Ellipso - The Age of Robots 

Ellipso is our first home robot design, where we combine state of the art robotic research and technology with very affordable pricing. We, at FRACH robotics, believe the robotic revolution will only help us, when the robots are affordable to all of society and especially to their most vulnerable parts. 

We need Your help to deliver this new and exciting technology to the World! And we want You to be the first to have access to this technology, the Age of Robots.  

Ellipso is an autonomous intelligent home robot, which is always online, listening to you and ready to execute your requests or just connect you with your loved ones.  The robot implements an animal like brain model, so it behaves almost like it is alive. Ellipso is also integrated with Google Assistant, Google Drive, Google Mail, YouTube and Microsoft Skype to let you stay in touch.

Ellipso design brings a large display to not only show just the robot's face, but also to show useful content on the screen, such as Google Assistant, YouTube or Skype. The robot is actively listening to all sounds and it automatically reacts to your verbal commands. Currently only English, but we will support other languages in the future.  

Ellipso comes with different personality profiles, faces and voices. But it is also fully customizable, if you are more on an artistic side. Ellipso remembers requests of different family members and also what happened in the past, so it behaves and provides specific feedback based on the situational and historical context.

Ellipso robot design includes the latest deep neural network frameworks for object and face detection to recognize you, your pets and other objects in your house. The robot uses optical recognition algorithms for understanding its location and map of your house, so it knows where is a kitchen, obstacles or a fall. Ellipso has also plenty of environmental sensors to fully understand what is happening in your house, such as people movements, sounds or alarms.  

Robot Behavior

The robot's role is not to replace your friends or pets, but rather to make your life easier. The robot will help you to stay in contact with your loved ones and automate tedious and boring tasks in your house.

Our robot products come with these default behavior tasks so you can specifically instruct them, at home or remotely, to focus on the right job:

•  Personal companion - the robot will follow you in your house or look at you on a desk, ready to execute your commands. The robot will greet you from time to time and share the latest status with you. 
•  Calling over Skype - you can ask the robot to call a person on Skype; from home or remotely. Or the robot will call you if it sees anything suspicious. 
•  Search and share a message - you can remotely ask the robot to find your loved one (person or pet) in the house and deliver a message or take an action.
•  Taking a picture - ask your robot to take a picture for a memorable moment and store it in the Google Cloud.
•  Going somewhere - you can ask your robot to go to a specific room (e.g. a kitchen) and take an action there. 
•  Google Assistant -  just ask the Google Assistant any tricky question you want. From weather to politics to science; or just for a joke.  
•  Youtube - you can ask your robot to play Youtube content of your choice.
•  Sharing the latest status - the robot will tell you how long you have been gone and what happened in your house in the meantime.
•  Sharing the latest weather info and news - every morning and when asked the robot will share with you the latest local weather forecast and news.
•  Teaching a foreign language -  the robot will teach you a foreign language, using simple, but effective active recall method. We start with Spanish, but more languages are coming. 
•  Setting an alarm - ask your robot to wake you up when it is the right time. 
•  Playing with pets - your pets can get a bit bored when they are left alone or perhaps you want to chat with them over Skype. Just ask your robot to be a messenger or entertainer. 
•  Securing the property - be better safe than sorry. Our robots can watch your house for you when you are away and alarm you if they detect any suspicious sounds, movements or a human presence. Our robots store all the taken evidence in the Google Cloud and call you on Skype, so the bad guys will have a bad day whatever they do.  
•  Robot administration - creating its own map of rooms and obstacles; watching its battery status and automatically recharging when due; or just endlessly waiting for you to come back.

Please do not worry if you are missing anything here. We will be releasing new functionality every 3 months. And we are going to listen to you on social media and our user forums to really understand your new requirements.  

Robot Customization

We, at FRACH robotics, understand that key to any successful product is a high level of customization for specific user needs and demands. We are all different and unique and therefore we require the same from our tools and gadgets. Our robotic technology supports comprehensive customization in both appearance and behavior. Our technology also supports user provided customization from our more DIY and artistically oriented customers.  

•  Robot call name - the default robot call name is "COMPUTER", but feel free to change it to anything else.
•  Robot personality profile customization - our robots come with plenty of different personality profiles so you can have fun every day: FRIEND, MEDIEVAL, TEENAGER, SERVANT, MILITARY, SCI-FI, ROMANTIC and obviously also your custom one. 
•  Robot face customization - out of the box we provide 9 different faces for our robots, but feel welcome to upload your own creative designs.

•  Robot voice -  you can chose tens of different voices, male/female speakers and different English accents. Later on our robots will also support other languages. 
•  Robot behavior - you can customize hundreds of behavioral rules, how often the robot should interact with you or what particular activities to be temporarily disabled. 
•  Face recognition - using the face recognition technology the robot is able to respond to each user with his/her own name and related history.   
•  Tyres - we will provide a rich selection of internal/outdoors tyres with different colors, so you can take your robot out on a garden and do some "digging".

Robot Models

Our robot products come in 3 models to let our customers to choose the right tool for the job:    

Privacy and Security

We, at FRACH robotics, consider the security and privacy as the most important functionality of our products. It is paramount that your personal data are comprehensively protected as our robots are present in your homes. 

Our technology use strictly only secure publicly available services from major SW providers for all robot external communication. Such as Google Android OS, Google Drive, Google Android Voice Recognition, Google Mail and  Microsoft Skype. There is no other robot communication with our company servers or any other 3rd parties. Users are also able to explicitly disable any robot interfaces such as camera or microphone for maximum privacy. 

Robot App

 Obviously our robots will come with an app, both Google Android and Apple iOS.  

The app will enable you to connect and use your robot, when you leave your house. You can check the status of your robot, what action it is currently executing, its position in the house, see details of any security alerts and use the live Skype video/audio feed. Also it could be more comfortable to use the app to configure the robot's settings, instead of typing on the robot's screen or talking to it. 

Robot Design 

• External shapes - Ellipso design is inspired by using a single geometrical shape (the ellipsoid) for the whole body and wheels, so the end result has a simple, but powerful and elegant impression.  
•  Robot SW design - The robot's main control process is implemented as an Android long running background Service. The Service's thread cycles every 100ms and it implements integration with all external modules; such as camera, BlueTooth or Android's speech recognition API. The external modules translate their specific custom events to a generic logical language so the robotic brain model can simply analyse and command the robot based on the historical context and current events.  
•  Robot brain model -  our robot brain cortex behavioral rules model is based on the “Affordance Competition Hypothesis” research of University of Montreal. This enables the robot to behave like it is alive and us to simply add new rules and behavior with minimal impact on the current ones. The same way a child would learn new behavioral patterns. 

•  Robot Android AI frameworks - Google TensorFlow Lite deep neural networks for object detection (20 class yolo); Google FireBase ML framework for face/expression detection; OpenCV open sourced framework for face recognition. 

•  Robot HW AI frameworks - HW accelerated Kendryte K210 deep neural network object detection and sound FFT to detect specific sound patterns (e.g. human voice or a fire alarm). 

•  Robot SLAM mapping and navigation - "Fast Semi-Direct Monocular Visual Odometry" algorithm with IMU support to detect 3D obstacles and falls  based on research of University of Zurich; simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) algorithm for robot's self-navigation and map generation.

•  Robot HW capabilities - Android ARM quad/octa core 1300/2000 MHz CPU for high level cognitive behavior and integration with Cloud services; Kendryte K210 dual core 400/600 MHz CPU with dedicated deep neural networks HW acceleration (TensorFlow Lite) and FFT acceleration; ESP32 dual core 240 MHz CPU for Bluetooth, UART and GPIO connectivity. 
•  Robot Android APIs - robot SW functionality and its behavior is tightly integrated with Android available public APIs and services. Such as Google Android Speech Recognition API; Google Android TextToSpeach API; Google Assistant and Google Youtube integration; Google Drive as Cloud based document storage; Google Mail as Cloud based communication API; Microsoft Skype as Cloud based IM service. 
•  Robot sensors - 32/16/5MPx upward and 2MPx downward facing two cameras; GPS satellite position detection, two microphones with HW accelerated FFT; two 3W speakers; two Doppler radar modules for movement detection; red 5mW laser pointer, 3W RGB LED lights, 3W white LED lights, 6 DoF IMU with gyros and accelerators. 
•  External connectivity - WiFi, Bluetooth, Android Cloud APIs. Our robots require only a standard Internet connectivity to access Google Mail, Google Drive and Microsoft Skype. No requirement to reconfigure your home or office WiFi routers to expose the IP ports or any other hassle. 
•  SW API dependency - our robots are only dependent on publicly available free Google and Microsoft APIs. Therefore, there is no risk to the robots functionality if anything happens to our company servers.    
•  Online SW updates - the robot's Android application (including its main behavioral rules and external interfaces) will be online updated every 3 months for new functionality and bug fixes; using Google Play market.   
•  No monthly charges - there are no monthly or other charges for using our robots. Have a fun and enjoy the robot every day.
•  Self-charging - our robots automatically monitor status of their batteries and when the charge is low the robot will automatically locate and recharge itself in a docking station. The robot can operate about 4h on a single charge when actively working; about 12h on standby with radar movement detection enabled.       
•  Obstacle and voids detection - when on a table or facing down a staircase the robot will automatically detect dangerous voids (using the visual odometry algorithm) and reverse back. 
•  User replaceable batteries - users can simply replace the robot's 18650 Li-ion batteries with minimal effort (2 x 2800mAh 18650 Li-ion cells). The batteries should last about 1 year if you use the robot every day.     
•  4x4 all wheel drive - all wheel drive is a necessary design choice to support good locomotion across long hair carpets, floor bumps and clothing left on floor.
•  Noise suppression - geared motors generated noise will be significantly reduced by 3 levels of sound insulation: geared motors rubber enclosure, rubber belt transmission to wheels and rubber tires.   
•  DIY customization and hacking SDK - our robots comprehensively broadcast their status using Android Intents to support integration with the 3rd party custom applications and hacks. So you can extend the robot's behavior for your own custom actions and integrate it with your apps.  

Our Products Pipeline

The plan below shows our product pipeline for next 3 years. Ellipso, Barrel and Globe robots are our generic designs; Blocker (compatible with major brick play-sets), Froggy and Cubby robots are models for children; and in 2022 we want to introduce our first soft robot Gripper and also a robot drone FastAir. 

Delivery Timeline

It has been a long journey, but now we, at FRACH robotics, have a great and exciting technology ready to be shared with You:

Total Quality Control

We, at FRACH robotics, are obsessed with quality control of our products. Based on the IT industry DevOps best practices the continues multi-level testing with fully automated 24/7 regression is necessary to deliver stable, functional and long-term reliable products. Majority of the automated test cycles will run at least every 24h and each identified defect will be required to be fixed immediately.

Functional behavioral testing - unit testing of the brain behavioral rules in JVM to assure a proper sequencing and habituation of the behavioral actions; unit testing of interface modules in JVM; virtual functional testing of the assembled robot in the virtual environment; environmental functional testing in real habitats.

None-functional electronic testing - unit testing of the off-the-shelf electronic modules (e.g. geared motors) before assembly; power consumption, endurance and self-charging testing; electronic interference testing. 

None-functional mechanical testing - unit testing of mechanical parts before assembly; mechanical functional stress, falls, vibrations and endurance testing; noise generation testing on different surfaces. 

User acceptance testing - testing the robot behavior and user interactions with small focus groups to assess simplicity, effectiveness and usability of the robot's user interfaces; both vocal and screen UIs.

Small Scale Production

Small scale production of electronic gadgets has been always a concern for its high investment and operational costs. For example, the high-quality steel plastic injection molds for a small robot can easily cost upto £100000. Therefore we, at FRACH robotics, have developed the SASS (Smart Agile Small Scale) method to minimize the costs, focus on fast delivery of the business value to our customers and risk mitigation at it's core. Our SASS method covers comprehensively all aspects of design, manufacturing, testing and fulfillment and it is strongly inspired by the IT industry best practices such as Agile, DevOps and Micro-services.  

• 3D design - using inexpensive 3D CAD SW, such as FreeCAD or AUTODESK Fusion 360.
•  Off-the-shelf HW design - component design based on reusing currently manufactured and easily sourced modules such as Android devices, geared motors, common DIY electronic modules, rubber transmission belts, etc. Focus on sourcing from multiple channels to minimize dependency risks and costs.   
•  Off-the-shelf SW design - robot SW functionality and its behavior is tightly integrated with Android available public APIs and services. Such as Google Android speech recognition API, Google Android TextToSpeach API, Google Assistant, Google Youtube, Google Drive, Google Mail and Microsoft Skype. This design approach significantly extends robot's capabilities, but reduces the costs. 
•  Rapid prototyping - using FDM 3D printers with 0.8mm nozzles for fast and 0.4 nozzles for more precise plastic parts prototyping; with PLA plastic for low environmental impact and recyclability. 
•  Rapid mold patterns - using SLA/DLP 3D printers with UV resins to achieve high quality mold patterns with 50 microns resolution.
•  Rubber plastic injection molds - using RTV silicone and thermoplastic PVC rubbers for inexpensive and recyclable injection molds; reinforced with fiberglass threads. 
•  Aluminium plastic injection molds - using inexpensive aluminium mold production technique based on the sequence: SLA 3D printed mold pattern / rubber mold / refractory plaster mold / vacuum assisted melted aluminium mold; where the aluminium molds can be also used directly in the plastic injection molding machines. Also with the benefit of aluminium recycling.  
•  Polyurethane plastics - low viscosity vacuum assisted injection molding without expensive injection molding machines for low production volumes. Adding chopped glass fibers for extra strength, durability and crack resistance.
•  Outsourced plastic injection molding - renting local available capacity and using low cost aluminium molds for standard plastic injection molding for medium production volumes.
•  Outsourced electronic PCB manufacturing and assembly - using online outsourced services, where a PCB is manufactured, assembled and delivered in 4 weeks. See bellow an example from our main PCB manufacturing partner; Seeed Studio.

•  Self-assembling design - designing both plastic and electronic PCB parts to simplify, mechanically guide and speed up the assembly of the final product with focus on mitigation of wrong direction/parts assembly. 
•  Batch assembly - using mass production techniques introduced by H. Ford to break down complex assembly processes to tens of simple assembly steps, which can be executed in batches of 100s. 
•  ISO quality - quality method focused on reproducibility, where the assembler is provided with visual and video description of each simple assembly step and with all required assembly tooling. So, the assembly batch is executed in the continuously same quality and productivity. 
•  SW Agile, DevOps and Micro-services - using the IT industry SW development best practices to continuously analyse, develop, test, deploy and assess business feedback in short monthly cycles. Breaking down complex SW packages to small components with defined interfaces to simplify, parallelize and de-risk the SW development. Totally automating repeatable processes, such as build, test and deploy.
•  Agile delivery of the business value - iteratively deliver the latest functionality and bugfixes to the customer base every few months over the Internet.    
•  Outsourced fulfillment - outsourcing fulfillment of the end product to global efficient professionals to minimize costs and environmental impact. Prefer local over global.  
•  Customer feedback - support multi-channel customer feedback on social media and forums to truly understand customer wishes, desires and new trends. Involving the customer base in selection of new functionality, capabilities and products. Running small focus groups for simple and inexpensive product marketing research and product capabilities assessment. 
•  Research & development - staying on the top of the latest University research and following the latest open sourced technologies from major SW companies. 

Prototyping

Agile delivery methods require a short iteration life-cycle of analyses, design, test, user feedback and improvement. It is necessary to innovate, test and accept/reject all parts of the design in fast and fine granular matter to maximize business value, mitigate delivery, quality and user acceptance risks and minimize the development, production and product costs. On the picture below you can see history of our prototyping cycle for last 2 years.  

Research & Development

We, at FRACH robotics, are fascinated with a prospect of having inexpensive humanoid robots at our homes. However to achieve this goal we need to first develop animalistic type of robot locomotion and also inexpensive and human safe robot muscles. As we are closely following the latest university research in these areas we believe we can develop our first soft-robot product (Gripper) in next 2 years. 

Utrecht University and University of British Columbia research of muscle based control with neural delay to simulate bio-mechanical constraints: 

Google DeepMind AI research of walking bi-pods using self-learning deep neural networks: 

Cornell University research of soft robotic muscles:

Harvard University research of small soft robots:

FRACH Robotics Team

We are a robotic start-up focused on advanced autonomous robotic technologies to be present in our homes. Turning our technology dreams into main stream consumer products. We believe that with Your help we can start the robotic revolution and take the human kind to next level ... the Age of Robots.

 Damian Frach MSc, MBA - founder, business and technical strategy; product development; design, development and manufacturing processes; logistics; programme management

 Katerina Frach BSc - founder; market research; product marketing; customer community development; quality assurance; customer care; fulfillment; finance and accounting

 Jerome Josephraj BSc - adviser; Entrepreneurship; Java Enterprise technologies; Cloud; full SW development life-cycle; Agile and DevOps delivery methods; test-driven and behavior-driven SW development

 Jonas Allemann MSc - adviser; advanced mathematics, 3D modelling and visualizations; simultaneous localisation and mapping

 Jack Cowling MSc - adviser; advanced mathematics; artificial intelligence; deep neural networks

Risks and Challenges

Capital Investment - mitigated by our small scale production SASS delivery method, which enables small and medium manufactures to avoid high investment costs in tooling and machinery.

Design complexity - mitigated by using off the shelf SW , HW and mechanical modules in our designs. Significant reduction of complexity and costs and improvement of reliability and quality of our products.

Sourcing - mitigated by using off the shelf modules from multiple manufactures and sale channels to avoid single point of failure in our sourcing. Sourcing competition also significantly reduces the costs.

Quality - mitigated by continues 24/7 test automation of all aspects of functional and none functional scope. This enables 100% daily regression quality assurance and detection of any long term issues.

Privacy, security and dependency - mitigated by using only Google and Microsoft public Cloud services with no dependency or content share with FRACH robotics servers.

Product functionality - mitigated by listening to our customer base on the social media and our forums for new requirements, trends, issues and concerns. Releasing new functionality every 3 months.

Environmental Commitments

Long-lasting design - Reinforced plastic parts, regular online SW updates and user replaceable batteries assure our products life-span is maximized.

Reusability and recyclability - The whole product life-cycle (off-the-shelf modules, casting molds, plastic product parts and packaging) is designed with the recycling perspective within. Using recyclable and bio-degradable materials, clearly marking the part material for recycling and minimizing the waste is the key.

Sustainable materials - Carving the product design and functions around the already available off-the-shelf SW, HW and mechanical modules minimizes not just the product costs, but also the end to end environmental impact.

Environmentally friendly factories - With the small scale manufacturing in mind we have developed the SASS manufacturing method, which does not require high investment and operational costs and enables us to support local communities with local job creation.

Sustainable Distribution - Our SASS manufacturing method with focus on the local production reduces considerably the distribution environmental impact. Local manufacturing for local jobs for local communities with minimal global fulfillment logistical chains.