ABB Robots, OmniCore and Home Robot Privacy

For most of the last century, help at home meant a person. This photo from around 1942 shows a maid cleaning a fireplace. Housekeepers and cleaners saw a family's rooms and daily habits, and families trusted them to keep quiet about what they saw.

A maid cleaning a fireplace, around 1942. Photo: Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robot vacuums brought sensors into homes, and many now map every room. In 2022, MIT Technology Review reported that images taken by test versions of a camera-equipped robot vacuum, sent out to be labelled for AI training, had been posted online by contract workers, including one of a woman on a toilet.

A robot vacuum with a laser distance sensor for mapping rooms. Photo: Nowforever / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In September, Matic said its home cleaning robots will use NVIDIA's Jetson Orin Nano 2, and that every frame from the robot's five cameras is processed on the robot rather than in the cloud. Tau Robotics takes the opposite approach: it rents humanoids to clean San Francisco homes for $30 an hour, with a remote operator directing the work.

Early telepresence robot prototypes, which let a remote person drive a robot and see through its camera. Photo: Intel Free Press / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Factories have had to answer the same questions. ABB builds cyber security into its OmniCore controllers, along with sensor and AI processing on the controller itself, so a robot cell can run its vision and control locally.

Engineers with an ABB robot cell run by the OmniCore controller. Photo: ABB

When ABB service staff need to see a robot from afar, its Remote Access service connects only when the customer asks and grants permission, and the session runs under the customer's supervision. The customer also sets the security policies. Engineers can test programs offline in RobotStudio before touching the real cell.

Testing a robot program on a laptop with ABB RobotStudio. Photo: ABB

I think home robots should copy that model: process video on the robot, ask before any remote person looks through its cameras, and log every session. I would let a robot tidy my kitchen long before I let a stranger steer one around my bedroom.

An engineer wearing an AR headset beside an ABB GoFa cobot. Photo: ABB

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