Robo-Revolution: Phones Meet Drones at AUVSI CTIA Event



By Danielle Lucey



The communications industry hit it big in the past decade, and at this week’s CTIA Super Mobility Week conference in Las Vegas, a session put on by AUVSI showed how robotics might be next in line to change how people use technology in their daily lives.



AUVSI Executive Vice President Gretchen West kicked off the series of talks, focusing on the 2015 integration deadline lag from the Federal Aviation Administration that has kept many commercial unmanned aircraft on the ground. 



“A lot of the FAA deadlines have slipped, so that 2015 deadline is probably not going to occur the way we think it is,” she said. 



West polled the audience, asking how many attendees were currently flying unmanned aircraft commercially and believed they were doing so legally. Two hands stayed in the air. And one of the two participants was actually correct. 



Speaker Greg Friesmuth from Nevada company Skyworks Aerial Systems focuses his business on operating unmanned aircraft inside, where operating in the National Airspace System is not an issue. 



“Why would you want to run one of these indoors?” he questioned. He said it could be useful in police hostage situations, mine collapses, searching for radiation, gas leaks — anywhere that is a dynamic and unsafe environment to send a human. His company is currently performing work at the Hoover Dam, inspecting the power plant with infrared imagery.



Fellow panelist, Jesse Kallman from components manufacturer Airware, said his company performs similar missions, like performing surveys in quarries that typically cost around $40,000 per month with manned teams. 



Key to the CTIA crowd, Kallman says Airware has also performed cell phone tower inspections. 



“People die falling off of towers all the time,” he said. And it costs around $8,000 to climb up a tower, where Airware will charge $2,000 to inspect it with an unmanned aircraft. 



Dr. Matt Hutchinson from aerial imagery company Woolpert Inc. says the firm got its start — and still uses — manned aircraft for a lot of data collection. However, the company is now using a Nova Block III unmanned aircraft in the mix as well. He said his company will spend next week offshore Mississippi performing unmanned environmental management and change detection operations for a U.S. government client. Again, when it’s appropriate to use unmanned aircraft for this type of mission, Hutchinson says it drives down the overall cost.



“The science is great, but it’s really the economics that’s going to help get things going,” he said. 



Change From the Ground Up



The final session of the day focused on commercial ground robots from Kiva Systems and Suitable Technologies. 



Kiva got its boost offering optimal warehouse fulfillment through mobile robotic systems for the robot-curious company Amazon. The company has developed six different platforms, most recently the fifth and sixth generations, which they released in 2013 and 2014. 



Matt Verminski from Kiva Systems says the company optimized the warehouse experience by making robots focus on what they are good at — repetitive work that requires stamina — and doing the same with the people working at the warehouse, who focus on problems like keeping products in stock and removing obstructions from the warehouse floor. 



At its peak, Amazon receives 300 orders per second, says Verminski. To keep up, Kiva’s current fleet has driven more than 100,000,000 kilometers — or about two-thirds of the way from the Earth to the sun. 



The company’s bandwidth requirements are low, says Verminski, but initially scaling the wireless network the robots operate on was an issue. 



“It was that we were having thousands of drivers on a single wireless network,” he said. 



Bandwidth at home and in the office is still sometimes an issue, but Erin Rapacki from Suitable Technologies says her company has focused on minimizing latency issues with audio and video to make its mobile robot Beam comfortable for people to interact with. 



In fact, while Rapacki was giving her speech, she had her booth at CTIA manned entirely by coworkers that had beamed into the telepresence robots on the show floor. 



Rapacki says the company focuses on giving people the ability to interact naturally from anywhere in the world through a mobile video conferencing robot. 



“Why can’t I just be there and do what I need to do?” she said. “And that’s what Beam allows.”



The company has a new version of the system, priced at $1,995, coming out at the end of the year for home use, called Beam+. People have used the company’s system for attending school while sick, for cutting down on business travel — it even allowed the travel-challenged Edward Snowden to address an audience at a TED Talk. 

 

Ultimately, Suitable Technology’s vision is one that is shared by the communications world. 



“Our mission, it started off as technology,” Rapacki says. “It started off as a robotics organization, … but the ultimate goal is we want to give people broader access to each other.”