Bear Robotics

Founded in 2017 by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and restaurateurs John Ha, Juan Higueros, Fangwei Li, and Brennand Pierce, Bear Robotic is still in the start-up phase.  However, its future looks big.

The company is developing robots that take care of the heavy lifting associated with delivering food and drinks to diners and then bussing away used glasses and dishes. Where many worry that such robots in a restaurant will diminish the warmth of a human connection, Bear Robotics says the result of its service robots is the opposite. That is, using robots to ferry food and drinks from the kitchen to customers’ tables frees up real humans to interact with those customers.

Bear Robotics’ main product is called Penny. It’s capable of moving food and drinks from the kitchen to tables, as well as retrieving used plates and glasses to bussing stations. Penny weighs 66 pounds and can run for 8 hours on a charge, carrying up to 60 pounds.

Penny avoids bumping into things by using on-board AI coupled with machine vision to learn the possible locations of these items and people.

The company’s service robots are currently successfully serving diners and restaurant service personnel at a variety of companies in the US, including Denny’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Marriott Hotels, and Sergio’s Cuban Kitchen and Bar.

Given the company’s current start-up status, it may be difficult to directly invest in the company. However, an IPO could be in the company’s near future.

Honda Robotics

Honda (NYSE: NMC) is most famous for its vehicles. However, perhaps less known is that Honda is at its heart an engine company, making lawn mowers, gas-powered generators, motorcycles, outboard marine motors, and snow blowers. The company even makes small jet aircrafts.

The company is also very involved in robotics. Its most recent iteration is ASIMO (Advanced Step in Innovation Mobility).

In the mid-1980s, Honda engineers set-out to create a robot that could walk like a human. In total, Honda produced 6 generations of its ASIMO robots. The early robots focused on just walking. They were also tall, at approximately six feet two inches. New generations are less than five feet tall, and they have more stabilized bipedal motion, which allows them to climb stairs, walk on uneven surfaces, and move obstacles out of the way so they can continue along their path.

In 2018, Honda announced that they would cease making the final generation of ASIMO and pivot to making products that use specific technologies developed as part of the ASIMO project, such as walking aids for impaired people, robotic hands with fine motor delicacy, and machine vision modules to be used on other robots. Over the six generations of ASIMO robots, Honda produced about 100 robots.

The final version of ASIMO was indeed remarkable. Its motions and behaviors were incredibly human-like. They could recognize moving objects, read their postures and gestures. They could also recognize individuals by their faces and the sounds of their voices.

ASIMO can react to human commands and recognize falling objects to avoid collisions. All of these incredible capabilities make the ASIMO able to interact with humans and make them feel recognized and understood.

Tesla

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Elon Musk is interested in humanoid, customer-facing robots. In 2021, at Tesla’s (NASDAQ: TSLA) Artificial Intelligence Day event, the company announced that it was developing a humanoid-like robot named Optimus.

Given the amazing successes of Tesla’s sister company, OpenAI, to produce convincing natural language capabilities, you could easily see the potential for Optimus to interact effectively with humans. 

Optimus stands at about 5 feet 8 inches and weighs 114 pounds. It’s capable of carrying about 30 pounds.

In addition, Tesla has already developed autonomous driving software for its cars. It has been reported that the company will realize economies of scale by deploying this same software to operate Optimus.

Optimus is at the early stages of development compared to Honda’s ASIMO or the amazing robots from Boston Dynamics, but the potential is clearly there. Elon Musk has publicly voiced his strong belief that one day the Optimus could bring in more profits to Tesla than its cars do.

The MegaTrend

The state of customer facing robotics is really in its infancy, but already many of the capabilities are impressive and show great utility.

Given all the advances provided by human recognition, natural language capabilities, machine learning, etc., you can certainly expect to see more and more very human-like robots in your daily life. Be sure, it isn’t long until you will walk into your favorite bar and order a drink from a very friendly, chatty robot. 

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