Transcript 

Andra: I’m talking today with Soft Robotics CEO, Carl Vause. Can you tell us about your work?

Carl: Our expertise is in the soft actuator, where we are able to make robotic actuators of completely elastomeric material – rubber, silicon rubbers, polyurethanes. It’s a really different aspect of making what you’re normally used to … rigid manipulators, or parallel bar linkages, or linear actuators … but we’re really doing it without any rigid components.

Andra: And what research has this come out of?

Carl: The company was actually spun out of Harvard.

In 2007 there was a DARPA project called ChemBots and Harvard was an awardee on that project. Professor George Whitesides in the chemistry department actually took up the challenge… [which was to] build an octopus. And instead of trying to build a mechatronic robot that we’re all familiar with, they developed the soft actuator … trying to replicate the tentacle. Out of that came the intellectual property that is called ‘pneumatic networks’ – and using pneumatic networks you can build all kinds of different actuators to make fingers, hands, joints and the like.

Harvard worked on this for about five to six years, and then there was a decision that the technology had matured to the point where it was no longer in the best interest to continue research. [Instead they began] commercializing the technology and using it to solve some well-understood problems, and so the company was put together in the late spring/early summer of 2013.

Andra: What are some of the problems and specific applications that you are looking at for Soft Robotics?

Carl: One of the things that’s really interesting about the technology is that it’s low cost, it’s conformal, and you can design the hands in an open loop system to apply just the right amount of force.

The example I use is picking a tomato off of a vine. This would be a very, very difficult problem for a traditional robotic manipulator to do with closed-loop feedback. We can design a soft hand with elastomeric fingers that will only operate at a force that is below the crush force of a tomato. And so you just simply visualize a tomato, you activate the gripper, and it will grab the tomato and pull it.

This really opens up what I like to think of as the future of robotics into collaborative robotics: having robotics being able to work side by side with people and factories, handing instruments and tools to workers on assembly lines … or automating areas that we haven’t been able to automate until now, such as produce processing and food processing. Right now it’s very hard to handle fruits and vegetables with robots, but we really feel that soft robotics will unlock this capability.

Andra: You’ve mentioned collaborative robotics – the ability to safely work alongside people – as one of the significant benefits. And you also mention the opening up new areas, for example handling food and agricultural products. Do you think this will also apply to some of the other areas that have not been so easy for robotic manipulation, like fabrics, textiles, other deformable materials?

Carl: Absolutely I do.

One of the big challenges in robotics is how do you handle these soft things. If you’re shipping a shirt from the shirt manufacturer to an outlet like The Gap, they come folded in a plastic wrap. Picking up a folded shirt in a plastic wrap is very difficult for a robotic manipulator, but we’ve actually shown [we can] handle these delicate highly unstructured objects, and we can do it with a lower complexity than is typically done today. And that same grasper we demonstrated handling a folded shirt can also pick up a bag of rice, or things as varied as children’s toys.

Andra: I find soft robotics a very interesting area because of these wide applications, but naturally there are some limitations as well. I assume there are tradeoffs in accuracy or perhaps in strength. Where do you feel the boundaries of the applications are?

Carl: The biggest feedback we get right now is lifespan.

Traditionally in the research environment, soft robotic devices have not had the best lifespan – they’ve had very low cycles – and if you are talking about automating things such as textile handling, produce handling or collaborative robotics, you need to have cyclic lifetimes that are similar to traditional hard graspers. This is a problem that we’ve really focused on solving, and right now in our lab we have one of our soft manipulators running on a lifetime test. As of this morning we are approaching three million cycles, so we feel like we’ve really bridged that lifecycle/lifetime problem that some soft robotics technologies have had.

The other challenge we have had and are working to address is speed of grasp. Sometimes in soft robotics you’re moving a fluid – whether it’s pneumatic or hydraulic – and it’s obviously at a slower rate than with an electrical motor. But we’ve also demonstrated grasp times in the hundred millisecond range. We feel that the current limitations are well known, but that they can be solved and that solving them is deterministic.

Andra: Are there some advantages as well, in terms of the cost and power-to-weight ratios?

Carl: Absolutely.

Right now we have a small gripper – a light-payload gripper – that can handle about 600 grams reliably. But it weighs only 100 grams, so when you put it on the end of a 1kg arm, you’ve got quite a bit more payload than a traditional device where you’re looking at maybe half of your end-of-arm payload taken up by the weight of the end-effector. We’re able to create very lightweight end-effectors, which make can collaborative arms much more productive in terms of payload capacity.

The other advantage that’s really been a powerful part of soft robotics is the cost. All of our cost goes into the engineering of the devices, but once we can get manufacturing a device, it’s really composed of proprietary design of the actuators, and then a light material such as polycarbonate and silicon elastomers. We’re not talking about an end-effector that’s got a lot of sensors and stepper motor and linkages in it. We believe that the standard cost for an adaptable end-effector can come down in price by an order of magnitude very easily, which is really important to opening up this new market of collaborative robotics.

Andra: You’re having to create a startup that’s going into unchartered waters, and I’m hoping you can tell me a little bit about the process. Soft Robotics has been in existence as a company for just over one year?

Carl: Since July of 2013.

Andra: How many people are there on your team?

Carl: Right now there are five of us. Two fulltime engineers, myself, and we use two consultants to keep the books and take care of our regulatory responsibilities.

Andra: Your background is not in robotics research so much as in business, and you’ve been doing medical devices before this. How did you come to join Soft Robotics?

Carl: My undergraduate degree was in electrical engineering and I worked on doing stepper motor control with 8-bit micro controllers. We were running assembly language at the time, and it was very miserable. I had forgotten all about that and was spending a lot of time with medical devices. I was introduced to [soft robotics] technology, and we were looking at various medical applications for it because of its soft conformal nature, obviously. The thing that makes soft robotics fantastic for handling tomatoes also makes it fantastic for handling human organs.

But when we got started, I remembered all the difficulties I had with control systems and feedback loops, and realized that we had a soft open-loop manipulator technology and that we should really spend time with the robotics community. And once we sat down with the robotics community, [their] feedback was, “This is the kind of thing we’ve had been waiting for! We’ve been trying to make the human hand, and that’s a very costly endeavor that takes a long time and a lot of effort … and you’ve created this highly dexterous, conformal, lightweight device in a short period of time!” With that initial feedback we decided to put all of our major efforts into focusing on the robotics opportunity.

Andra: Has this been supported through commercialization grants through the university, through the labs? What’s the process that has taken you this far, and what’s coming next?

Carl: It’s very difficult to run a hardware startup these days. We’re in the days of mobile apps and wonderful online portals that can access billions of people, but hardware startups require people and engineers and time.

We were lucky in that we did get some initial funding through the government, through two DARPA grants. DARPA had seen thetechnology in the university lab and asked us to push it forward. We’ve also been very lucky with angel investors. The company has been funded partially through government grants and the majority through angel investors who have seen the technology, done their fact checking with the robotics community, and who believe that this is something that will change robotics and will be very important going forward.

Andra: What I see is that angels are playing quite an important role in getting robotics startups closer to a large seed round or series A round, and it is a slower process than it is for many other startups. Certainly mobile and apps tend to give the impression of being cheap and easy to get off the ground, and it’s not totally the case. Whereas with hardware, it’s rarely the case that it’s cheap and easy.

Carl: It’s very interesting because in many of the discussions I have with investors, I try to help them understand that we need to buy materials, we need to fabricate things, we need to have access to a machine shop, and these are not things they’re accustomed to hearing from people working on software.

Andra: What do you think is coming up, that you’re facing?

Carl: The biggest obstacle in this is when you’re taking the technology out of university. The universities do very cutting edge early-stage research, and they’re not concerned about things like cost and manufacturability and scalability of a business process. That is what we spent the first nine months working on: could we get a good design space where we could build soft robotics in a 3D CAD system. That required a lot of work by our engineers. Second, we had to find vendors who could help us actually manufacture the parts in quantity, so that when we did start engaging companies we could sit down and say, “Look we’ve got a design space, we understand the design variables to solve these problems, and we have a manufacturing house that can make these in lots of 100 and lots of 1000 if desired.” That was a good nine months at the beginning of the company.

Now it’s really about understanding what the most important problem to solve is. We can do a lot of things with the soft gripper, and we’ve had suggestions for manipulating chickens and poultry processing, which is very interesting, but I know very little about poultry processing.

So we’ve been engaging the integrators, the end-users, and the robotics companies to really understand what problems they would like to see solved.

To circle back, the dominant themes really are realizing that dream of collaborative robotics, and automating industries (or parts of industries) that haven’t been conducive to robotics yet. But the feedback is, with soft robotics we could really bring automation to those new markets.

Andra: Are you going to tackle this one market at a time? For example, prove one out, and the add another? Or prove one out and then add ten or a hundred others?

Carl: I would say there’s maybe a third way.

What I’d like to do is to prove one out, focus on one market and really show that we can make a difference and then use the technology to go into new markets. And as early stage startup, focus really is important to our success.

As we are proving out these ‘one’ markets, one of the things we’ve been focused on is the unstructured warehousing environment: the ability to pack something that comes in a small electronics box, such as a phone or a tablet, or that shirt that’s wrapped in cellophane, or a football. Manipulating all these with the same system is very challenging and that’s a problem we believe we can solve.

But in that process, we have found that there are a lot of things that people would like us to focus on. Textiles is a good example, produce is a good example. So to bring it back to your original question, we are focusing on single markets at a time, but as we have focused on making a difference in those, that series processing if you will, we’re learning more that’s allowing us to open up new conversations in new markets.

Andra: What do you think is the single biggest obstacle that you’re facing in terms of startup growth? This could range from recruitment, to tools, to facilities, to funding, to things that I haven’t even thought of mentioning …

Carl: If I were giving advice to someone who’s going to start a robotics startup today, I would have them really spend a lot time on how to fund their company. We were at the Massachusetts Innovation UnConference two weeks ago, where we actually ran a session on funding the hardware startup. Traditional backers, the venture capitalists of the world, would really like to see traction.

Traction is the big word you hear in startups today. That means you have to have a prototype or you have to be running live pilots with potential paying customers or potential business partners. [You need to understand] the path and the funding necessary to get you from a really good idea or core technology, to where you have a pilot running and a customer, so you could stand in front of a venture capitalist and say, “This is real technology, we have solved the scientific risk. We can make it work and we have meaningful customers who are interested in the technology.”

By understanding that that’s the journey you’re going to be required to walk, I think you’re bringing clarity to [your] business plan. Unfortunately the world where you can have really great intellectual property or a great idea and get funding, it’s just becoming more difficult in recent years. So getting to that first customer contact is very, very important.

Andra: I agree, and I think by definition there’s a lot of intellectual property out there, but it’s hard to prove that it has value.

Carl: Yes.

Andra: Unless you have developed traction. I’d actually avoided using that word even though it’s written down in my notes, so thank you for bringing that up. [Laughs.]

Carl: You’re welcome!

Andra: Is there anything that you would like to say that we haven’t covered? Do you have any other tips for startups that you’d like to share?

Carl: Absolutely.

There are three things about doing a robotics startup today that I think are very important. One is, everyone is fascinated by robotics, and so whenever I’m out somewhere and someone hears the word robotics, they’re very interested in what we’re doing.

But as we’ve discussed many times at tradeshows, the public perception of robotics is very different from the reality of robotics, and [so second, you need to help] bridge that gap [by showing] the problems we’re trying to solve today versus the reality.

And third is that when you speak with investors – whether they are potential angel investors, or venture capitalists as investors – you need to help them understand the reality of robotics today, and also the vision of what robotics can be, and how you’re going to help move the industry forward. This is really the key I would say.

If you could remember those three things, you could be very successful in this industry.

Andra: That’s great. Thank you very much for your time. I really enjoyed the discussion!

All interviews are edited with great care for clarity of content, and may not represent the text of the original interview exactly. We can not assume responsibility for their accuracy. 

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• ShanghAI Lectures 2013, Lecture 5 – Soft Robotics and Bioinspiration I
• New soft ‘antagonistic’ actuator enables robots to fold
•  Startup Series #6: MIT Entreprise Forum VLAB
• Startup Series #5: Rodney Brooks, Steve Cousins & Pioneers Festival
• Robot startup series #4: Chris Anderson at CES 2013
• Robot startup series #3: Elad Inbar & RobotAppStore
•  Robot startup series #2: Bob Christopher
•  Robot startup series #1: Autom and Cory Kidd

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

The VLAB Collaborative Robots forum on Thursday May 29 was a masterclass for robot startups. For 90 minutes at the Knight Management Center at Stanford, we heard all about the business of robotics from industry veterans, VCs and startups. The panel consisted of Melonee Wise (CEO of Unbounded Robotics), Milan Shah (VP of Rethink Robotics), John Dulcinos (VP of Automation at Jabil), and Peter Hebert (cofounder of Lux Capital). The panel was moderated by myself, Andra Keay, Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics.

The MIT Enterprise Forum Bay Area (VLAB) was formed in 1990 and is one of 30 chapters around the world. VLAB helps startups and entrepreneurs find the best practices for developing viable business models for technology-oriented markets. The VLAB events are sponsored by the Stanford University Office of Technology Licensing, and the Alumni Association of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. The caliber of presenting companies and panelists at our events has earned VLAB the reputation as one of the premier high-tech forums in Silicon Valley.

The VLAB committee conducted quite a rigorous audition process for panelists (and moderators) looking for the most successful examples of companies in the industrial/service collaborative robotics space. VLAB panels usually consist of two startups, an incumbent company whose business model is under threat from the startups, and an investor. This was a really successful balance of opinions, although it’s humbling to realize that a company like Rethink Robotics is still considered a startup.

The panel opens with a 10 minute overview of the economics of robotics and then an in-depth look at Unbounded Robotics. Then the panel discussion really gets going with both John Dulchinos and Peter Hebert schooling us in the opportunities and challenges for robotics startups. I came away with a much better appreciation of the huge potential for industrial and logistical robotics. Not all successful robotics businesses are venture fundable, and understanding the customer/market space is still the biggest challenge for startups. According to VLAB’s promotional material:

It’s not every day you get to ask pioneering robot startup founders about their journey. The Robolution panel at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna comprised Rodney Brooks from Rethink Robotics and previously iRobot, Steve Cousins from Savioke and previously Willow Garage, Noland Katter from Anybots, and Walter Wohlkinger and Michael Zillich of Blue Danube Robotics, a new startup from Vienna University. Between them the panelists have started or spunoff well over 15 robotics companies, started the first robotics venture fund and been hugely influential in shaping the current rapidly emerging robot startup space. ‘Fast, cheap and out of control’ was Brooks’s 1987 insight into robot exploration of the solar system, but is very apt today, as drivers like open source software, affordable COTS and crowdfunding expand possibilities.

And here’s an excerpt from a great article on Robohub.org “Is this the right time for robotic startups?” by Torsten Andre who attended the event as a startup founder.

In the end, Rodney Brooks said that the trick is to find applications where robots can do something useful and the customer is willing to pay for it. Costing over $200,000, Willow Garage’s PR2 is probably not one these robots. But, as Steve Cousins points out, robots can also be built for approximately $15,000. Assuming a lifetime of two years, robots have to generate a value of about $20 per day for an investment like this to break even – something he thinks can certainly be accomplished. He expects robots to be present in our day-to-day lives within the next few years, making this indeed the right time to found a robotic startup.

Read more from our Startup Series.

Read more from our Startup Series.

I interviewed Elad Inbar, CEO of the RobotAppStore, just before the announcement that Grishin Robotics was investing $250,000 in this cloud robotics market play.

For Grishin Robotics, the future is in the clouds. Grishin Robotics are investing $250,000 into RobotAppStore, an online marketplace for robotics applications. It seems that Grishin is betting on the robotics industry following the same patterns as the smartphone or personal computing industry. But can robotics be compared to either personal computing or smartphones, given the lack of a unified robotic platform or even a common robotic function?

Elad Inbar, the founder of RobotAppStore believes that we are seeing the same sort of convergence in robotics as happened in the mobile phone industry. In the early days of the phone industry, developers used to have to build a different ring tone for every single model of phone, even phones from the same company. This convergence in robotics owes a lot to the development of ROS and the increasing use of COTS or common technologies.

RobotAppStore and Grishin Robotics also have infographics on robot apps and cloud robotics.

Read more from our Startup Series.

Bob Christopher was CEO of Ugobe, the company that made Pleo, the robot dinosaur, one of the first successful consumer robotics products. Greg Appelhof is the CEO of TRG, a global retail company specializing in emerging technologies.

Together they have written “The 2 Year Itch”, a paper advising hardware and robotics consumer technology companies on the finer points of surviving in the retail market.

In this video interview with Bob Christopher, the second in our robot startup series, he shares stories from the starting of Ugobe with Caleb Chung, and their first meetings with Greg Appelhof while they were doing stealth guerilla marketing at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show.

Bob talks about developing an understanding of your retail partners balanced against a clear understanding of your product and your company’s ‘dna’ or core principles. He explains the term, 2 year itch as more than just a critical period in company lifespan when poor inventory management can sink a successful product. It also represents the uneasy position of a consumer hardware company bookended between the costs of manufacturing and the revenue of retail.

You can download a copy of  The 2 Year Itch here.

Read more from our Startup Series.

Consumer robotics had a watershed moment just a few days ago, when Autom, the robot weightloss coach, was launched at Dublin Web Summit. I’m very excited to open our Robot Startup Series with an interview with Dr Cory Kidd, the founder of Intuitive Automata and maker of Autom, which is now being produced by PCH International.

Autom was originally Cory’s PHD research at MIT, which he then moved an accelerator in Hong Kong. Most recently Cory has been travelling the globe to secure Autom’s Series A funding. And as a Robot Launchpad startup, Cory has offered to share his experience of the gruelling process from prototype to production. This interview was recorded just before Autom’s funding was finally finalized.

Intuitive Automata introduction
Intuitive Automata creates interactive coaches for helping people better manage long-term health issues.  We address one of the biggest challenges in health care: getting patients to adhere to a medical or health regimen.  The technology is based on research by Dr. Kidd, our founder and CEO, that showed the efficacy of interactive robots at engaging a person over time and successfully conveying information to them.  He is joined by Bill McCord, our CTO who has over a decade of experience in commercial software development and has created the software on the robot and the back end.

Our platform has been shown to be significantly more effective at engaging a patient over an extended period of time, allowing them to better adhere to a treatment regimen as compared to web, computer, and mobile applications.  The advanced interaction algorithms that are drawn from psychology, medicine, and human-robot interaction are proven to be more engaging and effective at conveying information to the patient than screen-based systems.  We are building an API that allows us to license this core technology out to other companies while at the same time leveraging it as the main component of our products.  The physical nature of our weight combined with these algorithms has been shown to be more effective at keeping dieters engaged and has gained us early customers that include some of the largest US health insurance companies, hospital and provider networks, and employers.

Autom
Autom is an interactive robotic weight loss coach that has been shown to be more effective at keeping a dieter engaged than any existing weight loss program.  Using proprietary AI algorithms that create a daily interactive conversation between the coach and the user, Autom is able to create and maintain a long-term relationship.

Developed by Intuitive Automata, the theories behind Autom were created by Dr. Cory Kidd as part of his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab.  He also worked closely with a leading medical weight loss expert, Dr. Caroline Apovian of Boston University Medical Center’s Nutrition and Weight Management Clinic, who remains medical advisor to the company.

Kidd Biography

Dr. Cory Kidd is the founder and CEO of Intuitive Automata, a health care technology company that creates interactive coaches to help people address the challenges of making lasting change.  Dr. Kidd received his M.S. and Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab in human-robot interaction, a new field combining robotics, artificial intelligence, and psychology, among other disciplines.  While there, he conducted studies that showed the advantages of using a physical robot over screen-based interactions.  He also conducted an extensive study showing the efficacy of his weight loss coach in helping people to diet and did work in local nursing homes with robotic companions for elderly individuals.

Prior to his work at MIT, Dr. Kidd received his BS in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  While there he was a part of the Aware Home Research Initiative, a focused research effort that was looking for ways to allow older people to live in their homes longer.  He managed the research project and taught courses on related technologies.

Read more from our Startup Series.