The Scorpion
Hazmat Situation Support Robot For Military
2016 For Endeavor Robotics (FLIR System, Inc.)
Endeavor Robotics was a part of the iRobot as military and security purpose robot development division. They divided from the iRobot in 2015 to fully focus on security and military purpose robot development.
The Scorpion was their first developed robot as independent company and a success of the Scorpion was highly important for their future business.
Which visual design language should communicate through robot itself to appeal as trustworthy partner?
What would be the most important value of robot for the military missions? The answer will be a trust as partners.
The robot should provide trustworthy functions. Overall form factor and aesthetics should visually support functions to create deep trust as trustworthy partner.
Team explored visual design languages that can easily communicate trust.
Anticipating, Trustworthy and Adaptive.
Based on visual design language exploration, team defined key design elements that this new robot should visually communicate. Those were anticipating, trustworthy and adaptive.
The challenge of design development was that how to effectively express these elements through form factor, aesthetics and CMF. Another challenge was a limitation of design due to mechanical and functional requirements such as: Cameras locations, movement range of arm, tread shape and sensors locations.
Team was explored variety design concepts and possibilities to resolve this challenge and overall design development was proceed based on this.
The Scorpion is ready for your mission as trustworthy partner.
The Scorpion was designed with Simple, but robust overall shape to make you easily anticipate its functions.
A frame formed main body is only covered bottom of the Scorpion to support 360 degree rotatable arm movements as well as to reduce weight. Bottom front and back surface of body is slightly angled to help flow away any harmful dirts from the ground that can potentially block the Scorpion’s movements.
Concise function-focused overall form factor is easily communicating functions of individual parts to support user quickly adapting them in any use environments.
The Scorpion’s all design details were designed per purposes. They are easily adaptable and effectively inspire user to anticipate a solid mission as trustworthy partner.
The Scorpion is ready to support your mission as trustworthy partner not just an ordinary military robot.
Recognized its value from deep empathy.
The Scorpion won U.S Army’s Common Robotic System-Individual (CRS-I) program in 2018 and received $429 million dollars to manufacture up to 3,000 of the Scorpions.
This result is showing how The Scorpion effectively established deep empathy with its target users.
*Scorpion produced with modified design by FLIR System, Inc.
Officer website: www.flir.com
Design Team: Joongoo Lee (Industrial Design Lead), Jonathan Langer, Evan Gant and Tom Burchard (Project Manager) at Altitude, Inc.
Design Credit: FLIR System, Inc. (Former Endeavor Robotics) / Altitude, Inc.
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