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#436178 Within 10 Years, We’ll Travel by ...

What’s faster than autonomous vehicles and flying cars?

Try Hyperloop, rocket travel, and robotic avatars. Hyperloop is currently working towards 670 mph (1080 kph) passenger pods, capable of zipping us from Los Angeles to downtown Las Vegas in under 30 minutes. Rocket Travel (think SpaceX’s Starship) promises to deliver you almost anywhere on the planet in under an hour. Think New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes.

But wait, it gets even better…

As 5G connectivity, hyper-realistic virtual reality, and next-gen robotics continue their exponential progress, the emergence of “robotic avatars” will all but nullify the concept of distance, replacing human travel with immediate remote telepresence.

Let’s dive in.

Hyperloop One: LA to SF in 35 Minutes
Did you know that Hyperloop was the brainchild of Elon Musk? Just one in a series of transportation innovations from a man determined to leave his mark on the industry.

In 2013, in an attempt to shorten the long commute between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the California state legislature proposed a $68 billion budget allocation for what appeared to be the slowest and most expensive bullet train in history.

Musk was outraged. The cost was too high, the train too sluggish. Teaming up with a group of engineers from Tesla and SpaceX, he published a 58-page concept paper for “The Hyperloop,” a high-speed transportation network that used magnetic levitation to propel passenger pods down vacuum tubes at speeds of up to 670 mph. If successful, it would zip you across California in 35 minutes—just enough time to watch your favorite sitcom.

In January 2013, venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, with Musk’s blessing, started Hyperloop One with myself, Jim Messina (former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for President Obama), and tech entrepreneurs Joe Lonsdale and David Sacks as founding board members. A couple of years after that, the Virgin Group invested in this idea, Richard Branson was elected chairman, and Virgin Hyperloop One was born.

“The Hyperloop exists,” says Josh Giegel, co-founder and chief technology officer of Hyperloop One, “because of the rapid acceleration of power electronics, computational modeling, material sciences, and 3D printing.”

Thanks to these convergences, there are now ten major Hyperloop One projects—in various stages of development—spread across the globe. Chicago to DC in 35 minutes. Pune to Mumbai in 25 minutes. According to Giegel, “Hyperloop is targeting certification in 2023. By 2025, the company plans to have multiple projects under construction and running initial passenger testing.”

So think about this timetable: Autonomous car rollouts by 2020. Hyperloop certification and aerial ridesharing by 2023. By 2025—going on vacation might have a totally different meaning. Going to work most definitely will.

But what’s faster than Hyperloop?

Rocket Travel
As if autonomous vehicles, flying cars, and Hyperloop weren’t enough, in September of 2017, speaking at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, Musk promised that for the price of an economy airline ticket, his rockets will fly you “anywhere on Earth in under an hour.”

Musk wants to use SpaceX’s megarocket, Starship, which was designed to take humans to Mars, for terrestrial passenger delivery. The Starship travels at 17,500 mph. It’s an order of magnitude faster than the supersonic jet Concorde.

Think about what this actually means: New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes. London to Dubai in 29 minutes. Hong Kong to Singapore in 22 minutes.

So how real is the Starship?

“We could probably demonstrate this [technology] in three years,” Musk explained, “but it’s going to take a while to get the safety right. It’s a high bar. Aviation is incredibly safe. You’re safer on an airplane than you are at home.”

That demonstration is proceeding as planned. In September 2017, Musk announced his intentions to retire his current rocket fleet, both the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and replace them with the Starships in the 2020s.

Less than a year later, LA mayor Eric Garcetti tweeted that SpaceX was planning to break ground on an 18-acre rocket production facility near the port of Los Angeles. And April of this year marked an even bigger milestone: the very first test flights of the rocket.

Thus, sometime in the next decade or so, “off to Europe for lunch” may become a standard part of our lexicon.

Avatars
Wait, wait, there’s one more thing.

While the technologies we’ve discussed will decimate the traditional transportation industry, there’s something on the horizon that will disrupt travel itself. What if, to get from A to B, you didn’t have to move your body? What if you could quote Captain Kirk and just say “Beam me up, Scotty”?

Well, shy of the Star Trek transporter, there’s the world of avatars.

An avatar is a second self, typically in one of two forms. The digital version has been around for a couple of decades. It emerged from the video game industry and was popularized by virtual world sites like Second Life and books-turned-blockbusters like Ready Player One.

A VR headset teleports your eyes and ears to another location, while a set of haptic sensors shifts your sense of touch. Suddenly, you’re inside an avatar inside a virtual world. As you move in the real world, your avatar moves in the virtual.

Use this technology to give a lecture and you can do it from the comfort of your living room, skipping the trip to the airport, the cross-country flight, and the ride to the conference center.

Robots are the second form of avatars. Imagine a humanoid robot that you can occupy at will. Maybe, in a city far from home, you’ve rented the bot by the minute—via a different kind of ridesharing company—or maybe you have spare robot avatars located around the country.

Either way, put on VR goggles and a haptic suit, and you can teleport your senses into that robot. This allows you to walk around, shake hands, and take action—all without leaving your home.

And like the rest of the tech we’ve been talking about, even this future isn’t far away.

In 2018, entrepreneur Dr. Harry Kloor recommended to All Nippon Airways (ANA), Japan’s largest airline, the design of an Avatar XPRIZE. ANA then funded this vision to the tune of $10 million to speed the development of robotic avatars. Why? Because ANA knows this is one of the technologies likely to disrupt their own airline industry, and they want to be ready.

ANA recently announced its “newme” robot that humans can use to virtually explore new places. The colorful robots have Roomba-like wheeled bases and cameras mounted around eye-level, which capture surroundings viewable through VR headsets.

If the robot was stationed in your parents’ home, you could cruise around the rooms and chat with your family at any time of day. After revealing the technology at Tokyo’s Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies in October, ANA plans to deploy 1,000 newme robots by 2020.

With virtual avatars like newme, geography, distance, and cost will no longer limit our travel choices. From attractions like the Eiffel Tower or the pyramids of Egypt to unreachable destinations like the moon or deep sea, we will be able to transcend our own physical limits, explore the world and outer space, and access nearly any experience imaginable.

Final Thoughts
Individual car ownership has enjoyed over a century of ascendancy and dominance.

The first real threat it faced—today’s ride-sharing model—only showed up in the last decade. But that ridesharing model won’t even get ten years to dominate. Already, it’s on the brink of autonomous car displacement, which is on the brink of flying car disruption, which is on the brink of Hyperloop and rockets-to-anywhere decimation. Plus, avatars.

The most important part: All of this change will happen over the next ten years. Welcome to a future of human presence where the only constant is rapid change.

Note: This article—an excerpt from my next book The Future Is Faster Than You Think, co-authored with Steven Kotler, to be released January 28th, 2020—originally appeared on my tech blog at diamandis.com. Read the original article here.

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Image Credit: Virgin Hyperloop One Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#436167 Is it Time for Tech to Stop Moving Fast ...

On Monday, I attended the 2019 Fall Conference of Stanford’s Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). That same night I watched the Season 6 opener for the HBO TV show Silicon Valley. And the debates featured in both surrounded the responsibility of tech companies for the societal effects of the technologies they produce. The two events have jumbled together in my mind, perhaps because I was in a bit of a brain fog, thanks to the nasty combination of a head cold and the smoke that descended on Silicon Valley from the northern California wildfires. But perhaps that mixture turned out to be a good thing.

What is clear, in spite of the smoke, is that this issue is something a lot of people are talking about, inside and outside of Silicon Valley (witness the viral video of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) grilling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg).

So, to add to that conversation, here’s my HBO Silicon Valley/Stanford HAI conference mashup.

Silicon Valley’s fictional CEO Richard Hendriks, in the opening scene of the episode, tells Congress that Facebook, Google, and Amazon only care about exploiting personal data for profit. He states:

“These companies are kings, and they rule over kingdoms far larger than any nation in history.”

Meanwhile Marietje Schaake, former member of the European Parliament and a fellow at HAI, told the conference audience of 900:

“There is a lot of power in the hands of few actors—Facebook decides who is a news source, Microsoft will run the defense department’s cloud…. I believe we need a deeper debate about which tasks need to stay in the hands of the public.”

Eric Schmidt, former CEO and executive chairman of Google, agreed. He says:

“It is important that we debate now the ethics of what we are doing, and the impact of the technology that we are building.”

Stanford Associate Professor Ge Wang, also speaking at the HAI conference, pointed out:

“‘Doing no harm’ is a vital goal, and it is not easy. But it is different from a proactive goal, to ‘do good.’”

Had Silicon Valley’s Hendricks been there, he would have agreed. He said in the episode:

“Just because it’s successful, doesn’t mean it’s good. Hiroshima was a successful implementation.”

The speakers at the HAI conference discussed the implications of moving fast and breaking things, of putting untested and unregulated technology into the world now that we know that things like public trust and even democracy can be broken.

Google’s Schmidt told the HAI audience:

“I don’t think that everything that is possible should be put into the wild in society, we should answer the question, collectively, how much risk are we willing to take.

And Silicon Valley denizens real and fictional no longer think it’s OK to just say sorry afterwards. Says Schmidt:

“When you ask Facebook about various scandals, how can they still say ‘We are very sorry; we have a lot of learning to do.’ This kind of naiveté stands out of proportion to the power tech companies have. With great power should come great responsibility, or at least modesty.”

Schaake argued:

“We need more guarantees, institutions, and policies than stated good intentions. It’s about more than promises.”

Fictional CEO Hendricks thinks saying sorry is a cop-out as well. In the episode, a developer admits that his app collected user data in spite of Hendricks assuring Congress that his company doesn’t do that:

“You didn’t know at the time,” the developer says. “Don’t beat yourself up about it. But in the future, stop saying it. Or don’t; I don’t care. Maybe it will be like Google saying ‘Don’t be evil,’ or Facebook saying ‘I’m sorry, we’ll do better.’”

Hendricks doesn’t buy it:

“This stops now. I’m the boss, and this is over.”

(Well, he is fictional.)

How can government, the tech world, and the general public address this in a more comprehensive way? Out in the real world, the “what to do” discussion at Stanford HAI surrounded regulation—how much, what kind, and when.

Says the European Parliament’s Schaake:

“An often-heard argument is that government should refrain from regulating tech because [regulation] will stifle innovation. [That argument] implies that innovation is more important than democracy or the rule of law. Our problems don’t stem from over regulation, but under regulation of technologies.”

But when should that regulation happen. Stanford provost emeritus John Etchemendy, speaking from the audience at the HAI conference, said:

“I’ve been an advocate of not trying to regulate before you understand it. Like San Francisco banning of use of facial recognition is not a good example of regulation; there are uses of facial recognition that we should allow. We want regulations that are just right, that prevent the bad things and allow the good things. So we are going to get it wrong either way, if we regulate to soon or hold off, we will get some things wrong.”

Schaake would opt for regulating sooner rather than later. She says that she often hears the argument that it is too early to regulate artificial intelligence—as well as the argument that it is too late to regulate ad-based political advertising, or online privacy. Neither, to her, makes sense. She told the HAI attendees:

“We need more than guarantees than stated good intentions.”

U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios would go with later rather than sooner. (And, yes, the country has a CTO. President Barack Obama created the position in 2009; Kratsios is the fourth to hold the office and the first under President Donald Trump. He was confirmed in August.) Also speaking at the HAI conference, Kratsios argued:

“I don’t think we should be running to regulate anything. We are a leader [in technology] not because we had great regulations, but we have taken a free market approach. We have done great in driving innovation in technologies that are born free, like the Internet. Technologies born in captivity, like autonomous vehicles, lag behind.”

In the fictional world of HBO’s Silicon Valley, startup founder Hendricks has a solution—a technical one of course: the decentralized Internet. He tells Congress:

“The way we win is by creating a new, decentralized Internet, one where the behavior of companies like this will be impossible, forever. Where it is the users, not the kings, who have sovereign control over their data. I will help you build an Internet that is of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

(This is not a fictional concept, though it is a long way from wide use. Also called the decentralized Web, the concept takes the content on today’s Web and fragments it, and then replicates and scatters those fragments to hosts around the world, increasing privacy and reducing the ability of governments to restrict access.)

If neither regulation nor technology comes to make the world safe from the unforeseen effects of new technologies, there is one more hope, according to Schaake: the millennials and subsequent generations.

Tech companies can no longer pursue growth at all costs, not if they want to keep attracting the talent they need, says Schaake. She noted that, “the young generation looks at the environment, at homeless on the streets,” and they expect their companies to tackle those and other issues and make the world a better place. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#436165 Video Friday: DJI’s Mavic Mini Is ...

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

IROS 2019 – November 4-8, 2019 – Macau
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

DJI’s new Mavic Mini looks like a pretty great drone for US $400 ($500 for a combo with more accessories): It’s tiny, flies for 30 minutes, and will do what you need as far as pictures and video (although not a whole lot more).

DJI seems to have put a bunch of effort into making the drone 249 grams, 1 gram under what’s required for FAA registration. That means you save $5 and a few minutes of your time, but that does not mean you don’t have to follow the FAA’s rules and regulations governing drone use.

[ DJI ]

Don’t panic, but Clearpath and HEBI Robotics have armed the Jackal:

After locking eyes across a crowded room at ICRA 2019, Clearpath Robotics and HEBI Robotics basked in that warm and fuzzy feeling that comes with starting a new and exciting relationship. Over a conference hall coffee, they learned that the two companies have many overlapping interests. The most compelling was the realization that customers across a variety of industries are hunting for an elusive true love of their own – a robust but compact robotic platform combined with a long reach manipulator for remote inspection tasks.

After ICRA concluded, Arron Griffiths, Application Engineer at Clearpath, and Matthew Tesch, Software Engineer at HEBI, kept in touch and decided there had been enough magic in the air to warrant further exploration. A couple of months later, Matthew arrived at Clearpath to formally introduce the HEBI’s X-Series Arm to Clearpath’s Jackal UGV. It was love.

[ Clearpath ]

Thanks Dave!

I’m really not a fan of the people-carrying drones, but heavy lift cargo drones seem like a more okay idea.

Volocopter, the pioneer in Urban Air Mobility, presented the demonstrator of its VoloDrone. This marks Volocopters expansion into the logistics, agriculture, infrastructure and public services industry. The VoloDrone is an unmanned, fully electric, heavy-lift utility drone capable of carrying a payload of 200 kg (440 lbs) up to 40 km (25 miles). With a standardized payload attachment, VoloDrone can serve a great variety of purposes from transporting boxes, to liquids, to equipment and beyond. It can be remotely piloted or flown in automated mode on pre-set routes.

[ Volocopter ]

JAY is a mobile service robot that projects a display on the floor and plays sound with its speaker. By playing sounds and videos, it provides visual and audio entertainment in various places such as exhibition halls, airports, hotels, department stores and more.

[ Rainbow Robotics ]

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge Virtual Tunnel Circuit concluded this week—it was the same idea as the physical challenge that took place in August, just with a lot less IRL dirt.

The awards ceremony and team presentations are in this next video, and we’ll have more on this once we get back from IROS.

[ DARPA SubT ]

NASA is sending a mobile robot to the south pole of the Moon to get a close-up view of the location and concentration of water ice in the region and for the first time ever, actually sample the water ice at the same pole where the first woman and next man will land in 2024 under the Artemis program.

About the size of a golf cart, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, will roam several miles, using its four science instruments — including a 1-meter drill — to sample various soil environments. Planned for delivery in December 2022, VIPER will collect about 100 days of data that will be used to inform development of the first global water resource maps of the Moon.

[ NASA ]

Happy Halloween from HEBI Robotics!

[ HEBI ]

Happy Halloween from Soft Robotics!

[ Soft Robotics ]

Halloween must be really, really confusing for autonomous cars.

[ Waymo ]

Once a year at Halloween, hardworking JPL engineers put their skills to the test in a highly competitive pumpkin carving contest. The result: A pumpkin gently landed on the Moon, its retrorockets smoldering, while across the room a Nemo-inspired pumpkin explored the sub-surface ocean of Jupiter moon Europa. Suffice to say that when the scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory compete in a pumpkin-carving contest, the solar system’s the limit. Take a look at some of the masterpieces from 2019.

Now in its ninth year, the contest gives teams only one hour to carve and decorate their pumpkin though they can prepare non-pumpkin materials – like backgrounds, sound effects and motorized parts – ahead of time.

[ JPL ]

The online autonomous navigation and semantic mapping experiment presented [below] is conducted with the Cassie Blue bipedal robot at the University of Michigan. The sensors attached to the robot include an IMU, a 32-beam LiDAR and an RGB-D camera. The whole online process runs in real-time on a Jetson Xavier and a laptop with an i7 processor.

[ BPL ]

Misty II is now available to anyone who wants one, and she’s on sale for a mere $2900.

[ Misty ]

We leveraged LIDAR-based slam, in conjunction with our specialized relative localization sensor UVDAR to perform a de-centralized, communication-free swarm flight without the units knowing their absolute locations. The swarming and obstacle avoidance control is based on a modified Boids-like algorithm, while the whole swarm is controlled by directing a selected leader unit.

[ MRS ]

The MallARD robot is an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV), designed for the monitoring and inspection of wet storage facilities for example spent fuel pools or wet silos. The MallARD is holonomic, uses a LiDAR for localisation and features a robust trajectory tracking controller.

The University of Manchester’s researcher Dr Keir Groves designed and built the autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) for the challenge which came in the top three of the second round in Nov 2017. The MallARD went on to compete in a final 3rd round where it was deployed in a spent fuel pond at a nuclear power plant in Finland by the IAEA, along with two other entries. The MallARD came second overall, in November 2018.

[ RNE ]

Thanks Jennifer!

I sometimes get the sense that in the robotic grasping and manipulation world, suction cups are kinda seen as cheating at times. But, their nature allows you to do some pretty interesting things.

More clever octopus footage please.

[ CMU ]

A Personal, At-Home Teacher For Playful Learning: From academic topics to child-friendly news bulletins, fun facts and more, Miko 2 is packed with relevant and freshly updated content specially designed by educationists and child-specialists. Your little one won’t even realize they’re learning.

As we point out pretty much every time we post a video like this, keep in mind that you’re seeing a heavily edited version of a hypothetical best case scenario for how this robot can function. And things like “creating a relationship that they can then learn how to form with their peers” is almost certainly overselling things. But at $300 (shipping included), this may be a decent robot as long as your expectations are appropriately calibrated.

[ Miko ]

ICRA 2018 plenary talk by Rodney Brooks: “Robots and People: the Research Challenge.”

[ IEEE RAS ]

ICRA-X 2018 talk by Ron Arkin: “Lethal Autonomous Robots and the Plight of the Noncombatant.”

[ IEEE RAS ]

On the most recent episode of the AI Podcast, Lex Fridman interviews Garry Kasparov.

[ AI Podcast ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#436149 Blue Frog Robotics Answers (Some of) Our ...

In September of 2015, Buddy the social home robot closed its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign more than 600 percent over its funding goal. A thousand people pledged for a robot originally scheduled to be delivered in December of 2016. But nearly three years later, the future of Buddy is still unclear. Last May, Blue Frog Robotics asked for forgiveness from its backers and announced the launch of an “equity crowdfunding campaign” to try to raise the additional funding necessary to deliver the robot in April of 2020.

By the time the crowdfunding campaign launched in August, the delivery date had slipped again, to September 2020, even as Blue Frog attempted to draw investors by estimating that sales of Buddy would “increase from 2000 robots in 2020 to 20,000 in 2023.” Blue Frog’s most recent communication with backers, in September, mentions a new CTO and a North American office, but does little to reassure backers of Buddy that they’ll ever be receiving their robot.

Backers of the robot are understandably concerned about the future of Buddy, so we sent a series of questions to the founder and CEO of Blue Frog Robotics, Rodolphe Hasselvander.

We’ve edited this interview slightly for clarity, but we should also note that Hasselvander was unable to provide answers to every question. In particular, we asked for some basic information about Blue Frog’s near-term financial plans, on which the entire future of Buddy seems to depend. We’ve left those questions in the interview anyway, along with Hasselvander’s response.

1. At this point, how much additional funding is necessary to deliver Buddy to backers?
2. Assuming funding is successful, when can backers expect to receive Buddy?
3. What happens if the fundraising goal is not met?
4. You estimate that sales of Buddy will increase 10x over three years. What is this estimate based on?

Rodolphe Hasselvander: Regarding the questions 1-4, unfortunately, as we are fundraising in a Regulation D, we do not comment on prospect, customer data, sales forecasts, or figures. Please refer to our press release here to have information about the fundraising.

5. Do you feel that you are currently being transparent enough about this process to satisfy backers?
6. Buddy’s launch date has moved from April 2020 to September 2020 over the last four months. Why should backers remain confident about Buddy’s schedule?

Since the last newsletter, we haven’t changed our communication, the backers will be the first to receive their Buddy, and we plan an official launch in September 2020.

7. What is the goal of My Buddy World?

At Blue Frog, we think that matching a great product with a big market can only happen through continual experimentation, iteration and incorporation of customer feedback. That’s why we created the forum My Buddy World. It has been designed for our Buddy Community to join us, discuss the world’s first emotional robot, and create with us. The objective is to deepen our conversation with Buddy’s fans and users, stay agile in testing our hypothesis and validate our product-market fit. We trust the value of collaboration. Behind Buddy, there is a team of roboticists, engineers, and programmers that are eager to know more about our consumers’ needs and are excited to work with them to create the perfect human/robot experience.

8. How is the current version of Buddy different from the 2015 version that backers pledged for during the successful crowdfunding campaign, in both hardware and software?

We have completely revised some parts of Buddy as well as replaced and/or added more accurate and reliable components to ensure we fully satisfy our customers’ requirements for a mature and high-quality robot from day one. We sourced more innovative components to make sure that Buddy has the most up-to-date technologies such as adding four microphones, a high def thermal matrix, a 3D camera, an 8-megapixel RGB camera, time-of-flight sensors, and touch sensors.
If you want more info, we just posted an article about what is Buddy here.

9. Will the version of Buddy that ships to backers in 2020 do everything that that was shown in the original crowdfunding video?

Concerning the capabilities of Buddy regarding the video published on YouTube, I confirm that Buddy will be able to do everything you can see, like patrol autonomously and secure your home, telepresence, mathematics applications, interactive stories for children, IoT/smart home management, face recognition, alarm clock, reminder, message/photo sharing, music, hands free call, people following, games like hide and seek (and more). In addition, everyone will be able to create their own apps thanks to the “BuddyLab” application.

10. What makes you confident that Buddy will be successful when Jibo, Kuri, and other social robots have not?

Consumer robotics is a new market. Some people think it is a tough one. But we, at Blue Frog Robotics, believe it is a path of learning, understanding, and finding new ways to serve consumers. Here are the five key factors that will make Buddy successful.

1) A market-fit robot

Blue Frog Robotics is a consumer-centric company. We know that a successful business model and a compelling fit to market Buddy must come up from solving consumers’ frustrations and problems in a way that’s new and exciting. We started from there.

By leveraged existing research and syndicated consumer data sets to understand our customers’ needs and aspirations, we get that creating a robot is not about the best tech innovation and features, but always about how well technology becomes a service to one’s basic human needs and assets: convenience, connection, security, fun, self-improvement, and time. To answer to these consumers’ needs and wants, we designed an all-in-one robot with four vital capabilities: intelligence, emotionality, mobility, and customization.

With his multi-purpose brain, he addresses a broad range of needs in modern-day life, from securing homes to carrying out his owners’ daily activities, from helping people with disabilities to educating children, from entertaining to just becoming a robot friend.

Buddy is a disruptive innovative robot that is about to transform the way we live, learn, utilize information, play, and even care about our health.
2) Endless possibilities

One of the major advantages of Buddy is his adaptability. Beyond to be adorable, playful, talkative, and to accompany anyone in their daily life at home whether you are comfortable with technology or not, he offers via his platform applications to engage his owners in a wide range of activities. From fitness to cooking, from health monitoring to education, from games to meditation, the combination of intelligence, sensors, mobility, multi-touch panel opens endless possibilities for consumers and organizations to adapt their Buddy to their own needs.
3) An affordable price

Buddy will be the first robot combining smart, social, and mobile capabilities and a developed platform with a personality to enter the U.S. market at affordable price.

Our competitors are social or assistant robots but rarely both. Competitors differentiate themselves by features: mobile, non-mobile; by shapes: humanoid or not; by skills: social versus smart; targeting a specific domain like entertainment, retail assistant, eldercare, or education for children; and by price. Regarding our six competitors: Moorebot, Elli-Q, and Olly are not mobile; Lynx and Nao are in toy category; Pepper is above $10k targeting B2B market; and finally, Temi can’t be considered an emotional robot.
Buddy remains highly differentiated as an all-in-one, best of his class experience, covering the needs for social interactions and assistance of his owners at each stage of their life at an affordable price.

The price range of Buddy will be between US $1700 and $2000.

4) A winning business model

Buddy’s great business model combines hardware, software, and services, and provides game-changing convenience for consumers, organizations, and developers.

Buddy offers a multi-sided value proposition focused on three vertical markets: direct consumers, corporations (healthcare, education, hospitality), and developers. The model creates engagement and sustained usage and produces stable and diverse cash flow.
5) A Passion for people and technology

From day one, we have always believed in the power of our dream: To bring the services and the fun of an emotional robot in every house, every hospital, in every care house. Each day, we refuse to think that we are stuck or limited; we work hard to make Buddy a reality that will help people all over the world and make them smile.

While we certainly appreciate Hasselvander’s consistent optimism and obvious enthusiasm, we’re obligated to point out that some of our most important questions were not directly answered. We haven’t learned anything that makes us all that much more confident that Blue Frog will be able to successfully deliver Buddy this time. Hasselvander also didn’t address our specific question about whether he feels like Blue Frog’s communication strategy with backers has been adequate, which is particularly relevant considering that over the four months between the last two newsletters, Buddy’s launch date slipped by six months.

At this point, all we can do is hope that the strategy Blue Frog has chosen will be successful. We’ll let you know if as soon as we learn more.

[ Buddy ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#436140 Let’s Build Robots That Are as Smart ...

Illustration: Nicholas Little

Let’s face it: Robots are dumb. At best they are idiot savants, capable of doing one thing really well. In general, even those robots require specialized environments in which to do their one thing really well. This is why autonomous cars or robots for home health care are so difficult to build. They’ll need to react to an uncountable number of situations, and they’ll need a generalized understanding of the world in order to navigate them all.

Babies as young as two months already understand that an unsupported object will fall, while five-month-old babies know materials like sand and water will pour from a container rather than plop out as a single chunk. Robots lack these understandings, which hinders them as they try to navigate the world without a prescribed task and movement.

But we could see robots with a generalized understanding of the world (and the processing power required to wield it) thanks to the video-game industry. Researchers are bringing physics engines—the software that provides real-time physical interactions in complex video-game worlds—to robotics. The goal is to develop robots’ understanding in order to learn about the world in the same way babies do.

Giving robots a baby’s sense of physics helps them navigate the real world and can even save on computing power, according to Lochlainn Wilson, the CEO of SE4, a Japanese company building robots that could operate on Mars. SE4 plans to avoid the problems of latency caused by distance from Earth to Mars by building robots that can operate independently for a few hours before receiving more instructions from Earth.

Wilson says that his company uses simple physics engines such as PhysX to help build more-independent robots. He adds that if you can tie a physics engine to a coprocessor on the robot, the real-time basic physics intuitions won’t take compute cycles away from the robot’s primary processor, which will often be focused on a more complicated task.

Wilson’s firm occasionally still turns to a traditional graphics engine, such as Unity or the Unreal Engine, to handle the demands of a robot’s movement. In certain cases, however, such as a robot accounting for friction or understanding force, you really need a robust physics engine, Wilson says, not a graphics engine that simply simulates a virtual environment. For his projects, he often turns to the open-source Bullet Physics engine built by Erwin Coumans, who is now an employee at Google.

Bullet is a popular physics-engine option, but it isn’t the only one out there. Nvidia Corp., for example, has realized that its gaming and physics engines are well-placed to handle the computing demands required by robots. In a lab in Seattle, Nvidia is working with teams from the University of Washington to build kitchen robots, fully articulated robot hands and more, all equipped with Nvidia’s tech.

When I visited the lab, I watched a robot arm move boxes of food from counters to cabinets. That’s fairly straightforward, but that same robot arm could avoid my body if I got in its way, and it could adapt if I moved a box of food or dropped it onto the floor.

The robot could also understand that less pressure is needed to grasp something like a cardboard box of Cheez-It crackers versus something more durable like an aluminum can of tomato soup.

Nvidia’s silicon has already helped advance the fields of artificial intelligence and computer vision by making it possible to process multiple decisions in parallel. It’s possible that the company’s new focus on virtual worlds will help advance the field of robotics and teach robots to think like babies.

This article appears in the November 2019 print issue as “Robots as Smart as Babies.” Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots