Robotics is Aimed to Help and Assist Humans by Taking on the Dirty, Dangerous, and Dull Chores

Ishan Pandey: Hi Ran Zaslavsky, welcome to our series “Behind the Startup.” Please tell us about yourself and the story behind RoboDeck?

Ran Zaslavsky: I come from 20+ years of developing robotic lawnmowers, robotic vacuum cleaners and long endurance drones (at Elbit Systems LTD). Before co-founding Robodeck, I managed the R&D and innovation at Friendly Robotics (today Stanley Black and Decker). I hold a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from The Technion and Tel Aviv University, where I did my thesis on landmarks-based autonomous navigation.

Gal, Noam, and I founded RoboDeck two years ago after encountering an endless amount of pain and need from the hundreds of deck owners we interviewed. We set up a thinking group of robotics, decking, and business experts intending to prove that the current solutions in the market suffice and there is no need to develop new technology. We failed, and RoboDeck was founded :).

Ishan Pandey: Please tell us about RoboDeck. How does it work and what are its applications?

Ran Zaslavsky: RoboDeck is developing an autonomous robotic solution for the $10B deck maintenance market. We are reinventing the way decks are maintained. Instead of a costly, manual annual restoration, we designed, manufactured a highly affordable, technology-packed preventative maintenance system. Our autonomous robot cleans and renews the damaged stain layer every few weeks, keeping the deck in excellent condition all year round.

Ishan Pandey: In which different industries can robotics be applied? Please provide us with some illustrations? (Note: Restaurant, Medical, Cleaning, etc)

Ran Zaslavsky: Robotics is aimed to help and assist humans by taking on the dirty, dangerous, and dull chores. Assignments like floor cleaning, lawn mowing, repetitive manufacturing chores, mine disposal, and space exploration are classic. Longer-term, robots may replace everything that moves, and in an even broader sense of machines that sense, plan and act; robotics would also manifest in the virtual world. Web crawlers, chatbots, and trojan horses are good examples of such early virtual robots.

Ishan Pandey: What are your views on AI and Ethics?

Ran Zaslavsky: AI ethics is a system of moral principles and techniques intended to inform the development and responsible use of Artificial Intelligence. AI is rapidly becoming a “superpower” and with great power comes great responsibility.

Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, foresaw the potential dangers of autonomous AI agents long before their development and created The Three Laws of Robotics as a means of limiting those risks, which in my opinion serves as a good start for every such system. However, even Asimov’s laws fail to cope with intricate dilemmas like “The Trolley Problem” and its variants. Whatever system is chosen, it should promote transparency, fairness, and responsibility.

Ishan Pandey: AI and Robotics are still in their nascent stage. According to you, what will the future look like 20 years down the line?

Ran Zaslavsky: With the growing rate of changes, 20 years is forever. I expect fully autonomous driving to be mature within 5 years and multi-purpose robots in our factories and homes within 10. As for AI is already deployed everywhere, but still tailored to specific tasks and limited in its ability to go through rapid learning and improvement cycles. 20 years from now, we would see highly generalized AI infrastructures, able to use information in new situations, draw connections among ideas, evaluate and eventually produce new or original work.

Ishan Pandey: Currently, modern warfare is getting more and more mechanized. If we track the history of warfare for the past 200 years, the constant theme is technological advancement and the use of machines in warfare. Now, we have drones and robots that are used in bomb-defusing situations. What are your views on the argument that Military Robots should be used in wars instead of soldiers? Further, what would modern warfare look like?

Ran Zaslavsky: Modern warfare is less likely to be conducted on physical battlefields, as the virtual world is becoming central in our way of life, and damaging it is far more effective in shaping the leader’s perception than sending either soldiers or autonomous machines to fight.

Ishan Pandey: What advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs who want to build startups?

Ran Zaslavsky: Invent something you’re passionate about, do your homework regarding the real pain in the market and be ready for the roller coaster named startup - the rest would follow.

Ishan Pandey: What future trends are we going to see in Robotics?

Ran Zaslavsky: With growing abilities, Robotics would go from single-task highly tailored Robotics to generic autonomous platforms able to accomplish a variety of tasks in diverse conditions.