Thanks to Ra-Ya, Programming a robot is as simple as programming an app for android or ios.
Back in 2007, when steve jobs took to the stage and introduced the world to (arguably) the first smartphone, no one could foresee the immense impact the smartphone market would have on the world. The first generation iPhone blew everyone’s mind (an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator in one device!) even though it couldn’t do a lot out of the box; there was no app store, you couldn't change the wallpaper, record video or take selfies, you couldn’t even copy and paste!.
Sure, it was a giant leap forward in terms of technology, but what made the iPhone one of the greatest products of all time was the introduction of the app store. Suddenly, the iPhone went from a smartphone that can’t do much to a device that can do almost anything. For years Apple used the slogan “There is an app for that” to bolster the multifunctionality of its product.
Fast forward fifteen years (has it really been fifteen years? Say it isn’t so!), and we are at the beginning of a new era; robots are starting to appear everywhere you go. Restaurants have started using robots to carry and serve food, malls and airports are using robots to help visitors get to where they need, small delivery robots have become a common sight on the streets of several cities around the world, and a large percentage of the population have at least one robot in their house (usually a robot vacuum cleaner or an educational robot for children).
However, every robot we mentioned here is a single-purpose robot made by a company to serve just one function. So, for example, a robot waiter can make his way around the restaurant, but it can’t show a customer the way to the bathroom because it is only programmed to carry plates to the tables. Likewise, an educational robot can talk and has an internal clock, but it can’t remind you to take your pills at a fixed time every other day. Notice that it’s not that the robots are physically incapable of doing those chores; it’s just that they are a closed system that does not allow you access to the robot’s programming.
This needs to change. Ra-Ya is here to democratize robots; to give the user a lot more control over the product he purchased, help the companies selling the robots better their products at no additional cost, make the robots themselves achieve more, and, if that isn’t enough, allow countless people around the world to earn money from creating apps for these robots.
Ra-Ya allows anyone with basic knowledge in Python or Java to start making apps for robots. And it’s as easy as making an app for android or ios. You do not need to learn robotics, you do not need to know ROS (robot operating system), and you don’t even have to own a robot. Everything you need is already inside Ra-Ya. And much in the same way that a phone app developer doesn’t need to know how lenses work to incorporate the phone’s camera in his app, a Ra-Ya developer doesn’t need to understand navigation to make his robot get from point A to point B. Instead, as a developer, you just tell Ra-Ya what you need, and all the complex stuff happens automatically in the background.
Example: imagine you are on holiday in a hotel with a robot housekeeper; This robot goes from room to room with the other housekeepers, cleaning the toilets, making the beds, and replacing used towels. While you are there, you notice that the housekeepers keep placing the TV remote control next to the TV while you would much rather have it on the stand next to your bed. Without even knowing what model robot your hotel uses, you can go into Ra-Ya on your laptop and, with a few simple lines of code, create an app that allows the user to choose where they want their housekeeping robot to place the remote control - on the nightstand, next to the TV, maybe on the bed itself.
Once the app is ready, you can upload it to the app store, and once it is approved, you can notify the hotel that you have just added new functionality to their robot. Once the hotel downloads this new functionality to their housekeeping robots, you can use the app to let the robot know where you want it to place the remote in your room.
And the best part? The app you just created is now available worldwide. So every hotel in the world can potentially download your app to their robots and allow their customers to choose their preferred place for the remote control. And it is up to you to decide how to price your new app. Should every hotel pay a one-time fee of 100$ to add this functionality to their fleet of robots and then provide it for free for their customers, or should you give it to the hotels for free, and then every customer can purchase it for 99 cents? Again, it’s up to you to decide how to make your revenue.
Smartphones changed our lives and showed us there is almost no limit to what they can do. Instead of one company making various apps for their device based on how much revenue they can make back, you got countless developers from all over the world making an unlimited amount of apps and sharing the revenue with the parent company. The same is going to happen with robots, thanks to Ra-Ya.
The robot revolution is here; it is happening now! And Ra-Ya is here to help democratize the entire process. So the only question you should ask yourself is What app will you make?
