As robots become more and more into human spaces, robot companies need to think about safety in a different way than when the robots were mostly silent from their human counterparts.
Sonair believes that sensors will help robotic companies achieve their safety goals.
Norway-based Oslo has built ADAR (acoustic detection and range) sensors for robots that use high-frequency sound. These sensors transmit ultrasound waves and capture how the sound echoes. These signals give the robot a three-dimensional view of the surroundings.
This data complements the robot’s other sensors and cameras, providing a clearer image of the environment for the robot’s operating system.
“Human perception – it’s our eyes that we use most, but we use other senses to interpret all our senses in our environment, our ears and our brain,” Sonair co-founder and CEO Knut Sandven said in an interview with TechCrunch. “The same goes for robots and autonomous machines. We use cameras. Cameras are very good at understanding the environment, but they are not suitable for reliably detecting objects under any circumstances.”
Sonair is designed to help fill these gaps, especially for perception of depth. Traditionally, robotic companies rely on Lidar sensors. The Lidar sensor sends out beams of light and measures how they bounce back to collect that information. Sandven said Sonair’s sensors are a better option as they can capture more comprehensive data.
“Lidar is like swiping a laser pointer,” Sandven says. “(But) if you scream in a room, you fill the room with sounds. We fill the room with sounds.”
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Sandven said the sensor’s output consists of a standard industry format and is designed to work with a variety of robotic hardware and software.
The company released the sensor earlier this year and has since seen strong demand from the robotics field, with several companies planning to incorporate Sonair’s sensors into their next robotics model, Sandven said.
Sonair has also seen demand from the industrial safety sector. Sandven said companies use sensors to detect when people enter areas with heavy equipment, so they can automatically shut down machines before an accident occurs.
Now, Sonair is looking to expand its adoption of the technology and has raised a $6 million round to do so. The round included new investors’ scale capital, Norwegian state-backed Investinor, and Proventure.
Sandven said investors operating in the robotics space quickly understood the problem the company was trying to solve. This is not surprising as safety becomes a major concern as robots begin to interact with humans. It’s not like the safety conversation that emerged in the early days of the autonomous automotive industry.
Fady Saad, a general partner at Cybernetix Ventures, which focuses on Robotics, who is not an investor at Sonair, recently told TechCrunch that potential safety concerns are one of the reasons why people don’t think they want human robots in their homes anytime soon.
“There’s something like a dirty secret about humanoids at home. There’s a lot of safety, a lot of security, a lot of concern,” Saad told TechCrunch in August. “If this falls on pets or children, it’s going to hurt them. This is just one aspect of the big hurdle that no one pays attention to, or few people are paying attention.”
Sandven said Sonair is currently not directly competing with sonar-based sensors, but that could change as more companies try to find safety solutions for their robots.
“My goal is to put this technology on all robots, just like we use cameras,” Sandven says. “When I talk again next year, we’ll get some pretty good indications as to whether that’s the direction we’re heading.”
