BlueBotics: Navigation for the Clever Robot

lueBotics’ story started be-cause of the Swiss NationalExhibition in 2002. At thattime, the Autonomous Sys-tems Laboratory (directed by Prof.Roland Siegwart) was commissionedto develop tour-guide robots, whichhad to lead hundreds of visitors perday through a part of the exhibitionspeciallydedicatedtorobotics.Ateamof 25 scientists and artists was set inplace to work on mechatronics, navi-gation, and interaction aspects, andafter several months of intensivework, the tour-guide robot RoboXwasborn.During the six months of the exhi-bition, 11 RoboXes dispensed infor-mation to more than 680,000 visitors,worked uncomplainingly for 13,000 h,and covered more than 3,000 km.The visitors were enthusiastic aboutthe robots, and the level of professio-nal experience gained through thisevent was important for the spin-offtofocusonthisfirstnichemarket.Atthe beginning, there were just four ofus, each one with a specific focus incomputer science, mechanics, or elec-tronics. Our goal was to market inno-vative and promising mobile roboticstechnologies. We were optimistic inthinking, maybe naively at the time,that the industry was just waitingfor our mobile robotics solutionstoemerge.From Research to IndustryTherealworldprovedtougherthough.Our first two products, RoboX, thetour guide, and Shrimp, a researchplatformfor space exploration, did notallowustogrowasfastaswe’dlikedto. The mobile robotics market isindeed very restricted, expectationsare high, and the cost of the systemsisoftenprohibitive.Itwashoweverastrong decision for us to be self-financed from the beginning. We usedour know-how to develop robotics andmechatronics systems for various cus-tomers and invested our benefits inthe development of autonomousnavigation technology (ANT) ourautonomous navigation product. Thisproved a slow way to go but gave usthe chance to work on many projects,with visionary and stimulating indus-trialpartners.In2007,forexample,Nesbotcauseda sensation at the International Con-ference on Robotics and Automationin Rome when the robot served upto 150 coffees a day to visitors (seeFigure 1). This fully autonomous andcompletely embedded mobile coffeemachine with user interfaces for pro-fessional services—developed togetherwith Nestle Nespresso SA—shows howan independent serving platform canradically change the art of beverageandfoodordering.In a completely different type ofapplication,onbehalfoftheEuropeanSpaceAgency(ESA),ourengineerspar-ticipatedinvariousdevelopmentphasesof the ExoMars mission by developingand producing all the rovers for the lat-estB2phase.In another innovative partnership,we collaborated with Esatroll SA, anItalian firm specializing in automatedguided vehicles (AGVs), to createGilberto, the robot guide and infor-mation desk, which is now in ex-ploitation in several museums andthemeparks(Figure2).