Telexistence has brought its robots to the Bonin Islands, a world Heritage site more than 1,000km south of Tokyo. Using VR displays and tactile gloves, 100 remote operators in Tokyo have been able to enjoy virtual Tours of the islands, including feeding turtles. Even the hardness and smooth feel of the turtle shell can be felt in real time. The event spread quickly in Tokyo and caused a huge sensation.
According to introducing, Telexistence co., LTD is a famous professor at the Tokyo university Mr Tube 暲 in research and development in recent 40 years after remote Internet technology with students and friends, to scientific research achievements into commercial technology, realize remote linkage large-scale production of the robot. The CTO and CPO of the company have rich practical experience in the fields of robotics, control system and virtual reality technology. The CEO graduated from the world's top Ivy League university and once worked for a famous Japanese trading house. The COO graduated from the University of Tokyo, the capital of Japan, has the background of automation and economics, and holds a key position in the world's famous investment bank. Both the CEO and COO have extensive experience in corporate management and entrepreneurship.
The company raised A $2.5 million seed round in May 2017 and closed a $15 million Series A round in November 2018. Investors include Airbus, KDDI, GLP Logistics and others. The funds raised are mainly used for robot research and development and the development of new application scenarios.
Telexistence connects humans to robots in the cloud, allowing humans to operate the robots remotely wherever they are. As a humanoid robot, it has very similar body proportions to humans, making it easier for the operator to adapt to the robot body. The operator can observe the robot's environment through a VR visual device and haptic gloves installed in the portable control box, and manipulate the robot to complete difficult tasks. Because each finger of the robot is attached with a number of self-developed sensors, through these sensors, the robot can reliably determine the spatial position and posture of the object and other parameters, to achieve grasping and placing actions; In addition, there are also many biosensors similar to human bodies, such as tactile sensors and force sensors, which can recognize the cold and hot, softness and surface texture of objects, improve the robot's adaptive ability to the surrounding environment, and realize remote travel, remote shopping and remote interaction and other application scenarios.
Amazingly, many of the robots have only six degrees of freedom, and many have only a dozen. The company's robot has 49 degrees of freedom in its upper body alone, and 13 degrees of freedom in its arms alone. This means that it can achieve more complex gestures and movements expected by the operator, effectively expanding the operating area and greatly increasing the likelihood that the robot will move around as freely as a human.
In addition, the company is using 3D image recognition technology to recognize the distance, shape and size of more than 3,000 kinds of objects, learn and judge the best route to grasp objects, in order to complete the task of grasping objects of different shapes. Through the integration of artificial intelligence machine learning technology, robots can master and manipulate objects in a flexible way, collect and analyze large amounts of data in the process of tasks, and conduct self-learning, constantly improve their efficiency and ability, achieve complete automation and reduce labor costs.
Telexistence's technologies, which enable virtual travel, are available in retail, logistics, healthcare and high-risk industries. There are two applications the company is focusing on.
One is new retail. In the future, when convenience stores and supermarkets are fully automated, who will do the rest of the shopping, restocking, cleaning, food preparation and so on becomes a problem. What the company wants to solve is the placement of goods, replenishment of goods this part of the operation. According to statistics, this part of the operation can reach 30% of convenience stores and supermarkets, and with the automation of payment, 70% of the total labor cost can be reduced. Thanks to the popularity of convenience stores, there is an increasing demand for late night workers, and the introduction of robots could perfectly circumvent the problem of late night work. In the market environment of unmanned stores and new retail, the automation of repetitive work is an inevitable trend.
The second is smart logistics. The robot uses visual data to identify, grab the ordered goods, and then put them in the designated position to realize the rapid sorting of goods. As we all know, online shopping has become an indispensable part of Chinese People's Daily life, and the proportion of logistics industry expenses in China's total GDP is much higher than that of developed countries. How to improve warehouse operation efficiency on the basis of reducing logistics costs has become an urgent problem for e-commerce companies to solve. The use of robots with high degrees of freedom to complete the sorting and pick-up steps after receiving orders can greatly improve logistics efficiency and improve labor shortages.
After going through the process from the initial mechanical rotation to the development of artificial intelligence, with the continuous iteration and update of robot products and the mutual integration of various technologies, we believe that intelligent robot system will have infinite broad application space.
