 Okay, let's talk about robots I've had a very interesting good fortune over the last ten years to get to build Robots that interact with people and if you know anything about the history of robotics, you know There's a lot of hype in the 1950s about Robots anime robots and and where robots are gonna go For the last 50 years, we've had robots in factories building cars behind cages and today Only over the last about 10 or 12 years you start to see robots around people working side-by-side and doing deliveries So I want to talk about the human side of robots and robots around people They asked me to say a little bit about how I got here and since this is a conference about startups and innovation I thought I would say something about about my background How many people have heard of Xerox park? Some a few people this is where the PC was originally invented way back in the 1970s And I had the opportunity to work there for about seven years after I left Stanford and the interesting thing about Park was That it was all about innovation, but in a complete corporate bubble So it was a research environment where the whole goal was to do really cool stuff But there was a disconnect from the research to the real world Willow garage was a company that I was fortunate enough to found which was a robotics think tank and will a garage was a as a very interesting I'll show you a robot from there called the PR to that Was a chance for us to to go out and think about how can we make Robots around people how can we change the world of robots and Recognizing that that was the time to do it and then Savio my current company is a startup a clean startup from about three and a half years ago and What's unique about for me about Savio? This is the first time in my life. I did a real startup and I've been in Silicon Valley for 25 years And I've been missing it everybody around me is doing startups all the time And it's really a great adventure and I recommend it to everybody So I want to start by giving you a little bit of motivation. I want to talk about something called robots for humanity This robot that you see in this picture is a PR to robot. It's sort of humanoid But a little bit more industrial. It's a mobile base it's got two arms and a head that can move around like this and There was a Play video This is a man named Henry Evans who saw the PR to robot on CNN We we built the PR to at Willow garage and Henry saw the robot and he said that robot could be my external body You see Henry can't move his arms or his legs and he can't Speak but he can move his head around so he can type with an on-screen keyboard And when he saw the PR to robot of which there were about 50 made When he saw one of the early ones. He said can I try to use that robot? This was the clip on CNN and so we brought Henry into the lab and we said Sure, you can try to use this robot. We had the robot sitting at one side and we had Henry sitting here in his wheelchair and Henry reached over and he told the robot to turn its tour him reach its arm out to his head And we thought what is he doing? What's he why is he trying to you know bring this robot to himself? Well, he got the hand here and he reached out and scratched his own itch And it was the first time in ten years. He'd been able to do that for himself And so this is a big aha moment for me, right? It's not that robots are out there just Trying to take over all of our jobs and there's a lot of Talk about that One of the things that that became clear from this is that when you create robots that help people do things for themselves or help them do their own jobs that that's a big deal a big opportunity in terms of personal dignity in terms of how Henry can can live on his own and how he can be more of a contributing member to society And there's a lot of people who either permanently or temporarily have disabilities imagine if you break your knee and you're stuck or You know you're sick for a little while if we have the ability to care for ourselves It gives us a lot more power in the world So this is Henry remotely operating the robot From another room and we've done a lot of experiments With having him be able to control this robot and other robots And this is a collaboration that we did with Georgia Tech and the healthcare robotics laboratory. So I use that as a as a way to kind of set the context right robots are not just industrial They're not just welding machines And they are robot in there something that can be around us now for the future So About three and a half years ago. We founded Savio can Savioke You know it looks like karaoke, but it's pronounced Savioke and we created it to Build robots to help people but we started with something very simple. We knew that you could make robots. We knew that Robots could perceive the world in real time. And this is actually the key Technical breakthrough that happened over the last say ten years that allows us to have robots around us And that's that they can perceive the world and compute fast enough to Sort of look at all that sensor data and make a decision Should I go or should I turn or should I stop in real time if you can't make that decision in real time you say When you analyze your logs. Oh back there. I hit a kid. Well, that's not okay, right? You have to make the decision first And so with this change with this ability to do computation fast We said okay, how can these robots change the world for the better and we created Savioke to go do that So I want to introduce you to relay and relay is a Delivery robot that moves around human spaces. We originally deployed it in hotels and the mechanism for relay Oh, here he's coming So relay is coming completely autonomously now and we've got a number of them deployed in hotels around the world What relay does is basically drives to a location typically a guest room door and bring something to the guest so here we've asked relay to To drive out here and and interact with you when it gets to the guest room door it opens up and I can get a bottle of water or whatever is sent you can see There's actually a very deep Bin here, and you'll see some examples in a minute So I can interact with relay and When the when relay comes to a guest door in a hotel the human interaction is really interesting how? I'll try to Simulate being this woman, but I obviously don't look like that When the robot comes to your door chances are you've never used a robot before so how do you work it? how do you figure out what to do and the answer is The robot has sensors it can see in front of it and in a hotel We observe that all the doors are locked, and so we send relay with a locked bin It only opens its bin when it sees the door open So we use the sensors and the fact that it can perceive its environment to make it very easy to use When it arrives at the door it opens like this I Say I'll set and in the old days what we used to do is Simply after the person got their delivery got their water bottle It would just go away and people got really disappointed So one of the things we learned is people want more time with the robot here We ask how is your stay and if you give it five stars? It's very happy. It does a little happy dance. It says we and dances around a little bit And says can I get you anything else? I'll say no and all the time delay here again. The robot could have left a long time ago all this time is for the Hotel guests to kind of experience this new technology and maybe take a selfie And now it'll go back over there and park for the for the rest of the talk So here's just an example of what's going on in the hotel situation the front desk staff gets a call is asked to send something and and Puts it inside the robot and just tells it to go and then the robot is completely autonomous Navigating near the elevators when it gets near the elevator It calls the elevator and then gets inside and rides up And then when it gets to the guest room floor it navigates to the door Outside the guest room and it'll avoid things like carts one of the challenges we had was Handling the fact that sometimes the corridors get very narrow When the robot arrives it calls the room and this is actually very typical kid gets excited the robots coming and No grabs all the snacks and stuff that were ordered and then the mom's left to pick up the pieces and interact with it And then the robot goes back to its dock and docks and takes care of itself one of the key things here is that We're adding essentially a new staff member to the hotel and so one of the questions is how does It does it take care of itself and what does the staff think about it and the answer to those questions are yes Once it finishes interacting with the guest that goes back to its charging dock and waits for the next delivery and When it comes to Guess what a guest think and what did the staff think you can see From the videos and actually if you look online you can see comments of hotels that have it people really get into robots They really like the fact that And it's there's a novelty aspect, but there's another thing Think about the last time you got a delivery to your hotel room if you call the front desk and ask can you send me towels or a Toothbrush or send up some coffee or whatever you're asking for how long does it usually take? What we found is typically somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes is a typical hotel To get a response to your your request relay takes about five minutes So it's a five times faster than a typical hotel delivery and that means that the experience is dramatically changed it's the difference between Download this paper from an FTP server or you know somehow order something That's gonna come in a week versus you know a modern delivery where you say you know I'd like to order something on Amazon and it comes tomorrow The difference between coming in a week and coming tomorrow is very big in terms of how people perceive the service and use it The other thing about it is when when a robot comes to your door, it's not Asking you for a tip It's not asking you it doesn't judge what you're wearing So you don't have to get dressed because you're asking the robot to come it's coming to your door It's just innocent and non-threatening and cute So We've actually surveyed the staff and the guests and found out that they're very excited about it One of the interesting questions about the design of the robot. How do you make it cute is? What's the size of it and people I said well, can you make it bigger? Can you make it carry larger loads? You can make it bigger But then of course the whole thing has to get bigger and there's something about it's a particular footprint of this robot We designed it to be a first foray into a human environment So it has to be Non-threatening about the right size and so the footprint of the robot is about the footprint of a person It's not bigger doesn't take up more space than you do It's short partly because if you make it taller it might fall over and partly because if you make it taller It will actually threaten people who are shorter than it. So this robot is you know about this tall There's very few people who are shorter than it and so it's non-threatening And of course now we've developed this technology that can go from point A to point B in a human environment safely and Reliably so what do you do with it? We'll continue to put it into hotels because guest room delivery is a use case that works, but what we found is Apartment buildings luxury apartment buildings is a market that looks very much like hotels the buildings look very much like hotels Except that the delivery case is a little bit different usually it's some you know food being delivered Dinner being delivered or or package delivery and so relay can do that and then what we found was oh if you're looking at Human spaces where does stuff move and in logistics? There's people who are repairing things and so in the bottom video there you see pieces being repaired and All the intro logistics within a facility can basically be automated without having to do what we did in the old days Which was create a assembly line or other fixed Fixed format and and very hard to change infrastructure relay can basically look at you know the world as it is and navigate just like Here you know this is not a we didn't design it for the stage We just map the stage and then the robot and then really I can navigate on this stage wherever it wants to go after this There's a couple out in the in the open area here in one of the booths that our partners recruit and any see Nessick Are our hosting and those two robots are navigating around the floor and you can see them interact with people and interact with them yourselves so Bottom line about relay is that it is a it's a technology that I think is the beginning of a wave of technologies You're gonna see a lot of robots interacting with people But the the requirements are really different than those industrial robots so if I go back to To just thinking about the the old robots versus the new robots Robots in factories are typically bolted to the floor and They're dangerous and you can't go near them modern robots are flexible and just like the world is changing outside just like you're seeing self-driving cars just like you're seeing Robots Industrial robots that are okay to be next to now you're suddenly gonna see robots that move around our environments And take on the low-value tasks when you think about You know, what do robots do robots do the things and robots should do the things? That we as humans don't want to do they do the things that are The simplest things in a job and the more interesting parts the more valuable parts of a job those are the parts that we're gonna keep on doing because Repetitive tests are not really the best suited for humans But creative tasks and interactive tasks are things that humans should do So I guess we're not set up to do questions, but I will Seed my time to the audience and I will be over in the booth over there if anybody is interested in directly interacting So thank you very much