Ex-Willow Garage and Unbounded Robotics veterans get $3 million to bring mobile manipulator and mobile platform to market.

Funding came from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Shasta Ventures. Melonee Wise was named CEO. Fetch Robotics is the new name for FYS Systems. FYS stood for Fetch Your Stuff. The new name, Fetch Robotics, seems more appropriate for a materials handling logistics market line of products.

Things are moving fast at Fetch. They’ve announced that the first robots will be introduced in the second quarter of this year and are searching to hire up to 10 positions in addition to their present 10-member team. They will launch a research edition of the robot first and probably show it at ICRA in May in Seattle.

From comments made by CEO Wise to IEEE/Spectrum, it appears that they are making more than one product.

“One is a mobile manipulator and one is a mobile base, and they’ll work together. We’re targeting the logistics market, looking to do order fulfillment with robots.”

No pictures are available of the platform or the robot; the software however, will use and be built upon ROS.

Evan Ackerman said it best when he wrote:

There was a lot of interest in Unbounded and the UBR-1, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of interest in what Fetch is working on. It’s not often that companies get second chances like this, and I’m certain that the Unbounded core team (and the rest of the roboticists at Fetch) are looking forward to proving that they can deliver the next generation of mobile manipulators.

As advances in actuators, processors and machine vision enable robots to be mobile and do more, and do it safely alongside humans, many companies are working on and beginning to offer mobile manipulator robots. We wish Fetch well in their new venture.

For confusing reasons, Unbounded Robotics has shut down. Their $35,000 UBR-1 single-armed mobile robot that was shown late last year with great fanfare is no longer offered for sale.

“Why?” is the big question. Unbounded was one of the start-up spin-off companies incubated by Willow Garage. Unbounded’s UBR-1 robot was produced by the same team that developed Willow Garage’s $400,000 PR2 personal robot except that the UBR-1 only had one arm, used lower-cost building materials, and had a price of $35,000 – a phenomenal 1/10 the cost of the PR2! Both used the ROS open source robotic operating system.

At their launch in late 2013, they displayed and demonstrated multiple UBR-1s and described commercial applications ranging from material handling to picking up room service trays.

But early on there appeared to be a shift in focus to academia. It’s true that Rethink Robotics’ two-armed Baxter at $25,000 and UR’s one-armed UBR-1 at $35,000 are the cheapest robots with arms (and mobility with Unbounded’s UBR-1) available to the research community. Both offered SDKs so that applications could be developed and shared. But the academic marketplace is very limited and slow to purchase. Rethink is having some success on that front; perhaps Unbounded wasn’t.

In early July, things at Unbounded came to a halt. Principals changed their LinkedIn profiles and dropped their employment with Unbounded to “Previous.” The PR firm and other suppliers were told of the closure. An email from CEO Melonee Wise said that Unbounded was shutting down due to issues with the Willow Garage spin-off agreement which prevented them from raising an A round of equity funding. Perhaps there was an anti-dilution clause or a too-stringent IP royalty scheme that was a sticking point and gave pause to prospective investors. Generally these are things that get negotiated and resolved. Except in this case, to date, it has not been resolved and the closed doors are truly closed.

Evan Ackerman pondered the situation in an article posted on IEEE/Spectrum Automaton. Dan Kara posted a thoughtful piece for ABI Research wherein he postulated alternative reasons for Unboundeds closure, analyzing whether it was a failure, a non-negotiable clash, or something else.

Both Ackerman and Kara remarked on Unbounded’s achievement of providing a mobile manipulation platform at an affordable price. The UBR-1 was quite an achievement that sadly will not come to market.

PUZZLE PIECE #1:

At last week’s Xconomy Robo Madness event, we heard Willow Garage (WG) founder (and principal funder) Scott Hassan say that Willow Garage was alive and well and perhaps would focus on climate change and other massive social problems in the near future. This combined with the fact that WG has interests in all of WG’s 8 spin-off companies – two of which sold to Google late last year – suggests current and future income from those entities may fund new projects Hassen suggested. Or Hassan may supplement the funding himself with the same goals he had with WG: to speed up the development of service robotics by providing developmental tools such as the PR2 robots and the ROS operating system.

PUZZLE PIECE #2:

In a presentation about low-cost mobile manipulator robots by Melonee Wise, CEO of Unbounded Robotics, one of the 7 WG spin-offs, Wise described a WG project she headed which developed plans, renderings, simulations and foamboard prototypes of a line of mobile robots similar to her company’s product line. But she also described products not in the UR line, mobile bots with and without arms.

PUZZLE PIECE #3:

This brings up start-up company Savioke, not officially a WG spin-off, but all (but one) of the Savioke team are ex-WG people and Savioke CEO Steve Cousins was the CEO of WG. Savioke just got $2 million in seed funding and, although tight-lipped about specifics, says that they will have a mobile service robot available for trials by year-end. One of the funders was Google Ventures and last year Google acquired two of WG’s spin-offs.

Google Ventures GP Andy Wheeler said of their participating in Savioke’s seed funding:

As the lines continue to blur between industrial and personal robotics industries, Google Ventures is thrilled to be working with an exceptional group of people at Savioke. Steve and his team already have had a lot to do with moving the robotics industry forward. The next act promises to be even more revolutionary.

Savioke’s Steve Cousins said:

Hospitals, elder care facilities, hotels, restaurants, office services all provide large opportunities for robots to take on dirty, dull and dangerous work, improve process efficiency, reduce cost, and most importantly free up people to help other people, said Cousins to TechCrunch.

The Savioke website narrows his broad statement to focus on health care – to improving lives by deploying service robots in the places where people live and work, to use technology to overcome disabilities. This is a tough field to cover with today’s technology. Human-robot communication, speech recognition, vision, battery power, flexible mobility and navigation are all challenges that need to be conquered.

Resources:

Xconomy Robo Madness 2014 Takeaways: Jobs, Education, and Redefining Autonomy

Suitable Technologies Beam Remote Presence Robots

Two very visible things struck me as indicative of why the show was packed with enthusiastic exhibitors and attendees. One was the use of Beam remote-presence robots on the exhibition floor. Palo Alto start-up Suitable Technologies brought two dozen Beam robots to the show and rented them by the hour to people calling in from around the world. They worked flawlessly, moved freely and accident-free, carried on conversations with passersby and exhibitors – a perfect solution for those who couldn’t physically come and experience the trade show portion of RoboBusiness. There was even a Beam Hour where the show floor was closed to all except exhibitors and Beam attendees. A high-tech solution to broaden the high-tech audience of RoboBusiness.

Unbounded Robotics UBR-1 Mobile Robot

The other was Unbounded Robotics and their new UBR-1 one-armed mobile robot. Built by many of the same team that built Willow Garage’s two-armed robot PR2 – a robot that launched and sold for $400,000 in 2009, the new $35,000 UBR-1 is as capable as the older PR2 but it is now affordable whereas very few could pay for the PR2. This price drop phenomena was talked about by speakers and in private conversations. Words like “plug and play,” “convergence” and “confluence” were used to describe it.” “In just five years — from $400,000 to $35,000! Amazing.”

The UBR-1 appears to have encapsulated for all to see a major trend happening in robotics over the last five years: sensors, cameras, batteries and other component costs have been and continue to drop dramatically and, combined with mobility and ever-more-powerful CPUs, those lower costs are enabling cheaper more capable robots — such as Unbounded’s UBR-1.

With 2D and 3D sensors, scanners and cameras, more capable lighter and smaller batteries, and all the other functionality developed and incorporated in ROS and the PR2, Unbounded Robotics will begin shipping UBR-1 units next summer. First units will go to academia but shortly thereafter commercial versions will begin shipping to companies for various mobility tasks such as machine tending and material transport. After that, Melonee Wise, CEO, suggested additional application areas being developed for the hospitality business – mobility tasks like room service delivery and after-room-cleaning inspection. Other applications could include restocking shelves and, with the proper software, limited eldercare. The new UBRs will be manufactured and assembled in Silicon Valley. Unbounded is in the process of closing their “A” round of funding.

Invest, Innovate, Implement

“Invest, Innovate, Implement” was the theme for RoboBusiness 2013 and it was carried throughout with extensive speakers, panels and workshops. Funding methods and understanding what VCs think and want were a big part of the show. It started with a 3-hour workshop sponsored by Grishin Robotics, the start-up funding entity of the Russian VC Dmitry Grishin. It was followed by an evening session where a group of start-ups presented their elevator pitches in front of four venture capitalists. There was also a breakout session with VCs discussing today’s investment trends and how they view them in relation to investing.

ROS-Industrial

As costs come down and component systems become more capable, many companies are moving to add advanced vision and perception systems, path and grasp planning, and networking capabilities to their existing robots. One way to accomplish this is by having a ROS-Industrial front end – a common open-source language familiar to most engineering and robotics students – where one can design and simulate cross-platform vision systems and other additions before implementing them. ROS-Industrial, a non-profit open source robotics operating system organization, provides a common framework for robotics applications and is proving to be a good resource for rapid development of new components and uses for existing robots.

Google’s Self-Driving Cars

Google’s Chris Urmson, Director, Self-Driving Cars, a keynote speaker, showed not only the history but the complexity of the process of robotic self-driving cars. There’s a whole lot going on as a Google car moves along it’s path.

Notice the red circle in the left top picture. With 360º vision provided by the scanner, the car has to process every type of information, everywhere, including behind and around corners. In the top right picture, there are lights, pedestrians, lane markings, etc., all identified and color coded and tracked by the onboard computers. When maps are available, comparisons to what the car is seeing versus what the map says is there is another input to the massive data processing – 1 GB of data every second – that occurs thousands of times every second.

RoboBusiness 2013 had over 500 attendees and 60 exhibitors. Next year’s show will be held in Boston.

Unbounded Robotics today launched UBR-1, a robot that has many of us very excited. UBR is the first robot with intelligence, manipulation and mobility for below $50k. While UBR definitely resembles a smaller, cuter PR2, the UBR is actually more sophisticated. After all, the PR2 was developed 5 years ago and a lot has changed in robotics since. As well as being offered to universities as a research platform, the UBR can be deployed in business automation or logistics settings, like a Baxter but mobile. At one tenth the price of a PR2, and more sophisticated than any other similarly priced robot, UBR is going to move the goal posts for robotics. At this price point, with these capabilities, UBR is a disruptive technology and has potential in a wide range of scenarios outside of research. Some of the initial possibilities include office or medical delivery, warehouse picking and supermarket stacking and inspection. UBR plays well with people and is ADA-compliant.

There’s often a lot of hype in robotics and skeptics may ask if UBR can really deliver such incredible specs at such a low price. The answer is in the founding team: Melonee Wise, CEO; Michael Ferguson, CTO; Derek King, Lead Systems Engineer; and Eric Diehr, Lead Mechanical Engineer. The Unbounded Robotics team are Willow Garage alumni, who have been involved from the earliest days in building PR2, ROS and the Turtlebots.

Naturally enough, the UBR-1 mobile manipulation platform runs ROS. As the former Willow Garage team put it, “With decades of robotic hardware and software experience, we have developed a mobile manipulation platform that offers advanced software and a sophisticated hardware exterior.  The one-armed robot is designed for human-scale tasks and comes pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux LTS and ROS, along with applications such as MoveIt! navigation, calibration, and joystick teleoperation.  The robot offers mobility, dexterity, manipulation, and navigation in a human-scale, ADA-compliant model.”

On the hardware front, the UBR-1 requires no calibration at start-up, has a workspace large enough for the robot to reach the ground as well as countertops, and was designed with extensibility in mind so that users can easily develop custom applications. The extra value of the UBR will be all the applications developed by the robotics community, starting with researchers and flowing through to commercial app developers for enterprise and small businesses.

If you want to see one ‘in person’, UBR will be one of the stars at RoboBusiness 2013 in Santa Clara this week; a UBR will also be cutting the ribbon to open the Bay Area Science Festival on November 2. Unbounded Robotics are taking orders for the robot and expect to start shipping in summer 2014.  And I, for one, welcome this new uber robot.