Robotics

A nimble robotic quadruped made famous in a flurry of viral videos will head offshore to help oil companies keep offshore installations running smoothly. This is the latest deployment for Spot, a robot created by Boston Dynamics that’s amassing an impressively diverse resume as its adopted by more commercial enterprises.
After an initial early adopter program concluded successfully, Spot officially went on sale to commercial users earlier this year. The oil rig deployment is a good example of the utility of a nimble, task agnostic platform that can be used for inspection in heavy industries and dangerous environments.
The deployment is the work of Cognite, a global industrial AI software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, which partnered with Aker BP to deploy Spot on the Skarv installation, 210 kilometers offshore in the North Sea. The mission was designed to test how a platform like Spot might be used to collect images, scans, and sensor readings on the rig.
“Missions like these demonstrate Spot’s value in difficult environments. Cognite continues to excel in testing and validating Spot’s ability to reduce risk to humans and provide value in the energy industry,” said Michael Perry, Vice President of Business Development at Boston Dynamics.
The test run is part of a robotics-driven digital transformation for Aker BP. Data from Spot was available almost instantly via a Cognite dashboard, and Spot was remote controlled from a Cognite home office onshore demonstrating how teleoperated robots can effectively conduct missions in sensitive environments. 
“This historic pairing of minds and machines working together to solve industry problems demonstrates that data driven decisions can change industry now,” said Dr. John Markus Lervik, CEO of Cognite. “This ability to guide Spot by remote control is a huge step forward for the industry and something we will continue to work closely with our partners on as we continue to innovate and provide data driven solutions.”
Designed as a task-agnostic autonomous platform, Spot is well suited to applications like pipeline and infrastructure inspection, security & defense, and search & rescue. Under an early adopter program, Boston Dynamics previously released 150 Spot robots to businesses and research institutions, where they were used in power generation facilities, factory floors, and construction sites, to name a few. In one deployment, a construction firm in Canada used a Spot robot to automate the capture of thousands of images weekly on a 500,000 square foot building site, creating an ongoing record of progress and enabling the builders to identify growing problems and inefficiencies early. NASA’s JPL also used spot in DARPA’s SubT challenge.

The trial of Spot in oil infrastructure inspection presents a promising opportunity for Boston Dynamics and demonstrates how task-agnostic robots might play increasingly prominent roles in digital transformation efforts of heavy asset industries.
“We are eager to explore how robotics systems can make offshore operations safer, more efficient, and more sustainable. The Spot offshore visit at the Skarv FPSO is one small step towards Aker BP’s vision to digitalize all our operations from cradle to grave to increase productivity, enhance quality, and improve the safety of our employees,” says Karl Johnny Hersvik, CEO of Aker BP. More

Remember GM’s electric gem, the EV1? It was a cool vehicle, decidedly ahead of an industry that would continue to drag its feet in the galumphing slog toward inevitable electric vehicle dominance.
It also looked something like a well-funded college science team’s first-place entry. The car wasn’t exactly a featherweight at around 3000 pounds, but it was clearly designed with weight and aerodynamics in mind. A full 1,175 pounds of the car’s total weigh-in was battery weight thanks its lead acid bank (a later version replaced the lead acid bank with lithium.) As a result, everything else about the vehicle had to be trimmed to the bone.
It seemed for a while that would be the fate of electric and hybrid-electric vehicles into the foreseeable future. So it might seem puzzling that electric car makers seem to have largely cast off concerns over weight — and in fact are embracing decidedly heavy vehicles. The Audi e-tron weighs in at a whopping 6000 pounds, more than many midsized trucks.
What gives? Why aren’t electric car makers watching the scales anymore like a prize fighter’s fretting manager? 
A new report from Lux Research, “Electric Vehicle Lightweighting 2030,” provides some good answers while analyzing the future of vehicle lightweighting, the industry’s term for putting development cars on strict diets. The answer comes down to power efficiencies that, it turns out, are more than enough to offset the benefits of lightweighting. 
“Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are overwhelmingly more efficient than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles due to regenerative braking and more efficient motors and are increasingly outgrowing the issue of limited range,” says Anthony Schiavo, Senior Analyst at Lux. “Materials companies need to start planning for a fully mature BEV space.” 
According to the research, we’ll see roughly a 15% increase in battery pack energy densities over the next decade. That means car companies can increase range or reduce size and keep range the same. Lux modeled both scenarios and determined that in order for lightweighting to be a cost-effective solution against batteries by 2030, it would need to cost, on average, less than $5 per kilogram of weight saved.

In other words, saving on weight won’t cease to be a priority, but it will be de-emphasized as developers have more levers to pull. The weight saving strategies will also start to focus on specific parts of the vehicle that offer best value for weight savings. The same will be true for robots, which have long been constrained by similar energy density challenges.
“We predict vehicle structure will be an opportunity for high-strength steel and aluminum, as they provide weight reductions at minimal cost,” Schiavo continues. “Bumpers are expected to benefit from design advancements that utilize glass fiber, carbon fiber, and thermoplastics. Other material priorities, such as sustainability, durability, and end-of-life issues, however, will take priority over lightweighting by 2030.”
One benefit of a reduced focus on lightweighting may be increasing manufacturing efficiencies. Electric vehicles will more commonly be designed around shared rolling frames or platforms in the future, such as Volkswagen’s MEB – a shared battery architecture it plans to use for its BEV fleet.  More

I’ve searched for a reliable way to autonomously transcribe natural speech for years. I’m a journalist, and I often have hours of taped interviews with sources around the globe to transcribe. For now, I’m still paying for people-powered transcription services.
Speech to text has been a huge challenge for AI developers, and it’s a puzzle that’s being closely watched in a variety of industries. The technology has implications far beyond quoting sources; human-machine interfaces in fields like robotics, autonomous vehicles, and personal computing will benefit from computers that can accurately interpret natural speech. 
Transcription, then, is a kind of technological entry point, a straightforward market need that can help spur development of a technology that will have broad resonance and incalculable implications for how we interact with machines.
“Like nearly every market segment, the education, legal, and media and entertainment industries have had to quickly move to a remote environment,” says Jai Das, Managing Director and President at Sapphire Ventures. “As a result, the need for AI-driven, real-time and accurate transcription services has skyrocketed.” 
The problem is natural contextual speech, along with accents and dialects, has made the quest for AI-driven transcription quixotic to date. So what do you do when there’s a ripe market for a technology but the capability just isn’t there yet? 
Well, you improvise and use the tools at your disposal while pouring money into technology development.
That’s the strategy of an innovative transcription and captioning solution called Verbit, which utilizes an in-house, AI-based technology, along with an army of human overseers, to transform live and recorded video and audio into nearly perfect captions and transcripts for the higher education, legal, media, and enterprise industries. 

“Verbit combines the speed and low cost of Automatic Speech Recognition technology with the accuracy of human transcription to solve this massive problem for companies and organizations in these markets,” says Das, whose venture firm recently led Verbit’s $60 million Series C. Total funding for Verbit now tops $100 million.
Verbit’s model uses cutting edge transcription technology technology, which filters out background noises and echoes and recognizes things like domain specific terms. The acoustic, linguistic, and contextual data is then thoroughly checked by Verbit’s human transcribers, who maintain quality assurance by editing and reviewing the material and incorporating customer-supplied notes, guidelines, and more. I’ve often been delighted when human transcribers I work with include little contextual notes about spellings and usage in their transcriptions.
I like this strategy a lot. Verbit can tap into a huge need among major enterprise players — namely, the need for real-time transcription — with a core technology that’s good but not yet perfect. The hybrid human-machine model enables the company to go to market with a high-quality product while continuing to invest in development. Despite dystopian nightmares of robots stealing jobs, that’s the way automation is going to infiltrate the enterprise in the foreseeable future: by joining forces with humans rather than displacing them outright. 
According to a company statement, Verbit will use this latest investment round to further fuel its significant growth by continuing to innovate its data-driven product capabilities and increase the number of languages it supports.  More

Toys can have an outsized impact on the future. In a very real way, they program the next generation of scientists and developers, of legislators and builders. And that hasn’t always been a good thing.
The power of toys has long been recognized, notably in ancient traditions of creating toys as philosophical instruments. “Philosophical toys helped some of the foremost minds of the past to grapple with some of the greatest uncertainties about the origin and fate of the universe,” says experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, founding director and curator of The Museum of Future History, which is undertaking a special project for the UNESCO High-Level Futures Literacy Summit to help reconnect toy making to its noblest origins. “They can likewise prime the next generation to grapple with tomorrow.”
Keats is the mastermind behind creative, thought-provoking projects meant to challenge our daily perceptions and force us to entertain new perspectives on lived experience. One of his projects, which garnered significant press, involves the dissemination of cameras that take a single exposure that lasts 100 years. In summer 2019 we covered a Keats project to salvage the current geological epoch, the Holocene, in the face of efforts by the International Union of Geological Sciences to declare us in the midst of a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Part art project, part consciousness-raising endeavor, and part activism, Keats and volunteers attempted to catalog places where attributes of the Holocene still endure, which could “serve as models for Holocenic revival elsewhere in the world” and potentially provide “scientific grounds for remaining within the current epoch as we contend with Anthropocenic excess.”
Rather than take the stated goals of projects like these literally, people are encouraged to view the efforts as living thought experiments to help us reexamine our reality. 
Which brings us to toys. Keats’ museum has collected toys from the 20th century that have influenced the world in which we now live, to be displayed in a free digital publication to be distributed at the UNESCO summit in December 2020.
“The toys come from every populated continent,” says Mr. Keats, who created the list in consultation with a global committee of curators, scholars, and amateur collectors, and in collaboration with UNESCO head of foresight Riel Miller. Examples include an educational robot from 1960s Argentina, and a wind-up toy washing machine made in China in the ’70s, and a precursor to Legos. Another item in the collection is the Dick Tracy Wrist Radio, a 1950s electronic toy that Tim Cook has credited with inspiring the Apple Watch.
While a lot of ZDNet readers might think this casts the causal link between toys and the future in a positive light, Keats’ intention is raise critical awareness. The future conceived by adult toymakers is essentially being passed along to children, who in turn realize that future. 

“You could say that Tim Cook’s technological outlook was programmed by his parents’ generation,” observes Mr. Keats, who points out that professional futurists refer to this phenomenon as “colonizing the future,” thereby denying new generations the right to collective self-determination and authentic innovation.
“This form of chronological squatting has been a problem for the past couple hundred years,” observes Mr. Keats. “And it’s expanded even as the technological advances advocated by these toys have rendered living conditions less predictable, requiring each successive generation to have greater aptitude for adjusting to the present for the sake of survival. This hubristic futuristic feedback loop is unsustainable.”
Is this correctable? The Museum of Future History, alongside UNESCO’s Futures Literacy program, will put forth a public initiative to invent toys that encourage children to envision multiple possible futures, initially by hacking existing toys and games. 
“The ability to balance long-term thinking and contingency will only become more important in a world of pandemics and climate change,” says Mr. Keats. “Toys need to become more philosophical in order for children to start playing with tomorrow’s uncertainties today.” More

Industrial inspection continues to be a driver of growth in the automation sector. Case in point, a $45M Series B for Percepto, which makes a drone-in-a-box system for inspection and monitoring. 
The fundraise comes as Percepto expands its footprint in autonomous inspection via its Percepto’s Autonomous Inspection & Monitoring (AIM) platform, which harnesses third-party remote robotics. Along with Percepto’s Sparrow drone, the first robot to be deployed using AIM will be Boston Dynamics’ Spot robotic quadruped.
Based in Israel, Percepto has led the way in the fast-moving market for robotic inspection solutions. The space, which we frequently cover, is now brimming with hardware and full-stack inspection solutions designed to quickly and efficiently monitor indoor and outdoor industrial sites from the ground and air. Autonomous inspections reduce risk of injury and streamline monitoring of far flung and physically large sites, such as pipeline and mining installations.
Percepto’s AIM platform, which elevates the company beyond its more hardware offerings, allows operators to deploy a fleet of third party robots alongside the autonomous Sparrow drone for site analysis, which includes reporting trends and anomalies and alerting operators of potential risks.
“Our customers, which include some of the world’s leading utility, oil & gas sites, mining, and other critical infrastructure facilities, are eager to fully embrace automation across their operations and reap the benefits of driving efficiency, reducing costs and safeguarding staff. We’re excited to be the first to empower our customers with truly autonomous inspection and monitoring, driven by the management of multiple visual robotic data sources together with other visual sources including piloted drones, CCTV and mobile cameras, on site or remotely,” says Dor Abuhasira, CEO and Co-Founder Percepto. “We’re delighted that our investors have recognized the growing need in the market for autonomous inspection which is in demand now, more than ever.”
The addition of Spot, which is the first third-party robot to be deployed using AIM, adds ground inspection to the mix. A company called ICL Dead Sea, a leading global speciality potash, mineral and chemicals company, has been operating Percepto’s drone-in-a-box solution to carry out inspection, safety, and security missions at its operations at the Dead Sea site, and were the first to fly beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) in Israel. Regulations in the U.S. currently curb use of BVLOS without exemptions, but regulatory agencies are evolving rule making quickly. ICL Dead Sea is now looking at potentially integrating Spot, as well.
“With Percepto’s AIM, we can now live stream all of our missions and no longer have to be physically present on site to control decisions regarding maintenance and operations. Wherever we are, we know exactly what is happening on site,” said Shay Hen, ICL Dead Sea Drone Program Manager. “We are looking forward to examining the integration of additional robots such as Boston Dynamics’ Spot onto our site for holistic inspection capabilities beyond aerial inspection.” 

Spot, an agile mobile robot developed by Boston Dynamics, is particularly useful in Percepto’s growing ecosystem as an autonomous payload carrier for sensors including high resolution imaging and thermal vision, useful for detecting hot spots on machines or leaks in pipes.
“Combining Percepto’s Sparrow drone with Spot creates a unique solution for remote inspection,” says Michael Perry, VP of Business Development at Boston Dynamics. “This partnership demonstrates the value of harnessing robotic collaborations and the insurmountable benefits to worker safety and cost savings that robotics can bring to industries that involve hazardous or remote work.” More

My motorcycle accident was a classic, the scenario you hear about in rider safety programs and read about on forums. I was cruising down a four-lane city street with no traffic in my direction but bumper-to-bumper gridlock in the oncoming lanes. At a dogleg in the road I rounded a corner to find a car from one of those oncoming lanes turning left over the double yellow into a gas station parking lot. 
It was textbook, something I realized even as it was happening. My motorcycle slammed into the front fender of the turning car and I came off the bike, landing on the sidewalk 15 feet away. If not for an airbag vest I wore religiously–an inflatable powered by a CO2 cartridge and clipped to the bike’s frame via a tether, which acts like a rip cord when rider and machine are parted–I’m convinced I might not be writing this.
It goes without saying that not riding a motorcycle is the best way to avoid motorcycle accidents, but the fact remains that motorcycles are incredibly popular around the world. In many non-U.S. cities throughout Asia and South America they’re a way of life, an inexpensive and efficient means of conveyance that’s essential to sustaining a livelihood.
So it’s about time that a bit of the massive investment in technology development to help cars operate safer migrates to their two-wheeled cousins. A good example of this migration comes courtesy of Ride Vision, a collision-aversion technology provider based in Israel, which is rolling out its AI-driven, safety-alert system technology to prevent motorcycle collisions on the road. The rollout comes on the heels of a $7M Series A, as well as a partnership with the automotive player Continental AG. 
“As motorcycle enthusiasts, we at Ride Vision are excited at the prospect of our international launch and our partnership with Continental,” Uri Lavi, CEO and Co-Founder of Ride Vision, says. “This moment is a major milestone, as we stride toward our dream of empowering bikers to feel truly safe while they enjoy the ride.”
First some grim stats. Motorcycles account for 28 percent of all fatal road accidents, and cost for some countries up to 4.1 percent of the domestic GDP, each year. During the pandemic, motorcycles sales are skyrocketing, rising as much as 30 percent on average across the EU during COVID-19. 
Ride Vision’s human-machine interface relies on image-recognition combined with AI technologies and predictive algorithms to help riders make critical life-saving decisions in real time. Mounted on the front and rear of the vehicle are cameras. Mirror-mounted alert indicators reminiscent of lane-change warnings couple with onboard computing to alert drivers about forward collision, proximity, blindspot, and dangerous overtake maneuvers. Ride info is recorded, allowing riders to access trip summaries that contain information like distances, alerts, and speed data. Ride Vision imagines emergency calling and more alerts will come with future updates.

“We are proud to be leading this investment round in Ride Vision,” says Jon Medved, OurCrowd CEO. “This company has both a cutting edge product for this huge underserved market, and the ability to save so many lives. It doesn’t get better than this.”
Ultimately, motorcycles will always be dangerous, but also rewarding and exhilarating for a certain kind of rider. For the time being, with two small children, I’ve hung up my riding boots. But I plan to get back in the saddle before too long. When I do, in addition to the airbag vest, I’ll be investing in advanced safety technologies.  More

A company called WiBotic, which makes advanced wireless charging and fleet energy management solutions for technologies like drones and industrial robots, announced a major partnership to develop wireless charging solutions for robots on the moon. WiBotic will join in the $5.8 million contract with space robotics company Astrobotic, Bosch, and the University of Washington as part of NASA’s ‘Tipping Point’ program.
“We’re thrilled to have been selected by Astrobotic and NASA to deliver wireless charging capabilities to the next generation of lunar vehicles,” says Ben Waters, CEO and co-founder, WiBotic. “While WiBotic specializes in wireless charging for military, industrial and commercial robots in all sorts of punishing environments here on Earth – from large warehouses to dusty deserts and corrosive saltwater – this is our first chance to take our technology into space. We’re excited to work closely with NASA and be part of the next chapter of space exploration.” 
WiBotic has been one of the companies leading the way in industrial wireless charging, which has a special focus on automation technologies like robots and drones. Earlier this year the company got a big vote of confidence from the FCC when it was granted equipment authorization for high power transmitters and receivers, which provide up to 300 watts of wireless power. It was the first time the FCC had granted approval of this sort of technology for use in mobile robots, drones, and other devices with larger batteries.
In its new extraterrestrial brief, WiBotic will be developing rapid charging systems for lunar robots, including the Astrobotic’s small CubeRover. Another partner on the project, Bosch, will contribute software expertise in wireless connectivity and intelligent AI, and the University of Washington will help with testing and validation.
Inductive charging could have a major role in the future of a host of different technologies, and it’s highly attractive for space, where solar has limitations and docking and redocking to charge is impractical as it adds complexity to missions and introduces the potential for devastating charging errors. The technology works the same way those charging pads for phones work, only on a bigger scale.
“Think back to Physics 101,” WiBotic CEO Ben Waters explains in an article published on the company’s site. “You may recall that alternating electrical current creates an electromagnetic field as it flows through a conductor. If a second conductor is placed alongside the first, the electromagnetic field will induce electrical current in the second conductor as well. 
“By coiling the wire, and changing the number of coils between the primary and secondary wire, electrical energy of one voltage can be converted into another voltage. This is the principle behind electrical transformers — and is essentially the same concept behind wireless inductive charging.”

Transmission range is a function of the size of the coils, meaning it can be flexibly adapted to suit various applications, even space.
Believe it or not, lunar landers and exploration vehicles have traditionally been powered by technologies that include small nuclear reactors, as well as solar arrays. But robotics is always a compromise between power and weight, and for long lasting power tethers and large battery banks have always been necessary, which limits range. Cables are also a known weak point on the inhospitable lunar surface.
The idea here is that WiBotic’s proximity charging solution would allow robots to wirelessly charge from a base station or inside lunar landers distributed across the surface. That’s highly attractive to NASA under its Artemis Program, which aims to explore more of the moon than ever before in advance of possible human habitation.
Practical benefits to the charging stations include keeping robots warm during frigid lunar nights and making it easier for astronauts to navigate on the moon and manipulate their equipment by cutting the cord.
“Bringing wireless power technology to the surface of the Moon and beyond is a game changer in the way space robotics systems have traditionally interacted,” says Cedric Corpa de la Fuente, Electrical Engineer for Planetary Mobility at Astrobotic. “For instance, by removing dependencies to solar charging, a new wide range of opportunities for smaller and lighter systems becomes available for missions that were not within reach before – such as survival of lunar night missions. Just like Astrobotic’s CubeRover, WiBotic’s wireless technology platform is scalable and supports a wide range of power needs. This makes the end product very appealing not only for companies but also for all new space electrical systems and infrastructures.”
Longterm, WiBotic envisions extending its charging station technology to create true electrical grids on the moon. 
“Our longer term vision is to pioneer a lunar wireless power grid to supply energy for a wide range of both manned and unmanned vehicles, irrespective of their individual battery types, voltages or required power levels,” says Waters. “This is only the first step in creating a common infrastructure of wireless charging stations and Fleet Energy management software to be deployed across the surface of the moon.” More

Imagine the headache of physically retrieving a paper file from a large records room stuffed full of files. Now expand the problem by imagining a 250,000 square foot facility full of 360,000 filing bins stuffed with paper records. 
Not interesting enough? Well, these aren’t just any files, but sensitive law enforcement records that could be crucial in stopping crimes and vindicating innocent people.
That’s the scenario facing administrators of a Winchester, Virginia, retrieval warehouse for FBI files built to consolidate records previously contained within more than 250 FBI field offices around the world. The FBI is famous for its record keeping and has collected billions of pages over its more than a century in existence. The job of building the facility to house about 2 billion of those pages falls to the government’s General Services Administration, and it quickly became evident that manual retrieval for all the files in the new facility simply wasn’t an option. 
Enter the robots — 140 of them, to be exact. After vetting various solutions, the GSA  chose an automated record filing and retrieval system from robotics technology company AutoStore, which not only streamlines retrieval via radio-controlled robots but also optimizes space by allowing files to be stored in a way that eliminates aisle space. Within the facility, the robots maneuver on an overhead steel grid system to identify, access, and retrieve requested items from any of the 360,000 bins. 
“It is a privilege and honor to know our innovative warehouse automation technology serves U.S. government agencies,” says Karl Johan Lier, CEO of AutoStore. “With the agility, efficiency and accuracy of AutoStore robots operating within our elegantly sophisticated high-density grid, the FBI will be able to carry out their mission with greater effectiveness and maintain its leadership in vital information management.”
Security is obviously a key element of any installation using sensitive information. That includes ensuring the third-party supplier has no access to sensitive information, and the GSA and National Archives and Records Administration vetted several candidates before deciding on a supplier. The AutoStore software tracks record and bin numbers, allowing the robots to work securely without the system supplier having any access to the records themselves. AutoStore is headquartered outside the U.S., with its main offices in Norway. 
According to AutoStore, the filing density of the system will help the government save money on rent and free up valuable space. The Virginia complex opened earlier this year and will be fully operational by 2022. More