The Robot Report

  • Home
  • News
  • Technologies
    • Batteries / Power Supplies
    • Cameras / Imaging / Vision
    • Controllers
    • End Effectors
    • Microprocessors / SoCs
    • Motion Control
    • Sensors
    • Soft Robotics
    • Software / Simulation
  • Development
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Human Robot Interaction / Haptics
    • Mobility / Navigation
    • Research
  • Robots
    • AGVs
    • AMRs
    • Consumer
    • Collaborative Robots
    • Drones
    • Humanoids
    • Industrial
    • Self-Driving Vehicles
    • Unmanned Maritime Systems
  • Business
    • Financial
      • Investments
      • Mergers & Acquisitions
      • Earnings
    • Markets
      • Agriculture
      • Healthcare
      • Logistics
      • Manufacturing
      • Mining
      • Security
    • RBR50
      • RBR50 Winners 2025
      • RBR50 Winners 2024
      • RBR50 Winners 2023
      • RBR50 Winners 2022
      • RBR50 Winners 2021
  • Resources
    • Automated Warehouse Research Reports
    • Digital Issues
    • eBooks
    • Publications
      • Automated Warehouse
      • Collaborative Robotics Trends
    • Search Robotics Database
    • Videos
    • Webinars / Digital Events
  • Events
    • RoboBusiness
    • Robotics Summit & Expo
    • DeviceTalks
    • R&D 100
    • Robotics Weeks
  • Podcast
    • Episodes
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe

Freedom Pilot, Resource Monitor keep humans in the loop for rapid robot deployment

By Eugene Demaitre | August 3, 2020

Freedom Pilot, Resource Monitor keep humans in the loop for rapid robot deployment

Freedom Pilot is intended to help developers bring devices such as delivery robots to market. Source: Freedom Robotics

Freedom Robotics Inc., which has been developing a cloud-based infrastructure for managing fleets of robots, has released teleoperation and resource monitoring tools. With humans “in the loop,” companies can adopt, deploy, and manage automation more easily and quickly, said the company.

San Francisco-based Freedom Robotics secured $6.6 million in seed funding in July 2019. More recently, it released Freedom Pilot, a remote teleoperation tool, and it announced the Freedom Resource Monitor tool.

Steve Hansen, head of robotics at the company, and Hans Lee, chief technology officer (CTO) at Freedom Robotics, recently spoke with The Robot Report about Freedom Pilot, running a startup, and how the novel coronavirus has encouraged developers to rush robots to market.

Developing Freedom Pilot

“I used to work in industrial automation and manufacturing, but I was more interested in dynamic path planning, machine learning, and adaptive robots,” Hansen said. “I studied at Berkeley and met with a lot of CTOs and co-founders. We saw a pattern: The really successful robotics companies don’t just design robots; they also design products to solve business problems.”

“Freedom Pilot is teleoperation and remote-intervention software that installs in robots with one line of code in five minutes or less,” said Hansen. “It can be used right away. Businesses can try it out online.”

“Our philosophy is iterative development,” he added. “We’re not getting hung up on better SLAM [simultaneous localization and mapping]. We have to stay focused on the customer and make sure our tools are applicable to horizontal use cases.”

“Not every robot needs full teleoperation. It’s one tool for roboticists to use,” said Lee. “There’s a full spectrum between AMRs [autonomous mobile robots] and autonomous vehicles. On one end, with a fairly constrained environment, you can still get some vision faults when a person steps in front of a robot, and it faulted out and doesn’t know what to do.”

“Freedom Pilot allows customers to log in, press a command such as injecting a ROS [Robot Operating System] topic or Python, and tell it to stop,” he said. “It’s more reliable, and we use humans as a part of the process.”

Freedom Pilot delivery

Source: Freedom Robotics

ROS and RaaS

“ROS may not be exciting, but it’s how people are getting things done,” said Hansen about robotics developers. “Pilot and Freedom Robotics’ suite of tools work out of the box on ROS and non-ROS systems. The APIs [application programming interfaces] for Python through Linux are all openly documented.”

“Users can click on an individual device and see a streaming view of topics and information coming off the robot,” he said during a demonstration in which a Universal Robots arm waved and picked up cup of coffee. “It can run parts for a CNC machine and switch to a new application.”

“A remote operator could send a new command to a robot running a path where it would hit a wall,” Hansen said. “They could clear the path and reset the robot without having to go onsite.”

“As robotics companies move to robotics-as-a-service [RaaS] models, if people still have to fix problems on site and babysit the systems, the value diminishes,” he said. “Instead, by shipping a suite of tools, if there’s a problem, Freedom Pilot gets an alert, and someone can then log in. This equals a higher service level and value proposition.”

Hansen and Lee shared a demonstration of Fetch Robotics AMRs in which robots were managed in groups. “Freedom Pilot can support multiple cameras, lidar, GPS, and t can communicate pixel coordinates, from shelving to apple picking,” said Lee. “It provides the piping, so that robotics developers can determine how to do interventions. Simple commands are table stakes; users need to see transformations in real time.”


Applications and accelerated demand

Freedom Robotics said its products are used in agriculture, retail, hospitals, and last-mile delivery. “We have had a lot of growth and success with our customers leveraging our Pilot feature to take care of a lot of the software development they would’ve needed months to do in-house,” Hansen said. “This has enabled them to cut down the time to deploy robots from months to weeks.”

“In agriculture, labor shortages from limited border crossings, especially in Europe, have left fruits and vegetables rotting in the field,” Lee said. “A robot may have a moderate of autonomy to navigate between rows, and a farm worker could tell it where to pick.”

“In retail, robots can get lost in crowded environments. An operator can log into Freedom Pilot from anywhere in the world and relocalize it,” he explained. “People who had more elaborate automation plans are now looking to ship robots quicker, with human backstops and development tools. We’re generating data sets in real time to automate the process later.”

“We had Invento, a customer in India that leveraged Pilot to launch a brand-new robot to disinfect hospitals with UVC,” Hansen said. “This was only an idea at the beginning of COVID-19. It definitely wasn’t a robot 45 days ago, and now they’re in hospitals in India and the U.S.”

“Chair legs are difficult for path planning to work around, but we could develop a detector and plan in a data-driven way rather than trying to solve everything ahead of time,” he said. “Such customers can use Freedom for fleets later.”

“Commercial cleaning robots were thought of as labor augmentation, but with COVID and teleoperation, the idea of robots for dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks is extended to everyday life,” Hansen said. “Remote intervention tools will build up autonomy over time.”

“For sidewalk robots, people tried to handle all corner cases, so the amount of sensors and complex algorithms affected the cost of the robots,” said Lee. “With the spike in demand, roboticists have had to become product people. We have to focus on what we can do now.”

“Freedom Pilot is not just applicable to startups or hobbyists,” said Lee. “It’s also useful in larger enterprises, such as automotive manufacturing and logistics, where human intervention still has a role in reducing the percentage of errors.”

Freedom Pilot warehouse

Source: Freedom Robotics

Startups and scaling with Freedom Pilot, Resource Monitor

“We’re really confident about the industry and are seeing companies grow in scale,” said Lee. “COVID-19 accelerated robotics development by five years. We’re working with customers across a broad range of verticals to help ship, deploy, and scale robots.”

“Before, many companies didn’t get past prototypes,” he said. “Now, complex algorithms are ditched in favor of shipping robots faster with using humans as a remote backstop. For example, CyanBot deployed 10 robots for deliveries in the first month without writing any Web infrastructure code.”

“We’ve been using our software during the pandemic, since we don’t have direct access to our robots,” he said. “We’ve been affected by shelter-in-place orders, as have our customers. I was able to map and configure a robot without going into the office. We could then do all the software things remotely.”

Freedom Pilot is now available for free trials for one year for one robot, with tiered pricing beyond that level.

Freedom Robotics is hiring and is getting feedback from customers “across thousands of hours,” said Lee. “We’re excited about the maturing of the robotics industry as a whole and the accelerated timelines for robotics and rational development,” he said.

About The Author

Eugene Demaitre

Eugene Demaitre is editorial director of the robotics group at WTWH Media. He was senior editor of The Robot Report from 2019 to 2020 and editorial director of Robotics 24/7 from 2020 to 2023. Prior to working at WTWH Media, Demaitre was an editor at BNA (now part of Bloomberg), Computerworld, TechTarget, and Robotics Business Review.

Demaitre has participated in robotics webcasts, podcasts, and conferences worldwide. He has a master's from the George Washington University and lives in the Boston area.

Tell Us What You Think! Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Related Articles Read More >

Rendering of Realtime Robotics motion planning optimization with Resolve.
Realtime Robotics launches Resolver for motion planning, simulation
An image of ABB's Flexly P604 Visual Slam AMR.
ABB upgrades Flexley Mover AMR with visual SLAM capabilities
The M4 dynamic inventory dashboard represented here supports a variety of workflows.
SEER Robotics offers digital product matrix
A Pony.ai vehicle driving on a busy street.
Pony.ai unveils 7th gen self-driving platform, plans for mass production this year

RBR50 Innovation Awards

“rr
EXPAND YOUR KNOWLEDGE AND STAY CONNECTED
Get the latest info on technologies, tools and strategies for Robotics Professionals.
The Robot Report Listing Database

Latest Episode of The Robot Report Podcast

Automated Warehouse Research Reports

Sponsored Content

  • Sager Electronics and its partners, logos shown here, will exhibit at the 2025 Robotics Summit & Expo. Sager Electronics to exhibit at the Robotics Summit & Expo
  • The Shift in Robotics: How Visual Perception is Separating Winners from the Pack
  • An AutoStore automated storage and retrieval grid. Webinar to provide automated storage and retrieval adoption advice
  • Smaller, tougher devices for evolving demands
  • Modular motors and gearboxes make product development simple
The Robot Report
  • Mobile Robot Guide
  • Collaborative Robotics Trends
  • Field Robotics Forum
  • Healthcare Robotics Engineering Forum
  • RoboBusiness Event
  • Robotics Summit & Expo
  • About The Robot Report
  • Subscribe
  • Contact Us

Copyright © 2025 WTWH Media LLC. All Rights Reserved. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of WTWH Media
Privacy Policy | Advertising | About Us

Search The Robot Report

  • Home
  • News
  • Technologies
    • Batteries / Power Supplies
    • Cameras / Imaging / Vision
    • Controllers
    • End Effectors
    • Microprocessors / SoCs
    • Motion Control
    • Sensors
    • Soft Robotics
    • Software / Simulation
  • Development
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Human Robot Interaction / Haptics
    • Mobility / Navigation
    • Research
  • Robots
    • AGVs
    • AMRs
    • Consumer
    • Collaborative Robots
    • Drones
    • Humanoids
    • Industrial
    • Self-Driving Vehicles
    • Unmanned Maritime Systems
  • Business
    • Financial
      • Investments
      • Mergers & Acquisitions
      • Earnings
    • Markets
      • Agriculture
      • Healthcare
      • Logistics
      • Manufacturing
      • Mining
      • Security
    • RBR50
      • RBR50 Winners 2025
      • RBR50 Winners 2024
      • RBR50 Winners 2023
      • RBR50 Winners 2022
      • RBR50 Winners 2021
  • Resources
    • Automated Warehouse Research Reports
    • Digital Issues
    • eBooks
    • Publications
      • Automated Warehouse
      • Collaborative Robotics Trends
    • Search Robotics Database
    • Videos
    • Webinars / Digital Events
  • Events
    • RoboBusiness
    • Robotics Summit & Expo
    • DeviceTalks
    • R&D 100
    • Robotics Weeks
  • Podcast
    • Episodes
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe