BIS TECHNOVATORS | Pilot Lab: A US Based Start-up Focusing on Consumer Robots
A US based start-up, Pilot Lab has recently introduced Moorebot, a robot brand. Moorebot is an interactive intellectual assistant that is best for home automation, housekeeping, baby companion, voice-activated service, and more. It also provides cutting-edge robot-assisted products and services in STEM, language learning, and even rehabilitation programs for special children in hospitals. During an interaction with Nitisha, Jun Ye, CEO, Moorebot shares that the company is committed to improving everyone’s life quality with exclusive smart robots that are versatile, personalized, content-rich, and helpful.
1. Please explain Moorebot and Pilot Labs. How do you define your company differently from others?
Pilot Labs is the company and Moorebot is the robot brand. Pilot Labs was founded by several semiconductor veterans. The company is very focused on underline technologies. Besides making consumer robot products, the company is investing in some long term technologies. For example, we are developing experimental analog neural network ICs, which we think could become the instinct response system for robots in the future.
2. How does Moorebot make Robots more affordable and ‘sensible’ in the real world?
Home robots still have a long way to go. Besides technology readiness, the cost is also a key factor for consumer robots. That means fewer and less costly sensors, low-end CPUs, and GPUs. Moorebot’s team has put a lot of effort into the optimizing of AI algorithms, to achieve good results based on low-end hardware platforms.
3. What are your latest projects and what are your plans to make it popular?
Our current robot is an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) for the home. It is fun and quite useful. Besides monitoring and auto-patrol functions, it supports Scratch programming, suitable for kids learning robotics. We are gaining a lot of interest around the world. It is an open-source project. We are enabling robot lovers and application developers to program Scout to do much more with it.
4. What are the key design challenges faced? How does Moorebot plan to ease and accelerate the design of Robotics Technology?
We all think robots are the future. However, to date, besides vacuum cleaning robots, the applications of home robots are still rare. How to design a consumer robot that truly can help people and can get widely accepted by consumer is quite challenging. It is all about applications.
5. What are your marketing strategies? Please explain your further plans to improve everyone’s quality of life with exclusive smart robots?
We see robots can play crucial roles in daily life to help people. In the future, a robot will be a platform product and capable of doing many different tasks. However, we are still in a very early stage of the AI era. It is more realistic today to make a robot specifically to do one particular job. The key value of the product must be communicated with the consumer properly and efficiently.
6. How was the year 2019 in terms of business? And what are your plans for the year ahead?
Technologies evolve at a rapid pace. We will continue developing and integrating state-of-art technologies into our products. Also, we will be expanding into different applications.
7. Apart from house chores and children, are you planning to target any other sector?
Moorebot is primarily focused on consumer robot products. On the technology side, we do have collaboration on commercial robots, mainly AMRs (autonomous mobile robots).
8. Major focus and roadmap for the year 2021?
We have several home robots in planning. More importantly, we are developing technologies that can make robots more sensible and interactive.
9. During Covid-19 there was a huge economical breakdown. How Moorebot coped up with such situations?
Our business is hurt as well. That allowed us to put more effort on R&D for new robots. We hope 2021 is a good year for everyone.
