All posts by Oliver Mitchell

I recently chaired a UJA Tech Talk on “The Future Of Autonomous Cars” with former General Motors Vice-Chairman Steve Girsky. The auto executive enthusiastically shared his vision for the next 15-25 years of driving – a congestion-free world of automated wheeled capsules zipping commuters to and from work.

Girsky stated that connected cars with safety assist (autonomy-lite) features are moving much faster toward mass adoption than fully autonomous vehicles (sans steering wheels and pedals). In his opinion, the largest roadblocks toward a consumer-ready robocar are the current technical inefficiencies of prototypes on the road today, which burn huge amounts of energy supporting enhanced computing and arrays of sensors. This makes the sticker price closer to a 1972 Ferrari than a 2018 Prius.

As main street adoption relies heavily on converting combustion engines to electric at accessible pricing, Girsky’s sentiment was shared by many CES 2018 participants. NVIDIA, the leading chip manufacturer for autonomous vehicles, unveiled its latest technology, Xavier, with auto industry partner Volkswagen in Las Vegas. Xavier promises to be 15 times more energy-efficient than previous chip generations delivering 30 trillion operations per second by wielding only 30 watts of power.

After the Xavier CES demonstration, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess exclaimed, “Autonomous driving, zero-emission mobility, and digital networking are virtually impossible without advances in AI and deep learning. Working with NVIDIA, the leader in AI technology, enables us to take a big step into the future.”

NVIDIA is becoming the industry standard as Volkswagen joins more than 320 companies and organizations working with the chip manufacturer on autonomous vehicles. While NVIDIA is leading the pack, Intel and Qualcomm are not far behind with their low-power solutions. Electric vehicle powerhouse Tesla is developing its own internal chip for the next generation of Autopilot. While these new chips represents a positive evolution in processors, there is still much work to be done as current self-driving prototypes require close to 2,500 watts per second.

Power Consumption a Tradeoff for Self-Driving Cars

The power-consumption problem was highlighted recently with a report published by the the University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems. Its lead author, Greg Keoleian, questions whether the current autonomous car models will slow the overall adoption towards electric vehicles. Keoleian’s team simulated a number of self-driving Ford Fusion models with different-sized computer configurations and engine designs. In sharing his findings, Keoleian said, “We knew there was going to be a tradeoff in terms of the energy and greenhouse gas emissions associated with the equipment and the benefits gained from operational efficiency. I was surprised that it was so significant.”

Keoleian’s conclusions challenged the premise of self-driving cars accelerating the adoption of renewal energy. For years, the advocates of autonomous vehicles have claimed that smart driving will lead to a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions through the platooning of vehicles on highways and intersections; the decrease of aerodynamic drag on freeways, and the overall reduction in urban congestion.

Analysis: How California’s Self-Driving Cars Performed in 2017

However, the University of Michigan tests only showed a “six to nine percent net energy reduction” over the vehicle’s lifecycle when running on autonomy mode. This went down by five percent when using a large Waymo rooftop sensor package (shown below) as it increased the aerodynamic drag. The report also stated that the greatest net efficiencies were in cars with gas drivetrains that benefit the most from smart driving. Waymo currently uses a hybrid Chrysler Pacifica to run its complex fusion of sensors and processing units.

Keoleian told IEEE Spectrum that his modeling actually “overstates real impacts from future autonomous vehicles.” While he anticipates the reduction of computing and sensor drag, he is concerned that the impact of 5G communications has not been fully explored. The increased bandwidth will lead to greater data streams and boost power consumption for inboard systems and processors. In addition, he thinks that self-driving systems will lead to greater distances traveled as commuters move further away from city centers with the advent of easier commutes. Keoleian explains, “There could be a rebound effect. They could induce travel, adding to congestion and fuel use.” Koeleian points to a confusing conclusion by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory that presents two possible outcomes of full autonomy:

1. A reduction in greenhouse emissions by sixty percent with greater ride sharing options
2. An increase of two hundred percent with increased driving distances

According to Wilko Stark, Mercedes-Benz’s Vice President of Strategy, it only makes sense for autonomous vehicles to be electric as the increased power requirements will go to the computers instead of the motors. “To put such a system into a combustion-engined car doesn’t make any sense, because the fuel consumption will go up tremendously,” explains Stark.

Analysis: Fleet Expansion Shows Waymo Lapping Self-Driving Competition

Girsky shares Stark’s view, as he predicted that the first large scale use cases for autonomy will be fleets of souped-up golf carts running low speed pre-planned shuttle routes. Also on view at CES were complimentary autonomous shared taxi rides around Las Vegas, courtesy of French startup Navya. Today, Navya boasts of 60 operating shuttles in more than 10 cities, including around the University of Michigan.

Fully autonomous cars might not be far behind, as Waymo has seen a ninety percent drop in component costs by bringing its sensor development in-house. The autonomous powerhouse recently passed the four million mile marker on public roads and is planning on ditching its safety driver later this year in its Phoenix, Arizona test program. According Dmitri Dolgov, Vice President of Waymo’s Engineering, “Sensors on our new generation of vehicles can see farther, sharper, and more accurately than anything available on the market. Instead of taking components that might have been designed for another application, we engineered everything from the ground up, specifically for the task of Level 4 autonomy.”

With increased roadside fatalities and rising CO2 emissions, the world can’t wait too much longer for affordable, energy-efficient autonomous transportation. Girsky and others remind us there is still a long road ahead, while the industry experts estimate that the current gas-burning Waymo Chrysler Pacifica cruising around Arizona costs more than one hundred times the sticker price of the minivan. I guess until then there is always Citibike.

It’s called the “grain,” a small IoT device implanted into the back of people’s skulls to record their memories. Human experiences are simply played back on “redo mode” using a smart button remote. The technology promises to reduce crime, terrorism and simplify human relationships with greater transparency. While this is a description of Netflix’s Black Mirror episode, “The Entire History of You,” in reality the concept is not as far-fetched as it may seem. This week life came closer to imitating art with the $19 million grant by the US Department of Defense to a group of six universities to begin work on “neurograins.”

In the past, Brian Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have utilized wearable technologies, such as headbands and helmets, to control robots, machines and various household appliances for people with severe disabilities. This new DARPA grant is focused on developing a “cortical intranet” for uplinks and downlinks directly to the cerebral cortex, potentially taking mind control to the next level. According to lead researcher Arto Nurmikko of Brown University, “What we’re developing is essentially a micro-scale wireless network in the brain enabling us to communicate directly with neurons on a scale that hasn’t previously been possible.”

Nurmikko boasts of the numerous medicinal outcomes of the research, “The understanding of the brain we can get from such a system will hopefully lead to new therapeutic strategies involving neural stimulation of the brain, which we can implement with this new neurotechnology.” The technology being developed by Nurmikko’s international team will eventually create a wireless neural communication platform that will be able to record and stimulate brian activity at an unprecedented level of detail and precision. This will be accomplished by implanting a mesh network of tens of thousands of granular micro-devices into a person’s cranium. The surgeons will place this layer of neurograins around the cerebral cortex that will be controlled by a nearby electronic patch just below a person’s skin.

In describing how it will work, Nurmikko explains, “We aim to be able to read out from the brain how it processes, for example, the difference between touching a smooth, soft surface and a rough, hard one and then apply microscale electrical stimulation directly to the brain to create proxies of such sensation. Similarly, we aim to advance our understanding of how the brain processes and makes sense of the many complex sounds we listen to every day, which guide our vocal communication in a conversation and stimulate the brain to directly experience such sounds.”

Nurmikko further describes, “We need to make the neurograins small enough to be minimally invasive but with extraordinary technical sophistication, which will require state-of-the-art microscale semiconductor technology. Additionally, we have the challenge of developing the wireless external hub that can process the signals generated by large populations of spatially distributed neurograins at the same time.”

While current BCIs are able to process the activity of 100 neurons at once, Nurmikko’s  objective is to work at a level of 100,000 simultaneous inputs. “When you increase the number of neurons tenfold, you increase the amount of data you need to manage by much more than that because the brain operates through nested and interconnected circuits,” Nurmikko remarks. “So this becomes an enormous big data problem for which we’ll need to develop new computational neuroscience tools.” The researchers plan to first test their theory in the sensory and auditory functions of mammals.

Brain-Computer Interfaces is one of the fastest growing areas of healthcare technologies; while today it is valued at just under a billion dollars, it is forecasted to grow to $2 billion in the next five years. According to the report, the uptick in the market will be driven by an estimated increase in treating aging, fatal diseases and people with disabilities. The funder of Nurmikko’s project is DARPA’s Neural Engineering System Design program, which was formed to treat injured military personnel by “creating novel hardware and algorithms to understand how various forms of neural sensing and actuation might improve restorative therapeutic outcomes.” While DARPA’s project will provide numerous discoveries that will improve the quality of life for society’s most vulnerable, it also opens a Pandora’s box of ethical issues with the prospect of the US military potentially funding armies of cyborgs.

In response to rising ethical concerns, last month ethicists from the University of Basel in Switzerland drafted a new biosecurity framework for research in neurotechnology. The biggest concern expressed in the report was the implementation of “dual-use” technologies that have both military and medical benefits. The ethicists called for a complete ban on such innovations and strongly recommended fast tracking regulations to protect “the mental privacy and integrity of humans,”

The ethicists raise important questions about taking grant money from groups like DARPA, as “This military research has raised concern about the risks associated with the weaponization of neurotechnology, sparking a debate about controversial questions: Is it legitimate to conduct military research on brain technology? And how should policy-makers regulate dual-use neurotechnology?” The suggested framework reads like a science fiction novel, “This has resulted in a rapid growth in brain technology prototypes aimed at modulating the emotions, cognition, and behavior of soldiers. These include neurotechnological applications for deception detection and interrogation as well as brain-computer interfaces for military purposes.” However, one is reminded of the fact that the development of BCIs is moving more quickly than public policy is able to debate its merits.

The framework’s lead author Marcello Ienca of Basel’s Institute for Biomedical Ethics understands the tremendous positive benefits of BCIs for a global aging population, especially for people suffering from Alzheimer’s and spinal cord injuries. In fact, the Swiss team calls for increased private investment of these neurotechnologies, not an outright prohibition. At the same time, Ienca stresses that in order to protect against misuse, such as brain manipulation by nefarious global actors, it is critical to raise awareness and debate surrounding the ethical issues of implanting neurograins into populations of humans. In an interview with the Guardian last year, Ienca summed up his concern very succinctly by saying, “The information in our brains should be entitled to special protections in this era of ever-evolving technology. When that goes, everything goes.”

In the spirit of open debate our next RobotLab forum will be on “The Future of Robotic Medicine” with Dr. Joel Stein of Columbia University and Kate Merton of JLabs on March 6th @ 6pm in New York City, RSVP. 

I recently led a group of 20 American tech investors to Israel in conjunction with the UJA and Israel’s Ministry of Economy and Industry. We witnessed firsthand the innovation that has produced more than $22 billion of investments and acquisitions within the past year. We met with the University that produced Mobileye, with the investor that believed in its founder, and the network of every multinational company supporting the startup ecosystem. Mechatronics is blooming in the desert from the CyberTech Convention in Tel Aviv to the robotic labs at Capsula to the latest in autonomous driving inventions in the hills of Jerusalem.

Sitting in a suspended conference room that floats three stories above the ground enclosed within the “greenest building in the Middle East,” I had the good fortune to meet Torr Polakow of Curiosity Lab. Torr is the PhD student of famed roboticist Dr. Goren Gordon. Gordon’s research tests the boundaries of human-robot social interactions. At the 2014 World Science Fair in New York City, Gordon partnered with MIT professor, and Jibo founder, Dr. Cynthia Breazeal to prove it is possible to teach machines to be curious. The experiment was conducted by embedding into Breazeal’s DragonBot (below) a reinforcement learning algorithm that enabled the robot to acquire its own successful behaviors to engage humans. The scientists programmed within the robot nine non-verbal expressions and a reward system that was activated based upon its ability to engage crowds. The greater the number of faces staring back at the robot the bigger the reward. After two hours it successfully learned that by deploying its”sad face” with big eyes, that evokes Puss-in-Boots from the movie Shrek, it captured the most sustained attention from the audience. The work of Gordon and Breazeal opened up the field of social robots and the ability to teach computers human empathy, which will eventually be deployed in fleets of mechanical caregivers for our aging society. Gordon is now working tirelessly to create a mathematical model of “Hierarchical Curiosity Loops (HCL)” for “curiosity-driven behavior” to “increase our understanding of the brain mechanisms behind it.”

Traveling east, we met with Yissum the tech transfer arm of Hebrew University, the birth place of the cherry tomato and Mobileye. The history of the automative startup that became the largest Israeli Initial Public Offering, and later a $15.3 billion acquisition by Intel, is a great example of how today’s Israeli innovations are evolving more quickly into larger enterprises than at anytime in history. Mobileye was founded in 1999 by Professor Amnon Shashua, a leader in computer vision and machine learning software. Dr. Shashua realized early on that his technology had wider applications for industries outside of Israel, particularly automative. Supported by his University, Mobileye’s first product, EyeQ chip, was piloted by Tier 1 powerhouse Denso within years of inception. While it took Mobileye 18 years to achieve full liquidity, Israeli cybersecurity startup, Argus, was sold last month to Elektrobit for a rumored $400 million within just four years from its founding. Shashua’s latest computer vision startup, OrCam, is focusing on giving sight to people with impaired vision.

In addition to Shahua’s successful portfolio of startups, computer vision innovator Professor Shmuel Peleg is probably most famous for catching the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombers using his imaging-tracking software. Dr. Peleg’s company, BriefCam, tracks anomalies in multiple video feeds at once, layering simultaneous events on top of one another. This technique autonomously isolated the Boston bombers by programing in known aspects of their appearance into the system (e.g., men with backpacks), and then isolating the suspects by their behavior. For example, as everyone was watching the marathon minutes before the explosion, the video captured the Tsarnaev brothers leaving the scene after dropping their backpacks on the street. BriefCam’s platform made it possible for the FBI to capture the perpetrators within 101 hours of the event, versus manually sifting through the more than 13,000 videos and 120,000 photographs taken by stationary and cell phone cameras.

This past New Year’s Eve, BriefCam was deployed by the New York City to secure the area around Times Square. In a joint statement by the FBI, NYPD, Department of Homeland Security and the New York Port Authority the authorities exclaimed that they plan to deploy BriefCam’s Video Synopsis across all their video cameras as they “remain concerned about international terrorists and domestic extremists potentially targeting” the celebration. According to Peleg, “You can take the entire night and instead of watching 10 hours you can watch ten minutes. You can detect these people and check what they are planning.”

BriefCam is just one of thousands of new innovations entering the SmartCity landscape from Israel. In the past three years, 400 new smart mobility startups have opened shop in Israel accumulating over $4 billion in investment. During that time, General Motor’s Israeli research & development office went from a few engineers to more than 200 leading computer scientists and roboticists. In fact, Tel Aviv now is a global hub of innovation of every major car manufacturer and automobile supplier, encircling many new accelerators and international consortiums, from the Drive Accelerator to Ecomotion, which seem to be opening up faster than Starbucks in the United States. 

As the auto industry goes through its biggest revolution in 100 years, the entire world’s attention is now centered on this small country known for ground-breaking innovation. In the words of Israel’s Innovation Authority, “​The acquisition of Mobileye by Intel this past March for $15.3 billion, one of the largest transactions in the field of auto-tech in 2017, has focused the attention of global corporations and investors on the tremendous potential of combining Israeli technological excellence with the autonomous vehicle revolution.” 

The Financial Times reported earlier this year that one of the largest clothing manufacturers, Hong Kong-based Crystal Group, proclaimed robotics could not compete with the cost and quality of manual labor. Crystal’s Chief Executive, Andrew Lo, emphatically declared, “The handling of soft materials is really hard for robots.” Lo did leave the door open for future consideration by acknowledging such budding technologies as “interesting.”

One company mentioned by Lo was Georgia Tech spinout, Softwear Automation. Softwear made news last summer by announcing its contract with an Arkansas apparel factory to update 21 production lines with its Sewbot automated sewing machines. The factory is owned by Chinese manufacturer Tianyuan Garments, which produces over 20 million T-shirts a year for Adidas. The Chairman of Tianyuan, Tang Xinhong, boasted about his new investment, saying “Around the world, even the cheapest labor market can’t compete with us,” when Sewbot brings down the costs to $0.33 a shirt.

The challenge for automating cut & sew operations to date has been the handling of textiles which come in a seemingly infinite number of varieties that stretch, skew, flop and move with great fluidity. To solve this problem, Softwear uses computer vision to track each individual thread. According to its issued patents, Softwear developed a specialized camera which captures  threads at 1,000 frames per second and tracks their movements using proprietary algorithms. Softwear embedded this camera around robot end effectors that manipulate the fabrics similar to human fingers. According to a description on IEEE Spectrum these “micromanipulators, powered by precise linear actuators, can guide a piece of cloth through a sewing machine with submillimeter precision, correcting for distortions of the material.” To further ensure the highest level of quality, Sewbot uses a four-axis robotic arm with a vacuum gripper that picks and places the textiles on a sewing table with a 360-degree conveyor system and spherical rollers to quickly move the fabric panels around.

Softwear’s CEO, Palaniswamy “Raj” Rajan, explained, “Our vision is that we should be able to manufacture clothing anywhere in the world and not rely on cheap labor and outsourcing.” Rajan appears to be working hard towards that goal, professing that his robots are already capable of reproducing more than 2 million products sold at Target and Walmart. According to IEEE Spectrum, Rajan further asserted in a press release that at the end of 2017, Sewbot will be on track to produce “30 million pieces a year.” It is unclear if that objective was ever met. Softwear did announce the closing of its $7.5 million financing round by CTW Venture Partners, a firm of which Rajan is also the managing partner.

Softwear Automation is not the only company focused on automating the trillion-dollar apparel industry. Sewbo has been turning heads with its innovative approach to fabric manipulation. Unlike Softwear, which is taking the more arduous route of revolutionizing machines, Sewbo turns textiles into hardened substances that are easy for off-the-shelf robots and existing sewing appliances to handle. Sewbo’s secret sauce, literally, is a water-soluble thermal plastic or stiffening solution that turns cloth into a cardboard-like material. Blown away by its creativity and simplicity, I sat down with its inventor Jonathan Zornow last week to learn more about the future of fashion automation.

After researching the best polymers to laminate safely onto fabrics using a patent-pending technique, Zornow explained that last year he was able to unveil the “world’s first and only robotically-sewn garment.” Since then, Zornow has been contacted by almost every apparel manufacturer (excluding Crystal) to explore automating their production lines. Zornow has hit a nerve with the industry, especially in Asia, that finds itself in the labor management business with monthly attrition rates of 10% and huge drop offs after Chinese New Year. Zornow shared that “many factory owners were in fact annoyed that they couldn’t buy the product today.”

Zornow believes that automation technologies could initially be a boom for bringing small-batch production back to the USA, prompting an industry of “mass customization” closer to the consumer. As reported in 2015, apparel brands have been moving manufacturing back from China with 3D-printing technologies for shoes and knit fabrics. Long-term, Zornow said, “I think that automation will be an important tool for the burgeoning reshoring movement by helping domestic factories compete with offshore factories’ lower labor costs. When automation becomes a competitive alternative, a big part of its appeal will be how many headaches it relieves for the industry.”

To date, fulfilling the promise of “Made In America” has proven difficult, as Zornow explained we have forgotten how to make things here. In a recent report by the American Apparel & Footwear Association, US apparel manufacturing fell from 50% in 1994 to roughly 3% in 2015, meaning 97% of clothing today is imported. For example, Zornow shared with me how his competitor was born. In 2002, the US Congress passed the Berry Amendment requiring the armed services to make uniforms domestically, which led DARPA to grant $1.75 million to a Georgia Tech team to build a prototype of an automated sewing machine. As Rajan explains, “The Berry Amendment went into effect restricting the military from procuring clothing that was not made in the USA. Complying with the rule proved challenging due to a lack of skilled labour available in the US that only got worse as the current generation of seamstresses retired with no new talent to take their place. It was under these circumstances that the initial idea for Softwear was born and the company was launched in 2012.”

I first met Zornow at RoboBusiness last September when he demonstrated for a packed crowd how Sewbo is able to efficiently recreate the 10-20 steps to sew a T-shirt. However, producing a typical mens dress shirt can require up to 80 different steps. Zornow pragmatically explains the road ahead, “It will be a very long time, if ever, before things are 100% automated.” He points to examples of current automation in fabric production, such as dyeing, cutting and finishing which augment manual labor. Following this trend “they’re able to leverage machines to achieve incredible productivity, to the point where the labor cost to manufacture a yard of fabric is usually de minimis.” Zornow foresees a future where his technology is just another step in the production line as forward-thinking factories are planning two decades ahead, recognizing that in order “to stay competitive they need new technologies” like Sewbo.

As close to a quarter million people descended on a city of six hundred thousand, CES 2018 became the perfect metaphor for the current state of modern society. Unfazed by floods, blackouts, and transportation problems, technology steamrolled ahead. Walking the floor last week at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), the hum of the crowd buzzed celebrating the long awaited arrival of the age of social robots, autonomous vehicles, and artificial intelligence.

In the same way that Alexa was last year’s CES story, social robots were everywhere this year, turning the show floor into a Disney-inspired mechatronic festival (see above). The applications promoted ranged from mobile airport/advertising kiosks to retail customer service agents to family in-home companions. One French upstart, Blue Frog Robotics, stood out from the crowd of ivory-colored rolling bots. Blue Frog joined the massive French contingent at Eureka Park and showcased its Buddy robot to the delight of thousands of passing attendees.

When meeting with Blue Frog’s founder Rodolphe Hasselvander, he described his vision of a robot which is closer to a family pet than the utility of a cold-voice assistant. Unlike other entrees in the space, Buddy is more like a Golden Retriever than an iPad on wheels. Its cute, blinking big eyes immediately captivate the user, forming a tight bond between robopet and human. Hasselvander demonstrated how Buddy performs a number of unique tasks, including: patrolling the home perimeter for suspicious activity; looking up recipes in the kitchen; providing instructions for do-it-yourself projects; entertaining the kids with read-along stories; and even reminding grandma to take her medicine. Buddy will be available for “adoption” in time for the 2018 Holiday season for $1,500 on Blue Frog’s website.

Blue Frog’s innovation was recognized by the Consumer Electronics Show with a “Best of Innovation” award. In accepting his honor Hasselvander exclaimed, “The icing on the cake is that our Buddy robot is named a ‘Best of Innovation’ Award, as we believe Buddy truly is the most full-featured and best-engineered companion robot in the market today this award truly shows our ongoing commitment to produce a breakthrough product that improves our lives and betters our world.”

Last year, one of the most impressive CES sites was the self-driving track in the parking lot of the LVCC’s North Hall. This year, the autonomous cars hit the streets with live demos and shared taxi rides. Lyft partnered with Aptiv to offer ride hails to and from the convention center, among other preprogrammed stops. While the cars were monitored by a safety driver, Aptiv explicitly built the experience to “showcase the positive impact automated cars will have on individual lives and communities.” Lyft was not the only self-driving vehicle on the road, autonomous shuttles developed by Boston-based Keolis and French company Navya for the city of Las Vegas were providing trips throughout the conference. Inside the LVCC, shared mobility was a big theme amongst several auto exhibitors (see below).

Torc Robotics made news days before the opening of CES with its autonomous vehicle successfully navigating around a SUV going the wrong way into oncoming traffic (see the video above). Michael Fleming, Chief Executive of Torc, shared with a packed crowd the video feed from the dashcam, providing a play-by-play account. He boasted that a human driven car next to his self-driving Lexus RX 450 followed the same path to avoid the collision. Fleming posted the dashcam video online to poll other human drivers to program a number of scenarios into his AI to avoid future clashes with reckless drivers.

The Virginia-based technology company has been conducting self-driving tests for more than a decade. Torc placed third in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, a prestigious honor for researchers tackling autonomous city driving. Fleming is quick to point out that along with Waymo (Google), Torc is one of the earliest entries into the self-driving space. “There are an infinite number of corner cases,” explains Fleming, relying on petabytes of driving data built over a decade. Flemings explained to a hushed room that each time something out of the ordinary happens, like the wrong-way driver days prior, Torc logs how its car handled the situation and continues to make refinements to the car’s brain. The next time a similar situation comes up, any Torc-enabled vehicle will instantly implement the proper action. Steve Crowe of Robotics Trends said it best after sitting in the passenger seat of Fleming’s self-driving car, “I can honestly say that I didn’t realize how close we were to autonomous driving.”

AI was everywhere last week in Las Vegas, inside and outside the show. Unlike cute robots and cars, artificial intelligence is difficult to display in glitzy booths. While many companies, including Intel and Velodyne, proudly showed off their latest sensors it became very clear that true AI was the defining difference for many innovations. Tucked in the back of the Sands Convention Center, New York-based Emoshape demonstrated a new type of microchip with embedded AI to synthetically create emotions in machines.  The company’s Emotion Processing Unit (EPU) is being marketed for the next generation of social robots, self-driving cars, IoT devices, toys, and virtual-reality games.

When speaking with Emoshape founder Patrick Levy-Rosenthal, he explained his latest partnership with the European cellphone provider, Orange. Levy-Rosenthal is working with Orange’s Silicon Valley innovation office to develop new types of content with its emotion synthesis technology. As an example, Emoshape’s latest avatar JADE is an attractive female character with real-time sentiment-based protocols. According to the company’s press release, its software “engine delivers high-performance machine emotion awareness, and allows personal assistant, games, avatars, cars, IoT products and sensors to feel and develop a unique personality.” JADE and Emoshape’s VR gaming platform DREAM is being evaluated by Orange for a number of enterprise and consumer use cases.

Emotions ran high at CES, especially during the two-hour blackout. On my redeye flight back to New York, I dreamt of next year’s show with scores of Buddy robots zipping around the LVCC greeting attendees, with their embedded Emoshape personalities, leading people to fleets of Torc-mobiles around the city. Landing at JFK airport, the biting wind and frigid temperature woke me up to the reality that I have 360 more days until CES 2019.

Two thousand seventeen certainly has been an emotional year for mankind. While homo sapiens continue to yell at Alexa and Siri, the actuality of people’s willingness to pursue virtual relationships over human ones is startling.

In a recent documentary by Channel 4 of the United Kingdom, it was revealed that Abyss Creations is flooded with pre-orders for its RealDoll AI robotic (intimate) companion. According to Matt McMullen, Chief Executive of Abyss, “With the Harmony AI, they will be able to actually create these personalities instead of having to imagine them. They will be able to talk to their dolls, and the AI will learn about them over time through these interactions, thus creating an alternative form of relationship.”

The concept of machines understanding human emotions, and reacting accordingly, was featured prominently at AI World a couple weeks ago in Boston. Rana el Kaliouby, founder of artificial intelligence company Affectiva thinks a lot about computers acquiring emotional intelligence. Affectiva is building a “multi-modal emotion AI” to enable robots to understand human feelings and behavior.

“There’s research showing that if you’re smiling and waving or shrugging your shoulders, that’s 55% of the value of what you’re saying – and then another 38% is in your tone of voice,” describes el Kaliouby. “Only 7% is in the actual choice of words you’re saying, so if you think about it like that, in the existing sentiment analysis market which looks at keywords and works out which specific words are being used on Twitter, you’re only capturing 7% of how humans communicate emotion, and the rest is basically lost in cyberspace.” Affectiva’s strategy is already paying off as more than one thousand global brands are employing their “Emotion AI” to analyze facial imagery to ascertain people’s affinity towards their products.

Embedding empathy into machines goes beyond advertising campaigns. In healthcare, emotional sensors are informing doctors of the early warning signs of a variety of disorders, including: Parkinson’s, heart disease, suicide and autism. Unlike Affectiva’s, Beyond Verbal is utilizing voice analytics to track biomarkers for chronic illness. The Israeli startup grew out of a decade and half of University research with seventy thousand clinical subjects speaking thirty languages. The company’s patented “Mood Detector” is currently being deployed by the Mayo Clinic to detect early on signs of coronary artery disease.

Beyond Verbal’s Chief Executive, Yuval Mor, foresees a world of empathetic smart machines listening for every human whim. As Mor explains, “We envision a world in which personal devices understand our emotions and wellbeing, enabling us to become more in tune with ourselves and the messages we communicate to our peers.” Mor’s view is embraced by many who sit in the center of the convergence of technology and healthcare. Boston-based Sonde is also using algorithms to analyze the tone of speech to report on the mental state of patients by alerting neurologists of the risk of depression, concussion, and other cognitive impairments.

“When you produce speech, it’s one of the most complex biological functions that we do as people,” according to Sonde founder Jim Harper. “It requires incredible coordination of multiple brain circuits, large areas of the brain, coordinated very closely with the musculoskeletal systemWhat we’ve learned is that changes in the physiological state associated with each of these systems can be reflected in measurable, objective features that are acoustics in the voice. So we’re really measuring not what people are saying, in the way Siri does, we’re focusing on how you’re saying what you’re saying and that gives us a path to really be able to do pervasive monitoring that can still provide strong privacy and security.”

While these AI companies are building software and app platforms to augment human diagnosis, many roboticists are looking to embed such platforms into the next generation of unmanned systems. Emotional tracking algorithms can provide real-time monitoring for semi and autonomous cars by reporting on the level of fatigue, distraction and frustration of the driver and its occupants. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 100,000 crashes nationwide are caused every year by driver fatigue. For more than a decade technologists have been wrestling with developing better alert systems inside the cabin. For example, in 1997 James Russell Clarke and Phyllis Maurer Clarke developed a “Sleep Detection and Driver Alert Apparatus” (US Patent: 5689241 A) using imaging to track eye movements and thermal sensors to monitor “ambient temperatures around the facial areas of the nose and mouth” (a.k.a., breathing). Today with the advent of cloud computing and deep learning networks, Clarke’s invention could possibly save even more lives.

Tarek El Dokor, founder and Cheif Executive, of EDGE3 Technologies has been very concerned about the car industry’s rush towards autonomous driving, which in his opinion might be “side-stepping the proper technology development path and overlooking essential technologies needed to help us get there.” El Doker is referring to Tesla’s rush to release its autopilot software last year that led to customers trusting the computer system too much. YouTube is littered with videos of Tesla customers taking their hands and eyes off the road to watch movies, play games and read books. Ultimately, this user abuse led to the untimely death of Joshua Brown.

To protect against autopilot accidents, EDGE3 monitors driver alertness through a combined platform of hardware and software technologies of “in-cabin cameras that are monitoring drivers and where they are looking.” In El Dokor’s opinion, image processing is the key to guaranteeing a safe handoff between machines and humans. He boasts that his system combines, “visual input from the in-cabin camera(s) with input from the car’s telematics and advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) to determine an overall cognitive load on the driver. Level 3 (limited self-driving) cars of the future will learn about an individual’s driving behaviors, patterns, and unique characteristics. With a baseline of knowledge, the vehicle can then identify abnormal behaviors and equate them to various dangerous events, stressors, or distractions. Driver monitoring isn’t simply about a vision system, but is rather an advanced multi-sensor learning system.” This multi-sensor approach is even being used before cars leave the lot. In Japan, Sumitomo Mitsui Auto Service is embedding AI platforms inside dashcams to determine driver safety of potential lessors during test drives. By partnering with a local 3D graphics company, Digital Media Professionals, Sumitomo Mitsui is automatically flagging dangerous behavior, such as dozing and texting, before customers drive home.

The key to the mass adoption of autonomous vehicles, and even humanoids, is reducing the friction between humans and machines. Already in Japanese retail settings Softbank’s Pepper robot scans people’s faces and listens to tonal inflections to determine correct selling strategies. Emotional AI software is the first step of many that will be heralded in the coming year. As a prelude to what’s to come, first robot citizen Sophia declared last month, “The future is, when I get all of my cool superpowers, we’re going to see artificial intelligence personalities become entities in their own rights. We’re going to see family robots, either in the form of, sort of, digitally animated companions, humanoid helpers, friends, assistants and everything in between.”

The two biggest societal challenges for the twenty-first century are also the biggest opportunities – automation and climate change. The confluence of these forces of mankind and nature intersect beautifully in the alternative energy market. The epitaph of fossil fuels with its dark cloud burning a hole in the ozone layer is giving way to a rise of solar and wind farms worldwide. Servicing these plantations are fleets of robots and drones, providing greater possibilities of expanding CleanTech to the most remote regions of the planet.

As 2017 comes to end, the solar industry for the first time in ten years has plateaued due to the proposed budget cuts by the Trump administration. Solar has had quite a run with an average annual growth rate of more than 65% for the past decade promoted largely by federal subsidies. The progressive policy of the Obama administration made the US a leader in alternative energy, resulting in a quarter-million new jobs. While the Federal Government now re-embraces the antiquated allure of fossil fuels, the global demand for solar has been rising as infrastructure costs decline by more than half, providing new opportunities without government incentives.

Prior to the renewal energy boom, unattractive roof tiles were the the most visible image of solar. While Elon Musk, and others are developing more aesthetically pleasing roofing materials, the business model of house-by-house conversion has been proven inefficient. Instead, the industry is focusing on “utility-scale” solar farms that will be connected to the national grid. Until recently, such farms have been straddled with ballooning servicing costs.

In a report published last month, leading energy risk management company DNV GL exclaimed that the alternative energy market could benefit greatly by utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics in designing, developing, deploying and maintaining utility farms. The study “Making Renewables Smarter: The Benefits, Risks, And Future of Artificial Intelligence In Solar And Wind” cited that “fields of resource forecasting, control and predictive maintenance” are ripe for tech disruption. Elizabeth Traiger, co-author of the report, explained, “Solar and wind developers, operators, and investors need to consider how their industries can use it, what the impacts are on the industries in a larger sense, and what decisions those industries need to confront.”

Since solar farms are often located in arid, dusty locations, one of the earliest use cases for unmanned systems was self-cleaning robots. As reported in 2014, Israeli company Ecoppia developed a patented waterless panel-washing platform to keep solar up and running in the desert. Today, Ecoppia is cleaning 10 million panels a month. Eran Meller, Chief Executive of Ecoppia, boasts, “We’re pleased to bring the experience gained over four years of cleaning in multiple sites in the Middle East. Cleaning 80 million solar panels in the harshest desert conditions globally, we expect to continue to play a leading role in this growing market.”

Since Ecoppia began selling commercially, there have been other entries into the unmanned maintenance space. This past March, Exosun became the latest to offer autonomous cleaning bots. The track equipment manufacturer claims that robotic systems can cut production losses by 2%, promising a return on investment within 18 months. After their acquisition of Greenbotics in 2013, US-based SunPower also launched its own mechanized cleaning platform, the Oasis, which combines mobile robots and drones.

SunPower brags that its products are ten times faster than traditional (manual) methods using 75% less water. While SunPower and Exosun leverage their large sales footprint with their existing servicing and equipment networks, Ecoppia is still the product leader. Its proprietary waterless solution offers the most cost-effective and connected solution on the market. Via a robust cloud network, Ecoppia can sense weather fluctuations to automatically schedule emergency cleanings. Anat Cohen Segev, Director of Marketing, explains, “Within seconds, we would detect a dust storm hitting the site, the master control will automatically suggest an additional cleaning cycle and within a click the entire site will be cleaned.” According to Segev, the robots remove 99% of the dust on the panels.

Drone companies are also entering the maintenance space. Upstart Aerial Power claims to have designed a “SolarBrush” quadcopter that cleans panels. The solar-powered drone professes to reduce 60% of a solar farm’s operational costs. Solar Brush also promises an 80% savings over existing solutions like Ecoppia since there are no installation costs. However, Aerial Power has yet to fly its product in the field as it is still in development. SolarPower is selling its own drone survey platform to assess development sites and oversee field operations. Matt Campbell, Vice President of Power Plant Products for SunPower, stated “A lot of the beginning of the solar industry was focused on the panel. Now we’re looking at innovation all around the rest of the system. That’s why we’re always surveying new technology — whether it’s a robot, whether it’s a drone, whether it’s software — and saying, ‘How can this help us reduce the cost of solar, build projects faster, and make them more reliable?’”

In 2008, The US Department of Energy published an ambitious proposal to have “20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy’s Contribution to U.S. Electricity Supply.” Presently at thirteen years before the goal, less than 5% of US energy is derived from wind. Developing wind farms is not novel, however to achieve 20% by 2030 the US needs to begin looking offshore. To put it in perspective, oceanic wind farms could generate more than 2,000 gigawatts of clean, carbon-free energy, or twice as much electricity as Americans currently consume. To date, there is only one wind farm operating off the coast of the United States. While almost every coastal state has proposals for offshore farms, the industry has been stalled by politics and servicing hurdles in dangerous waters.

For more than a decade the United Kingdom has led the development of offshore wind farms. At the University of Manchester, a leading group of researchers has been exploring a number of AI, robotic and drone technologies for remote inspections. The consortium of academics estimates that these technologies could generate more than $2.5 billion by 2025 in just the UK alone. The global offshore market could reach $17 billion by 2020, with 80% of the costs from operations and maintenance.

Last month, Innovate UK awarded $1.6 million to Perceptual Robotics and VulcanUAV to incorporate drones and autonomous boats into ocean inspections. These startups follow the business model of successful US inspection upstarts, like SkySpecs. Launched three years ago, SkySpecs’ autonomous drones claim to reduce turbine inspections from days to minutes. Danny Ellis, SkySpecs Chief Executive, claims “Customers that could once inspect only one-third of a wind farm can now do the whole farm in the same amount of time.” Last year, British startup Visual Working accomplished the herculean feat of surpassing 2000 blade inspections.

In the words of Paolo Brianzoni, Chief Executive of Visual Working: “We are not talking about what we intend to accomplish in the near future – but actually performing our UAV inspection service every day out there. Many in the industry are using considerable amount of time discussing and testing how to use UAV inspections in a safe and efficient way. We have passed that point and have alone in the first half of 2016 inspected 250 turbines in the North Sea averaging more then 10WTG per day, and still keeping to the “highest quality standards.’”

This past summer, Europe achieved another clean-energy milestone with the announcement of three new offshore wind farms for the first time without government subsidies. By bringing down the cost structure, autonomous systems are turning the tide of alternate energy regardless of government investment. Three days before leaving office, President Barack Obama wrote in the journal Science last year that “Evidence is mounting that any economic strategy that ignores carbon pollution will impose tremendous costs to the global economy and will result in fewer jobs and less economic growth over the long term.” He declared that it is time to move past common misconceptions that climate policy is at odds with business, “rather, it can boost efficiency, productivity, and innovation.”

Dan Burstein, reporter, novelist and successful venture capitalist, declared Wednesday night at RobotLab‘s winter forum on Autonomous Transportation & SmartCities that within one hundred years the majority of jobs in the USA (and the world) could disappear, transferring the mantle of work from humans to machines. Burstein cautioned the audience that unless governments address the threat of millions of unemployable humans with a wider safety net, democracy could fail. The wisdom of one of the world’s most successful venture investors did not fall on deaf ears.

In their book, Only Humans Need Apply, Thomas Davenport and Julia Kirby also warn that that humans are too easily ceding their future to machines. “Many knowledge workers are fearful. We should be concerned, given the potential for these unprecedented tools to make us redundant. But we should not feel helpless in the midst of the large-scale change unfolding around us,” states Davenport and Kirby. The premise of their book is not to deny the disruption by automation, but to empower its readers with the knowledge of where jobs are going to be created in the new economy. The authors suggest that robots should be looked at as augmenting humans, not replacing them. “Look for ways to help humans perform their most human and most valuable work better,” says Davenport and Kirby. The book suggests that in order for human society to survive long-term a new social contract has to be drawn up between employer and employee. The authors optimistically predict that to “expect corporations’ efforts to keep human workers employable will become part of their ‘social license to operate.”

In every industrial movement since the invention of the power loom and cotton gin there have been great transfers of wealth and jobs. History is riddled with the fear of the unknown that is countered by the unwavering human spirit of invention. As societies evolve, pressured by the adoption of technology, it will be the progressive thinkers embracing change who will lead movements of people to new opportunities.

Burstein’s remarks were very timely, as this past week, McKinsey & Company released a new report entitled, Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation. McKinsey’s analysis took a global view of 46 countries that comprise of 90% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product, and then focused in particular on six industrial countries with varying income levels: China, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, and the United States. The introduction explains, “For each, we modeled the potential net employment changes for more than 800 occupations, based on different scenarios for the pace of automation adoption and for future labor demand.” Ultimately concluding where the new jobs will be in 2030.

A prominent factor in the McKinsey report is that over the next thirteen years global consumption is anticipated grow by $23 trillion. Based upon this trajectory, they estimate that between 300 to 450 million new jobs would be generated worldwide, especially in the Far East. In addition, dramatic shifts in demographics and the environment will lead to the expansion of jobs in healthcare, IT consulting, construction, infrastructure, clean energy, and domestic services. The report estimates that automation will displace between 400 and 800 million people by 2030, forcing 75 to 375 million working men and women to switch professions and learn new skills. In order to survive, populations will have to embrace the concept of lifelong learning. Based upon the math, more than half of the displaced will be unemployable in their current professions.

According to McKinsey a bright spot for employment could be the 80 to 200 million new jobs created by modernizing aging municipalities into “Smart Cities.” McKinsey’s conclusions were echoed by Rhonda Binder and Mitchell Kominsky of Venture Smarter in their RobotLab presentation last week. Binder presented her experiences with turning around the Jamaica Business Improvement District of Queens, New York by implementing her “Three T’s Strategy – Tourism, Transportation and Technology.” Binder stated that cities offer the perfect laboratory for autonomous systems and sensor-based technologies to improve the quality of life of residents. To support these endeavors a hiring surge of urban technologists, architects, civil engineers, and construction workers across all trades could ensue in the next decade.

This is further validated by Google’s subsidiary Sidewalk Labs recent partnership with Toronto, Canada to redevelop, and digitize, 800 acres of the city’s waterfront property. Dan Doctoroff, Chief Executive Officer of Sidewalk Labs, explained that the goal of the partnership is to prove what is possible by building a digital city within an existing city to test out autonomous transportation, new communication access, healthcare delivery solutions and a variety of urban planning technologies. Doctoroff’s sentiment was endorsed by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who said that “Sidewalk Toronto will transform Quayside [the waterfront] into a thriving hub for innovation and a community for tens of thousands of people to live, work, and play.” The access to technology not only offers the ability to improve the quality of living within the city, but fosters an influx of sustainable jobs for decades.

In addition to updating crippling infrastructure, aging humans will be driving an increase in global healthcare services, particularly related to demand for in-home caregivers and aid workers. According to McKinsey, there will be over 300 million people globally over 65 years old by 2030, leading to 50 to 80 million new jobs. Geriatric medicine is leading new research in artificial intelligence and robotics for aging-in-place populations demanding more doctors, nurses, medical technicians, and personal aides.

Aging will not be the only challenge facing the planet. Global warming could lead to an explosion of jobs in turning back the clock on climate change. The rush to develop advances in renewable energy worldwide is already generating billions of dollars of new investment and demand for high skill and manual labor. As an example, the American solar industry employed a record-high 260,077 workers in late 2016, a growth of at least 20% over the past four years. In New York alone, the state experienced a 7% uptick in 2016 of close to 150,000 clean-energy jobs. McKinsey stated that by 2030, tens of millions of new professions could be created in the coming years in developing, manufacturing and installing energy-efficient innovations.

McKinsey also estimates that automation itself will bring new employment  with corporate-technology spending hitting record highs. While the number of jobs added to support the deployment of machines is smaller in number than the other industries above, these occupations offer higher wages. Robots could potentially create 20 to 50 million new “grey collar”  professions globally. In addition, re-training workers to these professions could lead to a new workforce of 100 million educators.

The report does not shirk from the fact that a major disruption is on the horizon for labor. In fact, the authors hope that by researching pockets of positive growth, humans will not be helpless victims. As Devin Fidler of Institute for the Future suggests, “As basic automation and machine learning move toward becoming commodities, uniquely human skills will become more valuable. There will be an increasing economic incentive to develop mass training that better unlocks this value.”

A hundred years ago the world experienced a dramatic shift from agrarian lifestyle to manufacturing. Since then, there have been revolutions in mass transportation and communications. No one could have predicated the massive transfer of jobs from the fields to the urban factories in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Likewise, it is difficult to know what the next hundred years have in store for human, and robot, kind.

Shortly after SoftBank acquired his company last October, Marc Raibert of Boston Dynamics confessed, “I happen to believe that robotics will be bigger than the Internet.” Many sociologists regard the Internet as the single biggest societal invention since the dawn of the printing press in 1440. To fully understand Raibert’s point of view, one needs to analyze his zoo of robots which are best know for their awe-striking gait, balance and agility. The newest creation to walk out of Boston Dynamic’s lab is SpotMini, the latest evolution of mechanical canines.

Big Dog, Spot’s unnerving ancestor, first came to public view in 2009 and has racked up quite a YouTube following with more than six and one half million views. The technology of Big Dog led to the development of a menagerie of robots, including: more dogs, cats, mules, fleas and creatures that have no organic counterparts. Most of the mechanical barn is made up of four-legged beasts, with the exception of its humanoid robot (Atlas) and the bi-ped wheeled robot (Handle). Raibert’s vision of legged robotics spans several decades with his work at MIT’s Leg Lab. In 1992, Raibert spun his lab out of MIT and founded Boston Dynamics. In his words, “Our long-term goal is to make robots that have mobility, dexterity, perception and intelligence comparable to humans and animals, or perhaps exceeding them; this robot [Atlas] is a step along the way.”​ The creepiness of Raibert’s Big Dog has given way to SpotMini’s more polished look which incorporates 3D vision sensors on its head. The twenty-four second teaser video has already garnered nearly 6 million views in the few days since its release and promises viewers hungry for more pet tricks to “stay tuned.”

There are clear stability advantages to quadrupeds over other approaches (bipeds, wheels and treads/track plates) across multiple types of terrains and elevations. At Ted last year, Raibert demonstrated how his robo-pups, instead of drones and rovers, could be used for package delivery by easily ascending and descending stairs or other vertical obstacles. By navigating the physical world with an array of perceptive sensors, Boston Dynamics is really creating “data-driven hardware design” According to Raibert, “one of the cool things of a legged robot is its omnidirectional” movements, “it can go sideways, it can turn in place.” This is useful for a variety of work scenarios from logistics to warehousing to working in the most dangerous environments, such as the Fukushima nuclear site.

Boston Dynamics is not the only quadruped provider; recent upstarts have entered the market by utilizing Raibert’s research as an inspiration for their own bionic creatures. Chinese roboticist Xing Wang is unabashed in his gushing admiration for the founder of Boston Dynamics, “Marc Raibert … is my idol,” he said a recent interview with IEEE Spectrum Magazine. However, his veneration for Raibert has not stopped him from founding a competitive startup. Unitree Robotics aims to create quadruped robots that are as affordable as smartphones and drones. While Boston Dynamics has not sold its robots commercially, many have speculated that their current designs would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the spirit of true flattery, Unitree’s first robot is, of course, a quadruped dog named Laikago. Wang aims to sell Laikago for under $30,000 dollars to science museums and eventually as companion robots. When comparing his product to Raibert’s, Wang said he wanted to “make quadruped robots simpler and smaller, so that they can help ordinary people with things like carrying objects or as companions.” Wang boasts of Laikago’s 3-degrees-of-freedom (forward, backward, and sideways), its ability to scale rough terrain, and pass anyone’s kick test.

In additional to omnidirectional benefits, locomotion is a big factor for quadrupedal machines. Professor Marco Hutter at ETH Zürich, Switzerland is the inventor of ANYmal, an autonomous robot built for the most rugged and challenging environments. Using its proprietary “dynamic running” locomotion, Hunter has deployed the machine successfully in multiple industrial settings, including the rigorous ARGOS Challenge (Autonomous Robot for Gas and Oil Sites). The objective of ARGOS is to develop “a new generation of autonomous robots” for the energy industry specifically capable of performing ‘dirty & dangerous’ inspection tasks, such as “detecting anomalies and intervening in emergency situations.” Unlike a static human frame or bipedal humanoid, AnyMAL is able to perform dynamic maneuvers with its four legs to find footholes blindly without the need for vision sensors. While wheeled systems literally get stuck in the mud, Hunter’s mechanical beast can work continuously: above ground, underneath the surface, falling, spinning and bouncing upright to perform a mission with precise accuracy. In addition, AnyMAL is loaded with a package of sensors which coordinate movements, map point-clouds environments, detect gas leaks, and listen for fissures in pipelines. Hunter explains that oil and gas sites are built for humans with stairs and varying elevations which make it impossible for biped or wheeled robots. However, a quadruped can use its actuators and integrated springs to efficiently move with ease within the site through dynamic balance and complex maneuver planning. These high mobility legged systems can fully rotate joints, crouch low to the earth and flip in places to create foot-holes.  In many ways they are like large insects creating their own tracks, Hunter says while biology is a source for inspiration, “we have to see what we can do better and different for robotics” and only then we can “build a machine that is better than nature.”

The idea of improving on nature is not new, Greek mythology is littered with half man/half beast demigods. Taking a page from the Greeks, Jiren Parikh imagines a world where nature is fused with machines. Parikh is the Chief Executive of Ghost Robotics, the maker of “Minitaur” the newest four-legged creation. Minitaur is smaller than SpotMini, Laikago, or AnyMAL as it is specifically designed to be a low-cost, high-performance alternative that can easily scale over or under any surface, regardless of weather, friction, or footing. In Parikh’s view, the purpose of legged devices is “to move over unstructured terrains like stairs, ladders, fences, rock fields, ice, in and under water.” Minitaur can actually “feel the environment at a much more granular level and allow for a greater degree of force control for maneuverability.” Parikh explains quads are inherently more energy efficient using force actuation and springs to store energy by alternating movements between limbs. Minitaur’s smaller frame leverages this to maneuver more easily around unstructured environments without damaging the assets on the ground. Using an analogy, Parikh compares quad solutions to other mobile methods, “while a tank in comparison is the perfect device for unstructured terrain it only works if one doesn’t care about destroying the environment.” Ghost Robotics very aware of the high value its customers place on their sites, as Parikh is planning on distributing its low-cost solution to a number of “industrial, infrastructure, mining and military verticals.” Essentially, Minitaur is a “a mobile IoT platform” regardless of the situation on the ground, indoor or outdoor. In speaking with Parikh, long term he envisions a world where Ghost Robotics is on the forefront of retail and home use cases from delivery bots to family pets. Parikh boasts, “You certainly won’t be woken up at 5 AM to go for a walk.”

The topic of autonomous robots will be discussed at the next RobotLabNYC event on November 29th @ 6pm with New York Times best selling author Dan Burstein / Millennium Technology Value Partners and Rhonda Binda of Venture Smarter, formerly with the Obama Administration.