Raffaello D’Andrea, Verity co-founder and ETH Zurich professor, tells The Robot Brains Podcast’s Peter about autonomous warehouse drones, Kiva Systems, and his research and creative work.
Verity operates autonomous drones in warehouses across 13 countries. At night, they check locations where inventory errors are likely, read barcodes, and use depth sensors to estimate volume. More frequent checks can reduce misplaced stock, lost sales, and the need for workers to inspect high racks.
D’Andrea says cameras would need to be installed close to racks across warehouses that can exceed a million square feet. Verity’s drones gather information on demand and navigate indoors without GPS. Its current system localizes using sensors on the drone, with people remotely reviewing some map changes.
D’Andrea says he started Verity in 2014 after years of drone research at ETH Zurich. Live shows helped the company earn revenue while it developed the reliability, heavier payloads, optics, and autonomous charging needed for warehouse operations. Earlier, he joined Mick Mountz and Pete Wurman to start Kiva, whose robots bring shelves to workers; Amazon later expanded the system from about 10,000 robots at the time of sale to more than half a million.
D’Andrea traces Kiva’s origins partly to his Cornell team’s fast, autonomous RoboCup soccer robots, whose videos helped Mountz find him. He also describes a wingsuit research project shaped by a former student’s idea, and blind jugglers that used carefully designed motion to keep balls moving without sensing. He says doctoral work involves learning to solve problems and eventually learning to choose them.
D’Andrea discusses a mathematical study of a Hamiltonian system with quantized energies that, under specific conditions, can produce behavior resembling heat flowing from cold to hot. He also recalls TED rehearsals and problems during a live drone demonstration, including a drone flying into the audience. He describes research, entrepreneurship, and art as different forms of creating with technology and teams.
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Raffaello D’Andrea, CEO and founder of Verity, discusses building dependable autonomous robots and using small drone fleets for live entertainment and industrial sensing at Sony WOW Studio during SXSW.
