14 DAY TRIAL // Slack announced during their annual Slack Frontiers conference that they had built two security robots in collaboration with Cobalt Robotics to watch over the company's office after humans end their workday according to a Nextgov report.
According to the specs on Cobalt Robotics' website, their telepresence robots come with a slew of inbuilt sensors from thermal cameras, badge readers, environmental sensors and sirens, to LIDAR, long-range RFID and ultrasonic sensors.
They also have built-in 2-way audio/video communication, and a front-facing touch screen Cobalt specialists can use as a virtual presence device.
Cobalt Robotics markets their autonomous security robot business as "Cobalt as a Service," a reunion of hardware, software, and Cobalt Robotics human resources, designed from the ground up as the perfect solution to employee safety, security, and facilities solutions.
This translates into a potential "army" of robots roaming the workplace, continuously scanning for things that seem out of place and summoning a Cobalt Robotics specialist on its built-in display to evaluate the issue and come up with a resolution for the detected problem.
The autonomous security robots act as virtual presence devices for Cobalt's specialists
“Humans aren’t great at repetitive, redundant tasks. Guards simply doing their rounds are bad at picking up on the subtleties of a workspace," said Deano Roberts, global facilities director at Slack's San Francisco-based branch.
Even though security has historically been a subject of having the right people with the right experience to make sure that procedures and protocols are respected, having an automated option is most probably the way to go seeing that most security experts tend to migrate to the online domain.
Moreover, it's well known that security guards aren't exactly the most praised employees of big tech companies which would probably prefer, just like in the case of Slack, to build their own security-focused robots.
This way the automatons can roam on their own throughout the company's headquarters and enforce a specific set of security rules devised by the company, while also adding 100% focus on the job and eliminating the human error factor.
