Hi, guys! Philip English from RoboPhil.com and today we have an interview with the guys from Wicron, who are telling us about Webot

Philip English – Hi guys, Philip English here and we’ve just got another quick interview with Roman and his robot. These guys are part of the Skolkovo group of guys from Russia. I’m just gonna ask him a few questions, get him to introduce himself and tell us a little bit more about the robot. So Roman, can you first introduce yourself, tell me a little bit about your background and then tell me about the robot.

Roman – We are from Russia. We are from Moscow region. The product provides the market with a special telepresence system called Webot. It is very advanced telepresence robot. It contains new technology for organize teleconference using the technology of Google company. It’s based on the standards and you can control such type of robots with a browser, for example Firefox or Google Chrome. And also we have a special application at market and you can download our application and control the robot from the Android and, for example, iPad. And there is a special autonomous mode just touch the point on the screen and the robot can move to this point fully automatically. With obstacle avoidance systems, people detection, and the special attractive mode. It is very popular in Russia for the remote education for disabled people for example. For using in the exhibitions, for using in the museums, for the free services and even paid online services. And there are some applications in the shops and the office use.

Philip English – That’s a very good overview. So you were saying that you can tell it to go to different locations. So how does the robot know where it is? Has it got to do a map of the location?

Roman – They can create the map of location using the special laser system. The cost of the robot is not very big because we use the most cheap components inside the robot, especially from the China. We use a First China laser scanner system inside the robot, it can create the map and can make a localization on this map. And also this information is very useful to plan a trajectory and to avoid the obstacles during the moving.

Philip English – Okay.

Philip English – So I guess the end user, the customer you’re trying to sell to I suppose are shops and retail. Can it do like security as well, can it be used as a security robot?

Roman – In the second version of our robot we added the light for example. Because in some security applications, night telepresence, is a key component of such system. We believe that security telepresence is very prospective market. We don’t know about exact parameters of such robots for the telepresence, and now we have a research in the market to understand what does integrate, what do we integrate, to make this able for the security telepresence.

Philip English – Okay, yeah, because this is a, I mean I think, with a robot like this, it can be a multi-task sort of robot, You can have in the retail doing promotions, you can have doing telepresence, you can have it doing security, so you get many different wins for this type of robot. Have you ever been thinking about extending it out with arms or something like that, is that the next step?

Roman – Our system is very modular. It consists of two independent parts. The first part is the upper part, it can be disconnected from the down part, and the other modularity is this side, it can be removed and we can install a special part with arms, for example,

Philip English – Right but it is not very popular for the market now. I think we added this part to the robot for the prospect of using it.

Roman – Okay yeah, so I suppose in retail unless the arms are actually going to be doing something practical, it’s not really worth having it.

Roman – Now we have a very interesting project with a merchandising company in Russia, and this project is the first step to integrate such type of robot for the merchandising in the market, the real time merchandising can update the information in the database of company, and can help the company to understand which kind of product can be sold faster.

Philip English – Okay, yes.

Philip English – So the robot moves around shop, it has a special guidance system to detect the bar code, and can update the information database.

Philip English – Information that way, yeah. Okay, okay, that’s quite good, yeah that’s brilliant. What I do guys is I’ll put some links down there so you can find out some more information about the robot and yeah, thank you very, very much for the overview.

Roman – Thank you, thank you.

Wicron: https://wicron.com/en

WicronYouTube: https://youtu.be/t4YVBr1o1ns

Philip English: https://philipenglish.com

Sponsor – Robot Center: https://www.robotcenter.co.uk