A Montreal portfolio company of TandemLaunch, C2RO was recently part of an experiment at MIT that could help give us insights into better disaster relief.

C2RO Robotic’s cloud platform was implemented in an experimental sensor data stream at MIT Senseable City Lab (SCL). The experiment was done in the context of one of SCL’s recent projects, which aimed to equip single-purpose streetlights with different sensors to create a digital platform that would provide services like pedestrian detection.

The company’s SaaS platform uses real-time data processing technologies to artificially enable any sensor, device or robot in a relatively quick and inexpensive way.

As part of the experiment, thermal cameras were used for their ability to detect pedestrians in various light and weather conditions. Something that was nearly impossible in the past, turning thermal data information on pedestrian traffic has traditionally been a challenge due to the processor-intensive task of sensory analysis. C2RO solves the problem by shifting the more demanding processing tasks to the cloud.

“The Internet of Things (IoT) will soon change the way we live and work in the cities. As the number of connected things increases, we would need better ways to process and organize the huge amount of data generated by them,” said Dr. Amin Anjomshoaa, the Project Lead at MIT. “Cloud-based services such as C2RO’s platform are the perfect counterpart for IoT solutions which facilitate creating elaborated services for smart cities.”

See the latest in #cloudrobotics in room 203 at #RoboBusiness! #ml #ai #SLAM #cloud #cslam #roomba pic.twitter.com/HBV2pQxWtq

— C2RO Robotics (@C2RO_Robotics) September 28, 2017

C2RO’s platform autonomously detects any people in frame by analyzing image feedback from thermal cameras. Its dashboard displays image feedback in real-time as well as an updated count of the number of people in frame.

The data collected is especially useful for urban planning professionals and emergency monitoring system, giving more accurate information about urban areas. This type of pedestrian traffic data at scale could have major implications for crowd control efforts, autonomous vehicles, and even disaster relief.

“This application showcased the performance and scalability benefits of the integration with our ready-to-use SaaS platform for any large-scale robotics or sensor-based projects,” said Dr. Soodeh Farokhi, Founder and CTO at C2RO. “We enable customers to focus on the unique part of their products, while offloading the computational burden to our scalable and secure cloud solution and saving up to ten times the cost of necessary hardware.”

The C2RO platform is backed by 6 years of research. Sensors spread across the country are able to connect thanks to real-time data processing technology. Machine Learning modules operate on the Cloud to augment these analytics. The company’s beta product is expected to be released in the next few weeks to the wider public.