, but as we have focused on making a difference in those, that series processing if you will, we’re learning more that’s allowing us to open up new conversations in new markets.

Andra: What do you think is the single biggest obstacle that you’re facing in terms of startup growth? This could range from recruitment, to tools, to facilities, to funding, to things that I haven’t even thought of mentioning …

Carl: If I were giving advice to someone who’s going to start a robotics startup today, I would have them really spend a lot time on how to fund their company. We were at the Massachusetts Innovation UnConference two weeks ago, where we actually ran a session on funding the hardware startup. Traditional backers, the venture capitalists of the world, would really like to see traction.

Traction is the big word you hear in startups today. That means you have to have a prototype or you have to be running live pilots with potential paying customers or potential business partners. [You need to understand] the path and the funding necessary to get you from a really good idea or core technology, to where you have a pilot running and a customer, so you could stand in front of a venture capitalist and say, “This is real technology, we have solved the scientific risk. We can make it work and we have meaningful customers who are interested in the technology.”

By understanding that that’s the journey you’re going to be required to walk, I think you’re bringing clarity to [your] business plan. Unfortunately the world where you can have really great intellectual property or a great idea and get funding, it’s just becoming more difficult in recent years. So getting to that first customer contact is very, very important.

Andra: I agree, and I think by definition there’s a lot of intellectual property out there, but it’s hard to prove that it has value.

Carl: Yes.

Andra: Unless you have developed traction. I’d actually avoided using that word even though it’s written down in my notes, so thank you for bringing that up. [Laughs.]

Carl: You’re welcome!

Andra: Is there anything that you would like to say that we haven’t covered? Do you have any other tips for startups that you’d like to share?

Carl: Absolutely.

There are three things about doing a robotics startup today that I think are very important. One is, everyone is fascinated by robotics, and so whenever I’m out somewhere and someone hears the word robotics, they’re very interested in what we’re doing.

But as we’ve discussed many times at tradeshows, the public perception of robotics is very different from the reality of robotics, and [so second, you need to help] bridge that gap [by showing] the problems we’re trying to solve today versus the reality.

And third is that when you speak with investors – whether they are potential angel investors, or venture capitalists as investors – you need to help them understand the reality of robotics today, and also the vision of what robotics can be, and how you’re going to help move the industry forward. This is really the key I would say.

If you could remember those three things, you could be very successful in this industry.

Andra: That’s great. Thank you very much for your time. I really enjoyed the discussion!

All interviews are edited with great care for clarity of content, and may not represent the text of the original interview exactly. We can not assume responsibility for their accuracy. 

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Skysense is a Berlin-based start up designing and manufacturing a range of products to enable the remote operation of drones. Their first two products are the Skysense Charging pad and Skysense Hangar. 

The Skysense Charging Pad is a charging pad for drones that can be remotely operated, it provides fast charging and wide landing area, it supports nearly all existing multicopters and VTOL aircrafts and it can charge multiple drones at the same time.

The Skysense Hangar is a protective hangar to store and recharge the drone between flights.

These products are the start of the infrastructure needed if you are planning to maintain routine operations. Now Skysense have launched a range of multicopters designed for professional photographers. The SS700 hexacopter is the entry level model starting from €1,498. The SS750 Hexacopter is the mid level model starting from €2.998. The SS900 Octocopter is the top level model and starts from €4,498.

To celebrate Skysense has launched this showreel:

Evollve, Inc., a Southern California start-up, has received $2 million in a Series A round of funding. The money will be used to scale up manufacturing for the company’s first product: the Ozobot. Ozobots are able to read colors, flashing lights and patterns on game boards, tablets and smartphones. It recognizes them as code that can be programmed to perform specific actions such as speed up, slow down, turn right or left and stop. Ozobots are programmable learning devices as well as toys, and retail for $49.99.

Ozobots launched earlier this year at both the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and the American International Toy Fair after getting off to a rocky canceled Kickstarter campaign. But it won both Best of CES and Best of Toyfair awards, and USA Today and Popular Science also named it one of their Best Tech Toys of Toy Fair 2014.

HiBot, a Tokyo-based startup, developed what looked to be a great invention to inspect high-voltage transmission lines and was progressing nicely until the earthquake and subsequent disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. HiBot’s sponsor was KEPCO, the operator of that plant; funds for HiBot dried up, progress came to a halt, and the project has been on hold ever since.

HiBot went on to develop a snake robot for pipe inspection and components, sensors, cables and software – focusing on using robots to do dangerous jobs and improve safety for humans. Earlier this year HiBot entered into an agreement with Hitach High-Technologies, whereby Hitachi will manufacture and market the Expliner overhead transmission line inspecting robot, and Hibot will support and continue to provide development solutions for KEPCO and Hitachi. And just the other day HiBot secured a $3.1 million equity investment from Draper Nexus Venture Partners. Funds will be used to accelerate development and product launch for their new pipe inspection robot, which is expected to be released next spring.

Airware, a San Francisco-based inventor of a customizable autopilot drone operating system and platform, just received a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount from GE Ventures. [Airware was formerly known as Unmanned Innovation, an Orange County start-up.] Airware has already raised $40.4 million. GE Ventures will not only get an equity interest but they will work closely to “make sure the platform can address a number of their use cases”, said Airware CEO Jonathan Downey. Some of those use cases include checking power lines for downed cables; monitoring pipes for leaks and inspecting wind turbines for breaks and other problems.

Airware has grown to more than 70 people since their July $25 million Series B funding infusion led by Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz and First Round VCs.

Knightscope, a Silicon Valley security and robotics start-up, closed a $3.7 million Series A financing with an impressive list of strategic investors: NTT DOCOMO, Konica Minolta and Flextronics. Funds will be used to help the company accelerate deployments (as will be done for Microsoft by providing Knightscope security and K5 robots for the MS Campus).

Knightscope is marketing their start-up as a platform developer of autonomous technology that fuses robotics, predictive analytics and collaborative social engagement to predict and prevent crime. They’re even trying to coin a new term: ADMs – Autonomous Data Machines – for their K5 roving robots.

The $3.7 million funding round brings total Knightscope funding thus far to $5.2 million.

Knightscope is making the K5, available now for preorder on a MaaS (Machine-as-a-Service) basis to select customers in Silicon Valley at $6.25 per hour, per machine in 24/7 deployments for terms of one, two or three years. According to Knightscope, deploying K5 machines in outdoor environments on corporate campuses, around data centers, shopping malls and where private security guards are stationed will free humans to address strategic tasks while the machines handle the monotonous and sometimes dangerous tasks.

Correction from the editors: The title of this article originally suggested that Ozobot, HiBot and Airware all received funding from GE Ventures. In fact, only Airware received funding from GE Ventures. We apologies to the author and our readers for any inconvenience the error may have caused.

At RoboBusiness this week in Boston, Pitchfire – a Shark Tank-like pitch and question session – presented 14 start-up companies who pitched their wares to 5 judges. Two honorable mentions and one winner were chosen at the event.

SoftRobotics Inc, a Boston-based start-up (not to be confused with SoftRobotics, a Los Angeles area software and systems developer), presented their new soft gripper, a rubbery octopus-like 4-armed gripper that folded over whatever it was picking up. Although limited by the weight of the object being picked up, the pneumatic and hydraulic gripper seemed to adapt quickly to various sizes and shapes, and was able to softly grip and then lift its object. It won Honorable Mention.

Zen Robotics, a Helsinki-based start-up that provides a complete conveyor and robotic waste sortation system also received Honorable Mention. Zen Robotics also won a spot in the 2014 Global Cleantech 100, which recognizes the 100 promising and innovative companies most likely to make a significant market impact over the next five to ten years across 17 sectors, including Energy Efficiency, Biofuels & Biochemicals, Smart Grid, Transportation, Water & Wastewater and Recycling.

The 1st Place Winner was NLink, a Norwegian start-up focused on the construction industry and integrating a robotic drilling and measuring system for ceiling work. It relieves workers from overhead work involved with measuring and drilling ceilings. Ceilings are the most ergonomically difficult place to drill holes in concrete, yet one in which every office building with a drop-ceiling requires thousands of wholes drilled. Hence this solution of a mobile platform with a robot arm with a drill end effector. The system is driven by laser marking software from the CAD construction plans. It’s primary goal is to reduce work-related musculoskeletal disorders. This is a textbook success story waiting to happen: it provides a robotic solution to a serious and costly industry problem. We need more solution/start-up companies like this one.

The other start-ups included therapy robots for stroke victims and autistic kids, an unmanned marine surface vessel, a new type of actuator for exoskeleton use and as a gripper, a new type of mobile pick and place system, an aerial collision avoidance system of software and sensors, a data capture system from drones and a new robotic vacuum cleaner.

Pitchfire was emceed by Silicon Valley Robotics Director Andra Keay.