Uncrewed Systems Technology 049 - April/May 2023

50 Digest | Ottonomy Ottobot experienced, that sometimes influences you to make a product for engineers, instead of for restaurants, retailers and airports,” Vijay says. “So on top of making it easier to use, we also undertook an increasing number of trials in kerbside deliveries of food, groceries and consumer goods. That was a quite different use case to airports, so it demanded a different configuration.” This spurred a redesign of the Ottobot as a modular platform that could be customised to move, navigate and react as appropriate, whether in retail work, airport terminals or other environments. The design of version 2.0 would also aid in scalability. The company had previously planned two versions of the Ottobot, one for indoor work and the other for outdoors, but it soon realised that could mean needing two production lines and supply chains. A modular approach however would give it the flexibility to produce a wider range of designs using a single manufacturing line and supply base. “Another issue was manoeuvrability,” Vijay says. “Whether it’s working in a warehouse, along a sidewalk or in an airport terminal, people around the UGV will move differently, and there are so many edge cases where the Ottobot will be restricted in its movement for its safety and that of pedestrians that we soon realised that the best solution was if it could move sideways, which started an internal discussion about the kind of drivetrain we’d need to achieve that.” The team settled on a 4WD approach with differential steering (that is, azimuthing wheels), and although that meant packing a more expensive array of actuators and motor controllers inside the robot, the team agreed that it was worth it, as the Ottobot 2.0 gained the ability to navigate tight spaces on the edges of sidewalks. The final point of focus throughout the trials was how best to improve the experience of the end-user – that is, the recipient of goods bought from the retailer or restaurant – particularly in making the hand-offs intuitive and contactless for users as far as possible. To improve tactile access in these respects, particularly for wheelchair- bound and otherwise differently abled users, the Ottobot’s shape was changed from a trolley form to its current, flatter shape. It also has a mechanically actuated sliding door (visually similar to a bread bin) that makes packages accessible from the sides, rather than just from a top hatch, as in version 1.0. Ottonomy worked mainly with two companies to solve these issues. One was Dassault, which selected Ottonomy for its Global Entrepreneur Program, and in doing so granted the team some free one-year licences for the full version of SolidWorks, which became a vital development tool for the Ottobot. The other was Nvidia. Ottonomy took part in its Inception Program for Startups, which gave it access to considerable support not only in securing supply chains for Nvidia computer systems during the semiconductor shortages, but in the development of its AI technologies and autonomy algorithms. “Most recently we’ve signed a long- term contract with Ouster for the supply of their Lidar units, to ensure we get them when we need them,” Vijay adds. “We produced an initial batch of Ottobot 1.0 units, as we knew it would be subject to change based on user feedback. But for the Ottobot 2.0, we already have orders for a first batch of at least 100 robots, and scale production this year for a much larger number. “Our manufacturing facility is in India but our immediate market is the US. We were originally based in Santa Monica, but we wanted to test the Ottobots in a wide range of weather conditions, which we couldn’t get in California, so we moved to New York and started our first snow tests in January 2022.” He adds that the Newlab incubator in New York’s Brooklyn Navy Yard served as an invaluable supporter of Ottonomy’s development, and that its location was useful for testing the Ottobots in different scenarios, including varying traffic conditions, types of sidewalk and indoor versus outdoor spaces. Newlab also enabled Ottonomy to connect with industrial partners such as Verizon, through which Ottonomy completed a 5G study in late 2022 into the feasibility of cloud-hosting key Ottobot software modules (rather than installing them on the UGV). “Thanks to Verizon’s very low latency 5G connection, we successfully April/May 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology The Ottobot 1.0 featured upwards-opening hatch doors and fixed wheels, rather than sliding doors and 4WD