300 Lb Security Guard Robot
http://finance.yahoo.com/video/meet-security-guard-300-lb-021025528.html
$6.25/hour contract price. Let's see how far this one gets.
$6.25/hour contract price. Let's see how far this one gets.
Comments
Seems they have a great deal of experience with start-ups? Not sure if that is good or bad.
I wonder if they are bullet-proof ;-)
Why do all their photos look like the have prescriptions for medical marijuana?
$6.25/hour... Not really $4500/month. Read their contract carefully. Seems that you pay for their hours on a charger as well as working hours.
http://knightscope.com/preorder-survey.html
Reminds me of Macys* trying roving guard dogs in their NYC store. Someone called the police chief every night at 3am and said "Woof, woof.. Rover reporting in from Macys."
(Love the video of it patrolling a parking garage. These people have no clue about human behavior! A 300 pound robot is no match for a two ton pickup driven by a guy who's mad that he couldn't get his parking validated.)
A set of cameras cost far less to operate after installation, and cover a much larger area simultaneously. Some cameras even have AI features to detect things like vandalism and personal attacks. Human intervention is still needed eventually, roboto or camera.
My usual summary follows:
Big fat robots in protected areas: good.
Big fat robots out with the public: dumb.
The robot monitors vehicles licenses, and any activity in the area that is not expected.
It may be able to recognize faces; which implies identifying people who should be there,
people who were there, and criminals who do not need to be there. Seems like an extension
for police officers patrolling. I hope it is successful.
With this particular robot the customer pays for a service. It would be up to the service provider to maintain and repair/replace them. As long as they are roaming around and snapping pics then they are fulfilling their duty. If the robot spends half it's time performing it's job then it costs $12.50/hr. Hopefully that is much less than a security guard makes. But then wages are not the only expense for employers, I am sure that the real difference in cost is quite substantial. Too bad about the lost jobs though.
This robot, with a top speed of three mph, low CG and (I assume) bump sensors, should be about as safe as it can get for little kids. I think a shopping cart presents more hazards. True, there is always going to be a way by which someone can get injured. Such is life. The world is a dangerous place for little kids yet they seem to do pretty well for the most part.
How will the robot respond to taunting? I would expect that it would do absolutely nothing, aside from alerting a real security guard that something is amiss. If an injury then occurs (how?) I think it would be pretty hard to prove negligence.
To even pursue this endeavor, somebody, somewhere, had more money that they knew what to
do with. The robots will obviously cater to the people who have money to afford it.
Then again, This could also have been a stepping stone to another project, in which, was the real target to produce.
The robotic interface to LEO database software alone, is a big step. There may be items
that are being developed here, that are not being shown. (robotic drivers, robotic facial recognition/interrogation, etc.)
Or is it a matter of designing and manufacturing robots never results in error? If so, in this perfect world, the robot will always function correctly and safely. Therefore it's perfectly fine to let a hard-bodied device nearly twice the weight of the average adult wander about.
Presumably these will be used in conjunction with fewer human security guards -- otherwise what's the point. So good luck in having it call for "backup" in a hurry. The Bad Guys will know this, of course. And so will the trial lawyers when someone gets hurt doing something stupid and illegal. You're imagining a logical world where one doesn't exist. A perfectly good claim could very well be that the mere concept of deploying heavy robots among the population is unsafe. Who's to prove otherwise? Certainly not the years of experience -- it doesn't exist. In the timescale of technology, mobile robots have barely begun to be used in private controlled settings (e.g. warehouses). What makes anyone think they're ready for general public use?
Anyone who knows me knows I'm a big proponent of robots everywhere. Eventually. I just have a problem when people try to jump the gun to make a buck. Where's the proof that the technology is even anywhere near what they need to assure public safety? All it takes is one little blip, one mistake in coding or design or manufacture or assembly, to set us all back. These errors are mitigated in light robots that cause little damage, or heavy robots used only in private, controlled settings.
Either of two things would help considerably: A) Sell it as a robot used in controlled settings, until they have the years of blemish-free operation they need to prove safety, or
I'll be a security guard for $53,750 per year. I just want rest time equal to the bot's charging cycle.
I suppose the bot could be actively working at a charging station and only rove as required. But that would mean calling an electrician to install charging stations where required.
The whole thing is rather blithe -- Got resumes, got a web site, got a proto-type, etc... - so we will at least live well for a year or two on the seed money. I'd say these guys are just working a promotional process for all it is worth. Many a miner got richer from what the investors put in his pockets than what came out of the ground. Just going public allows one to pocket a big chunk of cash.
I already have 3 security cameras in my building and 6 on the street in my one block with one or two connected directly to the police station.
Sex sells. So they demonstrate these in the sexiest way possible, even if the demonstration is not plausible in the real world. Someday, some smart entrepreneurs will develop *and sell* their autonomous sentry robots for the applications they are best suited for: banks, museums, offices, and other locations at night when everyone is gone, car sales lots at night, warehouses, and other locations where public exposure can be controlled. They'll show them augmenting existing security, especially cameras and stationary sensors. That's far more realistic of how people actually deploy security.
The kicker is this: In one shot they have the robot strolling down what looks like the corridor in a hotel. Wha?! What kind of hotel would so obviously invade the privacy of their guests? Everyone knows the robot is recording everything. A discreet video camera at the end of the hall isn't enough -- they have to shove their surveillance right into hotel guests faces? Nearly all of the benefits they cite are already being done by cheaper and more ubiquitous technologies that are already deployed worldwide. Face recognition and other high-tech sensors aren't the sole domain of mobile robots.
While $6.50/hour is cheap, we all know it can't be used 24/7. It needs charging; it needs maintenance; it travels very slowly, meaning it cannot survey nearly as much area as a human, and so on. So in reality, most businesses will need a number of these, just to get the same coverage of human guards that work shifts (plus, many security tasks don't need 24 hour coverage, so you don't have to pay extra for what you don't need). Now things are starting to get expensive. That robot lurking down the hotel corridor.. guess they'll need one robot for every floor.
I had a friend that managed a 200 room Rodeway Inn on an interstate and every Saturday night wives would cruise the parking lot looking for their husband's car. Confrontations got so bad and so frequent that he started carrying a firearm 24/7.
What would a robot contribute to this kind of situation?
With facial recognition software and license plate OCR, the robot could phone the wife and snitch!
In fact, this is a great way to *make* money with these robots. Charge $7.50 for each tattle-tale. It could pay for itself!
NOT good. The wives were the ones that were angry and armed. Fortunately, women tend to stand down more than men when confronted by an armed hotel manager. But this all just goes no where good.
A lot of hotels divide floors into two groups of occupants --- regular and strange.
A 300 pound robot is going to spend a lot of time on a charger -- more weight, bigger motors, more power drain.
Angry wife control would likely recognize the wife's license plate and call the husband, so that the whole problem is avoided. Of course, that would mean telling the hotel, and the robot that you are doing something shady.
How do you figure that? Really depends upon the charge rate don't you think?
Why, a $55,000 a year robot is no match for a 25 cent garbage bag! Everyone knows that.
How's come they always think of the same things everyone else has. Security robots? Talked about for decades. Boring. Besides, human security guards are cheap, so the cost savings are relatively minimal. This isn't much of the killer app everyone has been waiting for.
Instead, how about some personal care robots? Put some arms on this thing and have it wash your hair. Or soak your nails in Palmolive. It's already got a Dalek design. Can't you just hear it chant "Exfoliate! Exfoliate!"
I look foward to robotics entrepreneurs being creative in addressing new markets, instead of getting their ideas from old 1960s issues of Popular Mechanics.
Talk about some tough proving grounds.
Claiming $6.25/hour and then pushing a 24 hour/day 30 day monthly rate of $4,500 destroys buyer trust.
Simply put, at $55,000 per year unit, plus installation costs and climbing, there are a lot of good alternatives to consider, including part-time human security when there is an event or a crisis.
Charge rates are generally C/10 for optimal battery life. That means 10 hours to a full charge.... implies a necessary 10 hours per day unless you abuse the batteries with faster charge rates. This has long been an obstacle of roving robots and storage of solar cell outputs. If you don't get enough time on the charger, sooner or later you have dead batteries. If you up the rate, you shorten the batteries total life.
It's worse than that Loopy. It takes 14 hours at C/10 to fully charge the battery. That may have improved somewhat with advances in battery technology, but not all that much.
But I have looked at batteries and diurnal charging cycles for quite sometime without seeing a clear way forward. If you are going to have a device used for maximum hours on a daily basis, you just about have to swap battery packs on the charger.
Now you see why I said that I'd take the job for $55,000 year if I got time off equivalent to time on the charger. For that pay, I could survive 7 days a week of 12 hours per day of security work. I'd just send out my laundry and I could afford to pay someone to clean house.
None of that has to do with the weight of the robot... larger robot + larger battery = higher rate of charge = same amount of time charging.
It wouldn't even need that much time. Few security roles require this kind of 24/7 patrolling. Example Most downtown parking garage are closed at night, and/or otherwise have secure gates. A few monitored cameras are enough, and those services can be outsourced for about $1,000 a month. There's no need to have a robot patrol an empty parking garage.
Another example: no one will stay a second night in a hotel that has a robot roaming up and down the corridor, so the hotel will ditch that idea real quick. There's a reason hotels use discreet house detectives, though the backers of this robot don't seem to understand this concept.
A third example: You don't need sentry during the operating hours in a warehouse. There are already people there, and the robot will just get in the way. So that's easily 10-12 hours a day when the robot will be parked anyway, recharger or no. Still, you're paying for that time because the robot is costing you an annualized rate. (This would be less of a sticking point if they weren't trying to sell it as costing only "$6.25 an hour.")
Add in the cost of a human for daily maintenance (ensuring charging, keeping it clean, removing bits of old garbage bags off it), in real productive terms the "24/7" robot likely costs more on the order of $80,000 to $90,000 a year.
Everyone will keep asking why they can't have a true $6.25/hour security robot.
(This kind of reminds me of when Taiwan had a new airline launched called U-Land. Yes it was owned by U-Bank, but it survived because Taiwanese did not understand the English implication. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-Land_Airlines)
Nonetheless, there seem a lot to pick apart here.... far more than something like Google Glass. But I am beginning to wonder if people are actually rejecting technology in favor of offering people work. We have 7 billion people that need to stay busy and be rewarded for doing so... before we really need to add robots into the mix.
Of course, making automobiles with robots has at least eliminated the nasty heavy lifting, the lung and liver destroying paint shop, and the eye blinding welding. But I don't see where a security guard is really suffering occupational hazards that should be replaced by a robot.
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The first guy to make a cheap reliable all-purpose house cleaning robot will make more than Steve Jobs ever could. A Roomba is easily destroyed by one shaggy dog.
Okay, time wise I suppose you are right. But if you have to put in 60amp recharging stations instead of 5 amp recharging stations; the wiring is going to be a lot more expensive and the actual docking interface for the robot is going to have to have more robust engineering and design for safety and durability.
One way or another, 300 lbs is going to require more of something.