Seegrid Co-Founder Hans Moravec’s Article Published in Scientific American

“Rise of the Robot” Suggests Robot Intelligence Will Surpass Human Intelligence Before 2050

PITTSBURGH — April 3, 2008 — Seegrid Corporation (www.seegrid.com), the premier provider of vision-guided mobile robots for the material handling industry, today announced Hans Moravec, the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, has published an article in a Special Edition on Robots in Scientific American.  In the special issue he joins authors Bill Gates and Ray Kurzweil to explore the state of robots today and the vision of tomorrow’s robots.

Moravec’s article titled “Rise of the Robot” discusses the reasons why robots have not become ubiquitous in daily lives; how today’s computer power and other technologies are helping robots’ “brains” achieve autonomous, intelligent behavior; and Moravec’s prediction that by 2050 robot “brains” based on computers that execute 100 trillion instructions per second will start rivaling human intelligence.

In the article Moravec describes how his company, Seegrid, is first to introduce true autonomous mobile robots in the material handling industry, providing low-cost step-change automation in manufacturing, warehouse and distribution environments.

“It amazes me that commercial mobile robots have found few jobs in manufacturing and warehouse facilities,” said Moravec. “AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) have been operating in limited environments with technology that has been around at least for the past two decades.  Installation of AGVs is expensive and time consuming and creates inflexible routes. Vision-guided robots, on the other hand, can be easily installed and rerouted.”

An excerpt from the article states:

Seegrid’s “Tugger” autonomously pulls a loaded cart along a memorized route. It sees the world through four stereoscopic cameras on its navigation “head,” which glimpses a few thousand visual features per second. A human “trains” the tugger by leading it through a new route. Thereafter the tugger can automatically retrace the route, matching what it sees with a 3-D grid map built from glimpses during training.

“Seegrid’s computers and software and thus its products will become more powerful, intelligent and functional—all this while the price of computing power continues to decrease,” Moravec said. “The result – more functionality and greater flexibility in Seegrid’s robots at a lower price.”

For more than 155 years, Scientific American, one of the world’s most enduring and revered science and technology magazines, has chronicled for its readers major and technology innovations and discoveries using expert accounts and assorted journalistic features. The magazine publishes 15 foreign language editions with a total circulation of more than 1,000,000 worldwide.

About Seegrid Corporation

Seegrid (www.seegrid.com) brings a new class of affordable industrial mobile robots to the material handling industry that operate reliably and safely in dynamic warehouse, distribution and manufacturing environments. Seegrid’s robots differ from today’s AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) in that the company’s IMR technology is the first to provide early-stage capabilities of autonomous robot behavior with Sense, Move, Analyze, Interact and Repeat capabilities. The result—AGV-like competence but with greater flexibility at a considerably lower cost. IMR-enabled robots provide WalkThroughThenWork™ capabilities, providing an operator with the capability to simply and easily instruct the robot along a desired path, adding behaviors such as horns and stop stations, usually in minutes. Seegrid robots literally come straight off the truck, an operator quickly inputs the path and the robot is immediately productive.

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