RightHand Robotics, Diligent Robotics and READY Robotics are young robotics startups that have all transitioned from the ICorps program and SBIR grant funding into becoming venture backed robotics startups. RightHand Robotics was founded in 2014 and is a Boston based company that specializes in robotics manipulation. It is spun out of work performed for the DARPA Autonomous Robotics Manipulation program and has since raised more than $34.3 million from investors that include Maniv Mobility, Playground and Menlo Ventures.

Diligent Robotics is based in Austin where they design and build robots like Moxi that assist clinical staff with routine activities so they can focus on caring for patients. Diligent Robotics is the youngest startup, founded in 2017 and having raised $15.8 million so far from investors that include True Ventures and Ubiquity Ventures. Andrea Thomaz maintains her position at UTexas Austin but has taken leave to focus on Diligent Robotics.

READY Robotics creates unique solutions that remove the barriers faced by small manufacturers when adopting robotic automation. Founded in 2016, and headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, the company has raised more than $41.8 million with investors that include Drive Capital and Canaan Capital. READY Robotics enables manufacturers to more easily deploy robots to the factory floor through a patented technology platform that combines a very easy to use programming interface and plug’n’play hardware. This enables small to medium sized manufacturers to be more competitive through the use of industrial robots.

To summarize the conversation into 8 key takeaways for startups.

1. Research is primarily involved in developing a prototype (works once), whereas commercialization requires a product (works every time). Robustness and reliability are essential features of whatever you build.
2. The customer development focus of the ICorps program speeds up the commercialization process, by forcing you into the field to talk face to face with potential customers and deeply explore their issues.
3. Don’t lead with the robot! Get comfortable talking to people and learn to speak the language your customers use. Your job is to solve their problem, not persuade them to use your technology.
4. The faster you can deeply embed yourself with your first customers, the faster you attain the critical knowledge that lets you define your product’s essential features, that the majority of your customers will need, from the merely ‘nice to have’ features or ‘one off’ ideas that can be misdirection.
5. Team building is your biggest challenge, as many roles you will need to hire for are outside of your own experience. Conduct preparatory interviews with experts in an area that you don’t know, so that you learn what real expertize looks like, what questions to ask and what skillsets to look for.
6. There is a lack of robotics skill sets in the marketplace so learn to look for transferable skills from other disciplines.
7. It is actually easy to get to ‘yes’, but the real trick is knowing when to say ‘no’. In other words, don’t create or agree to bad contracts or term sheets, just for the sake of getting an agreement, considering it a ‘loss leader’. Focus on the agreements that make repeatable business sense for your company.
8. Utilize the resources of your university, the accelerators, alumni funds, tech transfer departments, laboratories, experts and testing facilities.

And for robotics startups that don’t have immediate access to universities, then robotics clusters can provide similar assistance. From large clusters like RoboValley in Odense, MassRobotics in Boston and Silicon Valley Robotics which have startup programs, space and prototyping equipment, to smaller robotics clusters that can still provide a connection point to other resources.

Eliza Kosoy is a Ph.D Student at UC Berkeley. She studied mathematics in college and then worked for Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum at MIT in his computational cognitive science lab. She then started on a Ph.D at UC Berkeley working with Professor Alison Gopnik in 2018. She is most proud of receiving funding and winning an innovation prize that catalyzed her business!  Her startup is called E-liza Dolls. They are 18’’ electronic “liza” dolls that introduce young girls to coding and hardware in a fun way!

She chose this topic because as a woman in STEM she couldn’t help but feel the gender and racial divide and discrepancies in the hard sciences. With her background in child development, it only made sense that it’s best to expose children to these concepts early on so they will be embedded into their hypothesis space as they develop. The hardest challenge for her is “Soldering Errors” and when tiny components fall off without notice.

E-liza Dolls Kickstarter will open very soon in March 2021… We’ll update this post the moment it goes live!

Roboticists in Residence is a Silicon Valley Robotics initiative that provides free studio space and support for creative artists and engineers making a difference, whether it’s modding a Tesla with all the conveniences of the Victorian era or adding to the ROS2 navigational stack. For more information and updates from our Roboticists in Residence

Self-driving vehicles would not be possible without sensors and so it’s not surprising to see two small new sensors in the 2020 Silicon Valley Robotics ‘Good Robot’ Innovation Awards, the Velabit from Velodyne and the nanoScan3 from SICK. We showcase three other innovations in component technology, the FHA-C with Integrated Servo Drive from Harmonic Drive, the radically new Inception Drive from SRI International and Qualcomm’s RB5 Processor, all ideal for building robots.

Our other Innovation Awards go to companies with groundbreakingly new robots; from the tensegrity structure of Squishy Robotics, which will help in both space exploration and disaster response on earth, to the Dusty Robotics full scale FieldPrinter for the construction industry, and Titan from FarmWise for agriculture, which was also named one of Time’s Best Inventions for 2020. Finally, we’re delighted to see innovation in robotics that is affordable and collaborative enough for home robot applications, with Stretch from Hello Robot and Eve from Halodi Robotics.

The Velabit, a game-changing lidar sensor, leverages Velodyne’s innovative lidar technology and manufacturing partnerships for cost optimization and high-volume production, to make high-quality 3D lidar sensors readily accessible to everyone. The Velabit is smaller than a deck of playing cards, and it shatters the price barrier, costing $100.00 per sensor. The compact, mid-range Velabit is highly configurable for specialized use cases and can be embedded almost anywhere. Gatik and May Mobility are just two of pioneers in autonomous vehicle technology using Velodyne Lidar.

The nanoScan3 from SICK is the world’s smallest safety laser scanner and is based on their latest patented Time-Of-Flight technology. Not only does it provide the most robust protection for stationary and mobile robots, but being a LiDAR, it simultaneously supports navigation and other measurement-based applications.

Founded in 1946, SICK sensors help robots make more intelligent decisions and give them the ability to sense objects, the environment, or their own position. SICK, and their west coast distributor EandM, offer solutions for all challenges in the field of robotics: Robot Vision, Safe Robotics, End-of-Arm Tooling, and Position Feedback.

The FHA-C Mini Series from Harmonic Drive is a family of extremely compact actuators that deliver high torque with exceptional accuracy and repeatability. The revolutionary FHA-C with Integrated Servo Drive eliminates the need for an external drive and greatly improves wiring while retaining high-positional accuracy and torsional stiffness in a compact housing. This new mini actuator product is ideal for use in robotics.

The Qualcomm Robotics RB5 Platform supports the development of the next generation of high-compute, AI-enabled, low power robots and drones for the consumer, enterprise, defense, industrial and professional service sectors that can be connected by 5G. The QRB5165 processor, customized for robotics applications, offers a powerful heterogeneous computing architecture coupled with the leading 5th generation Qualcomm® Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engine delivering 15 Trillion Operations Per Second (TOPS) of AI performance. It’s designed to achieve peak performance while being able to also support small battery-operated robots with challenging power and thermal dissipation requirements. The platform offers support for Linux, Ubuntu and Robot Operating System (ROS) 2, as well as pre-integrated drivers for various cameras, sensors and connectivity.

The latest breakthrough from SRI Robotics is a novel ultra-compact, infinitely variable transmission that is an order of magnitude smaller and lighter than existing technologies. The Inception Drive is a new transmission that can reverse the direction of the output relative to input without clutches or extra stages, dramatically increasing total system efficiency in applications including robotics, transportation, and heavy industry.

Squishy Robotics’ rapidly deployable, air-droppable, mobile sensor robots provide lifesaving, cost-saving information in real time, enabling faster, better-informed data-driven decisions. The company’s robots provide first responders with location and chemical sensor data as well as the visual information needed to safely plan a mitigation response, all from a safe distance away from the “hot zones.” The scalable and reconfigurable robots can carry customized, third-party equipment (e.g., COTS sensors, emergency medical aid supplies, or specialized radio components) in a variety of deployment scenarios.

The company’s first target market is the HazMat and CBRNE (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive) response market, enabling lifesaving maneuvers and securing the safety of first responders by providing situational awareness and sensor data in uncharted terrains. The robots can be quickly deployed by ground or be dropped from drones or other aerial vehicles and then be used in a variety of ways, including remote monitoring, disaster response, and rescue assistance. A spin-off of prior work with NASA on robots for space exploration, the company’s Stationary Robot has been successfully dropped from airplanes from heights of up to 1,000 ft; the company’s Mobile Robot can traverse rugged and uneven territory.

Dusty Robotics develops innovative robotics technology that power the creation of high-accuracy mobile printers for the construction industry. Dusty’s novel robotics algorithms enable the system to achieve 1-millimeter precision printing construction layout on concrete decks, which is a breakthrough in the industry.

Construction industry veterans who are normally skeptical about new innovations have all embraced Dusty’s FieldPrinter as the solution to critical problems in the industry. Layout today involves a number of manual steps, each of which has the potential to introduce errors into the process. Errors increase building cost and delay time to completion. Dusty’s robotic layout printer automates the BIM->field workflow and is poised to be the first widely adopted robotic technology in the field across the construction industry.

For vegetable growers who face increased growing costs and new environmental and regulatory pressures, the FarmWise suite of data-driven services harnesses plant-level data to drive precise field actions in order to streamline farm operations and increase food production efficiency.

Titan FT-35, the automated weeding robot from FarmWise Labs, has just been named one of Time Magazine’s ‘Best Inventions of 2020’. Titan consists of a driverless tractor and a smart implement that uses deep learning to detect crops from weeds and mechanically removes weeds from farmers’ fields. Thanks to the trust and collaborative effort of visionary growers, the FarmWise idea of a machine that could kill weeds without using chemicals went from a proof-of-concept to a commercialized product.

Hello Robot has reinvented the mobile manipulator. In July 2020 they launched Stretch, the first capable, portable, and affordable mobile manipulator designed specifically to assist people in the home and workplace. At a fraction the cost, size, and weight of previous capable mobile manipulators, Stretch’s novel design is a game changer.

Stretch has a low mass, contact-sensitive body with a compact footprint and slender telescopic manipulator, so that it weighs only 51lb. Stretch is ready for autonomous operation as well as teleoperation, with Python interfaces, ROS integration and open source code. In the future, mobile manipulators will enhance the lives of older adults, people with disabilities, and caregivers. Hello Robot is working to build a bridge to this future.

Halodi Robotics has developed the EVE humanoid robot platform using its patented REVO1 actuators to enable truly capable and safe humanoid robots. The robots have been commercialized, and the first commercial customer pilots are being planned for next year in security, health care and retail.

By developing a new actuator and differential rope based transmission systems, the company has overcome many of the obstacles preventing the development of capable and safe robots. Impact energies of less than a thousandth of comparable systems means that the system can be inherently safe around humans and in human environments.

Halodi Robotics is using the EVE platform to pilot humanoid robotics into new areas while their next generation robot Sarah is being developed for 2022 launch.

You can see the full list of our Good Robot Awards in Innovation, Vision, Commercialization and our Community Champions here at https://svrobo.org/awards and we’ll be sharing articles about each category of award winners throughout the week.

If robotics is the technology of the 21st century, rather than biotech, then we have some serious work to do. This week marks the ‘beginning of the end’ of the coronavirus pandemic as a vaccine is deployed in the US. The Wall St Journal recently profiled the incredible effort of Pfizer and BioNTech who pioneered a novel Messenger RNA (mRNA) approach, and got it in production in a tenth to a quarter of the normal vaccine development time. It undoubtedly takes a team, but the WSJ article “How Pfizer delivered a COVID vaccine in record time” highlights the efforts of two men, CEO Albert Bourla and manufacturing chief Mike McDermott, and one woman, head of Pfizer’s vaccine research Dr Kathrin Jansen, in this achievement. And the WSJ feature makes more fuss about CEO Albert Bourla’s Greek heritage than about Dr Kathrin Jansen’s femaleness. Now the WSJ isn’t exactly a leftwing propaganda machine, so this reflects the strides that the biological sciences have taken in diversity in the last fifty years. Given the growing shortage of professionals in computer science, robotics and AI occupations, including basic manufacturing, and given the basic human right of empowering everyone with access to equal opportunities, then it is clear that systemic inequity is still at work in some new technologies like robotics. Biotech shows that hardware and innovation is doable. Sadly, Silicon Valley shows that equity is harder than hardware.

Silicon Valley Robotics announces its inaugural ‘Good Robot’ Industry Awards this week, celebrating Innovation in products, Vision in action, and the Commercialization of new technologies that offer us the chance to address global challenges. The computer age did not usher in the increases in productivity that were anticipated. Unlike the advent of tractors or electricity, productivity due to technology has largely stagnated since shortly after the second world war. This is in spite of large amounts of public research and development funding in advanced computing technologies like robotics and AI. In the meantime, the negative impacts of many technology advances (like plastics) continue to wage war on the planet. But there is no point in promoting a Luddite view of a technology free era (of high infant mortality, short average lifespan and child labor), instead we can use technology wisely to address areas where the gain to society will be great.

We want to also recognize the work of robotics community champions who do all sorts of (often unsung) work that advances the science and technology of robotics, from research, to production and employment. These awardees serve as great examples of how providing support for robotics supports all of us.

Community Champion Award:

Companies:

NASA Intelligent Robotics Group
Open Robotics
PickNik Robotics
Robohub
SICK
Willow Garage (best to see the Red Hat series How to Start a Robot Revolution)

Individuals:

Alex Padilla
Ayanna Howard
Evan Ackerman
Frank Tobe
Henrik Christensen
Joy Buolamwini
Katherine Scott
Khari Johnson
Louise Poubel
Mark Martin
Rodney Brooks
Rumman Chowdhury
Timnit Gebru

Silicon Valley Robotics appreciates the contributions made by all of our inaugural Community Champions! And we look forward to next year, because there are many of you out there who are making not just good robots, but a better robotics industry. One of the things I love most about robotics is being around so many people who are are passionate about using technology to improve the world. It can be frustrating that the world is so resistant to change sometimes but in ten short years, the robotics industry has gone from insignificant (in Silicon Valley terms) to unicorns. We all have an opportunity to be part of changing the world for the better, like our Community Champions.

Make no mistake, this is not an issue for women or black & brown people to solve. Without an accurate reflection of the society in which our technologies will be used we will not produce the best technologies and we will not be attractive or competitive as an industry that is fighting for the best talent. Diversity and equity in robotics should be worrying everybody in robotics. We need robots to solve our greatest global challenges. And we need global talent to do this.

I dream of seeing a Silicon Valley Robotics industry cluster and robotics education program in every country, hand in hand with non-profit programs like Women in Robotics and Black in Robotics to support workers entering what is still not an equitable work environment.

*The Silicon Valley Robotics Board is incredibly supportive, however this commentary is all my own opinion piece and I  put my Ruth Bader Ginsburg socks on today. I highly recommend them.

About Silicon Valley Robotics

Silicon Valley Robotics (SVR) supports the innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies, as a non-profit industry association. Our first strategic plan focused on connecting startups with investment, and since our founding in 2010, our membership has grown tenfold, reflecting our success in increasing investment into robotics. We believe that with robotics, we can improve productivity, meet labor shortages, get rid of jobs that treat humans like robots and finally create precision, personalized food, mobility, housing and health technologies. For more information, please visit https://svrobo.org

SOURCE: Silicon Valley Robotics (SVR)

CONTACT: Andra Keay andra@svrobo.org

President: Sabine Haeurt          

Founded: 2012

HQ:  Switzerland

Robohub is an online platform and non-profit that brings together leading communicators in robotics research, start-ups, business, and education from around the world, focused on connecting the robotics community to the public. It can be difficult for the public to find free, high-quality information about robotics. At Robohub, we enable roboticists to share their stories in their own words by providing them with a social media platform and editorial guidance. This means that our readers get to learn about the latest research and business news, events and opinions, directly from the experts.

Since 2012, Robohub and its international community of volunteers have published over 300 Robohub Podcasts, 7000 blog posts, videos and more, reaching 1M pageviews every year, and more than 30k followers on social media. You can follow robohub on Twitter at @robohub.

OAKLAND, California, Dec. 14, 2020 /Press Release/ — Silicon Valley Robotics, the world’s largest cluster of innovation in robotics, announces the inaugural ‘Good Robot’ Industry Awards, celebrating the robotics, automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that will help us solve global challenges. These 52 companies and individuals have all contributed to innovation that will improve the quality of our lives, whether it’s weed-free pesticide-free farming, like FarmWise or Iron Ox; supporting health workers and the elderly manage health care treatment regimes, like Catalia Health or Multiply Labs; or reimagining the logistics industry so that the transfer of physical goods becomes as efficient as the transfer of information, like Cruise, Embark, Matternet and Zipline. 

Mabu from Catalia Health helps treat a patient. (image from Catalia Health)

The categories Innovation, Vision and Commercialization represent the stages robotics companies go through, firstly with an innovative technology or product, then with a vision to change the world (and occasionally the investment to match), and finally with real evidence of customer traction. The criteria for our Commercialization Award is achieving $1 million in revenue, which is a huge milestone for a startup building a new invention. 

Titan agribot from FarmWise weeding fields in California. (image from FarmWise)

Tessa Lau, Founder and CEO of Dusty Robotics, an Innovation Awardee said “We’re almost there. $1 million in revenue is our next goal.” Dusty Robotics’ FieldPrinter automates the painstaking, time-consuming process of marking building plans in the field, replacing a traditional process using measuring tape and chalk lines that hasn’t changed in 5000 years. The company’s vision of creating robot-powered tools for the modern construction workforce resonates strongly with commercial construction companies. Dusty’s robot fleet is now in production, producing highly accurate layouts in record time on every floor of two multi-family residential towers going up in San Francisco.

The FieldPrinter from Dusty Robotics drawing plans. (image from Dusty Robotics)

The SVR ‘Good Robot’ Industry Awards also highlight diverse robotics companies. In our Visionary Category, Zoox is the first billion dollar company led by an African-American woman, Aicha Evans, and Robust AI shows diversity at every level of the organization. Diversity of thought will be critical as Robust AI tackles the challenge of building a cognitive engine for robotics that incorporates common sense reasoning. 

“Robotics and AI will shape the next century in the same way the Industrial revolution shaped the 20th century. To create a future that amplifies human potential, the full spectrum of human perspective needs to contribute to the design process. This is fundamental to how we are building Robust.AI” explains COO Anthony Jules. 

PR2 robots ‘graduate’ from Willow Garage before going to universities around the world.

We also wanted to highlight the community in robotics with our Champion Award, because as Silicon Valley Robotics Managing Director Andra Keay says, “In robotics, we’re always standing on the shoulders of giants. And many of these contributions go unrecognized outside of the robotics community. We depend on a strong community to help startups cross the chasm to commercialization, and so we want to recognize our Champions, starting with Willow Garage, which was the Fairchild of the 21st century.” 

Willow Garage had a massive impact on robotics in seven short years, from 2006 to 2013. Not only did they produce ROS, now maintained by Open Robotics, but alumni of Willow Garage can be found in the core teams of almost every groundbreaking new robotics company. Some, like Fetch Robotics, winner of our Overall Excellence Award and pioneer in autonomous mobile robots for logistics, achieved the full cycle from startup to ground breaking industry leader in only five short years. By 2018, Fetch Robotics was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, and is winner of our Award for Overall Excellence along with Ambidextrous.

Fetch Robotics now produces an entire family of robots. (image from Fetch Robotics)

Ambidextrous looks likely to follow the same successful trajectory as Fetch, but focused on manipulation instead of autonomous mobility. Ambidextrous is spinning out research from the University of California Berkeley, that uses AI and simulation to solve the ‘pick problem’ for handling real world items. At only two years old, Ambidextrous is already piloting solutions for significant customers. Two other UC Berkeley startups made our inaugural award list, Squishy Robotics and Covariant.ai, highlighting the large amount of robotics research happening in the Bay Area, in more than fifty robotics research labs. 

Dr Ayanna Howard, Chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, soon to be Dean of Engineering at Ohio State University. (image from Dr Howard)

Hopefully, this will lead to more good robots solving global challenges. As one of our Champions, Dr Ayanna Howard says, “I believe that every engineer has a responsibility to make the world a better place. We are gifted with an amazing power to take people’s wishes and make them a reality.”

The full details of the 52 Awardees in the 2020 Silicon Valley Robotics ‘Good Robot’ Industry Awards can be seen at https://svrobo.org/awards . 

Overall Excellence Award:

Fetch Robotics 

Ambidextrous 

Innovation Award:

Eve – Halodi
FHA-C with Integrated Servo Drive – Harmonic Drive LLC
FieldPrinter – Dusty Robotics
Inception Drive – SRI International
nanoScan3 – SICK
QRB5 – Qualcomm
Stretch – Hello Robot
Tensegrity Robots – Squishy Robotics
Titan – FarmWise
Velabit – Velodyne Lidar Inc.

Visionary Award:

Agility Robotics
Built Robotics
Covariant.ai
Cruise
Dishcraft Robotics
Embark
Formant
Iron Ox
Robust.ai
Zipline
Zoox

Commercialization Award:

Canvas
Catalia Health
Haddington Dynamics
Kindred.ai
Matternet
Multiply Labs
OhmniLabs
Simbe Robotics
Ubiquity Robotics

Entrepreneurship Award:

Yateou

Community Champion Award:

Companies:

NASA Intelligent Robotics Group
Open Robotics
PickNik Robotics
Robohub
SICK
Willow Garage (best to see the Red Hat series How to Start a Robot Revolution)

Individuals:

Alex Padilla
Ayanna Howard
Evan Ackerman
Frank Tobe
Henrik Christensen
Joy Buolamwini
Katherine Scott
Khari Johnson
Louise Poubel
Mark Martin
Rodney Brooks
Rumman Chowdhury
Timnit Gebru

About Silicon Valley Robotics

Silicon Valley Robotics (SVR) supports the innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies, as a non-profit industry association. Our first strategic plan focused on connecting startups with investment, and since our founding in 2010, our membership has grown tenfold, reflecting our success in increasing investment into robotics. We believe that with robotics, we can improve productivity, meet labor shortages, get rid of jobs that treat humans like robots and finally create precision, personalized food, mobility, housing and health technologies. For more information, please visit https://svrobo.org

SOURCE: Silicon Valley Robotics (SVR)

PRESS CONTACT: Andra Keay andra@svrobo.org

“Grocery workers are risking their safety, often for poverty-level wages, so the rest of us can shelter in place,” said John Logan, director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University. “The only way the rest of us are able to stay home is because they’re willing to go to work.” [Washington Post April 12 2020]

In our April 7th edition of “COVID-19, robots and us”, we heard from Linda Pouliot, CEO and founder of Dishcraft Robotics and Vipin Jain, CEO and founder of Blendid. Both provided us with insights into robotics in the food industry and the difficulties and joys of adapting robots to COVID-19 work.

Dishcraft Robotics is Linda Pouliot’s fourth startup, and second robotics startup. She previously cofounded Neato Robotics, the number two player in automated vacuuming. Dishcraft Robotics is a clean dish delivery service for cafeterias, or large kitchens. On a daily basis they deliver customized clean dishes to the customer, they collect the dirty dishes, and return them to a central hub where custom robots wash them.

“We initially thought we would develop the robot and install it directly into dish rooms. And then we found that it was a really high hurdle for an operation to have a big capital expense, and that we could solve their problem in a really frictionless way, by simply doing the delivery because there’s no upfront cost for them. There is no risk for them to try it. And in fact, we give a free couple week trial and we have found that once you start with dish craft, you immediately convert because the service solves all their labor problems, it also is more sustainable. And in today’s environment, it’s very, very sanitary.”

“We give them carts full of clean dishes, they are our dishes that are proprietary. The way our robots work is using magnetics. And so it requires using our specialized wares. And so we just bring in flexible, clean dishes and we give them a collection system where they can drop off. It’s very organized, it’s ADA compliant. It’s pretty space saving compared to where people normally store their dishes. So it’s worked really well for us. And that means for a customer, there’s no construction costs. There’s no months of planning. You know, it’s just been pretty delightful for both us and them.”

“Currently we service essential businesses and we have started to offer our services to help in this time of need to hospitals. Dish rooms are very small and cramped spaces and we realized that workers in them were unlikely to be able to be socially distance. Also today, the hospitals are overloaded. Some have twice the volume of what they normally expect a dish room to have to process. And so this was a great opportunity for them to use robots and use our service and keep their existing staff very safe.” [Linda Pouliot April 7 2020]

Vipin Jain is the CEO and founder of Blendid, a food robotic kiosk startup. After about 5 years of R&D Blendid opened their first kiosks just over a year ago in March 2019 at the University of San Francisco, followed by Sonoma State University, and while they were initially doubtful that people were ready to have their food or drink made by robots, they’ve seen great interest.

“We were told that automating food was too hard. And people won’t like it. People don’t want robots to make the food, people said. But people have different tastes and and standardized food doesn’t cut it anymore. So you need a better solution so that I can get what I like to eat anytime of the day wherever I am. And that can only be done using a lot of data, AI and robotics.”

“We were just getting ready to start deploying into retail, corporate and hospital environments when the COVID hit. So I wish we were a little bit ahead further ahead in terms of deployment because as you can imagine, food is an essential service. We all want food, we all want access to food, but in this environment, we will be fearful about the safety of people working on food preparation, because we don’t know how the food was handled.” [Vipin Jain April 7 2020]

Rich Stump is one of the cofounders of Studio Fathom for prototyping, product development and production services. Fathom specializes in 3d printing additive manufacturing, dealing with multiple materials and leveraging traditional manufacturing alongside, allowing them to solve some interesting engineering challenges or product development challenges. Fathom has been very active in COVID-19 response.

“There’s three main initiatives that we have going right now with COVID-19. And some of them are, are potentially revenue generating, but most of them are just just trying to help us with our expertise and capabilities. The first is obviously with PPE challenges we have. We have a facility in Asia and southern China and so we have a vast amount of supply chain resources. So, we called in our colleagues over there and we found a number of factories that had FDA approved PBE supplies that that were overrun from the flattening of the curve in Asia.”

“The news has been talking about investment into 3M and Honeywell ramping up production in the US, which is absolutely great. The problem is, it’s just not going to get done in time, right? Anytime you buy 150 thermoforming machines and you try to ramp up production to make n95 masks, it’s going to take weeks or potentially months to get any volume. So what we were trying to do is match hospitals and senior homes and folks that needed PPE with supply chain resources that we had in Asia.”

“We’ve had a bunch of roadblocks to the point where we’ve tried to reach out to the state government officials to try to remove some of the roadblocks with customs and tariffs and freight constraints. And so that’s been a an interesting challenge. But we’ve been able to connect, I think over 1.5 million and counting supplies into the US from Asia. It’s not our everyday business, but we have resources, so we tried to help there.

“The second initiative was around the test kits. Obviously there’s been a shortage of test kits. And it turns out, interestingly enough, one of the big shortage items is the nasopharyngeal swab that goes back into your nasal cavity. The main manufacturer was in Italy, and obviously with everything happened in Italy, that that shut down a lot of the supply. There’s been a community of about 50 folks that have come out of the 3d printing community to see if we can 3d print these swabs. And we’ve made a lot of progress.”

There’s now four manufacturers approved to 3d print nasopharyngeal swabs. Next week, we’ll get into production of these in at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in order to support the short term need. Long term, it probably doesn’t make sense to 3d print them given the cost base. But using 3d printing technology, we can design swabs that could potentially perform better than the traditional swab. So that’s been a fun and challenging project at the same time.”

“And the third initiative is around the ventilators. You have folks like Lawrence Livermore developing a ventilator with spare parts that are available today. And you have JPL, the NASA team, trying to develop their own ventilator. Then you have the large automotive manufacturers who have partnered up with various existing ventilator manufacturers and are trying to ramp up production. By today I think more than 270 people have come to us with either a ventilator design, a mask design, or some type of shield design, just over the last 10 days. There’s just a tremendous amount of activity. And it’s great because everyone wants to help, but at the same time, it presents a lot of challenges because so much effort going in so many different directions, that you you worry that, you know, all these efforts won’t end up being impactful by the time we need the supplies.” [Rich Stump April 7 2020]

Mark Martin is the Director of Industry and Workforce Development for California Community Colleges and founder of the Bay Area Manufacturers Discussion Forum. He’s very connected with manufacturers in the region and has a lot of insights into what’s going on in the manufacturing sector.

“Many of the manufacturing companies are being hurt and having to furlough people. There’s about 8000 in the Bay Area and we’re trying to help them repurpose. In some things, it’s relatively easy, maybe you have an injection mold facility, and you can injection mold these face shields, or some of these parts of the face shield. You have to make the molds but it’s still within your core business. Others are contract manufacturers that could theoretically assemble ventilators because they’re already doing medical products. Ventilators are a complicated product, but not necessarily more complicated than some of these people already doing.”

“But for others, you might have to get specialized machines, which can take a long time. And then you need to have expertise around. If you haven’t done medical products before, do you know how to handle the equipment and ensure QC? And the FDA approves factories, not just the designs. I created a list of Bay Area manufacturers and I got almost 200 responses with things they think they can manufacture and I’ve supplied that list to the state government.”

“And community colleges have makerspaces or fab labs. So where I’m located at Laney College in Oakland, we started working on face shields a week and a half ago, because that was relatively simple for us to be able to do. And we printed up 500 face shields to Highland hospital. It took us a day to do it with six people. And I asked the hospital what their daily use was for face shields and they said 600 a day. So I was like, all right, that was a day’s worth for this one hospital.”

“And then we actually took a design that was done by Stratasys for 3D printing and modified it a little bit. And in like two days, we got a molder to set up injection molding, although it’s going to take a couple of weeks to finish. And honestly, I have no idea if we’re going to need in a couple weeks. Because I have no idea what the demand is.”

“Apple’s bringing in over a million a week and others are doing this hundreds or even thousands a time in basements and little shops. But we don’t know if the demand is 5 million a week or 50 million. “

“So that that’s the thing the manufacturers all trying to figure out. I kept wondering why the government didn’t take a little bit of control. Even just financial incentives to say we will backstop you if you supply PPE, so that if the demand falls out, you don’t lose money.” [Mark Martin April 7 2020]

Ken Goldberg is the William S. Floyd Jr Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley, Director of CITRIS People and Robots Initiative and a regular guest on COVID-19, robots and us. Today in keeping with the theme of food robotics, Ken explained the reasoning behind one of his latest projects, AlphaGarden.

This is a farm bot that you can buy from a local company, in San Luis Obispo for about $3,000. Our garden includes 14 species of edible herbs and plants and they’re all growing in close proximity. The challenge is that they’re competing for increasingly scarce light and water. So what happens is that this starts to get quite out of control. Right now, the garden has been acting very autonomously because we haven’t been able to get into the greenhouse, and so it’s starting to decay, and certain invasive species like mint have essentially taken over.”

“We’re trying to optimize diversity, that is to maximize the number of different plant types that are growing. But the key idea here is that we’re using AI to simulate the garden, because a grow cycle takes three months. So we have a simulator that can simulate 10,000 times the speed of nature. We have 64 gardens but thousands of parameters to fine tune the system. Then we evaluate each of those gardens to figure out how to tune the parameters for the watering and pruning devices.”

“This is an ongoing project but the end goal is to be able to learn a policy for successful gardening because polyculture is much more labor intensive than monoculture. The reason that I call it an art project is because it’s extremely difficult for AI and robotics. It’s a big challenge. I’m not at all convinced we’re actually going to succeed. We’re really putting AI to the test. But just this week we did a deep learning method based on the data that we collected from our simulator. And in time we hope to learn how to be able to automate some of these very difficult tasks like organic gardening.” [Ken Goldberg April 7 2020]

The moderator of the weekly ‘COVID-19, robots and us’ discussions, Andra Keay, is the Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics, supporting innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies. Andra was also the Industry Co-Chair of the Human-Robot Interaction Conference 2020, which is taking place online. In the April 3 Industry Talks Session, Chris Roberts from Cambridge Consultants described the process of working out what sort of robotics or automation made sense for food production.

“Chris described a project with the food service industry to look at using robotics and AI. And of course what he wanted to build was a robot dipping chips and flipping burgers and all the rest, but on evaluation, that was not the best direction to go. In this instance AI optimization of locations was the best option. And this is something I’ve heard from a number of other people who’ve been doing robots for the actual preparation of food itself. For example, Creator, who make those fantastic hamburgers, didn’t have a robot arm, imitating the way humans cook. Instead, they completely re architected the entire process of constructing a burger, so that it could be done mechanically.” [Andra Keay April 7 2020]

There’s much more to hear in our weekly discussion on ‘COVID-19, robots and us’ from April 7 2020 with guest expert speakers: Linda Pouliot, CEO of Dishcraft Robotics Vipin Jain, CEO of Blendid Rich Stump, Principal at Studio Fathom Mark Martin, Industry & Workforce Development California Community Colleges and Bay Area Manufacturing Discussion Forum Ken Goldberg, Director of CITRIS People and Robots Initiative and William S. Lloyd Jr Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley; moderated by Andra Keay, Silicon Valley Robotics.

The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) has announced a call for startup companies in robotics, machine vision and motion control for its Automate Launch Pad Competition. The competition will be held at the Automate 2017 Show and Conference in Chicago, Illinois on April 5, 2017. The presenting sponsor of the competition is GE. The event is co-produced with Silicon Valley Robotics.

Automation applications in robotics, vision, motion and motors are impacting many industries today. Recently, there has been a groundswell of startup companies introducing new products in the sector. The Automate Launch Pad Startup Competition seeks out these startups to generate awareness of their technology and help them find new funding.

Eight (8) semi-finalist companies will be invited to participate in the competition that features a grand prize of $10,000. Companies will have three minutes to pitch their technology to a panel of investors and automation experts. Eligible companies include those in the automation space (robotics, vision, motion control, etc.) who were founded in the last 5 years; raised less than US $2 million since creation; and are not affiliated with a larger group. All semi-finalists will be provided booth space on the Automate show floor, putting them in front of an expected audience of over 20,000 people interested in automation. The exhibit space must be staffed during Automate show hours.

“We recognize the critical role of startup companies in driving innovation and bringing forth new technologies to foster continued growth,” said Jeff Burnstein, President of A3. “We encourage startups to take advantage of this opportunity to spread awareness and take their company to the next level.”

To apply for the Automate Launch Pad Competition, fill out the form here. Deadline for applications is February 17, 2017.

Robotics isn’t gender neutral, it’s gender blind. And that means that there are a lot of hidden opportunities for savvy investors and entrepreneurs. One of the first robotics companies I followed was Restoration Robotics, a Silicon Valley based company that’s raised more than $111 M USD in 6 rounds. Restoration Robotics saw a niche for robotics in treating male baldness.

Pree Walia, CEO and founder of Preemadonna has her eyes set on a robotics/computer vision nail art solution. Preemadonna’s Nailbot was runner-up in 2015 Robot Launch startup competition and went on to become a finalist on TechCrunch Disrupt. Her startup was the only one targeting female consumers. Not only does less than 7% of venture funding go to female founders [Bloomberg], but female focused products are also much less likely to get funded, even though they may be addressing a huge market.

Let’s face it — the nail salon industry in the US alone has an annual turnover in excess of $8B according to Statista and that’s before including nail products and home treatments, estimated at another $8–9B, for a total market size of approx $16B.

To put that in context, the entire US apple industry has an annual revenue of half that at around $4 B, with an overall downstream economic impact of $16B, according to the US Apple Association. And the US is the second largest apple producer in the world.

We’ve all heard about the Maker Community and how 3D printers and digital tools can reshape the economy and why 21st century STEM education needs access to fab labs. But meanwhile, there’s been a quiet crafting revolution, which is sending ripples into many adjacent areas. Women have traded their sewing machines in for digital machines, stitchers, knitters, cutters, etchers, embroiderers, etc. Many industries, from the sign industry to textile companies are moving from professional to prosumer, even consumer and DIY. The beauty industry is following.

Preemadonna was accepted into L’Oréal and Founders Factory’s accelerator program. CEO, Pree, presented to senior executives (including L’Oréal’s CEO) at L’Oréal’s Headquarters in France late last year and became one of only five startups to win a spot in the elite program.

Seems like a few robotics startups are now realizing that there are untapped markets in female facing products. The only downside is that robot solutions may start to displace women’s jobs. For example, being a nail artist is a lucrative yet low skilled job. However, there are opportunities both for female entrepreneurs ie for opening up beauty robot service salons, and for female founders and inventors, who may be first to market with new robot products and services.

Credit: Catalia Health

Catalia Health is leading the surge in social robotics, with Mabu, their patient care management system. Catalia Health likes to be seen primarily as a health company that utilizes robots, rather than a robotics company. This focus on solving real world problems while shipping a product has seen Catalia attract both customers and investors, and recently close their Series A round.

Interview with Cory Kidd, Founder & CEO of Catalia Health

(edited for clarity)

What is Catalia Health?

Catalia Health is a patient care management company. We focus on helping patients adhere to their treatment, whether that be taking medication, or managing chronic disease over the long term. That’s the focus of what we do, and part of how we deliver this to patients is through a cute little robot called Mabu who engages with patients through conversation. She’s a little over a foot tall, and can sit wherever you want to put her … on a countertop or bedside table … and she has big eyes that make eye contact with you while you’re talking to her. Conversations with her might last a minute or two, or maybe five or ten minutes; it really depends on the individual patient and what they want to talk about.

Mabu has a touch screen on the front that she can use to display information, but our overall focus is to create an engaging relationship between the technology and the patient. The reason that we use the robot — as opposed to just delivering this through a phone screen or a tablet or PC — is about psychology and not about technology. When we are in front of a robot that has eyes that can look at us and blink, we tend to be more engaged, and we find the robot to be more credible and informative than if the same information were delivered to us through an app. While we have a lot of healthcare applications that we’re looking to build, the core of this is really just basic psychology: how can we create engagement that lasts for a long time? Psychologists have studied the benefits of face-to-face communication for decades.

Is speech the primary interaction that people have with Mabu?

Our platform’s primary means of interaction is conversation, but this can happen in more than one way. For example, when Mabu is talking, she also displays what she is saying on her screen, to make it easy for anyone to understand what’s going on. And when I reply, I can speak back to her, or I can touch a button or location on the screen. And if I’m not at home, I can also get a reminder via text message … in the future this might happen through an app or other desktop interface.

The physical robot is the thing that’s creating the engagement — the relationship — but we can interact with people through other forms of technology as well.

Does the conversation with Mabu end at home? How is information transferred to the healthcare provider?

We do send information summaries back to health care providers — a pharmacist or physician or some other caregiver — but the overall problem we are trying to help with is that the healthcare system simply doesn’t have enough people to manage chronic disease at scale. So while our technology might also enable tele-operation or tele-presence, the focus of our business is to be able carry out an autonomous one-on-one interaction with patients in real time.

Is the patient, or end user, your customer?

Patients get a lot of benefit from our platform, but they are not the ones who are paying for it.

Our direct customers are pharmaceutical manufacturers and healthcare providers. They provide programs to help patients be more effective at taking their medications and managing their conditions, so in their eyes we are another tool in their arsenal.

Can you tell us about your first deployments?

The places where we are rolling out first are where there are existing care management programs already in place, and these tend to be in areas such as oncology and immunology where higher-end drugs are being used. Talking robots are very new and different, so we wanted our contract structure to look as similar as possible to existing offerings. These were the areas where there were already contract types that we could follow into market. We have been rolling out the first several hundred units in the first half of 2016 and are bringing patients onto the platform by the end of this year.

What is your business model? Is it “Robots as a Service”?

In terms of the patient relationship, our robot is key. But in terms of our business model and contracts, we don’t think of our robot as the key piece of what we’re delivering. We use a service model for care management; our customers pay us on a per patient per month basis.

What does interaction with your service look like from the patient’s perspective?

If you want to see what the patient interaction with Mabu actually looks like, we have a short video at cataliahealth.com.

Once the patient plugs Mabu in, the robot comes alive and starts talking. The conversation starts off with greetings and small talk (such as “Good morning, great to see you!”) and then moves on to whatever issue is relevant to the patient at that point in time. Maybe this is simply to check in on whether the patient has taken their medication, or maybe the patient is at a point in their treatment where it’s common to experience certain side effects, and the conversation is about how best to mitigate those for that patient. It really depends on the particular condition or treatment the patient is dealing with. We do a lot of research on each condition before rolling the platform out to patients, in order to build an understanding of common treatment challenges into the application.

In the background, the conversation is being crafted in real time for that patient.

When Mabu first comes out of the box, we know a little about the patient’s medical condition — perhaps what drugs they are on — but we don’t know much else. So from that very first conversation we start learning about and adapting to the patient’s individual personality and the treatment issues they are facing. Mabu largely directs the conversations, but the patient has a lot of say in terms of where that conversation goes. As we build more conversations and more AI into the platform, we are able to craft appropriate conversations for the patient.

This will very quickly become applicable to a lot more drugs and a lot more disease states. Let’s look at side effects, for example. Our first conversations about side effects will be new, but there are many common side effects among drugs. So while we are starting out in just a handful of areas, our goal is to help any patient who’s dealing with a condition on an ongoing basis to better manage their care, and to provide information back to their caregivers so that they can be more effective in supporting them.

Is it valid to be concerned about robots being used to replace human companionship?

We certainly don’t think of this as robots replacing people; we think of it as robots augmenting people.

One of the big challenges in healthcare today is that there are not enough caregivers to deliver healthcare the way we need it. Almost half our population is managing a chronic disease in this country, and there are very similar rates in advanced nations around the world; if we look at the rate of people dealing with health issues on an ongoing basis, it approaches 2/3 to 3/4 of the population.

People might get to see their doctor for fifteen minutes every two months, but that’s not much time, and it’s not an effective way to provide the ongoing care that is needed. We simply don’t have enough people to manage healthcare the way we did 50 or 100 years ago.

Patients need reminders, and they need answers to all the little questions that come up — and that’s where technology like this comes in. We see our service as a way for the people who are providing health care — doctors, nurses, and other trained caregivers — to more effectively reach a larger group of patients. We are not trying to be people’s doctors, we are trying to help their doctor do a much more effective job.

What kind of feedback have you received so far?

Broadly speaking, the feedback has been very positive. People tend to like the interaction right from the very first conversation, and they like how Mabu adapts to them.

We have a great solution that we’ve shown can effectively help many patients, but we still have a lot to learn. We are really excited about the amount of data that we’re going to be getting back from hundreds of person-months of interaction with our platform this year, and how we’re going to use that to improve conversations and personalize them to every patient.

Thanks to social platforms like Siri, Jibo and Amazon’s Echo, we are starting to get used to having conversations with our devices. But you’ve taken a very specialized path into the market. Why did you pick this pathway and business model?

Scalability — being able to provide care to a growing number of patients — is a big challenge in health care. I spent about a year before launching Catalia Health really digging into the US healthcare market to explore the business opportunities. We were thinking broadly around medication adherence and chronic disease management, talking to potential customers and trying to understand where there was a need for this kind of technology. The quick answer was that it is needed pretty much everywhere within the healthcare system. The question of how to provide healthcare in a cost-effective and scalable way is definitely a challenge here in the US, and also in most other nations in the world. We see an enormous opportunity for using technology to provide scalable personalized care.

Of all the robotics and AI movies that have come out in the past five or ten years, Robot and Frank offers a vision comes closest to what we’re doing. The goal of the robot in that movie was to help Frank live healthier by building a relationship with him. We have the same underlying premise in what we’re doing: our technology is focused on building a relationship with the patient, because once we can do that, then we can talk to them about their health care. By comparison, usage rates on healthcare apps are incredibly low; most patients don’t pick them up after the first or second try. But as it turns out, there are particular psychological aspects of how people interact with robots that make them really effective at helping to solve this challenge.

Do you see ways that other robotics companies can leverage what you’ve learned so far?

The broad lesson is to understand where there is a real human or business need. Asking “Where is there a problem that I can solve?” rather than asking “Where can I build a robot?” or “What market can I serve?”

It’s also important to understand what the existing marketplace looks like for those kinds of solutions right now, because the solution today may look very different. Our robot is an alternative to talking to a pharmacist on the phone, and it’s a very different solution, but understanding what the business model is for that kind of service, how those contracts work, who the players are in the space — I think that’s something that any company would be smart to take a look at and understand deeply before trying to compete in those markets.

You’re tackling one of the largest growing areas of our economy, and you’re doing it with a combination of data, AI and robotics. What do you think has changed in the past couple of years to make robotics a viable solution to a broader range of applications?

One of the biggest changes has been in the cost of building both hardware and software. Our robot is pretty simple; we’re not doing anything cutting edge in terms of the physical device that we’re building. But ten years ago producing our device might have cost 100 times what it does today, and that would have limited us to a small set of business models and it would have been very hard to make money.

With the cost of building the technology drastically lowered, it has enabled us to do something very different today than what we could have done five years ago. Today we can build cutting edge technology at a reasonable price point and therefore deliver a cost effective solution.

CATALIA HEALTH

Catalia Health is a patient health management system using social robotics. Founded in 2013 by Dr. Cory Kidd, Catalia Health builds on years of research into Human-Robot Interaction starting at MIT’s Media Lab and continuing with social robot startups like Intuitive Automata. In June 2015, Khosla Ventures led a $1.25 million seed round in Catalia Health for the first trial customer engagements. Catalia Health is on a mission to address both sides of the healthcare equation: improving patients’ health and extending the capabilities and efficiency of healthcare companies.

SILICON VALLEY ROBOTICS

Silicon Valley Robotics is the industry group for robotics and AI companies in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area, and is a not- for-profit (501c6) that supports innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies. We host the Silicon Valley Robot Block Party, networking events, investor forums, a directory, and a jobs board, and we provide additional services and information for members, such as these reports.

We’ll be releasing additional essays from the reports every week or so. You can read full reports by visiting the website.

If you enjoyed this article you may also want to read:

• HAX takes robotics to market in 2017
• Five women robotics experts from Silicon Valley share their stories
• $18.867 billion paid to acquire 50 robotics companies in 2016

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

If you attended CES 2017 last week you may have seen more than 70 HAX powered startups in Eureka Park, the ‘playground of innovation’. As service robotics steals the spotlight, we wanted to showcase some of the ways that accelerators and programs like HAX help grow hardware and robotics startups, including taking them to market.

Here’s an interview with Cyril Ebersweiler, Founder and Managing Director of HAX, excerpted from the new “Service Robotics Case Studies 2” report by Silicon Valley Robotics, the industry association.

Interview with Cyril Ebersweiler, Founder & Managing Director of HAX (edited for clarity)

You say HAX is the world’s first hardware accelerator. Can you tell us how it evolved?

We started the venture back in 2011 in a garage in Shenzhen. We had Eric Migicovsky from Pebble, who had just launched their first campaign, Ian Bernstein from Sphero, and there was also Zach Smith from Makerbot, who would later join us at HAX … a lot of people and technology were converging back then in Shenzhen.

One thing we discovered while leveraging the supply chain for these startups was that Shenzhen was a good place to prototype — and not just consumer electronics hardware (which was the modus operandi back then), but also extremely complex hardware for the health, robotics, and fabrication spaces. The robotics and fabrication spaces were particularly interesting. There are five thousand — maybe fifteen thousand — individual parts inside a robot, and it takes a lot of time, money and resources to build a prototype. By being in Shenzhen, where we had access to prototyping machines, we could accomplish this in record speed.

As more and more startups joined the ranks, we started to develop a better understanding of what it would take to bring those companies to market. Early on we created themes around our first incubation programs, and this has since become part of our philosophy at HAX. Four years and 145 companies later (as of mid 2016), we have HAX Lifestyle, HAX Health, HAX Robotics, HAX Infra, and HAX Fab, with dedicated resources, expertise, processes, curricula, and distribution channels that can help push those products to market as fast as possible.

HAX is still running, and has been scaling up — we have about fifteen people on staff — and we have changed offices almost every year. This year we are moving into a 30,000 sq foot office in the middle of the Huaqiangbei electronics market because we have a lot of lines that are continuously manufacturing and creating new products over there. Some of them are really big, like Makeblock, for example, which has 170 employees already.

After operating for a few years — we’ve done 69 Kickstarter campaigns with HAX Lifestyle alone — I started to receive a lot of requests from our network that our startups needed help to improve their marketing and sales. So eighteen months ago I moved to San Francisco in order to set up a follow-up to our accelerator program, called Hax Boost, which is run by a former Target executive, and which focused on sales funnels and marketing for each of our different themes. If you are a HAX Lifestyle company, for example, we’ll focus on getting you into retail and teach you how to build everything you need to talk to a buyer and test your products in store… test your pricing, point of sale, and packaging, etc. We also help with networking, and will travel to meet buyers and scale up the sales process. At HAX Health, on the other hand, the distribution channels are hospitals, doctors, and gyms — so we take a very different angle there.

Since we started HAX Boost, we’ve had three cohorts with thirty-two companies going through, not all of which have been through our accelerator program. We also have external companies joining us for a sales and marketing bootcamp, which is a lot shorter — just 42 days. The goal is to get these companies from zero to $5 million in revenue (which is extremely ambitious in the world of entrepreneurship and venture capital), so that they know they have a market for their product before they manufacture it. Then they can go back to Shenzhen, and if they’ve done their job well, their DFM (design for manufacture) will be less painful and they will get to market faster because they have already grown out the distribution on the other side. Essentially, we make them ‘kiss’ the other side a little earlier than usual, and we foster those relationships at scale so that instead of taking twelve months to grow to their store, it will take only three months.

How big are your cohorts at HAX Boost?

We do ten startups at a time. While the accelerator programs are fifteen weeks long (because you actually have to build a product in that time), HAX Boost is just forty-two days long because companies already have their product ready. Forty-two days is an ideal length of time to focus on marketing.

TechCrunch called you “the most active investor in crowdfunded hardware” — but that’s only one aspect of what you do, isn’t it?

Yes. We’ve had 145 companies go through our programs now, as of mid 2016 … 115 through our accelerator and 30 through Boost. These have included 65 Kickstarter campaigns, mostly lifestyle products, where we have raised an average of about $450,000 per campaign. If you consider that to raise $100,000 puts you in the top 1% of Kickstarter campaigns, that puts us in the top 0.01% every single time we launch a campaign. We represent 8% of all the $1M-plus campaigns on Kickstarter as well. So it sounds like crowdfunding investment is our focus, but it’s only half (or less) of what we do. Lifestyle companies represent only roughly 40% of what we do. The rest is divided between health, infrastructure, robotics and fabrication. These kinds of companies are B2B for the most part and require a different level of attention when it comes down to technology, obviously, but also business models — which are the most interesting aspect of this work, particularly in the robotics and fab space.

Many of the companies we feature in this report are B2B2C, where the customer is not the final interaction point. I think we’ll be seeing more and more robotics companies in this space … what are the challenges they face, and how have you been able to smooth the way for them?

There are three very obvious challenges on the robotics side.

One is the definition of a robot. We may define this as a machine that makes autonomous decisions and autonomous movements, but there is public confusion around this definition. What is a robot, and why does that matter? It’s important because the public’s vision of what a robot is is going to influence the success of these companies, whether they are making robots in the formal sense or not.

Another challenge is that roboticists deal with extremely complex environments, and the obvious trap for any startup is to become too enamored with the technology, or to become too busy with making it work and not getting to the specific application.

A third challenge is trying to do everything, or wanting to become a platform, because that seems to be the Holy Grail. But we’ve already seen many approaches to building robot platforms and they don’t always work immediately. Take the PR2, the Personal Robot platform, from Willow Garage. It was supposed to be something that could be shared and open sourced to create different kinds of robotics applications… only a few places ever had a PR2, it only worked as a platform if you consider Savioke and all the other startups that came out of Willow Garage.

Another important challenge is the business model. We’ve been pushing to find ways for robots to be more than a box and software being sold to a client. I’m referring to “Robotics as a Service” of course, ie. getting a monthly payment at scale. Why does this matter? It’s easier to be profitable and to attract investors if it’s not about paying for the device.

Historically, extremely high-tech robots designed for a single task were sold for $100,000 – $200,000 apiece. The industry knew this model well, and recurring revenue came mainly from maintenance contracts. But the obvious trend is that robots are getting less and less expensive as time goes on … they are following the path of consumer electronics, which are getting both more powerful and less expensive at the same time. Some of the robots we are seeing today cost just a few thousand dollars, which on the one hand could mean that you can sell a lot of them, but on the other hand, you are trying to sell the value at the moment as well. Lots to figure out.

One of the challenges of Robots as a Service is that robots are still physical and they still require a lot of maintenance, which pushes the price point up even though the cost of the hardware is coming down. This seems inherently less scalable. Do you think these obstacles have been overcome?

Not entirely. Most startups are in the phase of trying. I don’t know the perfect definition of RaaS, because simply making the robot isn’t enough. It has to be tied to an actual value being created by the robot itself. Take the RaaS model that Simbe is using: their clients are billed per item scanned, so the more items the robot scans, the more revenue they generate. Or in the case of Avidbots, the more square feet that the robot cleans, the more Avidbot earns. But it’s not the end user paying for it. It’s really the corporation behind all this infrastructure that is paying for it, and it’s still too early to know whether they will be willing to scale up.

That said, I think that hardware reliability is in some ways the bigger question, as these robots are just getting to market at scale and we don’t yet know how long they will last out there. Few robots have run more than a thousand miles today, so all this is up in the air.

Are there other areas in the retail and consumer goods chain that you would encourage startups to look at?

Robot arms are getting better, cheaper, more accurate and less dangerous, so I think they
will start to pop up in all sorts of places and will come in many forms. At first they will probably be used in commercial environments, for example in restaurant kitchens. In the retail space, robot arms could fill shelves and stock inventory, or they could also be used to deliver goods from the store. Today we are a little constrained in our thinking of how a robot arm can be used, but as they become more application-specific they will just become better at what they are supposed to do.

It’s a little more complex if you’re thinking about the consumer market. People tend think of consumer robots as companions — robot pets, for example. But consumer robots will no doubt differentiate as well. There is a HAX company called Trainerbot that launched this year on Kickstarter. They are building a ping pong robot that teaches you how to play and trains you — and you can imagine that could be done with many sports. When you add computer vision and sophisticated movement, some people might think of these robots as even better companions.

Obviously there is a period of land grab before the field becomes specialized. Right now we are in a phase where most companies want to be a platform, or want to have the killer app. I think it’s slowly becoming more competition-specific, but it will continue to specialize.

Being based for such a long time in China where there has been such growth in recent years, what do you see ahead?

One thing that isn’t well acknowledged is that China is starting to come up with their own robots. They now have a pretty good technical base and they are catching up on know-how. It’s an obvious market for China to serve its need for robots domestically – so that is something to watch for.

Also, we have seen a commoditization of manufacturing machines, from laser cutters and 3D printers, to production machines, CNC machines, and furnaces — anything that makes a product come alive, as it were. Being in the manufacturing center of the world, it is phenomenal the level of automation that has been achieved already. Smartphones are produced with barely any human touching them; even the touch screen is tested by robot fingers. Though it’s easier to create a fully automated robot factory if you have only one product to build, there are increasingly fewer people in factories here: there’s nobody in the injection molding department, for example, but you have robot arms and conveyor belts (which at some point will be replaced by mobile robots), so that trend will continue. Robot arms are going to replace a lot of jobs.

But I think the tipping point for robotics is going to happen when robots start creating jobs. One can imagine that some robotics companies might reappropriate themselves, with the value of the robot essentially coming from the production that comes out of it. Dispatch is a great example of a company that has to figure out whether or not it is better to create its own network and rent it — the same is true with most robot companies. Avidbots could become a cleaning company if it wanted to, and it would be a better one, for example. Or Rational Robotics could rent their industrial painting machines to someone who wants to build their own garage. We haven’t seen that yet, but I’m expecting to see it pretty soon.

What is most exciting to me about robotics is that the business model is all down to what you want to do with the future of robots: Do you want them to replace human workers? Or do you want robots to be creators of value in the very first place?

HAX

HAX is an accelerator for hardware companies founded in 2011 in Shenzhen by Cyril Ebersweiler and Sean O’Sullivan. The HAX accelerator program selects 30 startups a year for seed investment in a cohort program and, as of 2016, the HAX Boost program provides an additional marketing bootcamp. Although HAX is well known for backing successfully crowdfunded consumer hardware, a significant number of startups now moving through HAX are enterprise robotics startups. HAX is investing in five technology themes; lifestyle, health, robotics, infrastructure and fabrication/prototyping. HAX is funded by SOSV, the accelerator venture fund founded by Sean O’Sullivan.

SILICON VALLEY ROBOTICS

Silicon Valley Robotics is the industry group for robotics and AI companies in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area, and is a not- for-profit (501c6) that supports innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies. We host the Silicon Valley Robot Block Party, networking events, investor forums, a directory, and a jobs board, and we provide additional services and information for members, such as these reports.

WE’LL BE RELEASING ADDITIONAL ESSAYS FROM THE REPORTS EVERY WEEK OR SO. OR YOU CAN READ FULL REPORTS AT: https://svrobo.org/reports

Charging Bull statue. Credit: Sam Valadi/Flickr

You may be surprised, but I’m not. These are the people I see regularly both in Silicon Valley and overseas interacting with the robotics community. That makes them the smart money (most of the time). According to CB Insights, the 7 most active robotics investors over the last 5 years are: Eclipse Ventures, High-Tech Gründerfonds, Lux, Intel Capital, Sequoia China, CRV, and Visionaire Ventures.

As CB Insights demonstrates, old school ‘smart money’ is still making investments in robotics — just at a slower pace. Overall, the last 5 years has seen an increase in global robotics equity funding to $2.6 billion in 405 deals.

Source: CB Insights

Eclipse Ventures is a $125m hardware fund. which ‘backs iconic entrepreneurs building vertically integrated companies incorporating hardware, software and data.’ Some of their portfolio companies include; Kinema Systems, Marble, Modbot, Rise Robotics, and Clearpath Robotics.

High-Tech Gründerfonds is Germany’s most active and leading seed-stage investor across fields of cleantech, biotech and robotics, with e576m in two funds. Portfolio companies include; REVOBOTIK, Bionic Robotics, Magazino, Reactive Robotics, Medineering.

Lux Capital has $700m under management and ‘invests in emerging science and technology ventures at the outermost edges of what is possible’. Some of their portfolio companies include; Saildrone, Tempo Automation, CyPhy Works and Auris Surgical Robots.

Intel Capital has had more portfolio exits than any other venture capital firm since 2005. Intel Capital is stage agnostic, across a wide range of technologies. Portfolio companies include; Ninebot, Yuneec, Savioke, and Persimmon Technologies.

Sequoia has invested in an unprecedented number of enormously successful companies, including Apple, Google, Electronic Arts, LinkedIn, Dropbox, and WhatsApp. Today, Sequoia has robust connections to the four most innovative and fastest-changing economies in the world: China, India, Israel, and the United States. Sequoia China portfolio companies include; Ninebot, Makeblock, Quotient Kinematics Machine, and DJI Innovations.

CRV, aka Charles River Ventures, has over $2.1b under management with more than 40 years of experience in 16 funds. Some portfolio companies include; Jibo, Wonder Workshop, Airobotics, and Rethink Robotics

Visionaire Ventures has just closed a second $200m fund and is investing in companies from artificial intelligence to machine/deep learning, robotic automation, visual perception, agricultural and digital health technologies. Portfolio companies include; CANVAS Technology, Modbot, Savioke, and Zipline International.

Silicon Valley Robotics held an innovation tour for some of our global partners ahead of the RoboBusiness conference in San Jose. Representatives from Odense Robotics Cluster, Invest in Denmark and Denmark Innovation Center joined up with Sumitomi Mitsui Bank, Siemens, A3/RIA, Robotics Hub and the Office of Science and Technology Policy for a ’round the Bay’ innovation tour.The day started with a discussion on cluster strategies at Denmark Innovation Center in Palo Alto, then moved to SRI International for a lab tour, where we saw both historical robots like Shakey and the latest innovations like Motobot and Superflex.

After lunch, we visited Otherlab in San Francisco to see companies like Pneubotics and Otherlab Orthotics. Then we finished the afternoon off at The Switch in Livermore, with a visit to Positron Dynamics and the Robot Garden maker space. The brews on tap rounded out a very lively day of discussion.

We also welcome new Global Partners: Blue Ocean Robotics and Harmonic Drive. Blue Ocean Robotics is looking for local robotics companies to partner with in developing robotics solutions for the global market. Odense Robotics can also offer assistance in reaching partners and markets in Europe.

Plus, if you’re looking towards Asian markets and partners, SMBC can help. We also had another innovation tour very recently with SPRING Singapore and there are significant subsidies for US robotics companies launching into Singapore.

If you have any photos you’d like to share, or want to become a member of Silicon Valley Robotics, get in contact with Andra.

Photo source: LEKA

Catch up with past winners: CleverPet (2015), Preemadonna/Nailbot (2015 runner-up), and Leka (2014).

Will you be our next Robot Launch winner? There’s 25 days left to register! You can register by going to 2016 Robot Launch global online startup competition.

Grand prize winner (2015): CleverPet

CleverPet is a smart dog feeder that lets you play, teach, and connect with your pet all day. More than just an automatic dog feeder, CleverPet teaches your dog games, dispenses rewards, and adapts the gameplay as your pet gets more skilled. Robot Launch judges said they picked Cleverpet because they were “a polished company that is poised to serve a big market that people take seriously,” noting that the CleverPet’s adaptability and focus on play distinguishes it from other robotic pet products, and that the team understands the needs of both pets and their owners. CleverPet received a prize combination of $5000 in cash and $5000 in Amazon Web Services, courtesy of c/o CSIRO, SMBC, iRobot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp2qqQ3RKTw

Since winning last year, CleverPet was unveiled to the public at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), January 2016. Co-founder Leo Trottier successfully pitched CleverPet to a delighted and enthusiastic crowd, winning first place in the startup pitch battle.

The CleverPet Hub will be sold through their website, although they are not accepting orders yet. But you can sign up to receive an email for when they start accepting orders. The price of the Hub will be $299 (USD).

1st Runner Up (2015): Preemadonna

Preemadonna designed a nail decorating robot aimed at girls and young women. Nailbot uses thermal inkjet technology, computer vision and a smartphone to allow you to paint custom designs on your fingernails.

Since being awarded 1st Runner Up, Nailbot has amassed a collaborative community of testers, hackers, designers, and nail art fans—early adopters and recruits via the Preemadonna Ambassadors program. Walia has also partnered with nonprofit partners like Maker Girl to help test, design for, and the get the word out. Nailbot is currently in beta, with a limited trial release heading out later this year, after that, they’ll head into mass production. There’s a waitlist to join. Currently, the waitlist has over 20,000 people, and will be doing a preorder campaign September 2016.

“Since Robot Launch, we’ve been humbled and excited by the response from the tech community and from girls and boys that want to be a part of Preemadonna and help bring the Nailbot to market. In fact, we have over 20,000 people on our waitlist and will launch a pre-order campaign in the early Fall! We encourage students to get involved with our Nailbot journey by submitting to one of our Ambassador challenges (design Nailbot art, win a DIY printer or share your story on our blog!). Robot Launch was a terrific launchpad for Preemadonna to introduce the Nailbot to the world.” Pree Walia, CEO of Preemadonna & inventor of the Nailbot.

They also recently won The Audience Award, selected by Embedded Vision Summit attendees, based on innovative vision-based products in the inaugural Vision Tank competition. Other awards include being a finalist at both TechCrunch Disrupt SF’s 2015 Startup Battlefield and Girls in Tech’s 2015 Lady Pitch Night, as well as, being published in the Robohub 25 Women in Robotics to Know.

Grand Prize winner (2014): LEKA

LEKA is a robotic toy that helps autistic children learn to regulate their own emotions through play. The robotic companion is designed specifically for children with special needs, to sparkle their motivation and help them learn, play & progress.

After a recent successful Indigogo campaign, Leka Inc. (formerly Moti) developed a product roadmap for full-scale development. They plan on ensuring that the first version of LEKA meets all safety and security standards for American and European markets:

• July 2016 – Releasing the first manufactured prototype.
• November 2016 – Release the second improved and optimized manufacturing prototype.
• December 2016 – The last prototype will be released just before Christmas as we want to present LEKA to Santa’s workshop.
• January 2017 – LEKA will need to go through the validation process. The production of the pre-series products will start in February.
• April 2017 – Beginning manufacturing for the finished products.
• May 2017 – LEKA will finally be wrapped and delivered to your door.

You can also register at leka.io to keep in the loop for when they officially launch.

Will you be our next Robot Launch winner? Register at 2016 Robot Launch global online startup competition. Pitch your robotics startup online to an audience of top VCs, investors and experts, with live finals in Silicon Valley.

Entries close August 15.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also want to read:

• Meet the winners of #RobotLaunch2015
• One year later: Update from Leka, Robot Launch 2014 Grand Winner
• Robot Launch global robotics startup competition announces top 15 finalists

Lynx mobile robot platform can be adapted for many applications. Source: adept.com

Interview with Michael Oitzman, Sr. Product Line Manager, Adept Mobile Robots
courtesy of Tanya Anandan, for A3 Association for Advancing Automation

(edited for clarity)

What are the current markets and types of applications for Adept mobile robots in the service robotics sector?

Service robotics is a small, emerging part of our main target markets (manufacturing, warehouse/ logistics and semiconductor). We have begun to explore this market space through several partners that have deep market knowledge and established customer relationships. We are finding that the Lynx platform is flexible enough to address many growth opportunities in this space.

Hospitality

I want to start with Techmetics because it’s been an interesting relationship. We built and designed the Lynx to be an OEM platform for customers and partners to white label our solution, to take our technology and build onto that base with an application payload on top of it. That’s exactly what Techmetics has done.

Techi is a new service robot configured to serve food in restaurants.

Techmetics’ forte is in point-of-sale systems. That’s the technology that they’ve had for many years; these are systems for ordering and paying for food. The natural extension for them is robotic delivery. This fall they’re going to start installing multiple robots into their customer base to be robotic waiters (called Techi, as seen in this video). That will be the first application that they deploy. I think it’s a very interesting opportunity because the Lynx technology fits so well into that space because of its unique ability to navigate safely and reliably through very dynamic environments.

So we’re excited about that, and then the same thing with their robotic butler in hotels (video). There’s a lot of opportunity in Southeast Asia, especially in Singapore, which is where they are launching. Reduction of labor costs is a large focus in Singapore. The Singapore government has provided some funding to get them started in this application. Employers can replace the manpower of three servers with the Techi robot and have an ROI of less than a year.

With Techmetics, they have a couple of interesting applications that they are bringing to market and we’re going to see them grow over this coming year. We’re very excited about supporting them going forward.

Healthcare

We’ve also developed the Lynx Courier AIV, which is a vehicle that we sell completely configured. It’s available in either an enclosed or open configuration. The vehicle includes sliding shelves for holding the cargo. We designed that vehicle for hospitals, for carrying lab samples or for moving materials from the pharmacy out to the wards. That was an evolution with our friends at Swisslog. We’re continuing to work on the next generation of vehicles deploying to hospitals. Regionally, we’re also working with new partners such as the Lamson Group in Australia to go after healthcare applications in those markets (video).

An Adept press release referred to the first commercial use of its mobile robots as far back as 2010. Was that this partnership with Swisslog?

Yes, that was the prior generation. Before the Lynx, we had the MT-400. When we acquired MobileRobots, the MT-400 was the first generation Industrial Mobile Robot. Then we created a couple of application payloads on top of that vehicle, one of which is the Courier generation. That’s what Swisslog incorporated into their OEM product (RoboCourier®, as seen in this video).

Then two years ago when we released the Lynx, it was an entirely new design optimized for high reliability and flexibility. The software also evolved during those years. From this newer generation of the OEM platform we created the Lynx Handler SEMI, which is the semiconductor- specific vehicle. The Lynx Handler incorporates a collaborative SCARA robot on top of the Lynx mobile base. Our largest installed base right now is into the semiconductor industry. That’s where we matured the fleet management solution (Adept’s software tool for managing multiple robots is called Enterprise Manager).

The Lynx Enterprise Manager fleet management software coordinates multiple robots’ jobs.

Outside of manufacturing and logistics, those are the service applications that we have in terms of what I can talk to you about now.

How did these markets evolve or how did Adept choose these service market areas for concentration?

Our focus has been primarily on our three target markets as I mentioned. We wanted to get the operation and reliability in terms of the core navigation, safety, mapping and programming technology to meet the demands of these markets. Our partners in the service industry saw the performance of our Lynx product and realized that it was a great platform for their application space. They quickly adopted the technology and began to share the new capabilities with their customers.

Do these partners come to you or is it the other way around?

It’s a bit of both. We look strategically for the right opportunities and then we have partners that have come to us because they love our platform and don’t want to re-engineer everything. For those partners, like Techmetics, our advantage is what can be put on top of our solid platform.

What is a typical day like for the robot working in a hospital?

The hospital Couriers operate throughout the day, making deliveries as needed. When the robots aren’t driving, they’ll sit and charge to make sure that they are ready to go. That’s a pretty straightforward application for the Enterprise Manager, where there’s more than one vehicle operating and they’re running routes to a variety of pick-up and drop-off points.

How does the robot learn the routes and understand the layout of the hospital? 

This is part of the core technology. Our mapping technology is done using the vehicle, so you just have to walk the robot around the facility once. You simply show the robot every place it could potentially drive, and we use the drive navigation laser to do the mapping. Then we generate an accurate facility map, which will be used by all of the robots for path planning and navigation.

Here’s the interesting part about the Lynx Enterprise Manager solution – all the robots in the fleet share the same map, so when you edit the map for any reason all of the Lynx units are automatically updated with the new information. They’re all on Wi-Fi. That’s how the robots communicate with the Enterprise Manager.

Then on the map you designate the areas that are forbidden, where you don’t want the robot to drive. If you never want the robot to drive down a certain hallway, you put a forbidden zone there and the robot will never enter that spot. Or you can assign one-way aisles, so the robot will always drive in one direction in this aisle. Or you can designate two-way directional sections where the robot will hug the right or the left side of the aisle, or follow any preferred traffic pattern.

Who usually does that programming or tweaking?

The Lynx software interface is designed to be very intuitive and is easy for the end user to configure. Typically one or two end users attend a short training course.

Once you set up the map, the robots are then on their own to decide how they get from point A to point B based on the map features. So the robot will path plan through the facility and then if an obstacle appears in the path of the robot, for example, a door is shut or there’s a gurney parked in the way, or if there’s a bunch of boxes or a ladder, or anything that’s temporary that it might encounter, the robot will see that with its drive laser and will path plan an alternative route around the facility based on the definition of all the map features.

Enterprise Manager is required anytime you have two or more mobile robots operating in the same workspace. With Enterprise Manager in place, when both of those vehicles need to cross each other’s path, it will inform the other robot that there is a robot ahead and it’s going to go to its right, so you need to go to your right and drive around it. It will have a much faster and cleaner path planning without having to stop temporarily. And at intersections Enterprise Manager will give one robot the right of way. That sort of algorithmic decision making is built into Enterprise Manager to help the fleet be more efficient.

What other types of onboard technology support the robot’s performance?

One thing about our platform, because our primary markets are in industrial and warehousing, everything on our system is hardened for that environment. We’re perfectly comfortable taking it out of the warehouse and putting it into another environment with humans, where maybe the regulations aren’t as developed as they are in the warehouse or on the manufacturing floor. There’s no one else on the market today that’s using that level of technology in service robotics.

Lynx is a collaborative robot, interacting safely alongside people. We’ve designed the system with all the safety sensors and control architecture that make the system collaborative.

Then you have a sonar package on the front and the back of the robot for looking at things that might appear in its path. We have the option to include vertical lasers as well. That means we can put a vertical light curtain around the sides of the payload. The worst obstacle for a mobile robot would be a table where it only sees the legs and thinks it could navigate between those legs. Yet potentially you could have the payload located at the tabletop level. In that case, the vertical lasers would be able to spot that tabletop.

We have a very unique solution in something we call Acuity. Acuity is the option we developed because LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging, or laser radar) by itself is not capable of operating successfully in a complex, dynamic environment. Any mobile robot using LIDAR and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) can get lost if the route is too different from the reference map that it’s using to navigate. With Acuity we use an upward-facing camera placed on top of the vehicle for a 120-degree view. The vehicle looks up at the lights in the ceiling and uses those lights to triangulate its position. As it drives, it keeps looking for the next set of lights to come into view and it uses that to keep it localized in the world.

The vehicle itself has digital I/O and analog I/O so we’re able to control active elements on the payload. We also provide electrical power at various regulated voltages supplied from the robot’s battery. That’s actually how we power the robots that are running on top of our semiconductor applications. In addition to the robots, in the payload section, people are putting PLCs there. Techi (the hospitality robot) has the little tablet with its eyes, and that tablet communicates with the robot core to anticipate where it’s driving.

What kind of feedback have you received from customers/end users?

The units we have deployed are all performing very well. It is interesting to see our customers give the robots individual names and almost treat them as fellow employees! The advanced navigation capability really allows these robots to operate autonomously without any interaction or support. If we go back to the warehousing and manufacturing, we have some very happy customers that are just thrilled with the technology and what it’s been able to do. I think our newest service industry customers will see that same sort of value.

How do these robots provide value in each application? Typical return on investment?

We’re trying to design a solution that can give customers an ROI in a year. Techi is replacing waiters. They’re reducing the staff and then all the overhead costs of hiring and training that labor. Singapore is also a high-tech market. They’re used to having high-tech gadgets, so I think there’s a bit of novelty to it as well.

In the hospital environment, it’s about making people more productive so they can focus on more value-added tasks. There are also intangibles about predictability and traceability. Things are sent from one point to another and it is guaranteed that they are going to arrive intact and on time.

How significant of a role does Adept’s experience in the industrial sector play in the service sector and what have you learned from the industrial sector that you can apply to the service area?

The semiconductor market is extremely demanding, because time is money in a fab. Those robots run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They don’t even have time to charge the batteries on the robots. They swamp out the batteries between shifts. So from a systems stress standpoint, the fabs have been a true test of industrial reliability and have resulted in a robust product platform. Every other customer that’s come afterwards is now gaining the advantage of having worked through those situations in the fabs. We’ve learned a lot from those robots being deployed, so we’ve improved the reliability of the robots.

I think that’s a key buying criteria for those partners because they know that we design and build robust solutions. We have solutions that are designed and engineered to function in the industrial world and we’re bringing them into the consumer space where, if we have a partner that has a need, we have a platform that is fully featured and supported globally.

What are the main differences or new challenges you’re encountering in the service area?

The Lynx software for me is the enabler for service industry applications. The software will likely require specific capabilities that will need to evolve to get better across all these markets.

Does Adept’s reputation precede it or do you sometimes feel like a startup?

We have the advantage of taking the relatively new technology of mobile robots and leveraging our deep knowledge and experience of fixed industrial robotics and automation. We are trying to innovate at a very fast pace to address market demand. We’re growing the technology quickly and are working to be more nimble in terms of how we can design and evolve the market. I think Techi is a great example. That opportunity came to us and we said what can we do to help these guys with their vision. Here’s a partner that has all of the rest of the pieces put together, so it was the perfect partnership for us. Now they will take it to market in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Looking forward, what are you envisioning for Adept mobile robots?

I think it’s pretty intuitive if you look at our existing product line of fixed robots and the mobile robots. When I look at the next generation of mobile robots and the convergence of putting mobile manipulators on top of the vehicle, which is where everyone is looking to go, I think we’re a uniquely qualified organization because we have both assets in our portfolio, fixed robots and mobile robots. It’s a natural extension of our key core capabilities and a great place for us to drive towards.

Adept distributes and supports its products worldwide both directly and through channel partners. Around the globe, more than 68,000 robotic systems are installed with either Adept robots or robot controllers.

In 2010, Adept acquired MobileRobots, Inc., a strategic move positioning the multinational to explore commercial and industrial applications for the burgeoning mobile robots market. The flagship of its mobile robots product line is the Lynx® Autonomous Intelligent Vehicle (AIV) (video), which serves as the mobile platform for various payload solutions incorporating robotic manipulators, shelving systems, cart transportation and channel partners’ human machine interface technologies. The majority of Adept’s customer base for its mobile robots is in the industrial sector, including manufacturing, warehousing and logistics, and semiconductor fabs. Emerging and still evolving markets in the service robotics sector include hospitality and healthcare.

The rest of the Silicon Valley Robotics free report on service robotics is AVAILABLE HERE — or in instalments at Silicon Valley Robotics — featuring case studies and analysis from industry experts and investors.

BCG predicts the fastest growing segment in robotics will be those designed for “personal” uses like education, cleaning, and entertainment.

by Ekta Sahasi, Vice President at Konica Minolta Business Innovation Center
and Greg Lok, Business Strategy Lead at Konica Minolta Business Innovation Center

After years of flying under the venture capital (VC) radar, the robotic industry is finally starting to see a remarkable growth in funding traction. In 2014, VC investments in robotics rose 36% to $341.3 million up from $250.7 million in 2013, according to Travis Deyle’s annual robotics review. [1] The spike in 2014 investments follows what Deyle believes was a “frothy” funding environment, influx of drone startups, and later-stage medical robots. As a whole, the robotic industry continues to be dominated by industrial and manufacturing products. While this will continue to be the most prominent application, BCG predicts the fastest growing segment in robotics will be those designed for “personal” uses like education, cleaning, and entertainment.[2]

Source: svrobo.org

Although robotic VC funding is growing annually, these investments must be viewed in greater context. The increase in robotic funding follows the general venture trend of increasing investments in hardware startups, which have increased more than 30x from 2010-2014 (See Figure 1, Hardware Startups by Year).[3]

For hardware, theories on the increase in investments include strong hardware exits and the rise of crowd-funding platforms, such as Kickstarter and Indigogo, which lead to the $2.3 million backing of Jibo.[4]

While few robotics companies reach this level of crowd-funding success, successful campaigns appear to have a positive correlation to increased funding.[5] Additional investments from the corporate sphere and their associated high-publicity announcements have also served to increase awareness among general public, investors, and entrepreneurs that robotics is a growing and worthwhile industry.[6]

Source: svrobo.org

While both hardware and robotic investments are growing each year, they still lag behind the percent of investments in less-risky segments of internet- specific (25% in 2014) and software companies (41% in 2014) according to PwC 2014 venture capital data.[7] In stark contrast to these high percentages, only .07% of the $48.3 billion VC funding went to robotics.

Comparing the hardware- based robotic companies to those in software and internet-services, the investments in the latter are less risky and have the ability to grow and scale quickly with less upfront investment. Although some investors are willing to take risks and bet on the future of robotics, the funding of millions of dollars pales in comparison to the billions being poured into other sectors.

With less than 1% of VC going into the robotics industry, it begs the question: Why are venture capitalists skittish when it comes to robots? It boils down to perceived risk. William Santana Li, CEO of Knightscope, observes that most VCs believe “Hardware is too hard.” It requires expensive investments that appear risky when you consider that many emerging startups run on the fuel of hungry, yet relatively inexperienced entrepreneurs. And those who do have experience are unlikely to have developed the expertise needed to build a sustainable and scalable manufacturing operation.

Source: svrobo.org

For entrepreneurs and visionaries who see the possibilities of robotics, the constant struggle to receive funding can discourage the development of disruptive robotic solutions. Ironically, the challenge of receiving VC backing can encourage the best and brightest to shy away from the funding struggle: Peter Thiel observes, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” The perseverant founder William Santana continues to motivate entrepreneurs, “Tune out the naysayers who will just keep talking because building something is “too hard.” Ignore the noise, focus on your mission and deliver results.”

While hardware may be hard, there is a way to play it smart. The value of strategic investors and partners should not be underestimated. In what many consider to be an overly risky environment, strategics can provide the expertise needed to help accelerate robotics companies.

Strategics with strong legacies in hardware bring operations infrastructure, knowledge, and foresight to help emerging startups commercialize. Furthermore, these strategics can de-risk the most challenging components of starting a hardware company, including the servicing, deployment, design for servicing, maintenance, manufacturing, and distribution. With Konica Minolta Business Innovation Center (BIC) as a strategic partner, Steve Cousins, CEO of Savioke, notes that they “gain a strong services infrastructure, capabilities, global reach, and scale.” Having a strong strategic investor or partner allows the Savioke team to focus on putting more Relay robots into the world without having to worry about scaling to support their growing customer base.

Like any true partnership, the benefits flow both ways. Corporate strategics understand the necessity of staying innovative in today’s competitive market. At the Konica Minolta Business Innovation Center, “We are transforming Konica Minolta’s core business by focusing on industries that provide our customers the tools they need to stay ahead of the curve” says Ekta Sahasi, VP Konica Minolta BIC.

Source: svrobo.org

The desire to access these disruptive industries like robotics, offers a strong incentive to ensure the investment companies become best-in-class. Unlike some venture capitalist firms, corporate strategics are investing in products that align with both the strategy of their business and are poised to produce financial returns. By aligning the success of the emerging companies with the strategy of the business, corporate strategics are especially invested in the success of the emerging company.

There are many ways to connect with strategic investors. At Konica Minolta Business Innovation Center, we partner with emerging startups through investments, partnerships, co-development, and mentorships. We have invested in Knightscope, an autonomous crime-detecting robot that aims to reduce crime by empowering the community with data and security. Through our partnership with Savioke, an autonomous robot for the services industry, we have installed robots in hotels and created a service model to help scale.

We also co-develop with our robotic industry companies to integrate complementary technology from our platform. For instance, we are working to have Sigsense, a maintenance-detecting software, to integrate their product into robots in order to predict maintenance needs. Finally, we have worked with accelerators such as Plug and Play to identify and mentor the emerging robotic startups.

Konica Minolta is supporting the development of the robotic solutions that will transform the future. If you are an entrepreneur, investor, accelerator, or enthusiast, say hello and join our journey!

Konica Minolta’s Business Innovation Centers (BIC) are established in five major regions around the world as a core engine of business transformation. The BIC mission is to gain a deeper understanding of customers’ needs and deliver the greatest value to the world. BIC North America fosters a portfolio of solutions in the areas of robotics, healthcare, connected intelligent ecosystems, workplace and enterprise solutions. BIC manages the entire lifecycle of new business development from ideation to creation of actual business lines.

The rest of the Silicon Valley Robotics free report on service robotics is AVAILABLE HERE — or in instalments at Silicon Valley Robotics — featuring case studies and analysis from industry experts and investors.

1. Venture Capital (VC) Funding for Robotics in 2014 | Hizook. (n.d.). Retrieved November 2, 2015.
2. Deyle, T. (2015, January 20). Venture Capital (VC) Funding for Robotics in 2014 | Hizook.
3. Quintero, C. (2015, September 14). Who Invests in Hardware Startups? – Bolt Blog. Retrieved November 2, 2015.
4. Crowe, S. (2015, February 13). 10 Most Funded Kickstarter Robots Ever – Robotics Trends. Retrieved November 2, 2015.
5. Witheiler, M. (2014, December 14). Raising More Than $750K In Hardware Crowdfunding. Retrieved November 2, 2015.
6. Keay, A., & Komissarova, V. (2014, February 26). Valery Komissarova on when investing in robots is the right move. Retrieved November 2, 2015.
7. Kokalitcheva, K. (2015, January 17). VCs invested $48.3B in 2014, highest level since 2000. Retrieved November 2, 2015.
8. Quintero, C. (2015, September 14). Who Invests in Hardware Startups? – Bolt Blog. Retrieved November 2, 2015.

Many advances in our technologies occur through borrowing capabilities from one field to progress another. Our technological universe is built from a web of interrelated advances that push one another forward.

The practice of Enterprise IT is being transformed by a variety of innovations that emerged in the last decade. Vendors who have traditionally sold into this space are struggling to adapt. They are facing the Innovators Dilemma,[1] largely captive to their traditional business models.

We can expect a similar dynamic of disruption for the field of service robotics. Cloud computing, Software as a Service, and mobile connectivity represent an important competitive opportunity for every robotics-focused company, and the future of the service robotics industry is inevitably one of Robotics as a Service.

With each new generation, the weight of innovation and market momentum shifts. The latest generation is wrought from a mix of technologies that include cloud computing, Software as a Service, ubiquitous wireless connectivity, and universal end points.

Cloud computing is the notion that computer hardware is no longer something that everyone needs to purchase. Instead, compute cycles can be purchased from a centralized resource. One example of this is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which in 2014 had more than one million customers and was growing at 99% year on year.[2] EC2 is a type of “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS).

Software as a Service (SaaS) leverages the centralization of Cloud Computing with a targeted application offering, generally solving the whole of a business problem, whereby a company or individual can purchase a complete solution without needing to deal with servers, with installation, nor maintenance. This approach is increasing in popularity with IDC estimating $50.8B in revenue by 2018 up from $22.6B in 2013 on Enterprise SaaS applications.[3] SaaS ranges from collaboration technology like Citrix Gotomeeting to CRMs like SalesForce.

Ubiquitous wireless connectivity is about the degree to which every new device is connected wirelessly to the internet and is a significant shift in comparison to only a few years back. While wireless connectivity has been possible for a long while, smartphone adoption is now at over 64% of the US population,[4] assisted by massive increases in wireless data reliability, coverage, and speed.

Smartphones have taken over as the primary Internet connection point for most people, and even most businesses. Whereas connected end-points had for several decades been mainly desktop PCs, the emergence of Wi-Fi brought Laptops into dominance, and smartphones have since taken over. The expectation is that Internet Connected devices (the Internet of Things) will dwarf even the number of smartphones with 50 billion connected objects estimated by 2020.[5]

The combination of cloud computing, mobility, and ubiquitous connectivity is transforming Enterprise IT, and will impact a huge number of other industries. One symptom of this is the unprecedented number of startups emerging to reform almost every industry.[6]

Robotics is undergoing a similar transition, but from a different base. In this case, it’s enabled
by rapid reductions in the cost of components, innovation in physical artifacts, and all of the shifts in the cost and availability of compute cycles. Some of this has been explored over recent years as “cloud-robotics” for shared learning and offload of compute intensive tasks, and is now seeing practical implementation.

Imagine…

• Device 27 is two feet tall, and specialized for leather cutting. It’s a core component in a production line in ShoesRUs, a small shoe factory in Portland, Oregon. After several months of unimpaired operation, Device 27 identifies early signs of a burn out in its motor three.
• Device 27 is part of a whole of life service offering from FactoryRobotsCo, designed to address all the needs of a small local factory in the new “on demand” world of retail. The factory has no margin for downtime, and needs the service to “just work.”
• Device 27 coordinates it’s own preemptive replacement and Device 27a arrives by self driving Uber or Amazon drone delivery and slots into Device 27’s role while Device 27 returns to base for maintenance.

This is not realistic in the near term, but consider the following elements.

1. In this world, winning players will be those who can offer a complete service
2. Big data and forecasting are used to optimize the service
3. All devices are continually connected back to base
4. The Service company integrates with other service offerings, such as Uber and Amazon, all with the goal of providing a seamless experience

As with today’s Software as a Service offerings, this solution can now integrate global best practices. In this case for running local robots. Local installation and maintenance are controlled by FactoryRobotsCo, and the owner of ShoesRUs need not maintain a large technical staff, nor incur large consulting fees.

Let’s consider some parallels between the changes in how we use computers in business with similar changes in robotics.

In the same way that every business is now leveraging SaaS and cloud for IT, every business will be able to leverage SaaS and cloud as part of service robotics solutions. The first steps toward this future are already visible – some have been around for a while, some are emerging today – such as Rolls Royce and Tesla.

Once upon a time, Rolls Royce was famous just for their engines. Now Rolls Royce sells “propulsion” or “power by the hour” not engines.

Rolls Royce claim to have real time connectivity to every one of their engines as they fly around the globe, to collect a huge amount of performance and maintenance data and to ensure that maintenance is driven on an “as needed” basis rather than merely to a schedule. They also charge by the mile.

Tesla is another great example of putting service in the driver’s seat of their business. These cars are sold as a whole of life experience, with a focus on “ongoing delight.” Many argue that the rest of the industry will need to follow.

It’s been a perfect storm for Enterprise IT, and the accumulated capability represents a perfect storm for Robotics. This is a shift of power from local technologists calling the shots in the factory/workplace, to a world where capabilities are much more available: in the cloud, on demand, as a service.

1. Clayton Christensen, 1997, The Innovators Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Harvard Business Review Press
2. AWS re:Invent 2014 | (SPOT 301) AWS Innovation at Scale, Nov 17, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JIQETrFC_SQ
3. Worldwide SaaS Enterprise Applications 2014-2018 Forecast and 2013 Vendor Shares, Dec 2014, http:// www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=252568
4. Chapter One: A Portrait of Smartphone Ownership, April 1, 2015, http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/ chapter-one-a-portrait-of-smartphone-ownership/

The rest of our free report is available here — or in installments at Silicon Valley Robotics — featuring case studies and analysis from industry experts and investors.

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Robots in Depth is a new video series featuring interviews with researchers, entrepreneurs, VC investors, and policy makers in robotics, hosted by Per Sjöborg. In this interview, Andra Keay, director of Silicon Valley Robotics, talks about opportunities and challenges for robotics startups and how developments in the agricultural sector can aid consumer robots.

Andra explains how Silicon Valley Robotics formed and what they do, including organising networking events such as the annual Robot Block Party.

She also shares her views on the areas of robotics where we will see significant developments in the near future, including progress in agricultural robotics that could feed into improvements in other industries, such as home robots.

You can support Robots in Depth on Patreon. Check out all the Robots in Depth videos here.

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