Are you a developer with a great idea? It’s time to put a robot on it.
Part two in a four-part series on who Misty robots are made for and why.
We’re excited to be growing a community of creative, entrepreneurial developers at Misty Robotics. That’s because Misty is designed first and foremost as a development platform.
Yes, Misty robots can do amazing, professional-grade things out of the box (and I’ll go through them below). But Misty’s magic is that she’s not just an advanced, hardware-extensible robot, she’s also a dedicated, feature-full software platform.
What does that mean for developers? It means that you don’t have to worry about building a robot in order to have your code control a robot. You just get to use some sample code and simple REST, JavaScript, or Python APIs to make your Misty robot do what you want.
What can Misty do?
We’re creating Misty robots to fill a significant gap in the programmable robots available in the marketplace today. Misty is professional grade, easy to program, flexible, and capable.
We’ve configured each Misty II with:
- Two powerful cell phone processors, one running Windows IoT Core and another running Android 7. Both processors are capable of locally running deep, neural network machine learning, such as Microsoft Windows ML or Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine.
- High-end sensors. From an advanced Occipital Structure Core depth sensor that enables independent mapping and mobility to several time-of-flight sensors and bump sensors, Misty II is very well equipped, indeed.
- A 4K camera for face and object recognition.
- Six capacitive touch panels.
- Microphones, speakers, and an LCD display for local output and communication.
- Onboard Bluetooth and WiFi.
Misty Robotics Founder and Head of Product Ian Bernstein gives a fun feature walkthrough of Misty II in this video:
This all means that Misty can:
- Independently explore and autonomously map and navigate.
- Recognize object and faces and capture video, still images, or audio.
- Communicate to humans (or computers) locally or remote.
- Use embedded machine learning for improved processing and intelligence.
Misty robots also come with an attractive industrial design and some basic “personality”. Entrepreneurs go into the market to solve problems with customers in their office or home — not in a factory setting where workers might be able to put up with a hunk of metal. Customers need to be reassured that robots are here to help, so robots need to be pleasant and attractive to be accepted.
What can you do?
We’ve had our hand-built Misty I developer edition robots (affectionately known as “Misty 0.7”) out in the world for about six months now. During that time, we’ve had developers using them who range from beginners to professionals.
At Boulder’s Galvanize full-stack web developer program, we gave a Misty 0.7 to students Scott Rushford and Frederick Engelhardt. Their project used IBM’s Watson AI APIs along with JavaScript to get Misty to receive text messages, speak the text, and use different accents and languages.
GQueues founder Cameron Henneke, a tech entrepreneur and human-computer interaction hobbyist, has been exploring Misty’s personality (while building Python wrappers for her APIs). He also holds the distinction of being the first member of our community to introduce Misty 0.7 to a Misty 1.0.
At our robothons, teams have worked on projects that ranged from Misty identifying what containers could be put into recycle bins to a directed mapping routine to a receptionist skill that took advantage of her onboard facial recognition to a hardware hack so Misty could pick up after us.
On our community site, developer plans for Misty’s skills include security and patrol robots, assistance to the elderly, and providing a remote telepresence for co-workers spread across the globe. The list of opportunities we’ve heard about so far are only the tip of the iceberg. Like all the world-changing software platforms before us, once developers start exploring personal robots and the opportunities they create, nothing will be the same.
For the same amount of money developers regularly spend on a laptop, finally there’s a powerful robot that’s super easy to program. We’ve made the opportunity. You bring the vision. Let’s make the future together.
