6 years ago there were no Autonomous Security Robots (ASRs) roaming around across the country operating 24/7/365 – and now we’ve reached this tremendous milestone.
That 1 million hours is not digital simulation time. It is not testing time in a laboratory. It is not staging work outdoors. It is real world Level 5 autonomy with no human intervention at real clients generating real revenue. THIS IS NOT A TEST!
Here is a bit of the back story on how we reached this milestone.
If you haven’t figured it out yet – what we are doing at Knightscope is extremely difficult and execution intensive. Mechanical, electrical, firmware, software, telecommunication, video, audio, data storage, data processing, algorithms, batteries, charging – oh and it needs to operate on its own, autonomously – in the rain, at night, with people, cars, trucks – with a client down your throat 24/7!
Actually there have been numerous properly funded attempts, including a major corporation, to attempt to do it and pretty much have all gone out of business or given up. That certainly speaks to the difficulty level.
At first, we were so excited to get a machine to move by itself indoors under controlled conditions. Then we got brave and put one outside our headquarters here in Silicon Valley during the daytime. But then we wanted to run 24/7 so we left one outside – and we would pull all-nighters sleeping at the office to keep an eye on it!
Then we got our first contract for a pilot test and on May 4, 2015 (yes, May the Fourth Be With You!) we started the deployment at a local mall. We were confined to the upper level of a parking structure – and, yes, we slept in the K-Team Van overnight keeping an eye on it.
Eventually the client felt more comfortable and we got the OK to patrol for real, during the day and all around the mall. Unsupervised. What a win for the team! And what a massive amount of incoming workload!
We initially decided to stay in Northern California for all deployments as our engineers had to do all the driving around to inspect, fix, retouch, reflash, fix, or otherwise overhaul the whole thing.
Then one day, we pulled the band aid off, and set course to Southern California – and started leaving machines there unsupervised with us hours away. Oh…..the level of anxiety and excitement!
Now we have a team that monitors the health of our machines-in-network across the country, down to the millisecond. To perhaps help better understand the challenge, imagine if you drove your car 24/7 non-stop for an entire month straight? Might need some service and maintenance?
Knightscope Autonomous Security Robots have been running for over 1 Million hours, that is about 7,500 trips to the moon and back! There has been a lot of hard work to get here and we are eternally thankful to our 7,000+ investors – without you this milestone could not have been reached.
Now to tackle the next million!
