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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Source: Automatic Statistician.

In episode seven of Talking Machines we talk with Zoubin Ghahramani, professor of Information Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. His project, The Automatic Statistician, aims to use machine learning to take raw data and give you statistical reports and natural languages summaries of what trends that data shows.

We get really hungry exploring Bayesian Non-parametrics through the stories of the Chinese Restaurant Process and the Indian Buffet Process (but remember, there’s no free lunch). Plus we take a listener question about how much we should rely on ourselves and our ideas about what intelligence in electrified meat looks like when we try to build machine intelligences.

Link to audio file (27:29)

James McLurkin works with swarm robots at Rice University, and his unique work on robot communication has landed him on PBS’s “Nova,” in addition to speaking engagements at events like TED and Singularity Summit.

In this interview, McLurkin discusses how swarm robots have been inspired by insect behavior – and exactly what swarm robots are best suited for. McLurkin argues that in many cases, a group of smaller, inexpensive robots can perform a job much better than a single, more capable robot. He also sheds light on when and how swarm robots might become a part of everyday life and industry in the coming decades.

image credit: people.csail.mit.edu

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

• Thousand-robot swarm self-assembles into arbitrary shapes
• Crowdsourcing new strategies for cancer treatment: Towards swarming nanobots
• Robots Podcast: Dependable swarms
• Finding perfection in the imperfect: Applying Darwinian neuro-evolution to robotics

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

Following the International Federation of Robotics’ (IFR) announcement earlier this year that 2013 set an all-time robotics record, the North American Robotics Industries Association announced that 2nd quarter robot sales were the best ever, and the 1st and 2nd quarters combined have set a new record.

Since 2010 the robotics market in North America has grown an average of 26% per year leading up to its record setting first half performance in 2014. A record 14,135 robots, valued at $788 million were ordered from North American robotics companies in the first half of 2014, an increase of 30% in units and 16% in revenue over the same period in 2013. The second quarter of 2014 was the main driver of the market’s record first half, with 8,197 robots valued at $450 million sold to North American customers. This performance shattered the previous record for a single quarter, exceeding the fourth quarter of 2012 by 31% in units and 17% in revenue.

This is not an American phenomena, although it does reflect that the American economy is continuing to advance at a healthy pace.

ChinaDaily reports that Chinese companies are expected to triple their purchases to around 110,000 robots per year by 2020.

“As the world’s second-largest economy, China has huge potential in the robot market, which is prompting more foreign and domestic companies to invest in the sector,” said Wang Ruixiang, head of the China Machinery Industry Federation.

 

According to a recent United Nations report, China is likely to see a sharp fall in its labor force by 2015. The labor shortage and the lack of advanced technologies represent huge business opportunities for the robotics sector, said Song Xiaogang, secretary-general of the China Robot Industry Alliance.

Good news for robotics worldwide!

According to Colin Angle, chairman and chief executive officer of iRobot, the Board’s authorization of a share repurchase program reflects the companies confidence in the health and long-term outlook of the company. “With a strong balance sheet and cash flows, we believe we can take advantage of current market conditions to buy back our shares while maintaining the flexibility to make strategic investments in our future, ” Angle said.

As of February 11, 2013, iRobot had 27,872,850 shares of common stock outstanding. According to Morningstar data 64.19 percent of iRobot shares are owned by institutions, 37.04 percent of shares are owned by funds and 4.23 percent by insiders.

Credit: Google Finance, IRBT share price 2006-2013

What might be the motive for iRobot to initiate a share repurchase program. One likely motive might be to increase share value for its share owners, by reducing the total number of shares outstanding. This could also protect the company from unfriendly takeover. There have been some speculations about a strategic takeover by Google to become one of the largest suppliers of robotics in the world.

The robot, can achieve legged performance over rough surfaces and obstacles, using a high sprawl angle, and nearly wheel-like performance over smooth surfaces for small sprawl angles. By changing the sprawl angle it can climb over obstacles or crawl underneath them. STAR can run at 5.2m/s (43 body lengths/second, Froude number 9.8) over a smooth surface which makes it the fastest untethered crawling robot.  

Check out the video below for the robot’s crawling performance.

Credit: iRobot, RP-VITA

RP-VITA is a joint effort between two industry leaders, iRobot and InTouch Health. The robot combines the latest in autonomous navigation and mobility technologies developed by iRobot with state-of-the-art telemedicine and electronic health record integration developed by InTouch Health. RP-VITA allows remote doctor-to-patient consults, ensuring that the physician is in the right place at the right time and has access to the necessary clinical information to take immediate action. The robot has unprecedented ease of use. It maps its own environment and uses an array of sophisticated sensors to autonomously move about a busy space without interfering with people or other objects. Using an intuitive iPad® interface, a doctor can visit a patient, and communicate with hospital staff and patients with a single click, regardless of their location.

The FDA clearance specifies that RP-VITA can be used for active patient monitoring in pre-operative, peri-operative and post-surgical settings, including cardiovascular, neurological, prenatal, psychological and critical care assessments and examinations.
RP-VITA is being sold into the healthcare market by InTouch Health as its new flagship remote presence device. iRobot will continue to explore adjacent market opportunities for robots like RP-VITA and the iRobot Ava mobile robotics platform.

The U.S. military UAV market is projected to grow at an 12% CAGR reaching $18.7 billion in 2018 according to a new report of Market Research Media Ltd. The report finds that the U.S. military UAV market will generate $86.5 Billion revenues over the period 2013 – 2018.

According to ReportLinker market profile report The Global UAV Market 2011-2021 – Global UAV Market Size and Drivers, published June 2012 the global market for UAVs in 2011 was estimated at US$7.1 billion and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.08% to reach US$10.5 billion by 2021. Cumulatively, during the forecast period, the total market for UAVs is estimated to be US$91.7 billion.

According to a Frost & Sullivan report May 2012, the unmanned aerial systems (UASs) market accounted for $5.25 billion of the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) budget in 2010, with the Air Force emerging as the highest spender among all U.S. military services. Most of the $2.42 billion the Air Force has earmarked for UAS spending in 2012 is for the procurement of the MQ-9 Predator.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan’s DoD Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) research finds that fiscal year (FY) 2011 government contracts awarded specifically for the DoD UAS market amounted to $3.78 billion. Programs receiving the most contract dollars included the ER/MP MQ-1 Gray Eagle, MQ-9, and RQ-4 UASs.

Historically, UAVs have been used in various military settings outside of U.S. borders. UAVs have provided reconnaissance, surveillance, target acquisition, search and rescue, and battle damage assessments. In the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, UAVs have been used for surveillance purposes and to attack enemies. The Predator UAV, for example, was armed with anti-tank weapons to attack Taliban and Al Qaeda members.

CyPhy Works, Inc. creates robots to empower people. Their first products are a line of UAVs that expand military, law enforcement, and inspection capabilities in remote situational awareness, endurance, and access. CyPhy Works was founded in 2008 by Helen Greiner, who previously co-founded and served as President and Chairman of iRobot Corporation.

Credit: CyPhy Works

Credit: CyPhy Works

In January 2013 Swedish CybAero signed  a framework agreement contract with manufacturer PartnerTech AB, covering production and assembly of products and systems for CybAero AB.

Credit: CybAero AB

The cooperation between CybAero and PartnerTech was initiated in 2012 and the now signed agreement covers PartnerTech’s combined expertise within electronics, mechanics and systems integration. Production and assembly will initially mainly include PartnerTech’s unit in Åtvidaberg and other Swedish units. In the future the agreement may also entail development as well as production in PartnerTech’s other units globally. Revenue and first deliveries from this agreement are expected in the first quarter 2013.

The U.S. military UAV market is projected to grow at an 12% CAGR reaching $18.7 billion in 2018 according to a new report of Market Research Media Ltd. The report finds that the U.S. military UAV market will generate $86.5 Billion revenues over the period 2013-2018.

The U.S. military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) market has witnessed a meteoric growth over the past decade. UAS development went through a quantum leap, from lab concept to battle-tested proven technology. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have proven their worth in operations around the world. Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are considered today a key component of U.S. defense transformation and an integral part of U.S. military doctrine.

Credit: UCSC Bionics Lab, Raven IV

This 4-year multi-campus research project seeks to emulate the expert-apprentice relationship using human beings and robots. It focuses on developing ways in which robots can learn from human activity in order to help humans by providing extra hands, eyes and brain power as necessary, enabling multilateral manipulation from multiple vantage points. The range of applications includes manufacturing and surgery.
Multilateral manipulation systems have the potential to improve healthcare, improve American competitiveness and product quality in manufacturing, and open the door to new service robot applications in the home
Read more

The Hummingbird robotics kit is a spin-off product of Carnegie Mellon’s CREATE lab. Hummingbird is designed to enable engineering and robotics activities for ages 10 and up that involve the making of robots, kinetic sculptures, and animatronics built out of a combination of kit parts and crafting materials. Combined with a cross-platform, very easy-to-use visual programming environment, Hummingbird provides a great way to introduce kids to robotics and engineering with construction materials that they are already familiar with.

Read more

The annual CES – Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, is always a great opportunity for trendspotting and innovation hunting in consumer electronics including consumer robotics. CES 2013 will be held January 8-11 and some of the hot topics discussed this year will be mobility and connectivity, the new mantra of consumer electronics, the state of tech retailing in 2013 including show rooming, battling for online supremacy, OEMs going direct, private label. Other topics are cloud computing and the implications for consumer tech and the future of auto technology.

Credit: Suitable Technologies, Beam

Telepresence robots have been identified as a promising consumer application for many years and there is a growing number of start-up companies developing new mobile platforms for video conferencing, tele-traveling and remote control.

Read more

AeroVironment Inc.(NASDAQ: AVAV) the clear leader in the man-portable, hand-launched UAS market, has announced a strategic partnership with Sweden-based CybAero (NASDAQOMXS: CBA) and will invest up to $3 million in CybAero convertible notes. The agreement secures exclusive rights to distribute larger, higher flying, longer endurance vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aircraft system (UAS) in United States, NATO and other countries. The agreement expands AeroVironment family of unmanned aircraft systems capabilities beyond hand-launched category to address market requirements.

United States military customers typically segment the numerous types of unmanned aircraft systems they employ by size, weight, endurance and range into different tiers. Man-portable, hand-launched systems such as AeroVironment’s RQ-11B Raven®, RQ-20A Puma® AE and Wasp® AE that weight less than 20 pounds comprise the Tier I segment. Tier II UAS include heavier, larger and longer endurance systems with longer range, such as CybAero’s VTOL offering. Tiers III and IV include air vehicles of increasing size, capable of even longer endurance and range and requiring larger support teams and infrastructure requirements.

Read more

AndyVision is a robotic inventory system that takes the form of an autonomous robot that can patrol and scan the aisles and shelves of a retail store.
The robot generates a detailed aisle/shelf-level interactive store map that can be displayed on an in-store digital sign for customers to browse the virtual world of the store using gestures or a touchscreen interface.

The project is part of Priya Narasimhan’s work as head of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Embedded Computing at CMU. Check out the demo video below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Maturity of Robotics Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

next post: Increasing modularity & commonality plus decreasing component costs

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/business/fannie-mae-profit-signals-a-stabilizing-housing-market.html
2. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/29/myth-of-decline-u-s-is-stronger-and-faster-than-anywhere-else.html
3. http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57391570-76/robots-still-lack-the-human-touch/
4. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markpmills/2012/03/23/amazons-kiva-robot-acquisition-is-bullish-for-both-amazon-and-american-jobs/
5. http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2012/march/innovation-mountz.html
6. http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2012/march/innovation-mountz.html
7. http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2012/05/heartland_robotics_will_unveil.html