Corona Stems the Return of a Humanoid Robot

I left Switzerland in 2012 after completing my Master’s degree in Computational Science at ETH Zurich. One year later Roboy, Switzerland’s most famous robot was created, and I joined a research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). I adopted Roboy, the anthropomimetic brain child of University of Zurich Professor, Rolf Pfeifer and over the years, I’ve nurtured it and made it my own. With an amazing team, I built two new robots and then we felt it was time to “expand back.”

With the support of Mindfire, we founded the Zurich Roboy student team to bring the Roboy project back to Switzerland. We thought we’d arrive back in country with a bang. We planned to unveil Roboy 3.0 at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain at the end of February earlier this year. We planned to deploy the Roboy Hug Challenge in Zurich in March to prove that Zurich could be more welcoming to robots than both Shanghai (more than 750 hugs in just one day) and Barcelona (with almost 600 hugs) combined. Well, here we are in the midst of social distancing and hugging robots still has to become a thing again.

February 12th. We were feverishly working to complete the robot, just in time to deliver a show-stopping performance at our industrial partner’s booth during the MWC. Everything was almost ready and then came the news. What had started with LG a few days earlier, had developed into an avalanche of companies retracting from MWC - the world’s largest mobile technology fair. At a certain point, it was just too many and the organizers cancelled the congress on the evening before the robot’s debut.

All our plans shattered when the one event we had been pushing towards for months simply vanished. The opportunity to unveil the most advanced (and best looking) musculoskeletal robot on the worlds stage, gone. In our shock, we decided to push through, anyway despite the situation. We finished the robot that night, at 1h53 in the morning Roboy 3.0 was complete and its parents were both proud and sad at the same time.

First, we looked for alternatives. Certainly, more local events would still happen? We aimed for Forum Unternehmer at TUM in Munich, the local start-up ecosystem’s largest annual event scheduled for the end of March and then a later event in Zurich.

As more and more events were cancelled however, and the countries started to slide into lockdown, it became clear that we wouldn’t be unveiling the robot anytime soon. And that’s when our entrepreneurial minds kicked back in and we decided to shift gears. We started to remove a few hacks we had done to be ready for MWC and other public demonstrations and refocused work on the basic telepresence technology, as Roboy is competing to win the international robotics competition “ANA Avatar XPRIZE” for best telepresence robotics system.

Then we strategized, after all we had already been working on telepresence. That is, on creating a humanoid robot and wearable operator suit that would let people experience what it feels like to be a robot. People would see what the robot sees, what it hears, and the robot responds to the wearer’s movement mimicking it as if it were an extension of its wearer. Isn’t that exactly what anyone would want in a pandemic like this one? A robot system that would allow you to look after your parents with thousands of kilometers or even just meters in between, but with absolute certainty that the robot can neither get the virus nor spread it.

In fact, the COVID-19 crisis has seen a surge of robotic applications. From robots to disinfect hospital rooms, over robots used to bring groceries to quarantined citizens, to robots taking temperatures and virus swabs.

Working on telepresence, we could do a world’s first: A virtual unveiling, where spectators from the safety of their homes could see the robot’s unveiling from the robot’s very own perspective. As if they were the ones to be unveiled. This way, the team could unveil the robot at all of our locations at the same time. Despite the lockdown.

In the true spirit of entrepreneurship, we’ve changed gears yet again. Instead of just unveiling the robot at a tech congress, we aim to unveil a full telepresence system application. Plans for achieving the telepresence by autumn 2020 have been expedited. Instead of feeling beaten down by the Corona virus, we are living by Professor Rolf Pfeifer’s mantra, “There are no problems, only opportunities.”

We are almost there! We are not only returning to Switzerland, but also starting a collaboration with ETH Zurich and Professor Stelian Coros. We look forward to letting the world experience what it is like to see through the eyes of a robot. We also anticipate delivering the bang we had prepared for a few months earlier, but in an even bigger and better way. Towards the end of this summer, we will make robots make sense and unveil the robot in an event experience that links cities and the digital with the physical world. Let’s do this #togETHer.

The thing that keeps me busiest at the moment is: Winning the ANA Avatar XPRIZE.
My favourite app is: Telegram, as it keeps me connected to my teams.
One book or movie I recommend: Altered Carbon on Netflix.
If all else fails, my instant pick-me-up is: Against all odds, we’ve built a humanoid robot at minimal resources and maximal lifeblood.