determine mood, and play the appropriate song
accordingly. The artificial intelligence in the assistant
recognizes your face and your mood. It can interpret what
you say to determine what you are really trying to
communicate. It grows in learned intelligence daily based
on its interactions with you.
Robotbase offers a good selection of different personal
robotic assistants. Each robotic digital assistant has its own
face, personality, and talents. You can use the assistant to
control household devices with your voice. You can ask
questions about weather, news, sports scores, and general
information.
The assistant can schedule meetings, set alarms and
alerts, retrieve recipes, and hear and understand you from a
distance using noise cancelling microphone array
technologies and proprietary natural language interpreting
algorithms. The assistant communicates with all your
connected devices via Wireless Z-Wave Plus, Zigbee, BLE,
and Wi-Fi. The robot speaks to you and moves around the
house using mapping and navigation algorithms.
The robotic digital assistant is your personal security
guard, transferring real time video of every room in the
house. The assistant enables video chat and other services.
Check it out at
www.robotbase.com/robot.
Flyability SA/Gimball
According to Flyability SA, Gimball operates using a
gimbal system — a two thousand year old invention for
decoupling two objects. Gimball is a collision-tolerant flying
robot drone from Flyability SA that uses a shield to tolerate
collisions while flying anywhere and everywhere. Gimball
can explore chimneys, houses, collapsed buildings, and
similar spaces without risking crashing into things.
Gimball uses obstacles instead of avoiding them. There
is no need to be a world-class pilot to get it to the most
inaccessible places. “Gimball can use the obstacles to guide
its course. For instance, it can follow a hallway by rolling on
the ceiling without needing precise piloting. It can enter a
building through a small opening by rolling on the walls
until it reaches an open window,” says Patrick Thevoz, CEO,
Flyability SA.Gimball operation is user-friendly and safe for
everyday people. Due to its light weight and protective
cage, a person can touch the robot in flight without risk of
personal injury. When flying, the Gimball’s HD camera can
detect features <0.2 mm. It has its own lighting system and
can view in all directions. The flying robot maintains its
stability even after colliding with objects. Its rotating
protective frame — which is patented — together with its
flight control algorithms enable it to navigate in new ways.
The inner frame stabilizes flight using a coaxial motor,
two control surfaces, the battery, an IMU, and control
electronics. In case of collision, Gimball’s spherical
protective frame prevents obstacles from touching the inner
frame and can passively rotate thanks to its gimbal system.
The flying robot maintains its center of mass and
orientation regardless of outer frame collisions, according to
the company. Go to
www.flyability.com to find out more.
Empire Robotics — Maker
of End-Effectors
According to Empire Robotics, their Versaball end-effector system grips porous and delicate parts like no other
end-effector design can. It can hold objects firmly and
eliminates pinch points. It easily adjusts to variations in
objects handled. The end-effector uses the jamming phase
transition of granular materials to grip things.
12 SERVO 09.2015
The robot digital assistant — the one with the face on it — from Robotbase, in a smart home setting with the technologies
it controls for you labeled.
