Red Marten | Valencia (EFE) smart cities.
This was explained in an interview with EFE by its executive director, Clodo González, who is now working in collaboration with the Valencian innovation center Las Naves, within the framework of its Col·lab program, to launch its MercatBot at the end of March.
“We don’t make robots like churros, but we do very ‘ad hoc’ engineering projects,” says González, who assures that, in their collaboration with Las Naves, they wanted to provide a solution to the challenges in last-mile transport, the that brings orders from distribution centers to homes.
In a context in which “by European rule, city centers are going to have to be decarbonised and access to combustion vehicles is going to be restricted”, and taking into account that this distribution model to the final recipient has a high carbon footprint, Umibots is committed, according to González, to “autonomous and sustainable robotics”.
MercatBot allows a load of up to 200 kilos to be made at the place where the purchase is made, it works in a similar way to that of driverless cars and uses photovoltaic energy to feed itself through the solar panels that it has installed, which allow it to work with an autonomy of 6 to 8 hours.
Riding on the bike lane
The idea, explains Clodo González, is that once loaded it circulates from the municipal markets to the homes of the buyers along the bicycle lanes of the cities, something that allows the size with which it has been designed, although it requires regulatory modifications.
And it is that “there is a very large regulatory gap” both in terms of last-mile logistics and in terms of vehicles that can circulate on bike lanes, something about which the businessman assures that there would be no danger because, in addition to carrying a GPS-RTK system that allows them to move with centimeters of precision, their robots include a vision system to read signs and traffic lights.
The MercatBots will be tested on the ground in one of the municipal markets of Valencia, probably in the Central Market or in the Ruzafa Market.
robots that clean the beach
This same technology is used by the Umibots PlatjaBot, an also autonomous vehicle “similar to a tank” that includes “traction systems and a tool that collects the sand, with a sieve that filters it and a tank where it goes the waste”.
The company is already working on cleaning the beaches as its main use, because they assure that it allows even the smallest waste to be removed from the sand.
PlatjaBot is designed so that neither heat, nor rain nor fog stop it, because it has LIDAR lasers specially designed to be used even “in adverse weather conditions”, which allow detecting obstacles up to 16 meters away both during the day and at night.
This technology, which had not been seen on beaches until now, is common in the facilities of the large automotive manufacturers, as González explains.
This robot will begin to be tested on the Malvarrosa and Cabanyal beaches in Valencia at the beginning of April, since the idea is “to make it operational so that it can be used this summer.”
In the wake of the waiter robot
PlatjaBot and MercatBot have been developed entirely with Umibots technology, but they follow the path that the company already started with the application of its navigation system and its software to waiter robots, autonomous assistants that can bring food to the table.
“We launched this robot due to the lack of waiters and other staff in the hospitality industry,” says Clodo González, who nevertheless acknowledges that this is a “complicated” economic environment, especially since right now “it is not going through a very buoyant situation.”
At the moment, there are Umibots robot waiters in Madrid, and in a bar near the Logroño hospital that “had no waiters.”
However, the executive director of Umibots is aware that “a robot waiter is actually a robot assistant waiter”, because it was born with the intention of complementing and not replacing human work.
Up to 40 kilos of weight
Of course, it can “make it more bearable”, because it has the capacity, for example, to pick up up to 40 kilos of weight, which can be especially useful when clearing the tables, and that “can improve working conditions”.
Another of these Umibots waiter robots, for its part, has evolved a bit more and now offers guided tours in wine cellars in La Rioja.
“It has an acoustic and video system to tell the content of the visit, and the cargo space serves as a bottle rack, so you can follow the route, stop and taste a wine,” explains González, who is working to implement it in the Utiel-Requena area.
In his opinion, it is time for robotics on this scale because “the pandemic and the arrival of European funds have given the public administration an economic capacity that it did not have before.”
“We intend to move in cities that are committed to technological tourism, reinvent the concept of ‘smart cities’, because in this type of administration, betting on technology is a must,” he concludes. EFE