Fetch Unveils Robot Duo to Adapt Warehouses for Quick-Delivery Era

As reported by Xconomy: Consumers are getting spoiled—not only do they want movies on demand via digital networks, they also want physical things like books and diapers delivered almost as fast.

Amazon, which has fueled these consumer expectations, uses colonies of Kiva robots in automated warehouses to help achieve its fast shipping times. Modest-sized retailers and distribution centers can’t afford that kind of technology, so last summer San Jose, CA-based Fetch Robotics set out to create human-scale robot workers to help those smaller companies compete in the on-demand era. While Amazon can afford to rebuild its warehouses to accommodate the extensive Kiva system, Fetch decided to make robots that would work in existing buildings with a minimum of retrofitting.

Fetch kept its evolving robots under wraps for five to six months while they were being designed and fabricated, says CEO Melonee Wise. But today the company is unveiling its first robot duo—named Fetch and Freight—to attract potential customers interested in trying a pilot project.

Fetch is an automaton about as tall as a middle-school child. Its single arm ends in a two-fingered gripper that can pick boxes off warehouse shelves and pass them to its sidekick, Freight. That robot co-worker consists of a wheeled base—similar to the one propelling Fetch around—that can be fitted with a collection bin or a set of shelves to hold the items Fetch selects. Once the order has been assembled, Freight can carry the goods to a shipping station at speeds faster than Fetch can move, because Freight’s center of gravity is lower.

Wise says Fetch is one of the few robotics companies that combine a gripper function with the mobility to travel along warehouse shelves to pluck out goods. Other companies are developing robots with similar talents, such as Billerica, MA-based Harvest Automation’s rolling bots for agricultural use. Those robots can pick up potted plants and place them on a conveyer belt, for example. Boston-based Rethink Robotics tailors robots for manufacturing chores, such as circuit testing or feeding fabric into automated industrial sewing machines.

It’s hard to make head-to-head comparisons just yet between robots like those made by Harvest, Rethink, and Fetch, which focuses on logistics. That’s the art of managing the transport of goods from factories or storehouses to consumers. But what’s clear is that a market is emerging for dexterous and mobile robots in retail, distribution, and manufacturing.

Amazon itself is funding the Amazon Picking Challenge competition next month at the ICRA 2015 conference in Seattle, where $26,000 in prizes will be awarded to inventors who create robots that can select objects from a shelf and move them to a table. Amazon hasn’t mastered automated picking yet—its boxy 330-pound Kiva robots move whole shelving units to areas where human staffers pluck out items for an order. However, this saves workers the time they would have spent searching through vast warehouse spaces.

Fetch’s robots are designed to function in smaller, human-scale environments where people are also working amid the same shelves and tables. The 250-pound Fetch can extend its reach because of its telescoping spine—it can adjust its height from about 3 feet 7 inches to roughly 4 feet 10 inches. Its vision isn’t good enough to recognize specific objects, but the depth camera in its, er, head can perceive three-dimensional shapes such as boxes and the spaces between them on a shelf, Wise says.

The Fetch robots and accompanying software could be adapted for a range of different uses beyond order fulfillment chores, Wise says—from packaging kits of multiple parts to joining parts together in a light assembly process. Fetch’s flexible arm has the equivalent of three human joints: a shoulder, elbow, and wrist.

The Fetch robot model and Fetch Robotics CEO Melonee Wise

“We think the design is pretty good,” Wise says. “The vision for these robots is that they can do a lot of things.” In February, Fetch announced it had raised $3 million in Series A financing from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Shasta Ventures. The funds are being used to bring Fetch’s first robots to market.

Although Fetch and Freight can operate autonomously to fill customer orders, humans can also interact with them via connected devices including smartphones and tablets, Wise says. The robots can also dodge around people in corridors, and follow a human co-worker by fixing its gaze on the person’s legs and tracking them continuously.

But why would a modest-sized company spend money on such technology when it can just hire more workers and give them rolling ladders?

Wise says human workers come with their own operating limits. Many distribution centers struggle to hire enough reliable employees, and suffer high turnover, she says. And unlike robots, humans are associated with what Wise judiciously calls inventory “shrinkage,” or “goods unintentionally leaving the warehouse.”

Robots could also help companies that face specific challenges, Wise says. A pharmaceutical products warehouse may need to keep close tabs on controlled drugs whose distribution is carefully regulated. It may also need to monitor the building temperature or other storage conditions that are key to drug safety and effectiveness.

Fetch’s robots can take temperature readings and snap photos of goods as they pick them up, Wise says. “You could have a full record of how that drug or that medicine was handled,” she says.

If a distributor eventually uses an all-robot staff, it can operate a warehouse at temperatures or other conditions that human beings couldn’t tolerate, Wise says.

“You can have lights-out operations,” Wise says. “That’s a big cost savings.”

Wise says it’s hard to name a price range for the Fetch robots, which would be sold as a part of a system tailored to meet a customer’s particular needs. The software and the numbers of Fetch and Freight robots would vary, and some degree of retrofitting might be required, she says.

Fetch has already been in touch with potential partners, but by showcasing its robot technology it’s hoping to get the word out to a broader range of companies that might want to set up a pilot project for an interesting new application, Wise says. After a short pilot run for a specific use, Fetch expects to be able to supply robots not only to the original partner, but also to offer them for sale to similar companies.

The Fetch robots have a modular design that could accommodate new types of sensors, collection containers, and grippers to handle new tasks or larger products, Wise says. Fetch can now pick up items weighing up to 13 pounds, and Freight can transport as much as 150 pounds. There are plenty of new challenges to tackle, Wise says. At this point, for example, Fetch couldn’t handle selecting items of clothing from a group of garments.

The company plans to continue adding new capabilities to its robot pair, which can operate as a team or separately. “It really depends on the interest we find for different capabilities,” Wise says.

If anyone could be expected to predict a rapid expansion of robot uses over the next decade or so, Wise would seem to be that person. Starting as a college student intern, she has worked on projects including autonomous boats and cars, personal robot butlers, and robots that can plug themselves in for a re-charge. But Wise says she doesn’t expect to see scads of high-complexity robots commercialized in the near future, and certainly not at low cost.

“I know how hard it is,” Wise says. Designers have already whittled down the cost of robot components, but they’ll need to make even further gains, she says. And they’ll have to overcome many snags as robots begin to operate in the messy environment of the real world.

“I think it will take a good 50 years to do the things that everyone thinks will be done 10 years from now,” Wise says.

Out-Of-Control Russian ISS Cargo Vessel Will Plummet Back to Earth

As reported by Engadget: The Russian space agency (Roscosmos) has given up trying to regain control of Progress 59 and the 6,000 pounds of food, water, clothes and equipment on board. It reportedly told TASS, the country's news agency, that it's merely waiting for the vessel to plunge and burn as it reenters the atmosphere anytime from May 5th to 7th. The vehicle was supposed to shuttle all those supplies to the ISS, but it ended up tumbling wildly in the wrong orbit soon after it reached outer space. According to TASS, the engine of the Soyuz rocket that launched the vessel might have been "overworked" due to a control system glitch, causing it to burn overtime and to send the cargo craft into an uncontrollable spin.

Since Roscosmos failed to establish communication with Progress, it would be impossible to even attempt a rendezvous with the space station -- besides, it would be extremely dangerous to dock a spinning spacecraft. This is the second time in six months that a resupply mission to the ISS has failed to reach its goal.

Back in October 2014, Orbital Science's rocket exploded six seconds into launch, along with 5,000 pounds of supplies. The ISS crew has enough food and water to last them until early August despite the two failures -- the real loss here is the propellant included in Progress' cargo, which they need to maintain the space station's altitude. Hopefully, the crew can get by until SpaceX's Dragon capsule gets there with more supplies in June.

Amazon CEO's Company, Blue Origin, Unveiled a Video of Yesterday's New Shepard Launch

As reported by The Verge: If you didn't hear that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' secretive rocket company Blue Origin tested a rocket yesterday, you can be forgiven: unlike many launches, the first test flight of New Shepard wasn't streamed live. But the company has now released a video showing the successful launch from a base in Texas.

Blue Origin's goal is to create a cheap means of private space flight, and earlier this month, the company's president announced that it was prepared for test flights of its New Shepard rocket this year. "The engine is ready for flight... and ready for other commercial users," company president Rob Meyerson said. He didn't offer a timetable, but it appears the craft was closer to launch than most expected.

"Any astronauts on board would have had a very nice journey into space and a smooth return," Bezos writes in a note about the launch on Blue Origin's site. There was at least one hitch, however: "Of course one of our goals is reusability, and unfortunately we didn’t get to recover the propulsion module because we lost pressure in our hydraulic system on descent," Bezos writes, adding that new versions of the propulsion module are already being made.

The New Shepard is a suborbital craft that will be able to fly 62 miles above land, but it won't be able to make a full orbit of the planet. Although the craft can hold three people, Blue Origin previously said the first launch will be uncrewed, and it will stay that way for a while: the company says it wants to complete about a dozen tests before sending people aboard.

Blue Origin also released a less polished tracking shot of the launch, which is available to watch below.

Watch: First Apple Watch Teardown Reveals an Incredible Piece of Engineering

As reported by BGR: It’s the Apple Watch’s official launch day and it wouldn’t be the launch of a new Apple gadget without the folks at iFixit cracking it open and seeing what’s inside. They didn’t disappoint us on Friday and have already posted a terrific new video that shows you the remarkable engineering that went into Apple’s first wearable computer.

So what did iFixit find? Here are the highlights:

• The watch comes with a 205mAh battery, which is actually smaller than the batteries found in devices like the Moto 360. iFixit theorizes that Apple’s Watch OS may be more power efficient than Android Wear, which means you shouldn’t panic because the Apple Watch has a smaller battery.
• The solid-state S1 SiP really can’t be removed without suffering permanent damage since it’s encased in resin. In other words, it looks like upgrading your Apple Watch’s SiP is just not going to be possible when future Watch processors come out.
• From the looks of it, it seems that the heart rate monitor in the device can actually take your blood oxygen level as well, although Apple has never claimed it had any such capabilities. iFixit speculates that this might be due to FDA regulations.
• And yes, the Apple Watch contains the smallest screws iFixit has ever encountered. At one point they have to actually file down their smallest screwdriver to make it a proper fit

All told, the video shows the incredible engineering it takes to pack all this computing power into such a tiny device. Check it out below:

Waze Navigation App to Alert L.A. Drivers of Kidnappings and Hit-and-Runs

As reported by The Stack: Traffic-alert app Waze has announced a partnership with Los Angeles to share information on hit-and-runs and kidnappings taking place across the city, alongside traffic data and road closure updates.

The deal forms part of a data-sharing agreement between L.A. authorities and the Google-owned tech startup detailed yesterday by the city’s mayor Eric Garcetti. He assured that the data provided to the city by Waze would be “aggregated” and completely anonymous – “without identifying any individual driver.”

According to the councilor the collaboration was mutually confirmed on Monday following a “very good meeting” between Waze and LAPD chief officer Charlie Beck.

This move signals a considerable turn of events after Beck argued at the end of last year that the traffic alert app posed a danger to police due to its ability to track their location. The complaint followed the shooting of two police officers in New York after the shooter used the app to track his targets.

Beck added in a statement that he appreciated “Google and Waze coming to the table to elevate the discussion around how […] technology can help improve traffic safety, while ensuring the safety of officers.”

Waze, an Israeli-made traffic and navigation app bought by Google in 2013, already provides updates on road closures via user contributions. The new partnership with the West Coast city’s government will see further alerts pop up over the next few months, showing ‘amber’ incidents including hit-and-run attacks and kidnappings.

“This is going to be updated in real-time, every two minutes, giving motorists the information they need to […] get home for dinner in time,” said Garcetti.

LA now joins 30 U.S. and global cities involved in data-sharing schemes with Waze, including Washington, D.C., Sydney, Barcelona and Jakarta.

Di-Ann Eisnor of Waze noted that LA has the highest number of users in the U.S., with over 1.3mn Los Angelenos contributing traffic information to the app every month.

“We are very, very excited that Los Angeles is doing this,” she said. “It’s huge for us.”

Researchers Plan to Demonstrate a Wireless Car Hack This Summer

As reported by Wired: A note of caution to anyone who works on the security team of a major automobile manufacturer: Don’t plan your summer vacation just yet.

At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences this August, security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have announced they plan to wirelessly hack the digital network of a car or truck. That network, known as the CAN bus, is the connected system of computers that influences everything from the vehicle’s horn and seat belts to its steering and brakes. 

And their upcoming public demonstrations may be the most definitive proof yet of cars’ vulnerability to remote attacks, the result of more than two years of work since Miller and Valasek first received a DARPA grant to investigate cars’ security in 2013.  

“We will show the reality of car hacking by demonstrating exactly how a remote attack works against an unaltered, factory vehicle,” the hackers write in an abstract of their talk that appeared on the Black Hat website last week. “Starting with remote exploitation, we will show how to pivot through different pieces of the vehicle’s hardware in order to be able to send messages on the CAN bus to critical electronic control units. We will conclude by showing several CAN messages that affect physical systems of the vehicle.”

Miller and Valasek won’t yet name the vehicle they’re testing, and declined WIRED’s request to comment further on their research so far ahead of their talk.

Academic researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California at San Diego demonstrated in 2011 that they could wirelessly control a car’s brakes and steering via remote attacks. They exploited the car’s cellular communications, its Wi-Fi network, and even its bluetooth connection to an Android phone. But those researchers only identified their test vehicle as an “unnamed sedan.”

Miller and Valasek, by contrast, haven’t hesitated in the past to identify the exact make and model of their hacking experiments’ multi-ton guinea pigs. Before their presentation at the Defcon hacker conference in 2013, they put me behind the wheel of a Ford Escape and a Toyota Prius, then showed that they could hijack those two vehicles’ driving functions—including disabling and slamming on brakes or jerking the steering wheel—using only laptops plugged into the OBD2 port under the automobiles’ dashboards.

Some critics, including Toyota and Ford, argued at the time that a wired-in attack wasn’t exactly a full-blown hack. But Miller and Valasek have been working since then to prove that the same tricks can be pulled off wirelessly. In a talk at Black Hat last year, they published an analysis of 24 automobiles, rating which presented the most potential vulnerabilities to a hacker based on wireless attack points, network architecture and computerized control of key physical features. In that analysis, the Jeep Cherokee, Infiniti Q50 and Cadillac Escalade were rated as the most hackable vehicles they tested. The overall digital security of a car “depends on the architecture,” Valasek, director of vehicle security research at security firm IOActive told WIRED last year. “If you hack the radio, can you send messages to the brakes or the steering? And if you can, what can you do with them?”

Miller, who aside from his car hacking work holds a day job as a senior security engineer at Twitter, did offer what might be a hint of their target in a tweet last week:

Jeep, after all, received the worst security ratings by some measures in Miller and Valasek’s earlier analysis. It was the only vehicle to get the highest rating for “hackability” in all three categories of their rating system. Jeep-owner Chrysler wrote last year in a statement responding to that research that it would “endeavor to verify these claims and, if warranted, we will remediate them.”

Valasek and Miller’s work has already led to serious pressure on automakers to tighten their vehicles’ security. Congressman Ed Markey cited their research in a strongly-worded letter sent to 20 automakers following their 2013 presentation, demanding more information on their security measures. In the responses to that letter, all of the auto companies said their vehicles did have wireless points of access. Only seven of them said they used third parties auditors to test their vehicles’ security. And only two said they had active measures in place to counteract a potential digital attack on braking and steering systems.

It’s not clear exactly how much control Miller and Valasek have gained over their target automobile’s most sensitive systems. Their abstract hints that “the ambiguous nature of automotive security leads to narratives that are polar opposites: either we’re all going to die or our cars are perfectly safe,” and notes that they’ll “demonstrate the reality and limitations of remote car attacks.”

But in a tweet following the announcement of their upcoming talk last week, Valasek put it more simply:

“[Miller] and I will show you how to hack a car for remote control at [Defcon],” he wrote. “No wires. No mods. Straight off the showroom floor.”

Russian Cargo Ship Suffers Glitch After Launching Toward Space Station

As reported by Space.com: A robotic Russian cargo spaceship experienced a glitch shortly after launching toward the International Space Station Tuesday (April 28), delaying and potentially imperiling its arrival at the orbiting lab. 

Russia's unmanned Progress 59 spacecraft blasted off atop a Soyuz rocket at 3:09 a.m. EDT (0709 GMT; 1:09 p.m. local time) Tuesday from Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan. Everything went smoothly until the cargo vessel separated from the rocket. Progress 59's solar arrays deployed on schedule, but some of its navigational antennas apparently did not deploy, NASA launch commentators said.

Russian flight controllers have also been having trouble uplinking commands to the Progress 59, and there may be issues with the vehicle's propulsion system as well, commentators added.

Progress 59, which is loaded with about 6,000 lbs. (2,720 kilograms) of food, fuel and other supplies, was supposed to arrive at the orbiting lab just six hours after liftoff, at about 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) Tuesday. But the antenna issue will push the docking attempt back by nearly 48 hours, to 5:03 a.m. EDT (0900 GMT) on Thursday (April 30). 

This switch from the fast track, four-orbit route to the International Space Station to a two-day journey that requires 34 orbits to complete is "part of the nominal backup plan for all Soyuz and Progress vehicles" and gives Russian flight controllers time to try to troubleshoot the problems, NASA commentators said.

It was not entirely clear shortly after liftoff just what those problems are, or if they are fixable. Initial telemetry readings suggested that the Progress 59's two Kurs "automated rendezvous antennas" failed to deploy, but later telemetry seemed to indicate that the Kurs antennas are behaving normally but other antennas did not deploy, NASA launch commentators said.

The Progress is one of four different robotic vessels that ferry cargo to the space station. The other three are Japan's H-II Transfer Vehicle and the Dragon and Cygnus spacecraft, which are built by American aerospace firms SpaceX and Orbital ATK, respectively. Dragon is the only one of these craft that can bring cargo back down to Earth (the others are designed to burn up in the planet's atmosphere).