Category Robots Podcast

The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) cites that between 2010 and 2016, 136,748 robots were shipped to the US —the most in any seven-year period in the US robotics industry. At the same time, US manufacturing employment increased by 894,000 and the unemployment rate fell from 9.8% to 4.7%.

Yet manufacturers, robotics associations, ethicists and media pundits are still fighting the robotics and jobs issue. Brett Brune, Editor in Chief of Smart Manufacturing magazine, argues that “the hand-wringing around robotics and jobs in the US really needs to stop.” 

Manufacturers around the world, including in China, are busy figuring out how quickly to acquire robots. In Mexico, automation is thriving. So much so that the country is now the sixth-biggest auto producer globally. At the same time, the number of manufacturing workers is starting to swell.

A record-high 5.15 million Mexicans worked in manufacturing as of May, nearly a quarter of all workers registered with the country’s social security institute. Around 202,000 Mexicans joined the ranks of manufacturing workers during the first five months of this year alone.

California, which abuts Mexico, has America's largest Hispanic population (14.4 million in 2011), and has had a continuous supply of migrant farm workers since before statehood, has been an agricultural mainstay in the US for close to 100 years and currently produces about 60% of the nation's fresh produce. But as the state's minimum wage approaches $15 and competition from the growing Mexican manufacturing economy mounts, farm managers are having to cope with a workforce that has dropped and immigration policies that threaten to depress the labor supply further.

Since the late 1990s, the number of agricultural workers who move around the US working seasonal farming jobs fell by 60%. According to a study done by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (UC Berkeley), half of that labor transformation appears to be due to changes in the demographic makeup of the workforce while government and institutional changes in the market impacted the remaining 50%.

“This reduction in the number of migrant farmworkers increases the risk that fruits and vegetables will not be harvested before they spoil. To avoid this problem, farmers will switch crops, automate planting and harvesting, or take other actions to reduce the need for seasonal agricultural workers. Only a major change in our immigration and guest worker policies is likely to increase migration within the country and postpone automation.”

Interestingly, the trend line for documented workers, although going steadily down, outnumbers undocumented workers as governmental and economic changes in the US and Mexico make immigration less attractive plus demographic changes make farm workers less willing to migrate.

The case for robotics in the ag industry has never been stronger as agricultural migration rates within the United States plummet. Recent research reports suggest that growth in ag technology will be exponential but not necessarily in across-the-board robotics; rather, it will first attack three areas: (1) converting farms to become connected digital systems through the use of precision ag methods, (2) then, with sensor-laden ground-based and airborne drones, planes and satellites gathering and accumulating data, analyzing that data to produce actionable prescriptions, and (3) provide equipment that can vary its procedures (seeding, thinning, weeding, spraying, etc.) based on the actionable prescriptions from #2, and automate post-harvest processing (sorting, inspecting, handling, packaging, boxing, etc.). 

Resources and references

• Story idea from Robotiq weekly What's New blog
• Article: Where did all the migrant farm workers go?
• Article: With farm labor getting scarcer, big U.S. farms are preparing to turn to robots
• Article: What’s slowing the use of robots in the ag industry?
• Research report: Global agricultural robots market, May 2017, 70 pages, TechNavio
• Research report: Agriculture robots market, June 2017, TMR Research
• Research report: Agricultural Robots, December 2016, 225 pages, Tractica

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By Christoph Salge, Marie Curie Global Fellow, University of Hertfordshire

How do you stop a robot from hurting people? Many existing robots, such as those assembling cars in factories, shut down immediately when a human comes near. But this quick fix wouldn’t work for something like a self-driving car that might have to move to avoid a collision, or a care robot that might need to catch an old person if they fall. With robots set to become our servants, companions and co-workers, we need to deal with the increasingly complex situations this will create and the ethical and safety questions this will raise.

Science fiction already envisioned this problem and has suggested various potential solutions. The most famous was author Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which are designed to prevent robots harming humans. But since 2005, my colleagues and I at the University of Hertfordshire, have been working on an idea that could be an alternative.

Instead of laws to restrict robot behaviour, we think robots should be empowered to maximise the possible ways they can act so they can pick the best solution for any given scenario. As we describe in a new paper in Frontiers, this principle could form the basis of a new set of universal guidelines for robots to keep humans as safe as possible.

The Three Laws

Asimov’s Three Laws are as follows:

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

While these laws sound plausible, numerous arguments have demonstrated why they are inadequate. Asimov’s own stories are arguably a deconstruction of the laws, showing how they repeatedly fail in different situations. Most attempts to draft new guidelines follow a similar principle to create safe, compliant and robust robots.

One problem with any explicitly formulated robot guidelines is the need to translate them into a format that robots can work with. Understanding the full range of human language and the experience it represents is a very hard job for a robot. Broad behavioural goals, such as preventing harm to humans or protecting a robot’s existence, can mean different things in different contexts. Sticking to the rules might end up leaving a robot helpless to act as its creators might hope.

Our alternative concept, empowerment, stands for the opposite of helplessness. Being empowered means having the ability to affect a situation and being aware that you can. We have been developing ways to translate this social concept into a quantifiable and operational technical language. This would endow robots with the drive to keep their options open and act in a way that increases their influence on the world.

When we tried simulating how robots would use the empowerment principle in various scenarios, we found they would often act in surprisingly “natural” ways. It typically only requires them to model how the real world works but doesn’t need any specialised artificial intelligence programming designed to deal with the particular scenario.

But to keep people safe, the robots need to try to maintain or improve human empowerment as well as their own. This essentially means being protective and supportive. Opening a locked door for someone would increase their empowerment. Restraining them would result in a short-term loss of empowerment. And significantly hurting them could remove their empowerment altogether. At the same time, the robot has to try to maintain its own empowerment, for example by ensuring it has enough power to operate and it does not get stuck or damaged.

Robots could adapt to new situations

Using this general principle rather than predefined rules of behaviour would allow the robot to take account of the context and evaluate scenarios no one has previously envisaged. For example, instead of always following the rule “don’t push humans”, a robot would generally avoid pushing them but still be able to push them out of the way of a falling object. The human might still be harmed but less so than if the robot didn’t push them.

In the film I, Robot, based on several Asimov stories, robots create an oppressive state that is supposed to minimise the overall harm to humans by keeping them confined and “protected”. But our principle would avoid such a scenario because it would mean a loss of human empowerment.

While empowerment provides a new way of thinking about safe robot behaviour, we still have much work to do on scaling up its efficiency so it can easily be deployed on any robot and translate to good and safe behaviour in all respects. This poses a very difficult challenge. But we firmly believe empowerment can lead us towards a practical solution to the ongoing and highly debated problem of how to rein in robots’ behaviour, and how to keep robots -– in the most naive sense -– “ethical”.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Jim Robinson of RRE Ventures said it best last month at the Silicon Dragon Conference when comparing Silicon Valley to New York, “There are two kinds of centers that have a lot of startups and technology, there are technology centers and commerce centers.” New York falls into the later category, while the Valley is the former. Sitting next to Jim, I reflected that Singapore might be in both groups, an Asian commerce hub and a leader in mechatronics. As an advocate for automation, I am often disheartened that the United States significantly lags behind its industrial counterparts in manufacturing autonomous machines. The key to a pro-job policy could be gleaning from the successes of countries like Singapore to implement America’s own ‘Robot First Plan.’

Last August, Singapore became the first country to permit autonomous taxis on its roads. Boston-based startup nuTonomy moved its operations to the Far East, which enabled the company to launch public trials weeks before Uber’s test in Pittsburgh. The secret to the company’s speed to market was to skip America’s 19,492 municipal government licensing departments to pilot its technology years before any of the other competing technologies, with the exception of Google’s Waymo. In addition to less regulatory hoops, the Singapore Land Transport Authority has partnered with nuTonomy on its rollout.

Pang Kin Keong, Singapore’s Permanent Secretary for Transport and the Chairman of its Committee on autonomous driving, said “We face constraints in land and manpower. We want to take advantage of self-driving technology to overcome such constraints, and in particular to introduce new mobility concepts which could bring about transformational improvements to public transport in Singapore.”

The company is on track to offer its driverless taxis throughout the country by 2018. Doug Park’s, nuTonomy’s COO, estimates that autonomous taxis could ultimately reduce the number of cars on Singapore’s roads from 900,000 to 300,000. Park explains, “When you are able to take that many cars off the road, it creates a lot of possibilities. You can create smaller roads, you can create much smaller car parks. I think it will change how people interact with the city going forward.” Park’s partnership with the city-state is made possible because Singapore is not straddled with the costs of aging infrastructure like many US and European cities.

Since first announcing its test in 2016, nuTonomy is on pace to expand globally with its recent partnership with ride-sharing company Lyft in a pilot in Boston. Karl Lagnemma, nuTonomy’s CEO, said: “By combining forces with Lyft in the U.S., we’ll be positioned to build the best passenger experience for self-driving cars. Both companies care immensely about solving urban transportation issues and the future of our cities, and we look forward to working with Lyft as we continue to improve our autonomous vehicle software system.”

Besides autonomous vehicles, drones have been widely embraced by Singapore’s infamously strict police department. Singaporean startup H3 Dynamics became the first company last year to launch a drone in the box solution that offers storage and charging stations in the field. H3’s “DRONEBOX” is a unique solar-based charging station that enables longer autonomous missions in areas that are typically hostile for humans. Since showcasing its technology above the streets of Singapore, H3 faces increased competition from formidable upstarts, including: Airobotics, EasyAriel, and HiveUAV.

According to its original press release, “DRONEBOX is an all-inclusive, self-powered system that can be deployed anywhere, including in remote areas where industrial assets, borders, or sensitive installations require constant monitoring. Designed as an evolution over today’s many unattended sensors and CCTV cameras installed in cities, borders, or large industrial estates, DRONEBOX innovates by giving sensors freedom of movement using drones as their vehicles. End-users can now deploy flying sensor systems at different locations, and measure just about anything, anywhere, anytime. They offer 24/7 reactivity, providing critical information to operators – even to those located thousands of miles away.”

In June, Dynamic H3 announced the opening of new drone operation centers to include Europe, America and the Middle East. Additionaly, H3 is now marketing its next generation of battery technology for extended high-value asset missions. H3’s HES Energy Systems is the product a decade-long research initiative between the company and the Singaporean government. Unlike typical drone lithium batteries that have a flight-time of 20-40 minutes, HES Energy’s developed its ground-breaking 6 hour battery (above) with a first of its kind “solid-hydrogen on demand powered system.” The combination of longer flights, self-charging stations and autonomous missions is a powerful value proposition for this Singaporean offering in differentiating itself in an already crowded unmanned flight market.

This past week, Dubai announced its plans to roll out a fleet of mini autonomous police cars for surveillance and crime prevention. This effort is part of the Middle Eastern city’s program to automate 25% of its police force over the next decade. The Gulf State’s ambitious plans were a perfect fit for Singaporean OTSAW Digital, a division of ActiV-a global tech powerhouse. Similar to nuTonomy and H3, OTSAW’s O-R3 grew out of the innovation friendly environment of the Asian republic.

OR-3 is smaller than a golf cart, and not meant actually to capture nefarious actors, but to identify suspicious activity while it is happening. Using facial recognition technology and a built-in ariel drone, the robot will begin patrolling the Dubai beat by the end of the year. The autonomous car/drone combo is almost a hybrid of nuTonomy and H3, with an array of sensors and machine intelligence technologies to survey the area via thermal imaging, license plate readers and cloud-based computing.

According to Abdullah Khalifa Al Marri, the head of the Dubai police department, the OR-3 isn’t meant to replace officers but rather to augment their skills with more efficient resources. “We seek to augment operations with the help of technology such as robots. Essentially, we aim for streets to be safe and peaceful without heavy police patrol,” said Al Marri. Last month, Dubai even deployed a humanoid-looking robot to monitor tourist attractions, dubbed Robocop, that speaks English and Arabic. According to Dubai, it plans to deploy larger humanoids that stand over 10 feet tall and go over 50 mph, while the human controller operates the device inside the robots.

Brigadier-General Khalid Nasser Al Razzouqi, Director-General of Smart Services at Dubai Police’s department, boasted, “The launch of the world’s first operational Robocop is a significant milestone for the Emirate and a step towards realizing Dubai’s vision to be a global leader in smart cities technology adoption.” In 2015, The World Economic Forum ranked the United Arab Emirates as the second most tech savvy government in the world, just behind Singapore.

As I write this article I find myself at another conference, “The State of New York: Smart Cities.” Hoping for insights about how my city will compete with the likes of these tech savvy counterparts, I was met by a group of bureaucrats touting App Competitions and Free WiFi. One speaker even suggested that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is run by the best executive team, even though New York’s Governor has politely called the organization dysfunctional due to multiple train derailments, signal problems, and overcrowded stations (see: The Summer of Hell). Science is not just about the possible, but the willing. Singapore’s ability to reinvent the very nature of how a city operates and partners with the private sector is proof positive that even a country founded 50 years ago can climb to the “top of the heap.”

An interdisciplinary workshop on self-organization and swarm intelligence in cyber physical systems was held at Lakeside Labs this week. Experts presented their work and discussed open issues in this exciting field.

“Our crazyswarm is the largest indoor drone swarm that I’m aware of,” Nora Ayanian states. The assistant professor from the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles was recently described by MIT Technology Review to be one of “35 innovators under 35.” She came to Klagenfurt to expound her latest results on multirobot coordination. She advocates for taking the perspective of a robot when designing coordination algorithms. Her team thus programmed a multiplayer computer game in which people have to form a certain spatial pattern by moving around, but they are constrained by the limited view of a robot and are not allowed to use any explicit communication. She expects new insights from this game for the development of a human-inspired approach for robot coordination.

The second keynote was given by Gianni Di Caro from Carnegie Mellon University. His talk emphasized latest advances in wearable interfaces for multi-modal interaction between humans and robot swarms. His philosophy is that most computations, such as decoding and fusion of vocal and gestural commands, are not done in the robots but in the wearable devices. Gianni was also a guest in Klagenfurt in 2013. “I enjoyed the Lakeside Research Days so much, that’s why I came back,” he says.

Two additional highlights were the presentations by Johannes Gerstmayr, professor for machine elements and design at the University of Innsbruck, and Thomas Schmickl, a professor for biology at the University of Graz. Gerstmayr introduced his adaptive tetrahedal elements, which can be put together to form reconfigurable robots and programmable matter. It is fascinating to imagine that these elements have the potential to enable reconfigurable furniture and art objects. Schmickl explained that entities in biological swarms might not need any explicit communication in order to collaborate. He also explained that the behavior of honeybees is quite diverse, and that only seven percent of honeybees are “goal finders” having the capability to systematically find a certain target, such as heat spots. According to Schmickl, the most promising application of swarm robotics is the search for extraterrestrial life forms. He currently develops swarms of small underwater robots for this purpose, which will soon be tested in the Adriatic Sea.

About 30 people attended the 2017 Lakeside Research Days, which was held in collaboration with the University of Klagenfurt from July 10 – 12, 2017. Emphasis was on scientific interaction and group work. The participants discussed, for example, the differences between swarms and controlled systems and concluded that swarms are especially useful in unknown and changing environments. The program also included laboratory sessions with training on micro-robots and talks from the Horizon 2020 project CPSwarm.

Keynotes were sponsored by the Lakeside Science & Technology Park GmbH, Infineon Technologies Austria AG, KELAG, and the TeWi-Förderverein. Melanie Schranz, senior researcher at Lakeside Labs and one of the organizers, is very satisfied with the outcome of the workshop: “I gained a lot of inspiration from great people for my own research,” she concludes.

Further impressions about the event can be found at Twitter Moments and #resdays17.

#resdays17 Tweets

The Robotics Hub, in collaboration with Silicon Valley Robotics, is looking to invest up to $500,000 in robotics, AI and sensor startups! Finalists also receive exposure on Robohub and space in the new Silicon Valley Robotics Cowork Space. Plus you get to pitch your startup to an audience of top VCs, investors and experts. Entries close August 31.

In previous Robot Launch competitions we’ve had hundreds of entries from more than 20 countries around the world. Our finalists have also reached the finals of major startup competitions like Tech Crunch Disrupt, and gone on to raise millions of dollars of funding making strong industry partnerships, such as working with Siemens Frontier Program.

Our semifinalists will also been featured on Robohub, which means they’ll reach an audience of approx 100,000 viewers. Everyone who enters gets incredibly valuable feedback from top robotics VCs, investors and experts.

CRITERIA: Your startup should be under 5 years old, with less than $2 million in funding. You should have a great new robotics technology and business model. Your startup is related to robotics, AI, simulation, sensors or autonomous vehicles. ENTER NOW.

Robot Launch is supported by Silicon Valley Robotics to help more robotics startups present their technology and business models to prominent investors. Silicon Valley Robotics is the not-for-profit industry group supporting innovation and commercialization in robotics technologies. The Robotics Hub is the first investor in advanced robotics and AI startups, helping to get from ‘zero to one’ with their network of robotics and market experts.

Please share this in your networks and let us know if you’d like to be a judge, mentor or can offer a prize for Robot Launch 2017. Just email Andra [andra @ robotlaunch.com].

Learn more about previous Robot Launch competitions here.

Here are the slides I gave recently as member of panel Sci-Fi Dreams: How visions of the future are shaping the development of intelligent technology, at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence 2017 conference. I presented three short stories about robot stories.

Slide 2:

The FP7 TRUCE Project invited a number of scientists – mostly within the field of Artificial Life – to suggest ideas for short stories. Those stories were then sent to a panel of writers, who chose one of the stories. I submitted an idea called The feeling of what it is like to be a robot and was delighted when Lucy Caldwell contacted me. Following a visit to the lab Lucy drafted a beautiful story called The Familiar which – following some iteration – appeared in the collected volume Beta Life.

Slide 3:

More recently the EU Human Brain Project Foresight Lab brought three Sci Fi writers – Allen Ashley, Jule Owen and Stephen Oram – to visit the lab. Inspired by what they saw they then wrote three wonderful short stories, which were read at the 2016 Bristol Literature Festival. The readings were followed by a panel discussion which included myself and BRL colleagues Antonia Tzemanaki and Marta Palau Franco. The three stories are published in the volume Versions of the Future. Stephen Oram went on to publish a collection called Eating Robots.

Slide 4:

My first two stories were about people telling stories about robots. Now I turn to the possibility of robots themselves telling stories. Some years ago I speculated on the idea on the idea of robots telling each other stories (directly inspired by a conversation with Richard Gregory). That idea has now turned into a current project, with the aim of building an embodied computational model of storytelling. For a full description see this paper, currently in press.

A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox.

Robots, drones and AI in action

Let’s kick off our June review by looking at some great new robotics research and development in action: Inspired by arthropod insects and spiders, Harvard Professor George Whitesides and Alex Nemiroski—a former postdoctoral fellow in Whitesides’ Harvard lab—have created a type of semi-soft robot capable of standing and walking. The team also created a robotic water strider capable of pushing itself along the liquid surface. The robots are described in a recently published paper in the journal Soft Robotics.

And in news from the garden shed, Franklin Robotics has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Tertill, their solar-powered, garden-weeding robot. Tertill lives in your garden, collecting sunlight to power its weed patrol, and cutting down short plants with a string trimmer/weed whacker with almost no intervention required. Available for about $300USD, the fully autonomous Tertill is the first weeding robot available to home gardeners! Check out the video below.

You may have heard that humankind lost another important battle with artificial intelligence last month when AlphaGo beat the world’s leading Go player Ke Jie by three games to zero. AlphaGo is an AI program developed by DeepMind, part of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Last year it beat another leading player, Lee Se-dol, by four games to one, but since then AlphaGo has substantially improved. Ke Jie described AlphaGo’s skill as “like a God of Go”. But AlphaGo will now retire from playing Go, leaving behind a legacy of games played against itself. These games have been described by one Go expert as like “games from far in the future”, which humans will study for years to improve their own play.

Elsewhere, Chinese education authorities have gone high-tech to catch cheaters as millions of high-school students take their “gaokao”, the annual university entrance exam seen as key to landing a lucrative white-collar job. So high are the stakes and so competitive is the exam that some students resort to cheating. But not if these facial recognition drones can help it.

Meanwhile, back in the pub, students from the University of Leeds have created a robot which they claim is capable of pulling the perfect pint. The team, from the School of Mechanical Engineering, worked with local engineering company Quality Bearings, and Saltaire Brewery to come up with the concept. The robot was put through its paceswith a taste test, a consistency test and a wastage test. Check out the clip below.

At ICRA 2017, researchers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) introduced a small robotic explorer that uses a single solid-fuel rocket to launch itself into the air. What’s new is that their robot includes some braking rockets that help it make pinpoint landings, as well as a clever gyroscopic system to make sure that it flies straight as well as providing a way for the robot to get around after landing.

In other flying news, a team of MIT engineers has come up with a much less expensive UAV design that can hover for longer durations to provide wide-ranging communications support. The researchers designed, built, and tested a UAV resembling a thin glider with a 24-foot wingspan. The vehicle can carry 4.5 to 9 kg of communications equipment while flying at an altitude of 15,000 feet. Weighing in at just under 68 kg, the vehicle is powered by a 5-horsepower gasoline engine and can keep itself aloft for more than five days — longer than any gasoline-powered autonomous aircraft has remained in flight, the researchers say. Check out the Jungle Hawk Owl’s maiden flight below.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are aiming to develop flying robots that can both drive through a city-like setting with parking spots, no fly zones and landing pads. In a new paper, the team presented a system of eight quadcopter drones that can do all of that and more.

And last but not least: Authors of the ICRA 2017 Best Automation Paper “UAV-Based Crop and Weed Classification for Smart Farming” wrote about their findings for Robohub. Check it out.

Policy and financing

Europe needs a “human in command approach,” says the European Economic and Social Comitte (EESC). The EU must pursue a policy that ensures the development, deployment and use of artificial intelligence in Europe in favor, and not conducive to the detriment, of society and social welfare, the Committee said in an initiative opinion on the social impact of AI which 11 fields are identified for action.

Across the pond, some of the nation’s leading wireless giants and drone makers offered “effusive praise” of President Donald Trump in June as they lobbied his administration to eliminate the federal regulations that stand in the way of their businesses. As part of the White House’s five-day focus on technology, Trump gathered executives from those industries—including AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, PrecisionHawk CEO Michael Chasen and a number of venture capitalists—for a morning of brainstorming sessions devoted to spurring new investments in emerging fields.

And in a long-awaited business transaction, The New York Times Dealbook announced that SoftBank was buying Boston Dynamics from Alphabet (Google). Also included in the deal is the Japanese startup Schaft. Acquisition details were not disclosed. Both Boston Dynamics and Schaft were acquired by Google when Andy Rubin was developing Google’s robot group through a series of acquisitions. Both companies have continued to develop innovative mobile robots. And both have been on Google’s “for sale” list.

The Drone Racing League (DRL) has announced the closing of a $20 million Series B round of financing, bringing the total amount raised to $32 million. The new round of financing was led by Sky, Liberty Media LMCA +% (owner of Formula 1) and Lux Capital, with involvement by a couple of new investors in Allianz and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Investment from Allianz was expected after it was announced that Allianz signed on to become title sponsor of DRL’s elite racing circuit in February.

Health and medicine

Researchers from MIT’s CSAIL have developed a new system that uses a 3-D camera, a belt with separately controllable vibrational motors distributed around it, and an electronically reconfigurable Braille interface to give visually impaired users more information about their environments.

Elsewhere, a researcher at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) is developing a bio-inspired ‘smart’ knee joint for prosthetic lower limbs. Dr Appolinaire Etoundi, based at Bristol Robotics Laboratory, is leading the research and will analyse the functions, features and mechanisms of the human knee in order to translate this information into a new bio-inspired procedure for designing prosthetics.

And the medical innovations didn’t stop there in June. How about Robot snakes slithering into the delicate field of heart surgery? Or a robotic doctor that can be controlled hundreds of kilometres away by a human counterpart? Getting a check-up from a robot may sound like something from a sci-fi film, but scientists are closing in on this real-life scenario and have already tested a prototype.

An aging population means the age-dependency ratio—the proportion of the elderly compared with the number of workers—will almost double from 28.8 % in 2015 to 51 % in 2080, straining healthcare systems and national budgets. The creators of one humanoid robot (below) under development for the elderly say it can understand people’s actions and learn new behaviors in response, even though it is devoid of arms. Robots can be programmed to understand an elderly person’s preferences and habits to detect changes in behavior: for example if a yoga devotee misses a class, it will ask why, while if an elderly person falls it will automatically alert caregivers or emergency services.

Self-driving news

June was a huge month of wheeling and dealing in the self-driving cars industry. NuTonomy, a small Boston startup that makes software for self-driving cars, has launched a research-and-development partnership with San Francisco’s Lyft Inc., the second-largest ride-hailing company in the United States. It’s the latest alliance between Lyft and a maker of autonomous vehicle technology, and could boost nuTonomy’s efforts to become a major force in self-driving vehicles. Lyft chief executive Logan Green said the partnership “could lead to thousands of Lyft cars on the nuTonomy platform.”

Meanwhile, competitors Uber, the global ride-sharing transportation company, named two replacements to recover from the recent firing of Anthony Levandowski who headed their Advanced Technologies Group, their OTTO trucking unit, and their self-driving team. Levandowski was fired May 30th. Eric Meyhofer and Anthony Levandowski will pick up the slack.

In other high-level firing news, Tesla Inc. has parted ways with another senior leader on its self-driving technology team, adding more turmoil to a program that is under pressure to meet the grand ambitions of Chief Executive Elon Musk. The Silicon Valley electric-car maker said Chris Lattner—head of development of Tesla’s Autopilot program—left his post as after he and Musk failed to see eye to eye on some important issues during Lattner’s six months in post.

Meanwhile, Waymo is done driving around the cute, steering-wheel-free autonomous cars that were introduced by Google back in 2014. In a blog post, Waymo leaders write that time has come to “retire our fleet of Fireflies” —their name for the tiny cars—and focus instead of integrating self-driving technology into other vehicles, like the Chrysler Pacifica minivans Waymo put on the road earlier this year.

In the UK, Venturer driverless car project published results of their first trials. Venturer is the first Connected and Autonomous Vehicle project to start in the UK. The results of Venturer’s preliminary trials show that the handover process is a safety critical issue in the development of Autonomous Vehicles. The first Venturer  trials set out to investigate ‘takeover’ (time taken to reengage with vehicle controls) and ‘handover’ (time taken to regain a baseline/normal level of driving behavior and performance) when switching frequently between automated and manual driving modes within urban and extra-urban settings. This trial is believed to be the first to directly compare handover to human driver-control from autonomous mode in both simulator and autonomous road vehicle platforms.

Honda was the latest automaker to commit to an ambitious self-driving car goal in June. It wants cars with SAE Level 4 autonomy on the road by 2025, CEO Takahiro Hachigo announced at a media event in Japan. This news will likely stoke a fire underneath other Japanese self-driving car developers, so stay tuned for lots of new developments.

Auto supplier Robert Bosch GmbH will build a 1 billion-euro ($1.1 billion) semiconductor plant, the biggest single investment in its history, as the maker of brakes and engines prepares for a surge in demand for components used in self-driving vehicles.

Tutorials

Robohub showcased some great tutorials last month. Here’s one: The Robot Academy is a new learning resource from Professor Peter Corke and the Queensland University of Technology, the team behind the award-winning Introduction to Robotics and Robotic Vision courses. There are over 200 lessons available, all for free. The courses were designed for university undergraduate students but many lessons are suitable for anybody! So get stuck in.

Florian Enner offered this useful tutorial on programming: “Using MATLAB for hardware-in-the-loop prototyping #1 : Message passing systems”. Check it out here.

And Ricardo Téllez offered an article on “Teaching ROS quickly to students“—a novel method of teaching to class of students in a rapid time frame.

Enjoy!

Upcoming events for July– August 2017

CIROS: July 5, 2017 — July 8, 2017, Shanghai, China

ASCEND Conference and Expo: July 19, 2017 — July 21, 2017, Portland, OR

RoboCup: July 25, 2017 — July 31, 2017, Nagoya, Japan

Farm Progress Show: August 29, 2017 — August 31, 2017, Decatur, IL

World of Drones Congress (WoDC): August 31, 2017 — September 2, 2017, Brisbane, Australia

The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence is convening their first annual conference, this Thursday and Friday, in Cambridge UK.

The two days of conference will focus on topics that cut across many of the issues and disciplines involved in the future of AI: narratives and trust.

Keynote speakers include Professor Stuart Russell (Berkeley), Baroness Onora O’Neill (Cambridge), Dr Claire Craig (Royal Society), Matt Hancock (MP) and Professor Francesca Rossi (University of Padova, Italy).

You can watch the live stream here, or follow the tweets below at #CFIConf.

Future of Intelligence Live Stream

#CFIConf Tweets

SoftBank’s Pepper humanoid robot operation (a joint venture with Foxconn, Alibaba and SoftBank) has incurred a big $274 million loss while Asia more than doubled the amount of funding for tech startups thus far in 2017. No one ever said VC funding was for the faint of heart.

The Ups

According to PwC and CB Insights, venture capital investments in Asia in the first six months of 2017 totaled $28.8 billion. VC investments in North America for the same period totaled $18.4 billion.

CB Insights reports that 45% of all dollars invested in tech in 2017 went to Asian firms. 

Largest deals in Asia so far this year included Didi Chuxing raising $5.5 billion, One97 Communications ($1.4 billion), GO-JEK ($1.2 billion), Bytedance ($1 billion) and Ele.me ($1 billion).

Largest deals in North America in the quarter included San Francisco-based Lyft – which raised $600 million, Outcome Health ($500 million), Group Nine Media ($485 million), Houzz ($400 million), and Guardant Health ($360 million).

The number of deals around the world, as shown in the chart above, remains heavily in the West. Almost every day the news reports another fund being set up to invest in one area of tech or another. For example, Toyota Motor Corp today announced a $100 million fund (Toyota AI Ventures) for AI and robotics startups and have already made some initial investments. The first three are for a maker of cameras that monitor drivers and roads, a creator of autonomous car-mapping algorithms, and a developer of robotic companions for the elderly.

The Downs

Nikkei Asian Review reports on SoftBank Robotics’ $274 million loss which they attribute to the Pepper humanoid robot joint venture with Alibaba and Foxconn. The subsidiary was established in 2014 and began consumer sales of Pepper in June 2015 and business sales that October.

“Although the company does not release earnings, it recorded sales of 2.2 billion yen and a net loss of 11.7 billion yen in fiscal 2015, according to Tokyo Shoko Research. That is markedly worse than the 2.3 billion yen net loss from fiscal 2014. 'Pepper is unprofitable because of its relatively low price for a humanoid robot, costing just 198,000 yen ($1,750), which cannot cover development costs.'”

A SoftBank PR statement said that they will increase corporate sales and improve earnings through related businesses such as apps and content and that sales are good.

By Jennifer Chu

In recent years, engineers have worked to shrink drone technology, building flying prototypes that are the size of a bumblebee and loaded with even tinier sensors and cameras. Thus far, they have managed to miniaturize almost every part of a drone, except for the brains of the entire operation — the computer chip.

Standard computer chips for quadcoptors and other similarly sized drones process an enormous amount of streaming data from cameras and sensors, and interpret that data on the fly to autonomously direct a drone’s pitch, speed, and trajectory. To do so, these computers use between 10 and 30 watts of power, supplied by batteries that would weigh down a much smaller, bee-sized drone.

Now, engineers at MIT have taken a first step in designing a computer chip that uses a fraction of the power of larger drone computers and is tailored for a drone as small as a bottlecap. They will present a new methodology and design, which they call “Navion,” at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference, held this week at MIT.

The team, led by Sertac Karaman, the Class of 1948 Career Development Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, and Vivienne Sze, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, developed a low-power algorithm, in tandem with pared-down hardware, to create a specialized computer chip.

The key contribution of their work is a new approach for designing the chip hardware and the algorithms that run on the chip. “Traditionally, an algorithm is designed, and you throw it over to a hardware person to figure out how to map the algorithm to hardware,” Sze says. “But we found by designing the hardware and algorithms together, we can achieve more substantial power savings.”

“We are finding that this new approach to programming robots, which involves thinking about hardware and algorithms jointly, is key to scaling them down,” Karaman says.

The new chip processes streaming images at 20 frames per second and automatically carries out commands to adjust a drone’s orientation in space. The streamlined chip performs all these computations while using just below 2 watts of power — making it an order of magnitude more efficient than current drone-embedded chips.

Karaman, says the team’s design is the first step toward engineering “the smallest intelligent drone that can fly on its own.” He ultimately envisions disaster-response and search-and-rescue missions in which insect-sized drones flit in and out of tight spaces to examine a collapsed structure or look for trapped individuals. Karaman also foresees novel uses in consumer electronics.

“Imagine buying a bottlecap-sized drone that can integrate with your phone, and you can take it out and fit it in your palm,” he says. “If you lift your hand up a little, it would sense that, and start to fly around and film you. Then you open your hand again and it would land on your palm, and you could upload that video to your phone and share it with others.”

Karaman and Sze’s co-authors are graduate students Zhengdong Zhang and Amr Suleiman, and research scientist Luca Carlone.

From the ground up

Current minidrone prototypes are small enough to fit on a person’s fingertip and are extremely light, requiring only 1 watt of power to lift off from the ground. Their accompanying cameras and sensors use up an additional half a watt to operate.

“The missing piece is the computers — we can’t fit them in terms of size and power,” Karaman says. “We need to miniaturize the computers and make them low power.”

The group quickly realized that conventional chip design techniques would likely not produce a chip that was small enough and provided the required processing power to intelligently fly a small autonomous drone.

“As transistors have gotten smaller, there have been improvements in efficiency and speed, but that’s slowing down, and now we have to come up with specialized hardware to get improvements in efficiency,” Sze says.

The researchers decided to build a specialized chip from the ground up, developing algorithms to process data, and hardware to carry out that data-processing, in tandem.

Tweaking a formula

Specifically, the researchers made slight changes to an existing algorithm commonly used to determine a drone’s “ego-motion,” or awareness of its position in space. They then implemented various versions of the algorithm on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), a very simple programmable chip. To formalize this process, they developed a method called iterative splitting co-design that could strike the right balance of achieving accuracy while reducing the power consumption and the number of gates.

A typical FPGA consists of hundreds of thousands of disconnected gates, which researchers can connect in desired patterns to create specialized computing elements. Reducing the number gates with co-design allowed the team to chose an FPGA chip with fewer gates, leading to substantial power savings.

“If we don’t need a certain logic or memory process, we don’t use them, and that saves a lot of power,” Karaman explains.

Each time the researchers tweaked the ego-motion algorithm, they mapped the version onto the FPGA’s gates and connected the chip to a circuit board. They then fed the chip data from a standard drone dataset — an accumulation of streaming images and accelerometer measurements from previous drone-flying experiments that had been carried out by others and made available to the robotics community.

“These experiments are also done in a motion-capture room, so you know exactly where the drone is, and we use all this information after the fact,” Karaman says.

Memory savings

For each version of the algorithm that was implemented on the FPGA chip, the researchers observed the amount of power that the chip consumed as it processed the incoming data and estimated its resulting position in space.

The team’s most efficient design processed images at 20 frames per second and accurately estimated the drone’s orientation in space, while consuming less than 2 watts of power.

The power savings came partly from modifications to the amount of memory stored in the chip. Sze and her colleagues found that they were able to shrink the amount of data that the algorithm needed to process, while still achieving the same outcome. As a result, the chip itself was able to store less data and consume less power.

“Memory is really expensive in terms of power,” Sze says. “Since we do on-the-fly computing, as soon as we receive any data on the chip, we try to do as much processing as possible so we can throw it out right away, which enables us to keep a very small amount of memory on the chip without accessing off-chip memory, which is much more expensive.”

In this way, the team was able to reduce the chip’s memory storage to 2 megabytes without using off-chip memory, compared to a typical embedded computer chip for drones, which uses off-chip memory on the order of a few gigabytes.

“Any which way you can reduce the power so you can reduce battery size or extend battery life, the better,” Sze says.

This summer, the team will mount the FPGA chip onto a drone to test its performance in flight. Ultimately, the team plans to implement the optimized algorithm on an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, a more specialized hardware platform that allows engineers to design specific types of gates, directly onto the chip.

“We think we can get this down to just a few hundred milliwatts,” Karaman says. “With this platform, we can do all kinds of optimizations, which allows tremendous power savings.”

This research was supported, in part, by Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

Join us at the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017) for a full day workshop that will bring together international stakeholders in robotics to examine best practices for accelerating robotics innovation through strategic policy frameworks.

Best practices in designing effective roadmaps for robotics innovation

IROS Workshop | 8:30-17:00 September 28, 2017 | Vancouver Convention Centre | Vancouver BC

This is a unique opportunity to learn from people who have played a significant role in designing and implementing major strategic robotics initiatives around the globe.

Objectives
In the past decade, a number of governing bodies and industry consortia have developed strategic roadmaps to guide investment and development of robotic technology. With the roadmaps from the US, South Korea, Japan and EU etc. well underway, the time is right to take stock of these strategic robotics initiatives to see what is working, what is not, and what best practices in roadmap development might be broadly applied to other regions.

The objective of this two-part workshop is to examine the process of how these policy frameworks came to be created in the first place, how they have been tailored to local capabilities and strengths, and what performance indicators are being used to measure their success — so that participants may draw from international collective experience as they design and evaluate strategic robotics initiatives for their own regions.

Program Part ONE — Morning Session: “Developing innovation policy for robotics, and establishing key performance indicators that are relevant to your region”
The morning session will feature international speakers who have played a significant role in launching and shaping major strategic robotics initiatives across the globe. The focus of this session will be on the history and process of designing the roadmap (rather than on merely presenting the roadmap itself) and key performance indicators of roadmap success. Via presentations and panel discussion, the outcome of this session will be an exploratory overview of best practices and key performance metrics, so that participants can apply knowledge gained from the workshop as they design strategic robotics policy frameworks for their own regional or national contexts.

Program Part TWO — Afternoon Session: “Towards a national robotics strategy for Canada”
The afternoon session will bring together leading Canadian robotics experts from academia, industry, federal/provincial policy, and the national research council to discuss and strategize the future of robotics in Canada, with an emphasis on addressing the social, economic, legal/ethical and regulatory issues, and the robotics strengths and capabilities specific to this country. The main goals of this session will be to 1) establish a clear picture of the internal Canadian robotics landscape and how it compares to other nations worldwide, 2) discuss lessons learned in the International session within the Canadian context, and 3) discuss and identify gaps and opportunities for a Canadian initiative. Ultimately the Canadian session will serve as a venue for collecting data and viewpoints to support the development of a Canadian Robotics Roadmap.

Who should attend
This workshop is open to all members of academia, government, and industry with an interest in funding, policy and research strategy.

Part One of the workshop (morning session) will be broadly applicable to anyone with an interest in robotics policy, partnerships and funding.

Part Two (afternoon session) will be of particular interest to Canadian conference-goers as well as those who are interested in Canadian research and industry partnerships.

Call for participation
We are actively seeking participants for this workshop. If you are

involved in developing or evaluating a major strategic robotics initiative in your region and would like to participate in our international discussion, OR

are a member of the Canadian robotics ecosystem or are a Canadian roboticist living abroad who would like to be involved in a national robotics strategy for Canada

then please send an email with your expression of interest to: info@canadianroboticsnetwork.com. We look forward to hearing from you!!

Workshop Organizers

• Elizabeth Croft, Director, Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CARIS) Lab, UBC
• Clément Gosselin, Professor, Laboratoire de Robotique, Université Laval
• Paul Johnston, Research Policy Consultant, former President of Precarn Incorporated
• Dana Kulić, Associate Professor, Adaptive Systems Laboratory, University of Waterloo
• AJung Moon, Co-Founder & Director, Open Roboethics Institute
• Angela Schoellig, Assistant Professor, Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), University of Toronto
• Hallie Siegel, Strategic Foresight & Innovation @ OCAD U, former Managing Editor @Robohub

Workshop Registration

Registration for IROS workshops is separate from the IROS conference fee. Please see the IROS Website for details: http://www.iros2017.org/registration-travel/registration# 

Early workshop registration deadline: July 22nd.

More Info
http://canadianroboticsnetwork.com/iros-workshop/
http://www.iros2017.org/program/workshops-and-tutorials

Contact
info@canadianroboticsnetwork.com

News

A U.S. drone strike in Somalia targeted members of al-Shabab. It is the second drone strike in Somalia since President Trump relaxed rules for targeting members of the al-Qaeda-allied group. (New York Times)

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is offering refunds to drone hobbyists who paid the $5 fee to register with the agency. The move follows a federal court ruling in May that found that the FAA could not compel recreational drone users to register. The FAA has collected over $4 million in fees since it implemented the registration policy in December 2015. (Recode)

Commentary, Analysis, and Art

At the Washington Post, Greg Jaffe profiles U.S. Air Force analysts who examine video imagery from drones.

In a report published by the Mitchell Institute, Gen. David Deptula argues that the U.S. Department of Defense should create an office for unmanned aircraft to coordinate efforts across the different services. (Breaking Defense)

In Drone Warrior, Brett Velicovich and Christopher S. Stewart offer an insider’s account of running U.S. targeted killing operations. (Wired)

At Lawfare, Kenneth Anderson and Matthew Waxman present a primer on the legal and ethical debates over autonomous weapons.

At the Jamestown Foundation, Elsa Kania writes that the China is seeking to leverage recent advances in swarming drones to bolster its military.

This month’s Signal magazine includes several articles on drones and robots. (AFCEA)

At Breaking Defense, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. looks at how the lack of trust between humans and unmanned systems will inhibit the integration of robots in the future.

At the Morning Consult, Edward Graham writes that recent legislation in Congress would enable localities to have a greater say in drone regulations.

At TechCrunch, Helen Greiner discusses how robots and drones have taken on more and more roles.

At Poynter, Melody Kramer considers how recent aerial images of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on an empty beach demonstrate how drones are becoming effective newsgathering tools.

At Drone360, Lauren Sigfusson looks at how the FAA’s Part 107 waiver and authorization process has changed in recent weeks.

At Arkansas Matters, Chris Pulliam says that crop dusters are concerned about the potential threats posed to their aircraft by drones.

At DefenseNews, Burak Ege Bekdil writes that Turkey is increasingly relying on drones for border security, counterterrorism, and operations against Kurdish groups.  

At the National Interest, Samuel Bendett considers whether Russia will ever be able to catch up with the U.S. and Israel in terms of drone development.

In a letter to the editor of the Pocono Record, Pete Sauvigne argues that a local model aircraft club should not be stripped of its permission to fly in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

At The Drive, Marco Margaritoff looks at a few of National Geographic’s best drone photos of year to date. Know Your Drone

The U.S. Army is developing a drone that moves like a flying squirrel. (Popular Mechanics)

Meanwhile, the Army is developing a system that allows a single human operator to control multiple drones. (Press Release)

Defense firm Rafael has added a laser interceptor to its Drone Dome counter-drone system. (IHS Jane’s 360)

Italian firm Piaggio has resumed flight testing of its HammerHead military drone a year after the program was grounded due to a crash. (AIN Online)

Israeli defense firm Elbit has demonstrated its Seagull unmanned surface vehicle in an end-to-end mine countermeasures mission. (IHS Jane’s 360)

A group of researchers in Florida is developing an underwater drone that seeks out and collects lionfish, an invasive species in the area. (Pensacola News Journal)

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley are developing a jumping one-legged robot that could eventually be used for search and rescue. (Wired)

The U.S. Coast Guard will begin evaluating different small drones with the goal of acquiring a system in 2018. (C4ISRNet)

Meanwhile, South Korea’s Coast Guard is looking to equip its offshore patrol vessels with aerial surveillance drones by 2020. (IHS Jane’s 360)

The Netherlands Aerospace Centre is testing a small jet-powered fixed-wing drone. (Unmanned Systems Technology)

Hot dog company Oscar Mayer revealed the newest addition to its WienerFleet, the WienerDrone, a hot dog delivery drone. (Fortune)

Drones at Work

An inmate who broke out of a South Carolina prison reportedly escaped using tools delivered to him by a drone. (The New York Times)

The Russian Navy is reportedly displeased with the performance of its Inspector Mk2 unmanned surface vehicle developed by French firm ECA Group. (Mil.Today)

Officials in Kaziranga National Park in India are using drones to monitor wildlife displaced by recent floods in the area. (Hindustan Times)

The Redondo Beach Police Department in California used a drone to conduct aerial surveillance during the local Independence Day celebrations. (Easy Reader News)

Meanwhile, Police in Nashville, Tennessee arrested a man for flying a drone over a large crowd during a Fourth of July celebration. (Fox 17)

The French Air Force flew one of its MQ-9 Reaper drones in civilian domestic airspace for the first time. (Aviation Analysis Wing)

Ohio has passed a law that permits ground delivery robots to operate on sidewalks. It is the fifth U.S. state to pass such a law. (Recode)

Florida governor Rick Scott signed a bill that establishes statewide regulations for drone use. (Flying Magazine)

A volunteer rescue group in Italy is using drones to look for signs of possible impending rock slides before they happen. (Motherboard)

Industry Intel

The U.S. Army awarded Assist Consultants a $18.1 million contract to build a facility for the Navy’s MQ-4C Triton at Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. (FBO)

The Department of Justice awarded AARDVARK a $51,247 contract for backpackable robots. (FBO)

Germany’s Bayer CropScience awarded SlantRange, a U.S. company that makes sensors for drones, a contract to collect data on crop breeding and research programs. (Agriculture.com)

Australia’s new Defense Cooperative Research Center will award $50 million in grants to develop autonomous capabilities for military unmanned systems. (Press Release)

The European Union selected Sensofusion, a Finnish company, to help develop a counter-drone security system. (Press Release)

Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris has contracted Aveillant to install a counter-drone system called Gamekeeper. (FlightGlobal)

Germany is pausing plans to acquire the Israel Aerospace Industries Heron military drone until after its upcoming election. (DefenseNews)

IAI has agreed to transfer drone technology to India’s Dynamatic Technologies and Elcom Systems. (IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly)

Meanwhile, Indonesia and Turkey agreed to cooperate on the development of military systems and technologies, including drones. (IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly)

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions stock prices lifted 11 percent in June, due in part to news of a sale of attritable unmanned aircraft. (Motley Fool)

The Israeli military awarded Duke Robotics, a Florida-based startup, a contract for the TIKAD, a quadrotor drone that can be armed with a machine gun or grenade launcher. (Defense One)

For updates, news, and commentary, follow us on Twitter. The Weekly Drone Roundup is a newsletter from the Center for the Study of the Drone. It covers news, commentary, analysis and technology from the drone world. You can subscribe to the Roundup here.

by Joe Dodgshun
Drone innovators are transforming the way we watch events, from football matches and boat races to music festivals.

Anyone who has watched coverage of a festival or sports event in the last few years will probably have witnessed commercial drone use — in the form of breathtaking aerial footage.

But a collaboration of universities, research institutes and broadcasters is looking to take this to the next level by using a small swarm of intelligent drones.

The EU-funded MULTIDRONE project seeks to create teams of three to five semi-automated drones that can react to and capture unfolding action at large-scale sports events.

Project coordinator Professor Ioannis Pitas, of the University of Bristol, UK, says the collaboration aims to have prototypes ready for testing by its media partners Deutsche Welle and Rai – Radiotelevisione Italiana within 18 months.

‘Deutsche Welle has two potential uses lined up – filming the Rund um Wannsee boat race in Berlin, Germany, and also filming football matches with drones instead of normal cameras – while Rai is interested in covering cycling races,’ said Prof. Pitas.

‘We think we have the potential to offer a much better film experience at a reduced cost compared to helicopters or single drones, producing a new genre in drone cinematography.’

‘We have the potential to offer a much better film experience at a reduced cost compared to helicopters or single drones, producing a new genre in drone cinematography.’

Professor Ioannis Pitas, University of Bristol, UK

But before they can chase the leader of the Tour de France, MULTIDRONE faces the hefty challenge of creating AI that allows its drones to safely carry out a mission as a team.

Prof. Pitas says safety is the utmost priority, so the drones will include advanced crowd avoidance mechanisms and the ability to make emergency landings.

And it’s not just safety in the case of bad weather, a flat battery or a rogue football.

‘Security of communications is important as a drone could otherwise be hijacked, not just undermining privacy but also raising the possibility that it could be used as a weapon,’ said Prof. Pitas.

The early project phase will have a strong focus on ethics to prevent any issues around privacy.

‘People are sensitive about drones and about being filmed and we’re approaching this in three ways — trying to avoid shooting over private spaces, getting consent from the athletes being followed, and creating mechanisms that decide which persons to follow and blur other faces.’

If they can pull it off, he predicts a huge boost for the European entertainment industry and believes it could lead to much larger drone swarms capable of covering city-wide events.

Drones-on-demand
According to Gartner research, sales of commercial-use drones are set to jump from 110 000 units in 2016 to 174 000 this year. Although 2 million toy drones were snapped up last year for USD 1.7 billion, the commercial market dwarfed this at USD 2.8 billion.

Aside from pure footage, drones have also proven their worth in research, disaster response, construction and even in monitoring industrial assets.

One company trying to open up the market to those needing a sky-high helping hand is Integra Aerial Services, a young drones-as-a-service company.

An offshoot of Danish aeronautics firm Integra Holding Group, INAS, was launched in 2014 thanks to an EU-backed feasibility study.

INAS has more than 25 years of experience in aviation and used its knowledge of the sector’s legislation to shape a business model targeting heavier, more versatile drones weighing up to 25 kilogrammes. And they have already been granted a commercial drone operating license by the Danish Civil Aviation Authority.

These bigger drones have far more endurance than typical toy drones, which can weigh anywhere from 250 grams to several kilos. INAS CEO Gilles Fartek says their bigger size means they can carry multiple sensors, thus collecting all the needed data in one fell swoop, instead of across multiple flights.

For example, one of their drones flies LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) radar over Greenland to measure ice thickness as a measure of climate change, but could also carry a 100 megapixel, high-definition camera.

While INAS spends most of the Arctic summer running experiments from the remote host Station Nord in Greenland, Fartek says they’re free to use the drones for different projects in other seasons, mostly in areas of environmental research, mapping and agricultural monitoring.

‘You can’t match the quality of data for the price, but drone-use regulations in Europe are still quite complicated and make between-country operations almost impossible,’ said Fartek.

‘The paradox is that you have an increasing demand for such civil applications across Europe and even in institutional areas like civil protection and maritime safety where they cannot use military drones.’

A single European sky
These issues, and more, should soon be addressed by SESAR, the project which coordinates all EU research and development activities in air traffic management. SESAR plans to deploy a harmonised approach to European airspace management by 2030 in order to meet a predicted leap in air traffic.

Recently SESAR unveiled its blueprint outlining how it plans to make drone use in low-level airspace safe, secure and environmentally friendly. They hope this plan will be ready by 2019, paving the way for an EU drone services market by safely integrating highly automated or autonomous drones into low-level airspace of up to 150 metres.

Modelled after manned aviation traffic management, the plan will include registration of drones and operators, provide information for autonomous drone flights and introduce geo-fencing to limit areas where drones can fly.

The Issue
Emerging drone sectors range from delivery services, collecting industry data, infrastructure inspections, precision agriculture, transportation and logistics.

The market for drone services is expected to grow substantially in the coming years with an estimated worth of EUR 10 billion by 2035.

To support high-potential small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the European Commission has allocated EUR 3 billion over the period 2014-2020. A further EUR 17 billion was set aside under the Industrial Leadership pillar of the EU’s current research funding programme Horizon 2020.

More info
MULTIDRONE

INAS

Two reputable research resources are reporting that the robotics industry is growing more rapidly than expected. BCG (Boston Consulting Group) is conservatively projecting that the market will reach $87 billion by 2025; Tractica, incorporating the robotic and AI elements of the emerging self-driving industry, is forecasting the market will reach $237 billion by 2022.

Both research firms acknowledge that yesterday’s robots — which were blind, big, dangerous and difficult to program and maintain — are being replaced and supplemented with newer, more capable ones. Today's new, and future robots, will have voice and language recognition, access to super-fast communications, data and libraries of algorithms, learning capability, mobility, portability and dexterity. These new precision robots can sort and fill prescriptions, pick and pack warehouse orders, sort, inspect, process and handle fruits and vegetables, plus a myriad of other industrial and non-industrial tasks, most faster than humans, yet all the while working safely along side them.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Gaining Robotic Advantage, June 2017, 13 pages, free

BCG suggests that business executives be aware of ways robots are changing the global business landscape and think and act now. They see robotics-fueled changes coming in retail, logistics, transportation, healthcare, food processing, mining and agriculture.

BCG cites the following drivers:

• Private investment in the robotic space has continued to amaze with exponential year-over-year funding curves and sensational billion dollar acquisitions.
• Prices continue to fall on robots, sensors, CPUs and communications while capabilities continue to increase.
• Robot programming is being transformed by easier interfaces, GUIs and ROS.
• The prospect of a self-driving vehicles industry disrupting transportation is propelling a talent grab and strategic acquisitions by competing international players with deep pockets.
• 40% of robotic startups have been in the consumer sector and will soon augment humans in high-touch fields such as health and elder care.

 BCG also cites the following example of paying close attention to gain advantage:

“Amazon gained a first-mover advantage in 2012 when it bought Kiva Systems, which makes robots for warehouses. Once a Kiva customer, Amazon acquired the robot maker to improve the productivity and margins of its network of warehouses and fulfillment centers. The move helped Amazon maintain its low costs and expand its rapid delivery capabilities. It took five years for a Kiva alternative to hit the market. By then, Amazon had a jump on its rivals and had developed an experienced robotics team, giving the company a sustainable edge.”

Tractica

Robotics Market Forecast – June 2017, 26 pages, $4,200
Drones for Commercial Applications – June 2017, 196 pages, $4,200
AI for Automotive Applications – May 2017, 63 pages, $4,200
Consumer Robotics – May 2017, 130 pages, $4,200

The key story is that industrial robotics, the traditional pillar of the robotics market, dominated by Japanese and European robotics manufacturers, has given way to non-industrial robot categories like personal assistant robots, UAVs, and autonomous vehicles, with the epicenter shifting toward Silicon Valley, which is now becoming a hotbed for artificial intelligence (AI), a set of technologies that are, in turn, driving a lot of the most significant advancements in robotics. Consequently, Tractica forecasts that the global robotics market will grow rapidly between 2016 and 2022, with revenue from unit sales of industrial and non-industrial robots rising from $31 billion in 2016 to $237.3 billion by 2022.  The market intelligence firm anticipates that most of this growth will be driven by non-industrial robots.

Tractica is headquartered in Boulder and analyzes global market trends and applications for robotics and related automation technologies within consumer, enterprise, and industrial marketplaces and related industries.

General Research Reports

• Global autonomous mobile robots market, June 2017, 95 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  TechNavio forecasts that the global autonomous mobile robots market will grow at a CAGR of more than 14% through 2021.
• Global underwater exploration robots, June 2017, 70 pages, TechNavio, $3,500
  TechNavio forecasts that the global underwater exploration robots market will grow at a CAGR of 13.92 % during the period 2017-2021.
• Household vacuum cleaners market, March 2017, 134 pages, Global Market Insights, $4,500
  Global Market Insights forecasts that household vacuum cleaners market size will surpass $17.5 billion by 2024 and global shipments are estimated to exceed 130 million units by 2024, albeit at a low 3.0% CAGR. Robotic vacuums show a slightly higher growth CAGR.
• Global unmanned surface vehicle market, June 2017, Value Market Research, $3,950
  Value Market Research analyzed drivers (security and mapping) versus restraints such as AUVs and ROVs and made their forecasts for the period 2017-2023.
• Innovations in Robotics, Sensor Platforms, Block Chain, and Artificial Intelligence for Homeland Security, May 2017, Frost & Sullivan, $6,950
  This Frost & Sullivan report covers recent developments such as co-bots for surveillance applications, airborne sensor platforms for border security, blockchain tech, AI as first responder, and tech for detecting nuclear threats.
• Top technologies in advanced manufacturing and automation, April 2017, Frost & Sullivan, $4,950
  This Frost & Sullivan report focuses on exoskeletons, metal and nano 3D printing, co-bots and agile robots – all of which are in the top 10 technologies covered.
• Mobile robotics market, December 2016, 110 pages, Zion Market Research, $4,199
  Global mobile robotics market will reach $18.8 billion by end of 2021, growing at a CAGR of slightly above 13.0% between 2017 and 2021.
• Unmanned surface vehicle (USV) market, May 2017, MarketsandMarkets, $5,650
  MarketsandMarkets forecasts the unmanned surface vehicle (USV) market to grow from $470.1 Million in 2017 to $938.5 Million by 2022, at a CAGR of 14.83%.

Agricultural Research Reports

• Global agricultural robots market, May 2017, 70 pages, TechNavio, $2,500
  Forecasts the global agricultural robots market will grow steadily at a CAGR of close to 18% through 2021.
• Agriculture robots market, June 2017, TMR Research, $3,716
  Robots are poised to replace agricultural hands. They can pluck fruits, sow and reap crops, and milk cows. They carry out the tasks much faster and with a great degree of accuracy. This coupled with mandates on higher minimum pay being levied in most countries, have spelt good news for the global market for agriculture robots.
• Agricultural Robots, December 2016, 225 pages, Tractica, $4,200
  Forecasts that shipments of agricultural robots will increase from 32,000 units in 2016 to 594,000 units annually in 2024 and that the market is expected to reach $74.1 billion in annual revenue by 2024. Report, done in conjunction with The Robot Report, profiles over 165 companies involved in developing robotics for the industry.