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Two things are immediately noticeable when watching the Carter Pro robot navigate the aisles of the demo warehouse inside Robust AI’s headquarters in San Carlos, California. The first is shelving units: standardized, modular, and ready to use. Wireframes will look familiar to anyone who has spent time in warehouses, and that’s certainly by design.
The second issue is not a visual element of the wheeled robot itself, but rather how humans in space interact with their robotic co-workers. As Carter wanders the halls, the powerful staff pick him up and move him around. This may seem like a small distinction, but it is notable in this world where humans and robots work side by side.
The issue of safety is not raised regularly enough in stories covering the emergence of humanoid robots in the workplace. While some companies have moved beyond the days of industrial weapons locked in safety cages, there is always a risk when humans work alongside an independently moving metal system. Well, electric forklifts have been around since the 1930s and are still regularly involved in workplace injuries.
The ability to manually move a robot could be an important part of the deployment of industrial robotic systems in the future. For Carter, this means more than just becoming a passive piece of equipment, it means sensing the force applied and adjusting it accordingly. There’s also a bright orange joystick that allows for one-handed control – a surprisingly complex challenge when creating a system like this.
That the cooperative nature is one of the system’s core principles is not surprising, given the lineage of the founders. Before Robust, CTO Rodney Brooks founded Rethink Robotics, which also focused on human-robot interactions (HRI). While much column space is devoted to a future in which humanoid robots and other robots completely replace their human counterparts, this is a far-fetched vision, at best.
Humans and robots will be working side by side for the foreseeable future, so it’s important to make sure we can do this safely.
Another differentiator for Carter that Brooks is quick to point out is the use of cameras, rather than lidar. It’s a move that is increasingly popular among makers of autonomous mobile robots (AMR). Pricing is a big piece of this puzzle, but there are additional reasons why lidar may not be the best solution in a warehouse environment.
A number of partners tested an early version of the system, before the production model was released. “It’s been a little over a week since the first product rolled off the production line,” Brooks tells TechCrunch. DHL is the first major customer to be publicly announced, but while the global logistics company undoubtedly has enough work to keep the robotics startup busy throughout the next decade, Brooks says Robust is deliberately working to diversify its customer portfolio.
“We won’t just deal with DHL,” he explains. “Walmart had a whole bunch of robotics companies, and then they shut them down, and now those robotics companies have a problem. We made it clear to DHL that they only get a certain percentage of the robots we build, because we have to have a broader customer base.
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