Swiss-Mile UGV | UVIO “Even in safety inspections it isn’t so urgent that the data be actionable immediately. It is unlikely, for example, that a speaker will be installed on Milo so it can go and tell a worker to put on their hard hat,” Wellhausen says. “The far more important thing to construction companies is that the UGV can autonomously circumvent obstacles, stairs, and so on, to do its surveys and provide data without needing human help.” Naturally, it helps that Milo can run far longer than non-wheeled robots, and Swiss-Mile reports that it has operated for up to six hours on singular charges. Once near depletion of battery energy, the robot walks to a predefined location where a compatible charging plate is known to be, so it can sit on the plate, dock its charging connector and replenish its energy stores. By this autonomous behaviour, human workers are also freed from the maintenance burden of recharging it manually, although they can replace the battery if someone is on location and they want Milo to immediately return to work. As shown in trial demonstrations, a Swiss-Mile engineer is onsite, and once Milo has returned from a survey they will perform a set of maintenance checks much like that carried out before the operation commenced, visually inspecting for signs of damage and listening for suspicious clicking or grinding sounds from electric motors. “Then, of course, the data that the robot collected will be transferred so the customer can perform the valuable analyses they actually want. That is typically done wirelessly. As mentioned, there is no frantic urgency to perform the analysis immediately, and for security reasons most customers don’t want a physical plug-in between the robot and their network,” Wellhausen adds. “Lastly, on our side, we run some automated telemetry analyses to check the robot’s subsystems have been operating smoothly.” Future Going forwards, Swiss-Mile plans to continue carrying out use-case demonstrations across not only construction sites but also other industries where security and monitoring are useful, as well as looking into ways of applying Milo in logistics while minimising the engineering overheads that such work would entail. “Nailing the first use-cases will enable us to go into series production and have a sustainable business,” Wellhausen says. “And, in terms of our technological focus, we’re going to keep working to improve the robot’s core capabilities however we can think of doing so, because different use-cases and sectors will have little nuances for how the autonomous behaviours need to change slightly, and accounting for those just makes our product and its services better.” Much of that will involve honing the wheeled quadruped’s abilities in manual manipulation: being able to pull open doors is rapidly becoming a hot-button issue in autonomy discussions, because if a UGV can pull doors open it becomes notably more useful than one that cannot, and a UGV’s real autonomy – its ability to work without human intervention – becomes considerably more far-reaching. “Beyond that, we will want to improve Milo’s high-level decision-making across all operating environments,” Wellhausen says. “That will mean delving into cuttingedge AI topics and leveraging foundation models to increase the robot’s autonomy and its intelligent understanding of its surroundings more than any uncrewed system has before.” 101 Uncrewed Systems Technology | August/September 2024 Milo Wheeled quadruped Battery-electric Weight (no payload): 75 kg Maximum payload: 60 kg Dimensions (standing four-legged): 1098 x 550 x 450 mm Maximum wheeled speed: 6 m/s (21 kph) Operating speed: 2 m/s (7 kph) Maximum incline: 45o Endurance: 6 hours Key specifications Future development will focus on fine-tuning Milo’s autonomy across not only construction but also further use-cases such as logistics (Image courtesy of Swiss-Mile, enabled by Halter AG)
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