Two speakers at the EmTech Digital Conference gave examples of how robots have become increasingly reliable colleagues and service providers day in and day out. Today, however, the biggest danger that robots face is perhaps the most unthinkable: young people.
Speaking at the annual EmTech Digital Conference in MIT Technology Review in San Francisco, Martin Hitch from Bossa Nova Robotics told how Bossa Nova robots have arrived at a Walmart store in rural Pennsylvania, from California to Arkansas, to walk through the shelves of 50 major stores.
Bossa Nova robots scan the shelves and send information to the cloud. This information about what is missing in the shelves or whether it is a mislabeled product is a fact that a sales assistant is hurrying through the shelves and scanning each product manually. "So at the end of the day, we are solving simple problems," says Hitch. Solved problems can be simple, but Bossa Nova has a lot of data in his possession. The robots of the company have carried out autonomous navigation of 6 thousand 320 hours, covering 3 thousand 600 kilometers, 117 thousand leisons and 395 million visuals.
Of course there are some problems that Hitch and Bossa Nova face in the long walks. For example, make sure that the robot's interaction with people runs smoothly. Initially, Hitch says some store employees are reluctant to accept that robots are not a physical threat. However, he also notes that human workers over time get warmed up by their mechanical colleagues and give names to robots like Megan or Little Eric.
Robots also learn to solve some of the more difficult problems like the last mile problem. Speaking at the same conference, Robby Technologies CEO and founding partner Rui Li showed a video of Robby 2.0, a wheeled cooling robot capable of carrying 70 liters of beverage. The robot says, "Excuse me." When people are pulled from the front, "Thank you." Li also said that they were trained to use robots on one side of the curb as well as to make them more polite. Li "This simple change in the behavior of the robots has solved a major problem," he says.
Robby 2.0 is equipped with a less friendly human interaction: if someone tries to open the robot, the alarm sounds and the robot's camera can be turned on remotely to see what's going on. The biggest enemies that these robots can face in the real world are the hardest group to predict: young people. Hitch says shoppers are kicking robots at Walmart and even hit shopping malls with robots. It is anticipated that such reactions will diminish as usual in society, such as robots like Bossa Nova and Robby Technologies. However, Hitch believes that a simple solution should be adopted until then, such as designing robots with these dangers in mind.