An Afternoon With Ava: The Tablet-Headed Future of Commercial Robotics

A year ago, iRobot's Ava was penned in, ping-ponging around a roped-off corner of the company's booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This year, the tablet-headed robot has been unleashed on the show floor. It's actually outrunning me as I write this, weaving through the crowd as it navigates a loop around one portion of the Las Vegas Convention Center's south hall. I keep cringing, waiting for the inevitable thump of its wide, triangular base against someone's shoe or rollaway bag, or the sudden ding of its top-mounted iPad off an elbow.

Ava is better than that. The robot, built by the same company that makes the Roomba, has a ground-level laser rangefinder can detect walls and large obstacles up to 30 meters away (about 100 feet), sweeping back and forth at a 270-degree angle. Downward and forward-facing 3D scanners (similar to what's on Microsoft's Kinect) provide more precise data on impending collisions. And its omni-directional wheels allow Ava to strafe, moving diagonally or laterally instead of turning in place.

Suddenly, Ava gets flustered. It comes to a stop, drawing up behind a woman in a powered wheelchair. She's immobile, for the moment, and flush against the wall. To Ava, this doesn't compute. It had mapped out this area the day before. Any moving objects, meaning people, exist as floating data points within that map. What was this new terrain feature?

But along with an impressive level of autonomy, Ava is also built to be agreeable. By touching a soft, rubber ring that encircles its upper portion, you can suggest a new path. Less politely, you could simply kick its base. The nearest of three running lights will switch from blue to purple in a silent protest, but Ava will scoot. Ava responds to other nudges, too: It telescopes when you lightly pull it upwards, and collapses when you press down. Combined with its navigation algorithms and overlapping sensors, Ava is built to do one thing: peacefully co-exist with humans. Asimov would be flattered.

As an industry, consumer robotics has largely stalled. Even robotic toys, once the next big thing from the likes of Sony and Wowwee, have all but vanished. But for commercial-grade robotics, Ava's ability to not only navigate a cluttered environment, but to do it safely?yielding instead of bumping?could be crucial to bringing bots out of laboratories and factories and into the workplace and home.

Cleaning models like the Roomba and Mint have the luxury of banging into?or at least touching?furniture or feet that cross their paths. They are tiny janitors, meant to operate in relative isolation. But for the Ava platform, iRobot has partnered with Santa Barbara-based telemedicine firm InTouch Health, and the first application of this robot is likely to be in the medical world. A robot that steers itself through a hospital corridor shouldn't make contact with passing patients, staff, and gurneys. Along with being unnerving, it might not be entirely safe (Ava is heavier than a child, and rolls along at a brisk two-meters-per-second clip).

While iRobot won't discuss when Ava might be deployed to an actual hospital, COO Joe Dyer sees retail as the next logical application. The robot could serve as a greeter at a big-box hardware store, for example. With the right app installed in its tablet head (the open API works with both iOS and Android platforms), the bot could ask what the customer is looking for, display the product on its face, and lead them to it. On the way, it could scan the products it passes, updating the store's on-shelf inventory. If that's the customer's sole purchase, Ava could potentially ring them up, using the same tablet-connected payment apps and hardware that are already commonly used in retail.

All of this is within the realm of technical possibility, Dyer says. The only obstacle is price. He wouldn't specify how much Ava would likely cost, except to say that it's somewhere between the sub-$1000 Roomba, and $100,000 Packbots that iRobot sells to the Pentagon. Ava uses a combination of the consumer-grade iAdapt navigation software, and the battlefield-worthy AWARE system. But software, once developed, is cheap to deploy. It's the durable construction and sensor suite that should keep Ava in the tens of thousands of dollars. For hospital administrators and retail executives, that's a tough sell, but not an impossible one. Provided InTouch can show quantifiable benefits from using Ava, this robot, or a very similar model, could start showing up in hospitals and big-box stores in the coming years.

But iRobot's ultimate goal, Dyer claims, is a social good. He wants Ava in the home, providing elder care. "If it detects that your mother is horizontal, not vertical, that she's in the pantry, and not the bedroom or living room, it could give you a call. It could even display what it's seeing," says Dyer. "Millions of people could live independently, for longer. It would change they way we live."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/robots/the-tablet-headed-future-of-commercial-robotics?src=rss

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