The Cobalt team has enough background and experience with robots to know that while autonomy is important, having the option for a human in the loop can solve a lot of problems, so it’s easy for a remote operator to hop into the robot and control it via telepresence whenever necessary. Photo: Cobalt RoboticsĬobalt was founded by Erik Schluntz, a former engineer at SpaceX, and Travis Deyle, who’s written for IEEE Spectrum in the past and comes from Georgia Tech’s Healthcare Robotics Lab by way (most recently) of Google X.
It can navigate around premapped areas in buildings, it can recognize people and read badges, and it has a pile of sensors (day-night cameras, lidar, microphone array, RFID and badge readers, and even smoke and CO 2 detectors) that helps it to recognize potential security issues (unauthorized people, open doors and windows) and hazards (suspicious items, moved items, water leaks) and flag them for review.Ĭobalt’s robots gather data using sensors like cameras and lidar, and process the information using machine-learning algorithms to detect and flag anomalies. In general, a security guard needs to be able to walk around a building checking on things, occasionally interact with humans in a limited capacity, and (this is the most important thing) notice if anything unusual is going on and tell someone about it.Ĭobalt’s robot is able to do all of these things. The key realization here is that security guards spend the vast majority of their time doing almost nothing, and even in a worst-case scenario (like someone trying to break in, or a fire or other serious problem), their primary responsibility is making the right phone call as quickly as possible as opposed to dealing with the situation directly. Today, Cobalt Robotics (a startup based in Palo Alto, Calif.) is announcing an autonomous mobile robot designed for indoor security applications that can “work alongside human guards to provide better security than people can do alone.” Despite the fact that robots can do work for businesses, it’s been difficult to identify use cases where they can be valuable enough that said businesses will pay money to use them.
At this point, the most you can realistically expect from a reliable and affordable autonomous platform is the ability to navigate in a semistructured premapped environment, which Savioke (to take one example) has managed to do with its delivery robots for hotels. Finding a viable business case for a commercial mobile robot is very tricky.
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