GetRobo Blog English

Interview with Max Safai, Neato Robotics CEO

 GetRobo had the chance to visit Neato Robotics in Mountain View, CA, and got a first-hand look at the new robotic vacuum cleaner Neato XV-11. I wanted to try out their "crown jewel" - as CEO Max Safai puts it - which is their original inexpensive laser rangefinder that costs only $30.

 First of all, I wanted to see how the XV-11 can detect and avoid obstacles on the fly. 

 Very clever!

  It's also neat that the robot can identify a door and will not go out of the room until it has finished cleaning. Once it's done, it will go out of the door and move on to the next room. You can check out the other videos on the YouTube GetRobo Channel.

  There were some questions that I wanted to ask the company. The main one being whether they are willing to sell the laser rangefinder component separately. 

 The following is an edited excerpt from an interview with Neato CEO, Mr. Safai. The original article appeared on GetRobo Japanese on Feb. 6. 

 

 Q. How do you feel about competing with iRobot?

Telepresent at iREX through the QB robot

 I didn't go to iREX this year, but I did get to see a bit of the action through Anybot's new telepresence robot QB.  

 QB is a simplified version of QA, costing one third of the price while maintaining the basic functions of the original robot. By making the design simpler, namely decreasing the number of motors from 6 to 2 and moving most of the electronics to the base, the price has now come down to 10,000 dollars. QB weighs 35 lb, 20 lb less than QA, and is height adjustable. All this makes QB easier to transport than QA. Anybots plans to commercialize QB by next spring.

    

   Anybots officially announced QB at iREX in Tokyo this week and I wanted to use the robot to interview people at the show. Trevor Blackwell, founder of Anybots, kindly agreed, and he came with his Mac so that I can operate QB from my home office. QB was being exhibited at the iREX booth by Innovation Matrix which will be the distributor in Japan. 

 And it was EXTREMELY FUN!!! I got to catch up with a couple of GetRobo readers that appeared at the booth and also chatted with vistors that were wandering around the exhibit floor. In general they were all pleased to be approached by QB and being asked questions from me in California (except for the 2 cases where I ran into them). They too had questions about the robot so I relayed them to Trevor and he was able to answer them real time. It worked out great! 

 So, although I don't see myself buying a 10,000 dollar robot anytime soon, I can imagine a future scenario where I would rent it by the hour so that I can visit places and do things that I would not normally be able to do. The feeling was a bit similar to doing interviews inside Second Life (which by the way I did do several years ago for a news article) but much more fun and of course real. In terms of approaching and interviewing complete strangers, I felt it was easier using a robot than doing it there myself. Even when I am rejected, I don't have to feel personal about it. :-)
  
 
 

Stanford’s Robot Car to Drive from SF to LA Next Spring

Prof. Sebastian Thrun at Stanford University is world famous for leading a team of students and engineers to develop an autonomous car that won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. The history making car “Stanley” now resides at the Smithsonian.

Since then, his next mission was set to develop a vehicle that can achieve urban driving. The team went on to develop “Junior” and during that process in 2007, won second place in the Urban Challenge. But the goal had always been grander – to create a car that can drive itself from downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles without human intervention.

GetRobo got to chat with Prof. Thrun on the phone to get an update on this project and learned that he now plans to accomplish this goal by next spring. The following is an edited version of the interview. (Photograph from Oct. 2007)

 

Q. The last time we talked, you were working on developing a fully autonomous vehicle that can drive on its own from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Can you give us an update on this project?

 

A. The project is underway and we are making good progress. For example, we are now able to handle traffic lights and to localize reliably on highways, which is important for lane keeping. We can now speed up the vehicle in traffic. Also we are much better able to track the other cars around us and we can find and identify pedestrians.

 There are a few open problems that we haven’t solved including merging and lane changing that need some work. Then we have to start doing large-scale experiments on the road to see what other problems exist.

 

Q. Has your car already been driving autonomously on regular roads?

 

A. Yes, we have done many experiments on public roads. We always have a safety driver in the car who can take over just by grabbing the steering wheel. And he can disengage any point in time. And we have a safety computer engineer on board, who monitors the systems. There has never been a close call or anything like that. It is totally safe to do this.

 

Q. Has the car already attempted a trip from SF to LA?

 

A. No. We are gearing up for this. We are making good progress but we are not there yet. Certain behaviors on highways, such as mergers, lane shifts and exiting, entering ramps are still not ready. And I’m sure as we start tackling long distances, we will find more and more problems that we have to solve.

 

Q. If you were to measure your progress on a scale of one to ten, and your goal being ten, where are you at now? And when do you plan to do the full-blown experiment from SF to LA?

 

A. We are at seven. And we plan on doing it by spring of next year.

Pleo Creators Form New Venture

Many readers were sad to see Ugobe – maker of the Pleo dinosaur robot – go, but we have good news today. John Sosoka, former CTO of Ugobe, has started a new company. GetRobo got to talk with John on the phone about his new venture. Also he shared with us some very important experience and insights about why Ugobe failed and the future of the consumer robotics market.

 

(Photo:John with Pleo)

 

Q. What have you been working on lately?

 

A. I have co-founded 2 new companies with Tyler Wilson whom I worked with at my previous ventures including Ugobe. Tyler was the head of software development at Ugobe and the architect and driving force behind the Pleo Development Kit (PDK). By the way, the PDK has just been released as an alpha by Innvo Labs, a part of Jetta (that bought Ugobe’s intellectual property). Tyler and I are very happy that all the effort that we put into the PDK will now open up the creative possibilities for Pleo fans.

 

 So, one company we started is called Vita Robotica, which was formed when I got stopped being paid by Ugobe. While I was working without getting paid to try to deal with all the issues of Ugobe, I started working on a completely new implementation of a brain for robots that interact with humans. It’s something that I really had hoped to do at Ugobe, but never got to.

 

 I am fascinated in this life-in-robotics thing. And what I’m currently most interested in is in developing robots for special needs such as medical applications and companionship in institutions. For example, there are so many interesting things that have come up in the use of therapy dogs, and I think there are a lot of areas where medications don’t work well and where you can make use of robotics. Automated diagnostics at home is another area. Companion robots could help people keep track of their health everyday so that they can identify problems before they become real problems. There are not enough products that address those areas, and I think the market is pretty wide open.

 

 So Vita Robotica is a research company that builds the platform and tools that could be used to develop robots in this area.

First Autonomous Non-Human Boards Airplane - gets window seat

 News from our friends in Houston!

 LARA (Lego Autonomous Robotic Android) developed by the RoboBuffs, the robotics team at Charles Milby High School in Houston - became the first autonomous humanoid ever to pass airport security and board a commercial airplane. On May 7, 2009, LARA flew from Houston to Michigan on Continental Airlines. Her seat was 5A. The team and LARA participated in the Robofest, where she came in 5th place in the exhibition competition. 

 Here are a couple of photos forwarded to me from the Education Foundation of Harris County, which funded this project. Thank you so much!

 The reason they decided to get LARA a seat was because Fedex damaged her on the way to Michigan last year and lost her for two weeks after the competition.   

 This year, the lead teacher of the team Stephanie Hobbs explains in her email,  "on the way back, (we) almost did not get her on the plane: sent to two different scanning sites, TSA inspected with x-ray, physical, photos, chemicals, bomb squad, extensive interviews with TSA and FBI and bomb squad...finally we were allowed on since one of the inspectors saw the robot on the news through a story on RoboFest and I was wearing a ST Lawrence RoboFest t-shirt. We learned, and trained underclassmen for next year, and made history."

 According to this press release, LARA "is anatomically correct in that it has skeletal, nervous, and muscular systems. It also has arms and legs with moving wrists, elbows, and knees, and it is autonomous in that it can be operated using only verbal commands and gestures (independent of a computer or a remote control)."

 Also with help from the foundation, the RoboBuffs will copyright and trademark their creation as an assembly kit complete with instructions that other schools can use as an educational tool.