This Warehouse Robot Reads Human Body Language

There is a fair amount of knowledge aboutrobots byRodney brooks. He has founded companies that have given the world the robot vacuum cleaner, bomb disposal bot, and factory robot anyone can program.

A mobile warehouse robot with the ability to read human body language could be the next revolutionary type of robot helpers. Finding ways to maximize human-machine teamwork could help companies boost productivity and possibly lead to new kinds of jobs rather than using robots. It's not easy to give a robot the ability to read human signals.

Carter is a mobile robot designed to work in warehouses. A service dog is the same as a service dog. You can modify its behavior and it will help you.

Carter is a robot that looks like a dolly, but it has a motorized base, a touch screen above its handlebars, and a periscope with several cameras. These cameras allow it to identify workers nearby and try to figure out what they are doing from their poses and how they are moving. For example, if a human worker needs to move several boxes, they can approach a Carter robot and grab the handlebars to control it. A graphical interface can be used to make the robot perform a variety of different tasks.

He has been an outspoken critic of the recent hype over progress in artificial intelligence and has a track record of being early to explore new directions in robotics. His career shows the challenges of commercializing advanced robotic research.

The benefits of an approach that created complex and practical behaviors by programingrobots with relatively simple rules about how to respond to their environment helped make them more practical in the 1990s. His lab worked on human-robot interaction. He cofound iRobot, a company that developed floor cleaningrobots, as well as machines used by the military for tasks like bomb disposal. In 2008 he started Rethink Robotics, a company that built two workplace robots that were designed to be more user friendly. The company folded because it didn't have enough sales.

If the company can convince other companies to purchase its machines, it could be a leap for robot-kind. Industrial robot cages are used to prevent them from hurting anyone. Although factories and warehouses increasingly use wheeledrobots to ferry items around, and low-power robotic arms designed to work safely alongside people, human and robot worker still remain largely separate.