This Autonomous Robot Might Soon Make Food Deliveries in Airports

Sometime subsequent 12 months, an autonomous robotic may ship meals from an airport restaurant to your gate.

The concept for Ottobot, a supply robotic, got here out of a want to assist eating places meet the elevated demand for takeout orders in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ottobot can discover its means round indoor areas the place GPS can’t penetrate.

Ottobot is the brainchild of Ritukar Vijay, Ashish Gupta, Hardik Sharma, and Pradyot Korupolu. The 4 based Ottonomy in 2020 in Santa Monica, Calif. The startup now has 40 workers within the United States and India.

Ottonomy, which has raised greater than US $4.5 million in funding, obtained a Sustainability Product of the Year Award final 12 months from the Business Intelligence Group.

Today Ottobot is being piloted not solely by eating places but additionally grocery shops, postal providers, and airports.

Vijay and his colleagues say they centered on three qualities: full autonomy, ease of maneuverability, and accessibility.

“The robot is not replacing any staff members; it’s aiding them in their duties,” Vijay says. “It’s rewarding seeing staff members at our pilot locations so happy about having the robot helping them do their tasks. It’s also very rewarding seeing people take their delivery order from the Ottobot.”

Focusing on autonomous know-how

For 15 years Vijay, an IEEE senior member, labored on autonomous robots and autos at firms together with HCL Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, and THRSL. In 2019 he joined Aptiv, an automotive know-how provider headquartered in Dublin. There he labored on BMW’s city mobility mission, which is creating autonomous transportation and traffic-control methods.

During Vijay’s time there, he observed that Aptiv and its rivals have been focusing extra on creating electrical automobiles reasonably than autonomous ones. He figured it was going to take a very long time for autonomous automobiles to change into mainstream, so he started to search for area of interest purposes. He come across eating places and different companies that have been struggling to maintain up with deliveries.

Ottobot reduces supply prices by as much as 70 %, Vijay says, and it could scale back carbon emissions for small-distance deliveries nearly 40 %.

Using wheelchair know-how, the Ottobot can maneuver over curbs and different obstacles. robotic on wheel strolling down a metropolis sidewalk

Ottobot as an airport assistant

Within the primary few months of the startup’s launch, Vijay and the Ottonomy crew started working with Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport. The facility needed to present passengers the choice of getting meals from the airport’s eating places and comfort shops delivered to their gate, but it surely couldn’t discover an autonomous robotic that would navigate the crowded facility with out GPS entry, Vijay says.

To substitute for GPS, the robotic used 3-D lidars, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors. The lidars present geometric details about the surroundings. The cameras gather semantic and depth knowledge, and the short-range ultrasonic sensors be sure that the Ottobot detects poles and different obstructions. The Ottonomy crew wrote its personal software program to allow the robotic to create high-information maps—a 3D digital twin of the ability.

Vijay says there’s a security mechanism in place that lets a workers member “take over the controls if the robot can’t decide how to maneuver on its own, such as through a crowd.” The security mechanism additionally notifies an Ottonomy engineer if the robotic’s battery runs low on energy, Vijay says.

“Imagine passengers are boarding their plane at a gate,” he says. “Those areas get very crowded. During the robot’s development process, one of our engineers joked around, saying that the only way to navigate a crowd of this size was to move sideways. We laughed at it then, but three weeks later we started developing a way for the robot to walk sideways.”

The crew took its inspiration from electric-powered wheelchairs. All 4 of the Ottobot’s wheels are powered and may steer concurrently—which permits it to maneuver laterally, swerve, and take zero-radius turns.

The wheelchair know-how additionally permits the Ottobot to maneuver outdoors an airport setting. The wheels can carry the robotic over sidewalk curbs and different obstacles.

“It’s rewarding seeing staff members at our pilot locations so happy about having the robot helping them do their tasks.”

Ottobot is 1.5 meters tall—sufficient to make it seen. It can regulate its place and peak in order that its cargo may be reached by youngsters, the aged, and other people with disabilities, Vijay says.

The robotic’s compartments can maintain merchandise of various sizes, and they’re massive sufficient to permit it to make a number of deliveries in a single run.

To place orders, clients scan a QR code on the entrance of a enterprise or at their gate to entry Crave, a meals ordering and supply cell app. After inserting their order, clients present their location. In an airport, the situation can be the gate quantity. The clients then are despatched a QR code that matches them to their order.

A retailer or restaurant worker hundreds the ordered objects into Ottobot. The robotic’s location and estimated arrival time is up to date repeatedly on the app.

Delivery time and pricing varies by location, however on common retail orders may be delivered in as rapidly as 10 minutes, whereas the supply time for restaurant orders typically ranges from 20 to 25 minutes, Vijay says.

Once the robotic reaches its remaining vacation spot, it sends an alert to the shopper’s telephone. The Ottobot then scans the particular person’s QR code, which unlocks the compartment.

Pilot packages are being run with Rome Airport and Posten, a Norwegian postal and logistics group.

Ottonomy says it expects Ottobot for use at airports, school campuses, eating places, and retailers subsequent 12 months in Europe and North America.

Why IEEE membership is important

Being an IEEE member has given Vijay the chance to work together with different working towards engineers, he says. He attends conferences incessantly and participates in on-line occasions.

“When my team and I were facing difficulties during the development of the Ottonomy robot,” he says, “I was able to reach out to the IEEE members I’m connected with for help.”

Access to IEEE publications resembling IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, IEEE Robotics and Automations Letters, and IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering has been very important to his success, he says. His crew referred to the journals all through the Ottobot’s improvement and cited them of their technical papers and when finishing their patent purposes.

“Being an IEEE member, for me, is a no-brainer,” Vijay says.

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