Building the future with robots
Misty and the enterprise market
This past week Misty racked up the frequent flier miles and industry insights, appearing at two major conferences and meeting both enterprise developers and futurists. How does Misty fit into enterprise IT needs? How was she received? Let’s find out.
Microsoft Build 2018 Developer Conference
By invitation, Misty Robotics shared the Windows 10 IoT Core booth at Microsoft Build with engineers from Microsoft.
Lou Amadio, a principal software architect at Microsoft, noted “Misty’s mission of creating a platform with advanced robotics sensors and capabilities that are accessible with easy-to-use coding constructs has driven lots of excitement with hobbyists, educators, and researchers — both within Microsoft as well as the broader community.”
Many visitors to the booth wanted to dive deep into Misty’s utility as a data collection node. In some cases, people were interested in her ability to gather raw data for computer vision training or other ML training methods. In others, the interest was far more practical. Misty was suggested as a way to detect anomalies in industrial settings and as well as serving in more human-facing roles in customer or client care.
Misty fit in well with Microsoft’s emphasis on the “Intelligent Edge” in the conference; that is, the growing intelligence of our home and business devices. As Misty does, people want home and business devices to both collect data locally and process it locally, too. Like Misty, devices can then be smart offline as well as on, and they can still make use of cloud services as desired.
Once visitors discovered how easy Misty II is to modify and extend with smart, powered add-ons, Misty’s hardware extensibility also ended up being an important point of interest.
The Wall Street Journal “The Future of Everything Festival”
Many enterprise professionals we met here were eager to explore the key visual tasks Misty could fill in their businesses: reception, mapping floor layouts, scanning QR codes/packages. For example, Walmart’s in-house tech incubator, Store No. 8 was very interested in Misty’s customer service possibilities, including helping shoppers find items.
One of the critical pieces of knowledge that our CEO, Tim Enwall, identified from chatting with parents in the crowd of business futurists is that they have a significant interest in robots not just to have a robot around, but as an investment in their kids’ future.
Attendees readily agreed that robotics is definitely a “Future of…” technology, and they appreciated Misty’s “cute” looks as a gentle entrance to the ubiquity of personal robots. Visitors were also excited at the prospect of downloading apps/skills for their robot, as with a phone.
