Security Robots

Palo Alto-based Cobalt Robotics says its nearly human-sized rolling robot is designed to continually move through a building, scanning for anything suspicious: People not wearing badges, doors left open, water leaks, the sound of breaking glass, and more. Data from more than 60 onboard sensors gets sent back to a human security guard, who can dispatch people to fix the problem. Cobalt didn’t say how much the robots will cost, or when they’ll be widely available. About a dozen Cobalt robots will be installed this quarter, the company told TechCrunch. Cobalt’s sales pitch is that much of a human security guard’s work can be automated, and possibly enhanced through sensors. Rather than hiring dozens of guards to sit at entrances and periodically walk through a building, a smaller number of guards can instead monitor live video feeds from rolling robots and make decisions based on data.

The robots were designed by Yves Béhar, who — among other projects — helped design the kid-friendly, green and white budget laptop for the One Laptop Per Child project. Cobalt’s bot has a blue fabric body, which is supposed to put people at ease while it navigates around a building, the company says. Cobalt launched in early 2016 and raised an unspecified amount of money from Bloomberg Beta, Promus Ventures, Haystack, Comet Labs and Subtraction Capital. Its cofounders, CEO Travis Deyle and CTO Erik Schluntz, were both accepted into Y Combinator’s winter 2013 class — Deyle, for a fashion retail startup called Lollipuff, and Schluntz, for an iPad-centric customer service product called Posmetrics. Posmetrics was acquired later that year, while Lollipuff continues to operate independently. The following year, Deyle joined Google[x] as a hardware engineer. Schluntz, who was a Harvard student at the time, interned at Google[x] and SpaceX before helping launch Cobalt, according to their LinkedIn profiles.



Credits:
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/03/01/cobalt-robotics-indoor-security-robot-video.html