A Thai robot specialises in grocery shopping
Rutchanee Gullayanon’s ‘Cira’ will help the visually disabled with grocery shopping
While grocery shopping can be an enjoyable ritual for some, it usually is not something looked forward to by the blind. With thousands and thousands of different products cluttered on shelves and fast-paced crowds thoughtlessly moving around their shopping carts, searching for the right product is very difficult for the blind. They surely could use a helping hand, yet the best hand for them may not necessarily be a human’s hand.
Meet Cira, a Thai robot that is specialised in grocery shopping. Cira knows, inside out, every corner of the particular supermarket, from the whereabouts of a particular low-sodium soy sauce to the whereabouts of a particular antibacterial fabric softener. Although Cira’s otherworldly, bluecoloured countenance, made distinct by a red round nose, doesn’t tell us much about its sexual orientation, the monotonically dulcet, Siri-like voice suggests that Cira is born a lady. Yet she is unbelievably subservient to a certain degree. Tell her “I want some water” and she will respond “Yes, Sir, Boss!” (exactly like this) before departing to fetch a bottle of water.
Cira operates to both voice and touchscreen. Equipped with a laser to detect her surroundings, she is able to move about freely unlike the other “less smart” orientated robots. Once she receives her orders, she will make her way to accomplish them via the shortest distance possible, to pick up the products from the shelves and return them to the orderer. She can differentiate between products through her ability to scan both the product’s appearance and its barcode.
The mastermind behind the robot is Rutchanee Gullayanon, a professor of control engineering at the Faculty of Engineering at King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology in Lat Krabang. Despite being the only girl in a robot-study class of more than 40 students back in her college days, she enthused that as a woman she has never had a problem playing with the boy’s toys.
Guided by her father who was a physicist and engineer, the 34-year-old enjoyed creating and devising things from a young age. By the end of primary school, she had been taught by her father how to fix the circuit of battery charger. Then, in secondary school, she went on to immerse herself in solving mathematical and science-related problems that concerned things such as house building and not before long realised that she wanted to become an engineer just like her father.
“My father would give me three to five days to solve the problems on my own,” Rutchanee recalled. “If I couldn’t solve them, then he would give me the answers in detail. That was the beginning of my interest in engineering. Let’s say, though, I was not into the robot field yet.”
In high school, Rutchanee earned herself a scholarship from the Office of the Civil Service Commission to pursue a higher education in the US to the level of a doctoral degree. She attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for her undergraduate degree and went on to attend the Georgia Institute of Technology for the remainder of her time, focusing on electrical and computer engineering all the way through.
Robot making was part of what Rutchanee was exposed to in school. But it was not until her master’s degree when she met with a professor who had a knack for making robots that would facilitate consumer behaviours that she became convinced that there were boundless possibilities in the field.
“My professor always dragged me along with him to meet with his clients and I started to like it because I would have to work to meet with demands of real customers,” Rutchanee said. “Then it dawned on me that I wanted to settle with making commercial robots.”
Prior to finishing her studies, Rutchanee got a chance to go to the exhibition “Dialogue in the Dark” where attendants assumed the role of blind people. Experiencing a pitch-dark world for a good two hours, she understood darkness a little better and began to empathise with blind people, especially those living in Thailand where, as she believes, the services and facilities geared towards people with disabilities is much inferior to other countries of the world.
“I feel that the lives of blind people are far more difficult than I had ever assumed,” Rutchanee said. “This feeling was always struck with a thought afterwards, that there should be something that I can do to help them.”
In 2011, Rutchanee came back to Thailand and became a professor at the university where she was set to spend years working to pay back her scholarship. Figuring that she could use her tenure to create something that would benefit the visually disabled, something she had merely got to toy with earlier, she came up with the idea of inventing the shopaholic robot. Delighted by the proposal, the university’s dean gave her a fund and the go-ahead to form a team. Later in 2014, Cira was brought to life.
So far, Cira has been appearing at innovation fairs and in the media, as well as receiving generous attention from entrepreneurs of retail stores.
Nevertheless, Cira still needs a lot of polishing before she is seen trundling in a supermarket for real. Further improvements, according to Rutchanee, include three emphatic points. Firstly, when she screens a particular product, a number of mistakes still occur and she fully picked up how to scan all barcodes just yet. Secondly, when she graces through aisles, she has a tendency to be too polite by stopping herself to let humans go first without realising that she could simply do a sidestep instead. Thirdly, Cira is not yet fluent in Thai.
One may be wondering how cutting-edge made-in-Thailand robots could possibly get. While Rutchanee believes it’s out of the question that the technological advancements of robots in Thailand pale in comparison with countries like Japan, she said the country, full of many qualified teaching fellows doing research on robots, might be able to keep up the same pace with them if it chooses a different path to focus on.
“Though Japan has pretty much done everything about robots, they still haven’t gone commercial for 100% yet,” Rutchanee said. “So this would be a point that we could compete with them.”
Asked if she thinks the super-intelligent kind of robots often seen in movies have a chance of becoming our reality, Rutchanee answered it’s just a matter of time.
“Chappie or iRobots, they are all possible,” she commented. “The only limitations are hardwares and sensors which haven’t reached a certain point yet. But if soon, researchers are able to make more effective or smart sensors, the kind of robots that we see in the movies are not far from reality at all.”
The lives of blind people are far more difficult than I assumed. I always felt there should be something I could do to help them