It’s been a while since we connected, and shared updates on our journey and the amazing world of robots - but this is about to change. I wanted to reach out to give you a quick update on what we have been up to the last period and what you should expect in the near future. It’s been a long and challenging pandemic, especially for robots like Misty who thrive in the physical world! However, this period has also shed light on how much we need social, friendly and interactive robots in our world.
We’ve been hard at work adding great capabilities to Misty, both in launching our temperature screening robots and in supporting our many new customers who are showing us exciting ways Misty can be used for. To make sure we continue to support these innovative newcomers, we are continuously building the best tools and SDK in the field to support Misty’s growing developer and research community.
We are very excited about the future of Misty and the future of social robots! With this specific newsletter, we want to rebuild our communication with all of you. We have a lot of great news to share over the next few months. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy reading the selected highlights below, celebrating some of you, our customers, who are on this amazing journey with Misty. There has never been a better time to start learning about social robots, and we are here to take you on that journey.
Customer Spotlight
Piloting socially assistive robots with Peerbots and St. Vrain Valley Schools
In this pilot, the Innovation Center of St. Vrain Valley Schools partnered up with PEERbots and St. Vrain’s Special Education Department to explore how Misty robots engage with students with special needs.
Among several goals, the pilot hoped to improve student self-regulation, communication and appropriate socialization. The results so far are very promising! Looking e.g at one of the schools in the pilot, a majority of the included students showed improvements in speech and communication as well as social interactions. Furthermore, almost 90% of the students remained regulated both during the interaction with Misty and when transitioning to other activities.
Exploring new techniques for robots to detect when humans need help
Wouldn’t it be useful if robots could autonomously determine whether their help is needed or not for the human user? This is exactly what researchers at the Franklin & Marshall College are exploring.
In their recent study, the team is focusing on estimating how much help the user needs. When a user needs help, it can be conveyed in different ways - either by asking it explicitly, or by showing this in implicit ways such as facial expressions, body language or comments. This particular research focused on eye-gazed-related cues, called confirmatory gaze, and how a robot can automatically process these cues in a useful way.
Misty Temperature Screening Assistant is helping to make a difference
Many of you have probably heard about the Misty Temperature Screening Assistant (TSA), which we launched in June 2020.
When COVID hit, we basically decided to “eat our own dog food”, and use the platform to help protect people by doing temperature and health screenings. To date, Misty TSA has screened over 16,000 people, and we’re very happy to be able to contribute to battling the pandemic. Misty TSA is currently in use at hospitals, retail stores, offices and government facilities, to name a few places.
Because it’s been a while since our last newsletter, I wanted to talk about some of the more interesting features released in recent months:
AR tag detection - Misty can now detect AR tags in the environment, returning tag ID information, and a robot-relative pose for that tag.
Enterprise wifi onboarding - Misty now has some support for network onboarding onto enterprise wifi environments. While this doesn’t accommodate a captive portal yet, it does offer all of the configuration necessary to connect to an enterprise wifi network.
Object detection - Misty runs a TensorFlow Lite model trained on the COCO dataset. She returns labels, image positions, and confidence scores when any of 70 objects is recognized.
Updated wakeword - Misty now uses the Microsoft Azure keyword system to identify her wakeword. This system, while still running fully at the edge, has proven far more robust and offers the opportunity to push their own wakeword.
Vosk embedded ASR - Misty now has the Vosk ASR directly integrated. This gives the ability to implement conversational use cases without the latency often experienced when using Google or Microsoft’s ASR.
Video frame streaming - We already have support for RTP streaming, but wanted something simpler. To this end, we’ve created a system of transmitting images via websocket to a client. This still achieves around 30 FPS, while being very simple to consume.
Get Involved
Need inspiration for Christmas gifts? You can now enjoy an extra 10% off from us to celebrate the year-end, just use the code YEAREND2021 in our webshop or respond to this e-mail.
We wish you a wonderful holiday season, and will be in touch soon again. We’d of course love to hear from you and learn how we can help you be successful with your Mistys! Please reach out to us with feedback, questions or ideas, either by responding to this e-mail, or in the Misty Community Forums.
Sincerely,
Ian Bernstein
Misty Robotics, 5305 Spine Rd., Unit E, Boulder, CO 80301, PH. 720-370-4912
