Sarcos’ snake robot could be coming to a small space near you – to save lives

As seen on Microsoft.

Aboard a tim­ber-haul­ing ship in calm waters, one crew mem­ber climbed down into a car­go hold. He col­lapsed. His crew mate, sens­ing trou­ble, dashed down the same lad­der for a res­cue. He col­lapsed. Then their chief offi­cer descend­ed to inves­ti­gate. He col­lapsed.

All three men died. Their car­go ship, the Sun­tis, was offload­ing at a British port on that spring day in 2014. The tim­ber had absorbed air below deck, caus­ing a lethal­ly low oxy­gen lev­el in the hold and asphyx­i­at­ing the crew, inves­ti­ga­tors found.

That tragedy – under­scor­ing the hun­dreds of work­er deaths that occur in con­fined spaces annu­al­ly around the world – offers a use case for a new, cloud-con­nect­ed snake robot built to crawl into per­ilous places that put peo­ple at risk.

The Guardian S, a com­pact, cam­era-equipped device that slith­ers atop its mag­ne­tized tracks, can maneu­ver down a vessel’s hold, roam near haz-mat spills or creep into the line of fire at a police stand­off – near­ly any­where its human oper­a­tors need it to go, say engi­neers at Sar­cos Robot­ics, a glob­al lead­er in the devel­op­ment and pro­duc­tion of robot­ic sys­tems.

Packed with sen­sors, the snake bot feeds still images, video and real-time envi­ron­men­tal data to Microsoft Azure, offer­ing its oper­a­tors – or off­site ana­lysts – up-close intel on heat, leaks, struc­tural dam­age or tox­ic fumes, says Ben Wolff, co-founder and chair­man of Sar­cos. The com­pa­ny is based in Salt Lake City.

“We’re going to keep peo­ple out of harm’s way,” Wolff says. “In each of those cas­es, we are not elim­i­nat­ing humans because humans still have to oper­ate the robot. But we are cre­at­ing that degree of sep­a­ra­tion from the dan­ger­ous loca­tion.”

In 2015, 136 U.S. work­ers were killed dur­ing inci­dents in con­fined spaces, accord­ing to a recent report  by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics. The gov­ern­ment lists tun­nels, pipeli­nes and ship holds as prime exam­ples. That death rate exceed­ed those of the pre­vi­ous decade when the aver­age was 96.

In Jan­u­ary, three Flori­da con­struc­tion work­ers died after inhal­ing tox­ic gas­es while inspect­ing a pipeline below a street. Their deaths were eeri­ly sim­i­lar to what hap­pened aboard the Sun­tis – the first man nev­er came out, prompt­ing the sec­ond and third men to con­duct fatal search­es.

“If we had sent our snake robot into that man­hole with a suite of gas sen­sors, that could have sent back real-time infor­ma­tion – as well as cat­a­log infor­ma­tion for the future about what it was dis­cov­er­ing down there,” Wolff says. “We could have poten­tial­ly saved those three lives.”

Across the mar­itime indus­try, where cramped spaces are designed to boost effi­cien­cy and save weight, nooks and cran­nies are com­mon at job sites like ship­yards and oil plat­forms over water. But those tight spots are ide­al quar­ters for the Sar­cos snake bot to deploy then scope out cracks in ves­sel holds, cor­ro­sion in pipeli­nes or weak seams in refin­ery tanks, Wolff says.

To assess and detect dete­ri­o­ra­tion or anom­alies, the Guardian S can be hand-car­ried to the pre­cise place an oper­a­tor needs to inspect. Weigh­ing 13.5 pounds, the robot and its com­po­nents are packed in a small plas­tic case, suit­able for a trunk or back­pack and about the size of a traveler’s car­ry-on.

Once removed from the case, an oper­a­tor can turn it on, allow­ing the Guardian S to wire­less­ly synch with a Win­dows-based tablet that’s fit­ted with joy­sticks for steer­ing the device and touch-sen­si­tive screens that show the snake’s move­ments.

“We’ve tried to keep con­sis­tent with the per­cep­tion that the younger gen­er­a­tion is insep­a­ra­ble from game con­trollers,” says Dr. Fraser Smith, Sar­cos pres­i­dent.

The water­proof robot is low­ered, hand placed or dri­ven down a wall or through an open­ing to reach a struc­ture, tra­verse uneven ter­rain or head under­wa­ter, and the mis­sion begins. The smart machine’s suite of onboard tools extends the operator’s human sens­es for a deep­er look into a dan­ger­ous space.

Four cam­eras, which swivel in all direc­tions, feed a steady pic­ture and offer a chance to record video or snap high-res stills, mark­ing the coor­di­nates of any con­cern­ing spots. LED lights illu­mi­nate dark cor­ners.

“On your screen, you see what the snake sees,” Smith says. The tablet also shows motor tem­per­a­ture and bat­tery life. The snake bots can observe for 18 hours min­i­mum.

Two-way audio allows oper­a­tors to lis­ten to an envi­ron­ment (or offer calm­ing words, in the case of police sit­u­a­tions). Sen­sors, con­fig­ured to a customer’s speci­fic needs, can report the tem­per­a­ture and humid­i­ty. Probes can be placed direct­ly on a structure’s sur­face to hunt for cracks or weak­ness­es, and sonar can ping sound off the sur­face to sim­i­lar­ly check for soft spots in welds or seams.

Its design enables the snake to move for­ward, back­ward or side-to-side, and to roll back over if it flips dur­ing its jour­ney. A degree-of-free­dom design that’s built into its cen­ter helps the robot twist into many con­fig­u­ra­tions, includ­ing a “Z” shape, to increase its sta­bil­i­ty and squeeze through tricky topog­ra­phy.

But what makes the robot tru­ly unique is the cloud-con­nect­ed sen­sors on board that link the device with the Inter­net of Things (IoT), Wolff says. As the snake col­lects and streams live envi­ron­men­tal data, com­pa­ny oper­a­tors work­ing far away can doc­u­ment, ana­lyze and bet­ter under­stand the cramped spaces they’re safe­ly inspect­ing.

“This has the poten­tial to enhance pre­ci­sion because it’s not just what one per­son may see when they are in a tank or the hold of a ship. The images can now be cap­tured and shared with mul­ti­ple peo­ple around the world and ana­lyzed lat­er by oth­ers,” Wolff says.

In April, Sar­cos made the Guardian S com­mer­cial­ly avail­able, offer­ing it pri­mar­i­ly through robot-as-a-ser­vice agree­ments. To date, six pre-pro­duc­tion mod­els are with cus­tomers, Wolff says.

He recent­ly spent time at the Microsoft AI & IoT Insid­er Lab in Red­mond, Wash­ing­ton to evolve the Guardian S from an Android-based robot to a device that’s embed­ded with Win­dows 10 and inte­grat­ed with the Azure IoT Suite.

Engi­neers at Microsoft’s IoT & AI Insid­er Lab in Red­mond inspect the robot. (Pho­to by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pic­tures)

“When you can col­lect mean­ing­ful sen­sor data and then allow peo­ple around the world to make use of that sen­sor data, it fun­da­men­tal­ly changes the robot,” Wolff says.

Even­tu­al­ly, Wolff says the snake bot will be capa­ble of machine learn­ing, mean­ing it will exam­ine large amounts of data to sniff out pat­terns and pre­dict struc­tural prob­lems.

“The machine will be able to iden­ti­fy anom­alies with its cam­eras and then be able to learn – through inter­ac­tion with the cloud and with humans – what types of anom­alies and what types of cor­ro­sion are more impor­tant to pay atten­tion to,” he says. “That’s part of our future roadmap.”

Top image: Guardian S on dis­play at the Dig­i­tal Dif­fer­ence con­fer­ence in New York, April 26, 2017. (Pho­to by Bri­an Smale)