California's Satyress showed Threehalves: a two-metre teleoperated robot with four legs and tools instead of hands, for work that kills people. Its safety is not in the software but in the geometry.
- California startup Satyress showed Threehalves - a teleoperated centaur-shaped robot around 2 metres tall, with four legs.
- No hands: tools such as a chainsaw attach to its arms through square mounts. Cameras in the head give the operator a video feed.
- Safety is built into the shape: the horns will not pass through a standard pedestrian door and the robot cannot turn around in an ordinary hallway.
Its horns are wide enough that it will not fit through a standard door. That is not styling. It is a safety measure.
Teleoperated means a human sits behind it. The company puts it honestly: we are not replacing the skilled worker, we are giving them superpowers where the job today carries a risk to life.
The robot is not the interesting part, though. The decisions are. Instead of software promising not to enter human space, the machine physically does not fit into it. The measure is in centimetres, and centimetres do not update by mistake.
And the honest boundary: this is a prototype shown on a social network and a podcast. I will check back after the first site it has actually worked on.