Name: Brainstorm Design 2019: The Socialization Of Robots
Uploaded: 2019-03-19
Duration: 12 min 54 s
Description: Sharing urban sidewalks with delivery robots is no longer in the distant future; it is today’s reality.

So I'm gonna talk about serve. But before that, I want to introduce a problem. The problem is actually delivering packages through urban space. And that's been a problem that has been for going on for many, many years, probably millennia. And we are quite familiar with you solutions, solutions has been like that for a while. This is a picture from about 150 years ago. And it doesn't necessarily relate to first world it could be third world. And in any case, the same problem appears, and it is a major problem for robots to deal with. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] The last city mile is really the most difficult part of any supply chain. And this involves multiple layers. I'll try to dissect them before we get to the design project. Cities are very crowded and again they are all around the world in different cultures, at different densities. But what. Is always there is a level of hassle that we need to put in to move from point a to point b. Sometimes this hassle is going through enormous difficulties of communication between humans and Vehicles, in this case you see a picture from Vietnam. Obviously, nobody is gonna stop. And this is a person, just imagine what is gonna happen if robots try to cross the street. Another element that is exceptionally complicated is figuring out what is the right format, what is the formula if you wish for how much you carry for how long. And the more you carry, the more cumbersome it is to move around. So you need to figure out the right size and load capacity. Another element is route planning and route planning needs to be adjusted on the fly continuously because the situation in cities adjusts all the time. And we also familiar with crumbling infrastructure, coming from San Francisco. Our infrastructure is going south for the last decade. And it doesn't look like it's going to stop. Unlike for instance in Singapore where it seems to be an orderly city. So we need to deal with these physical obstacles. And above all, something that is exceptionally difficult for robots to deal with is the flow. People are used to give way. We have social codes of how to deal with possible collisions. And we do that not only among people but also between people and vehicles, and vice versa. So here come the robots, and they're quite popular and quite eye- catching for the media, but they come with a lot of problems Within this category. The first image that you see here, it was quite popular when this robot came to the scene. This is supposedly a nice moment of interaction, but if you look carefully, the path is about two, three feet wide. And it's already quite clear that one of the two parties will need to give way to the other, and that's not easy. You see quite a lot of companies jumping into this, this is quite recent. And last week, there was an announcement by FedEx, everybody's trying to get a piece of this action. Now, some of the robots are moving on the pavement, some of the robots are moving on the sidewalk. Overall, they kind of look the same. This is a very nice work that was done, it's a very large one nearly a car size, but it is very much Similar to others. This work that was done about a year and a half to cause a problem. What you see here is a robot experiment by Marble, a company in San Francisco and crossing the street in the Mission District. Actually, just across from the police station. And as the city saw this happening, what happened was actually quite extraordinary. There was an immediate action by the local legislature to stop these robots from moving around the city. So the one thing that we took to mind is that we need to respect the people. The streets belong to the people. They don't belong the companies who manufacture or distribute these robots. And this essentially, when the Project Rover, as we call it, started, I'm gonna go quickly through the process and where we got new deal we work in large teams. We create a lot of ideas. We mix variety of different inputs it could more- I would say storytelling, associating with the inspiration behind the image of the robot, it could be the structure of the drive train, it could be location of sensors, and it could be a variety of other elements including, for instance Ideas coming from additional load carrying animals like Llamas and so on. So we have multiple ideas being played continuously and we keep many ideas- Is alive for a long time so we could get this magical moment where serendipity happens and you put one plus one equals two three and four and that's the magic of real good design process. One of the things that we noticed earlier in the process is that many of these robots look more or less the same. They are quite sterile, they try to create this austere cocoon and we equated it to a very famous Character from the Wally the Eva. It's kind of a wide blob of high tech that is quite, I would say austere and unfriendly to people. As a contrast to that, we really wanted to create something that is lovable at first sight like Wally. And this is somewhat a harkening on mechanical rather than digital, set of parameters. The second element within the digital world was to create and you icon. We all use emojis and ideally we want it to create. Robot that will become the emoji of robotic shipment. So this was another goal of the project. One of the ideas came to light quite early, it was essentially a hack of a shopping cart. It's a shopping cart with added technology in it and a very nice drivetrain. This concept was called Serve and later became the product that was released. So I'm gonna go through some of the elements of Serve. First, what's striking about it is that it's very colorful. We decided that we want to emit a very unique and genuine image. The notion here is that we're gonna have a wrapper, graphics that is gonna be localized to a neighborhood, possibly by using a local artist. Maybe someone who typically would do graffiti will actually do something unique for that robot. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So you could see more or less the size of it, more or less the imagery. It's definitely harkening on the proverbial shopping cart. And we've been dealing well both with the initial modeling as well as the finite engineering of it. One of the things that for us is very important to note is that we are talking about an object that has 360 degree view. So we need to design it from the back, we need to design it from the top. The dominant view is actually as you get closer, it's more of the top rather than the sides. And that's something that was quite the challenge given all the sensors and all the feature we had to put into it. A special aspect of the work was dealing with interaction. As I mentioned earlier interaction between humans is natural to us. But interactions between humans cars and robots is something completely different. We never actually had a language to deal with that. So we dealt with interaction design in many ways, and eventually created a scheme that has multiple layers, some of which are related to far away interactions, some for close and nearby interactions. Some for humans and some for cars. What you see here are a few interactions. I'll go quickly through them. The first thing you see is a band of LEDs at the very top. This is done to avoid collisions with cars. One of the most awkward moments between robot and a car is when robot is trying to cross the street. And the car is waiting and there is a little bit of this game. The car doesn't know when the robot will start moving and therefore, some of these robots got teed and had collisions with cars. So this is made to tell the cars and nearby Humans. I'm gonna move. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Another element when we are talking about the front facing view of the robot is that we have ability to create interactions on the screen of high quality. We have also eyes, these are true stereoscopic cameras that we added LED around them and these are allowing the robot to emit motions. On top of that band of LED that I mentioned earlier. Here. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So we've been working and these are still being perfected in interaction. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So altogether what you see is three layers of communication. And it could be that it is overcommunication but we opted at this stage of very embryonic industry to actually overcommunicate so then we could curl down and create the right amount of communication. We are now in a stage where humans and robots need to learn each other, each other's behaviors and cues. And we are actually taking an approach where we'll put more cues out there and then we'll pare down as society's getting more and more used to deal with robots. So, this is more or less the story of Serve. We are now building these first ones and shipping them. And hopefully they'll get a very good welcome in the streets, and this will be next stage in us working together with robots, which something that we all know is gonna happen and we just need to figure out how to work through that That. That's it, thank you very much. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Brainstorm Design 2019: The Socialization Of Robots

Tech

Sharing urban sidewalks with delivery robots is no longer in the distant future; it is today’s reality.