The obvious question here is how exactly Grace and Carter are different from existing AMRs, because at first glance, a lot of this is stuff that other AMR companies already do—adaptable cloud-based software infrastructure, working in the same spaces as busy squishy humans, and a mobile robot that can move stuff around. A mobile robot, it’s important to note, that doesn’t have any manipulators on it.
“We kept hearing that we were working on manipulators, and we’re not, and so it was important to let people know!” Brooks says. That’s the problem with staying in stealth mode for so long, but Rodney Brooks seems genuinely excited by what Robust.AI is doing, and (more important) that it’s something unique, emphasizing that “both Grace and Carter we believe offer features that aren’t available on other systems.”
Let’s start with the software stack, Grace. Initially, a user can simply walk through their work environment with a tablet to build a VSLAM (visual simultaneous localization and mapping) model of the world that the robots then use, which, Brooks says, eliminates the need to joystick a robot around in order to generate an initial map. It’s not so much that joysticking around is difficult, but typically it’s something that AMR companies do as part of a deployment, and Robust.AI is hoping to lower that barrier to adoption by removing the requirement for a custom setup process. Users then label places and regions to tell the robots where to go, and the Grace system allocates people and robots to tasks. “You can get the whole system up and running in the cloud without having to reengineer anything,” Brooks says. “Eighty percent of the warehouses in the United States have zero automation, and we want to start getting them automated.”
Carter (“Cart-er,” get it?) is a mobile robot about the size of a shopping cart. It has no lidar, but it’s full of cameras (16 on the current version), with neural processors running models at each camera so that the only data that needs to be passed around is semantic information along with coordinates.
“The key thing about Carter is that if you grab its handlebar, it’s now in power-assist mode, and you can just move it anywhere you want,” Brooks says. “With most other AMRs, even ones with good sensing, they go where they want, and the best you can do as a human is dance with them to try to block them. The important thing is that human workers are not separate from the automation—they get to use the automation.”