I’m just wondering about the internal components on mall cop robots like the Knightscope K5. It must be using a GPU and some pretty nice cameras, right? These are common models found in the United States. I have worked closely with knockoff BD dogs, I’m not talking about those, I’m talking about the Dalek looking things.
My guess is that the most expensive single component would be the lidar. Prices on lidars can be well over $100k. When I worked with lidar about 5 years ago, IIRC a Velodyne 128 was $160k. These robots would probably be using a 32 though, which is probably going to be less than 1/4 of a 128.
Also, Velodyne and Ouster merged since I last used lidar. Ouster does in-device sensor fusion, which likely takes a significant load off the CPU and potentially GPU, meaning these robots may be able to get away with lower spec CPU and GPU.
It appears that Ouster now does object detection, which is another reason these could get away with lower spec GPUs (assuming they’re using Ouster)
Obviously there’s a lot of speculation in my response, but since there’s no teardown of the robot, and without spec sheets or a BOM, all we can do is speculate.
Thanks for the actual input, people who haven’t worked around this kind of hardware are mostly limited to goofing around like it’s sci-fi when it’s mostly John Deere style nonsense
Dang my $65 robot vacuum has lidar.