Six Utah State robots helped out with Super Bowl security
While most of America gathered around television sets to watch nickel defenses and quarterback protections in Super Bowl XL, six robots developed at USU were running security of their own in the parking garages outside Ford Field.
Known as ODIS to its friends, the Omni-Directional Inspection System is a 45-pound “bathroom scale” that rolls beneath the undercarriages of cars to look for contraband or explosives, said YangQuan Chen, director of the Center for Self-Organizing and Intelligent Systems (CSOIS) at USU. “Basically, it puts the robot in harm’s way,” he said.
Controlled by a remote, he said ODIS can be operated up to 100 meters away from the vehicle it inspects. The robot can move in any direction while its body rotates independently, allowing for a full range of views, Chen said. A camera attached to the robot allows the operator to see what’s under a vehicle, replacing the old “mirror on a stick” method, he said.
Approximately 30 USU electrical engineering students developed ODIS between 1998 and 2004 with funding from the U.S. Army, he said. The technology was then licensed to Kuchera Defense Systems of Windber, Pa., for mass-production, Chen said. ODIS has since been used at checkpoints in the Iraq war and to inspect cars arriving at the trial of Lee Boyd Malvo, one of the snipers who terrorized the Washington D.C. area in fall 2002, he said.
The vice president of technology commercialization, Steve Kubisen, said ODIS has so far only generated modest revenue for USU. Though he said exact figures were “confidential,” Kubisen said he expected revenues to increase as ODIS becomes more widely used.
ODIS is not patented, Kubisen said, because too much information was published about it before the patenting process. He said what USU is capitalizing on is the trademark of the name ODIS, similar to what the University of Florida did after the development of Gatorade.
“A lot of people know Gatorade makes a lot of money for the University of Florida,” Kubisen said. “But there are no patents on Gatorade. It’s the name that’s trademarked.”
Kubisen said ODIS has become popular because of its smooth operation, enabling the camera to produce clear pictures.
“Sometimes people ask, ‘Why do people like ODIS robots?'” Kubisen said. “The reason is that they move very smoothly under vehicles. It’s not like popping the clutch on a car or something.”? Kevin L. Moore, who was the director of the CSOIS during the development of ODIS, said the robot that is being used at the Super Bowl and in Iraq is the third generation of the robot, called the ODIS T2. He said the first generation was completely autonomous and could be programmed to inspect the undercarriages of cars in a parking lot without being controlled by a person.
“The government didn’t want that,” Moore said. “Soldiers don’t necessarily want antonomy. They want to control the robot.”
He said removing all the programming for autonomy reduced the cost of producing ODIS from $50,000 in the first generation to about $20,000 in the second and third generations, which are both controlled by a remote. Moore said once the robot was developed, it was always going to be licensed out for mass production and fine-tuning.
“Universities don’t build things,” Moore said. “Companies build things. Universities do research.”
Moore said that Kuchera, the company that licensed ODIS, was able to reduce its weight and profile and make the robot more practical for real-world applications.
“You give these to soldiers in Afghanistan and if they’re bored, they’re going to be surfing on the thing,” Moore said. “After research, you have to engineer for that.”
Moore, who is now a professor of engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, said he envisions future generations of the robot with capabilities to inspect larger vehicles and to examine the interior of vehicles with robotic arms. ? “At this point, we’re just excited that they’re being used,” Moore said. “We don’t know completely that they’ve saved a life or anything, but we do know that soldiers like them. They’ve told us that anecdotally.”
-jenbeasley@cc.usu.edu