The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Company aims to stop school shootings
Intellitronix develops, seeks patent for weapons detecting robot
The question of how to prevent school shootings has been asked many times in the United States in recent years.
An Eastlake company believes it can provide a good answer to that question with a weapons detection robot that it has developed.
Intellitronix, a manufacturer based on Melinz Parkway, recently filed for a patent on the robot, which uses a camera and pattern recognition to identify weapons with a high degree of accuracy, the company stated in a news release. The company has started marketing the weapons detection robot while the patent is pending.
“Intellitronix sees weapons detection as a growing market, especially in schools,” said Paul Spivak, the company’s president and CEO.
The company is advancing that effort by designing and providing sophisticated electronics that go into a robot which is manufactured by Promobot LLC, a company based in Russia. Intellitronix holds the exclusive marketing rights for Promobots in the United States.
Spivak recently demonstrated how the weapons detection robot works.
It stands 5 feet tall and is connected to the IBM Watson supercomputer. A camera attached to the robot’s shoulder takes pictures of people it encounters and determines whether or not they’re carrying a weapon.
“The weapons detection part uses Watson,” Spivak said. “(The robot) takes a picture, sends it to IBM, Watson analyzes it, and within 4 seconds gets it back. And we’re working on speeding that up.”
When Spivak, with nothing in his hands, approached the robot, seconds later it stated, “No weapon detected.”
Then Spivak walked up to the robot with an unloaded AK-47. It quickly issued the announcement of “weapon detected,” accompanied by a siren that went off.
Once it detects a person holding a weapon, the robot sends text messages with a photo of the suspect to an established contact group, which could include everyone from school administrators to teachers to parents. Intellitronix also is consulting with police departments to determine the best way to interface with them when a robot detects a weapon, Spivak said.
Although the robot currently only detects weapons that a person is displaying openly, Intellitronix is working on an infrared camera that will make it possible for the robot to spot concealed weapons as well.
While schools are the most obvious places where the weapons detection robots could be stationed, they also could do their work in places like airports or shopping malls, Spivak said.
Intellitronix, which also manufactures LED lightbulbs and LED gauges and panels for automobiles, initially began marketing Promobots as a tool for sales promotions.
“The reason he’s called a Promobot is he’s good to promote things,” Spivak said. “So he’s great for sales. So by using him to sell products, he can pay for himself.”
For example, Promobots are well-suited to use in promotions at car dealerships, Spivak noted.
“You walk into the dealership and he’ll ask you, ‘Do you want a fast car, a family car, do you want a truck? You tell me.’ Then he’ll bring up, like, ‘We have Camaros and Corvettes,’ and will keep going from there.”
Next, Intellitronix decided to equip a Promobot so that it can be used to teach curriculum to children.
“We believe that a kid will play more attention to a robot than a person,” Spivak said.
Intellitronix has entered into an agreement with Certify-Ed, a Canfield, Ohio, company, to develop curriculum for the robot.
After Intellitronix decided it wanted to help make America’s children more intelligent, it also set a goal of making them safer, and that led to the weapons detection robot. The company hopes to market robots to schools for teaching and weapons detecting all in one. The current retail price for these robots is $50,000 each.
By the end of the year, Intellitronix hopes to start selling what it calls doctor robots. Perhaps these robots would be more accurately described as doctor’s assistants, but they provide the added feature of being connected to the IBM Watson supercomputer.
Spivak said the doctor robot would check a patient’s blood pressure, height and weight, and gather other preliminary health information that’s typically recorded during a doctor’s visit. The doctor robot also would talk with a patient about his or her health problems or complaints, and then the information goes through an intermediate phase, when it’s entered into IBM Watson.
Watson then will return information that is intended to give the physician greater insight to a patient’s health problems or issues.
“Google has all answers to everything, but nobody is looking at all the answers. Watson has already done that,” Spivak said. “That way, when you tell the robot what your problem is, it goes to Watson, who figures all that out then gives it to doctor. So then the doctor sits down with you, armed not only with his own knowledge and experience, but all information that’s already out there. He has it. The robot will do that in, like, a blink of an eye.”
Intellitronix is custombuilding the doctor robot, rather than adding electronics technology to a Promobot design. One thing that this new robot will not do is prescribe drugs, Spivak said.
“We want to have a (human) doctor involved. But this robot will be one heck of a doctor’s assistant,” he said.
Every time Intellitronix sells a robot, the company puts some of the money back into research and development to make the same model of robot smarter and better, Spivak noted.
“At the end of the day, robots are going to make our lives much better, and Intellitronix’s plan is to be at the forefront of doing this,” he said.