How do you disinfect a hospital from COVID-19 without putting any humans at risk? How do you get autonomous drones to help search and rescue teams find people who have gotten lost or had an accident while hiking?
In pretty much the same way you automate a factory.
By deploying smart software that coordinates smart hardware, enabling multiple robots and smart systems to work together as a combined, integrated workforce.
A drone flying in the mountains
That’s something European startup Unmanned.Life is working on. CEO Kumardev Chatterjee calls it autonomy as a service, and the company is already deploying technology with partners such as the city of Vienna as well as companies like Walmart, Swiss Post, Teléfonica and Deutsche Telekom.
The company just won a top four placement in the “Demonstrate Purpose” category at the recent European Union’s anti-Coronavirus hackathon: EUusVirus.
We’re in the early beginnings of the era of autonomy, Kumardev says.
“We are entering .. an era of the autonomous economy,” Kumardev told me in a recent episode of the TechFirst podcast. “And what that effectively means is that today we have humans-first in most jobs and most sort of processes, whether that’s industrial, or retail, or even food delivery ... medical delivery … and my vision is that we are going to move to a world where machines-first.”
Frankly, it couldn’t come soon enough, given COVID-19.
Although it does come with its own set of risks.
What we’ve largely built so far is technology that works in isolated pillars of activity: a drone that flies medications to retirees in Florida, a Roomba that vacuums the floors of our homes, an assembly robot that adds one component to a car in a factory. All of these are interesting, but they’re not game changers.
What’s required is technology that coordinates multiple robots and autonomous systems — and humans — into a ballet of action, much like human workers now perform.
The result, Kumardev says, “looks like an orchestrated dance, humans and robots working together, what I call kind of like a ‘next generation Swan Lake.’”
In a factory setting, that might mean both transporting materials and components as well as assembling them. And not just adding one part, but adding all or most parts to the whole. This is something Tesla famously tried and failed to do — building the machine that builds the machine — during Model 3 production. That didn't succeed, but the company is still working on it.
One of the problems is that humans are much more versatile that robots, generally. And they work in teams very well, unlike robots to date.
That’s something Unmanned Life is working on, and forms the basis of the technology it built in the EUvsVirus hackathon.
“And now with COVID, we’re now deploying autonomous disinfection solutions,” Kumardev says. “What we’re saying is that you can have autonomous disinfection for hospitals and large public places, and even indoors, because our drones can do outdoors and indoors, just like a human team would do, but there are no humans, so they’re not at risk from COVID.”
The system enables autonomous deployment of disinfection drones — which is a big deal now with Coronavirus — including flying drones for outdoor areas, and wheeled robots that can disinfect indoor facilities. It includes a software interface for selecting the area to be treated, and getting real-time data for what’s being accomplished.
A screenshot of one of Unmanned Life's autonomous rescue drones in action.
Another project, also in the public safety realm, is in search and rescue.
“The city of Vienna is deploying the world’s first fully autonomous drone service for search and rescue,” he says. “Our drones will take off from fire engines and will go and search for people who are lost or who are in distress, and then first responders will take that data and respond to that.”
The company is also in the Walmart accelerator, building robots that collect and deliver packages and parcels in a sorting and shipping center.
The hardware is necessary, but the software adds the intelligence that enables autonomous systems to be able to work together with both humans and other machines.
The danger, of course, is that we reinvent the world of work, building a world where a huge percentage of labor is automated, but don’t also reinvent how people live, earn a livelihood, and support themselves. For that, we may have to look at solutions like taxing robot labor, as Bill Gates has suggested, and universal basic income, which is getting more and more in vogue with all the COVID-19 job losses.
To do this, we need political innovation just as much as we need technology innovation.
