[00:00:00] Speaker A: So super capacitors essentially have a static charge instead of a chemical reaction. Like batteries, they charge very quickly, within one to two minutes, depending on the size of the pack. And they're perfect for opportunity charging because a lot of the times along your process, you might only get a couple of minutes to really quickly charge between each cycle.
Close.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Robot Industry podcast. We're glad you're here, and thank you for subscribing. And my guest for this episode is Conrad Curlio. He is with Sew Mac Solution System Solutions, and a lot of us know it is sew your drive. Hey, welcome to the podcast, Conrad.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Hey Jeff, thanks for having me on your platform.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Hey, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about how you got interested and excited about robotics and automation?
[00:00:55] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, in secret, I'm a closet Sci-Fi geek, so anything to do know robotics and space and future tech is my jam. And one of my favorite authors of all time is Isaac Asimov, who just happened to formulate the three laws of robotics. So anything to do with AI, robotics, machine learning, all that stuff is just right up my alley. Right? So anyway, I've been working within the industrial automation space now for about 18 years, coincidentally always for a German company. I wore many hats over the years, from business developer to technical sales consulting to project management. So I'm proud to say, I guess for the last eleven years, I've been part of the SCW family. And at SCW, I'm the brand manager for Max Solution, which is SCW Eurodrive's system solution division, essentially the company's integration arm, OEM branch for AGVs.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: And can you tell us a little bit about who sew Eurodrive is? And we mentioned in the warm up, like, I'm in a lot of factories and I see the sew brand a lot, but for those people who maybe aren't in as many factories as I'm in, could you explain about who is sew?
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Absolutely, I'd love to. So, originally founded in 1931 in Brooksville, Germany. So for over 90 years, SCW Draft has grown to be really the global leader for industrial automation. We have about 100 facilities in 90 countries, and amazingly, even to this day, SEV, as it's pronounced in Germany, is a private company owned by the Blicko family. So in the event you're curious, SEV stands for Sedoce, electromotor, and verks, which is the extent of my German. So hopefully I didn't butcher that.
The company is active mainly in the manufacturing industry, we're a very strong brand in the automotive as well as food and beverage, where of know service, reliability and uptime is key and important not to overlook our activities in mining and very large scale material handling with SCW's industrial gear division. And these gears are the size of a small truck, for example. But anyway, the core business of SCW is power transmission and industrial automation, meaning geared motors, servo motors, drives, motion controllers, decentralized technology, inductive wireless power, and all the kinematic software to kind of tie all that together. It's kind of unique because as a manufacturer we also face the same challenges and we also have the need to automate our own processes. So we have developed our own line of AGVs, first for our own internal use, followed by, I guess, the general release to the industry. So I would say the company now is running probably over, I don't know, 1000 AGVs. And we've been doing that for about a couple of decades now. So all the bugs, all the pains in learning and developing that technology, we kind of absorbed through our own internal use.
We, by the way, grow organically. We develop everything in house. There is no third party software on the vehicles or the fleet manager. If you happen to open up one of SCW's units, I would say 90% of the content is SCW hardware, with the exception of cameras and safety scanners.
[00:04:26] Speaker B: So we're going to back up just a little bit. And because you are an AGV expert and you're representing AGVs with Sew, let's talk about what an AGV is. And of course somebodY's going to be walking their dog and going, what is an AGV? What does it look like? So can you tell our audience a little bit about what that looks like?
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Totally. But I also have to step back and sort of discuss what the AGV acronym stands for, because it might be a little bit confusing for a lot of audiences.
I've heard them being called autonomous guided vehicles, or automated guided vehicles. There's other terminology, like mobile industrial robots, MERS, AMRS.
So for us at SCW, we focus on the automated units. So in our case, our vehicles are actually automated guided vehicles. While AMRs would be more autonomous mobile robots, maybe a little bit best suited where the environment is more chaotic and it has to change.
To simplify, both types would follow a virtual path, have obstacle detection, and are safe for humans to be around. However, only the autonomous units would dynamically reroute themselves, which could affect your cycle time and most likely come with an annual subscription per unit, while the automated ones, I would say, are a little bit more basic. They have a predefined path, and they just follow that path. That path is virtual, so it doesn't have to be the old school painted line on the floor. But they wouldn't reroute themselves dynamically. They might not necessarily do obstacle avoidance, and they would basically want the obstacle to be cleared by a human. So very different levels of technology between one and the other.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: If I'm walking in a factory or a distribution center and I see an SCW unit coming towards me, it will stop, or it will go around me, depending on which one it is. Right? Or if it sees a forklift or something, a box is in its way, it will detect that, and it will navigate around that box or that person.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: Yes, totally. I mean, they're meant to be used with people around and other forklifts, although we always kind of laugh. That can prevent the AGV hitting the forklift, but not the other way around. That's why you want to replace the manually driven forklift. But, yeah, totaLly. The units have Lidar that we always use for safety as well. So we have 360 degree field of vision and safety. We don't do slam per se. We do more like natural feature localization, where we use the terrain to bounce off the light from our scanners to get that reflection to know where the obstacle is. That's a 2D plane. Above that plane, we use 3D time of flight cameras, so we could totally see people or other equipment going through the path of the vehicle. It will stop, it will send signals to red flag that there is an obstacle in the way. It's all programmable. So that behavior, what you want it to do, whether you want the AGV to send a warning to the PLC or the warehouse management system saying that unblocked. But in our case, it will not go around the obstacle. It would stop, and it would reset and restart itself once the obstacle is manually removed, but it would not go and do the dynamic object skirting or object rerouting. That's the big difference. So, in a warehouse environment, where you have pallets everywhere and you have a bit of a chaotic environment, you would probably need that. And the AGV would sort of go around and reroute itself, and might affect the cycle time, because it's obviously going to go around in a manufacturing facility where you might be delivering hardware to an individual cell at a very precise cycle time. You don't want the AGV to take a different path and take an extra two minutes to get to its final destination. You want that product to be delivered very quickly and that's the difference. So you have to keep essentially the path clear.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: And where are you seeing growth in the industry, like which sectors and which types of facilities? And you go all across Canada too, right?
[00:08:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Obviously our clients are national. Well, it could be any facility with AGVs. I mean, they're not cheap. So the ROI gets a lot better when the customer is running multiple shifts. So two, three shifts. In the past, the traditional customer would be the automotive customer, where they are highly automated and they run three shifts. Food and beverage is also now very highly automated and they also run 24 624 seven. The cost of technology is coming down. So in the past it would be the larger companies, now it could be any SME that would be able to purchase this equipment. And essentially I would kind of draw parallels to the EV market where, for example, Tesla would start off with the higher models, like the Model X and S, where you have to have deep pockets to afford that. And now you have the Model Y and Model three, I think the same thing with AGBs. They are becoming a commodity product. The prices of technology is dropping and now any SME can afford the product. But if a customer wants to improve productivity, if they want the flexibility of being able to scale up their production, they can use AGVs. If they have a very chaotic environment and it's not safe because you have forklifts driving around everywhere, then safety could be a driving KPI for you. And then you would want to use AGVs in that case.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: And what are some of the average applications for you? I mean, it's material handling for sure.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. But it could be any application, really. Anything that's dangerous, anything that's repetitive, anything that's monotonous, if you will, which could be just a simple application, doesn't have to be complex, like I said, to justify the tech. So transfer to and from storage, feeding a manufacturing cell, driving to shipping, anything that's like low skill, low value add, but necessary, could be replaced by a vehicle. Right? So for us, the way I see it, to achieve a balance between, like a human robot collaboration, we want to strive for the human to really do the value add along the manufacturing process and the robot to handle the routine tasks.
So if we were to, let's say, take an SCW manufacturing process, for example, because like I mentioned, we use our own vehicles, we deliver parts of motors and gear motors to the assembly cell using AGVs, or we would actually use the AGV as a mobile Workbench so we would actually build things on top of an AGV in a progressive type assembly.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: Could you give us an idea about some of the payloads and kind of the popular AGV model?
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Yeah, for us, I would say anything that's 500 kg, up to 1500 or higher would be good. We like the big, heavy, dirty and bulky. So we prefer the larger type vehicles. It's just better suited for a high voltage hardware.
But I would say the sweet spot is like 500 to 1500, where we're really good at the style of AGV. Usually most customers kind of envision this platform type AGV that's very low to the ground, very boxy. And that gives you the advantage of using that as a base to install what we would call like a low inhaling device, which could be maybe like a conveyor or some sort of a lift. So our most popular drive arrangements would be omnidirectional drive arrangement, where you can go in basically in any direction. Left, right, you can do that crab walk in a very confined environment that's really good, as opposed to just bi directional movement where you have to actually turn or pirouette and you have to look at your turning radius. So omnidirectional, I would say, is one of our go to type arrangements, just for flexibility. And that would probably also be our segue, maybe to one of your future questions, is what the energy storage would look like? Because that's very unique to what we do for a living and that's very unique to what we try to deploy in our AGV systems. Yes.
[00:13:06] Speaker B: And so what is different for SCW energy storage systems?
[00:13:11] Speaker A: Yeah, so I guess it's a two part question, two part answer. At SCW, our preference is actually to use supercapacitors on most projects, along with movie trends, which is our inductive charging method. So supercapacitors essentially have a static charge instead of a chemical reaction. Like batteries, they charge very quickly, within one to two minutes, depending on the size of the pack. And they're perfect for opportunity charging, because a lot of the times along your process, you might only get a couple of minutes to really quickly charge between each cycle. So that's true opportunity charging, but they also have a bit of a smaller energy density than batteries, so you might actually need more of them. So again, better suited for the larger payload vehicles, where the form factor of the vehicle might be bigger. And now you have the opportunity to essentially crab more supercapacitors. So storage capacity and life is not affected by temperature on super capacitors. It's not affected by the number of cycles. It's not affected by the charging amperage or the depth of discharge. Well, even it's not affected by anything. So, super capacitors are rated for up to 100,000 working hours and 1 million cycles. So if you crunch this on your calculator, because I can't do that in my head, that's over eleven years of running your unit at 24/7 which is insane. So imagine your phone or any of your electronics lasting eleven years. That just doesn't happen. They don't build it that way because they don't use super capacitors. They use batteries, right. And just to point out that we don't use super capacitors just for mobile applications like AGVs. We can install them on any application with any regenerative loads. And we can recover some of that energy when the motor is acting like a generator. So a perfect example of this is a stacker crane in like a warehouse, like an automated warehouse, right. When the load comes down, we can harness that energy and store it inside the supercapacitors for future consumption on the next cycle, instead of just dissipating that heat in, say, a braking resistor. So if you're running a cold storage facility, like a cold warehouse, normally that energy would be wasted. And not only that, it would be dissipated through the brake resistor. So you're actually adding heat into environment that you're paying to cool. Right. So it's actually a really good fit. So I'm not sure if you ever noticed all these storage warehouses popping up everywhere off the major highways. But typically, if those are high, they're high racking and those are essentially automated. So this tech would be perfect suited for a lot of that stuff, because we can make that whole facility very green because we're recovering a lot of that wasted energy. And then on the flip side of that, we favored the use of wireless inductive power for mobile machines, right? So this is SCW's movie trans product. We introduced this back in 2005. So this is not even new technology, and this is not even Sci-Fi this is simply the inverse of a transformer, where you have the primary coil that's embedded in the ground. That would be the form of a line cable. So that would allow you to have continuous charging or charging lanes. So if you have a very simple loop for your AGVs to run, you can put that line cable everywhere and you can actually get rid of, not only getting rid of batteries, which we don't use anyway, but you can actually get rid of super capacitors and essentially power that vehicle nonstop and have zero energy content because you're wirelessly powering that vehicle throughout the entire driving distance. Right. It's perfect for a wet and dirty environment.
So, for example, if you are running AGVs and you're using LiDAR, which most AGVs use for navigation, you can actually get rid of some of those Lidar scanners, which they wouldn't really be suited in a wet environment or a dirty environment anyway. So you can actually get rid of that altogether and use the electromagnetic field to actually navigate. So it's like a two for one. You're charging the vehicle, and you're also using that to navigate.
There's another form of that. It's called spot charging, that allows AGVs to leapfrog from one charging puck to another. So tons of cool, different applications, but, yeah, very neat stuff.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: So I wanted to change the conversation a bit and ask a little bit on the more of the sales side, like, who buys these mobile robots? Is it plant manager? Is it the president? Is it people in operations?
[00:18:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I would say that depends, really on the customer's driving factor and the KPIs that they're setting for the company. So maybe the plant manager would be responsible for making the plant safe, so he would opt to automate that process instead of having a manually driven tugger or a forklift do it, because, as you know, on Friday afternoon before a long weekend, people are ready to check out, or maybe people are coming into work and they're just kind of tired after a long weekend. And safety is a concern for, let's say, the plant manager. Perhaps the operations manager wants to increase the efficiency and the flexibility of his factory, so he might put in AGVs just because he can scale them up very quickly. So if your process gets more demanding, if you need to increase your throughput, you can just keep adding AGVs versus if you have a conveyor, a fixed conveyor. Increasing that throughput of that conveyor is very difficult. Right? Everything snowballs. So if you want to go faster, you got to increase, maybe the motor power. If you increase the motor power snowballs into increasing the inverter, maybe the fuses, maybe the cables. As you can see, it just becomes very inflexible. And perhaps the president or the owner is interested in reducing the operating cost and circumvent some of the labor shortages. So he might put in an AGB for that reason.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: And so if I'm interested in an sew system for my warehouse, what's the process to reach out to you and maybe order a system.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Yeah. So obviously we would sort of have our first initial conversation just to try to make sense of the process and see if that's a good fit for technology. Usually the most important part is trying to decipher the process and understand the customer's process as well as they do. Just because you can't just drop in an AGV and just expect it to work, most likely you are tweaking the process to accommodate that AGV. Probably at some point of that sales cycle. That means a visit to site to look at potential pitfalls, maybe look at the environment and understand that process. Then we would basically select the right appropriate charging method and the energy storage. We would do the simulation to figure out how many vehicles that customer would actually require based on the cycle times that they feed us. And then that would determine maybe if you go with contact charging versus wireless charging, as you know, if you do contact charging in your parking spot, then you're removing that AGV offline for a couple of hours to charge. That means you need an extra AGV, which actually adds to your ROI. So that case we would kind of look at the simulation, figure out, hey, you should actually put in inductive charging and charge the AGV on the fly, and that way you actually don't need any extra vehicles to compensate. So in the long run, you could save the customer hundreds and thousands of dollars in removing the number of required AGVs.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: And I wanted to ask you too about control systems and say, what happens if there's other autonomous robots on the floor, such as a forklift?
[00:21:18] Speaker A: So there's always going to be another control system in place, especially if it's like a brownfield type project where you're working with an inherited system. So typically that's like a warehouse management system or a SCADA system, PLC based, things like that. So at SCW, we actually designed our own vehicles to be VDA 50 50 compatible as a default. So a lot of your listeners are going to go, what the hell on earth is this VDA 50 50 standard? So it's been initiated by the German automotive industry. It's a standard interface for AGB communication between the AGBs and master control, aka the fleet manager. Right. So what essentially this does, it allows for different brands of AGVs to be controlled via one central fleet manager that the customer might be running, as opposed to brand specific logistic controllers. So what does that mean? Essentially, the customer can get different types of AGVs, different form factors from different suppliers, and they will all have the same protocol standard, so it doesn't really matter. The customer can mix and match AGVs from different suppliers around the world. That's kind of what we see going forward. Customers having a mixed bag of AGVs, and they all have to talk to each other and to one central controller versus talking in their own individual language. So it's like a common, universal language for all brands out there.
[00:22:51] Speaker B: One of the things too, that I did want to touch on is what kind of accessories are you putting on top of the SCW units?
[00:22:59] Speaker A: Yeah. So some of our base units would allow you to actually pick up things from underneath, which means you have to put some sort of a stand to elevate the pallet and the AGV drives underneath, and it would have its own lifting devices. But for other applications, we integrated conveyors, chain conveyors, roller conveyors, usually that's very specific to the application and the customer. We integrated scissor lifts as an alternative to those internal lifts that I mentioned. But that's sort of the stuff that's unique to each customer and each application, and that's the local know how. Right. So you would get units from Germany, sort of like off the shelf units, and we would basically modify them to suit the application. But this is where our expertise kind of come in play. So as a partial machine builder, we have the capability of designing this custom load handling device for the customer, or we would work with their engineering firm to make sure that it will integrate well with the base vehicle, because obviously the base vehicle would have to provide the power for that load handling device. So either way, whether we are involved with the design or the integration, it's a discussion to be had, because the AGV needs to power that sort of tooling, and we would have to integrate that. So we would work head in head to design that and make that seamless.
[00:24:24] Speaker B: Thank you for that. And I wanted to thank you for coming on today and ask, did we forget to talk about anything?
[00:24:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Maybe we can briefly mention where the SCW units are produced and who supports them, because we are global. So maybe that's important for customers that have facilities worldwide. So majority of them come from SCW Germany, either complete or as a base vehicle ready for custom tooling, as talked about. So we would have the local expertise to obviously assist customers with that local design.
But from my personal experience, regardless how many standard vehicle models you have, there will always be specific applications requiring modification. Essentially almost a ground up custom design. So SCW Germany is very good at that, because we have essentially a modular concept building AGVs. Right? So, like our core product, which are the gear motors that we are known for, we don't have, like, an off the shelf product. We assemble base to order, so we can combine all of our little subsystems and what we call them modulus and bundles to create a very customer specific, application specific AGV. So we can do that in Germany.
But again, due to our construction. Sorry, not mobile construction, modular construction and modular concept, we don't shy away from that. Custom. We actually prefer custom. AGVs are very expensive to begin with, so might as well get something that checks all your boxes versus trying to get something that's kind of off the shelf and trying to massage it into place. Might as well have that very unique application specific solution.
And this is where I'm going to drop my little bit of an Easter egg. And I want to mention that SCW Canada is also working on developing forklift AGV using all these subsystems and bundles and modules that I just mentioned. So we're just essentially creating a new form factor, AGV. But it's a forklift AGV that I hope SCW Canada has on the market very soon. So that's my little Easter egg that I would like to include in there.
[00:26:35] Speaker B: Oh, no, that's great. So it'll actually be built in Canada?
[00:26:38] Speaker A: Built in Canada with local suppliers. 100% Canadian, which is something that we're very proud of. Obviously, it helps us to support the local markets, but we are very proud of having that local expertise to be able to make something like that.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: And we'll probably be exporting to Germany, hopefully.
[00:26:58] Speaker A: Yeah, we all follow the same ANC standards in North America. So once it's ready, this is good to go for Canada, US and Mexico. The mechanics of it, they can be used anywhere around the world. Maybe different countries have their own different local electrical code. That's the easy stuff. That's what we do for a living. Right. We're an automation company. To be able to retrofit that very quickly for the local market. For Brazil or Germany or South Africa or Finland, for example. No problem. We can do that. That's what we do day in, day out. So super excited about that.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: Well, thanks for that. And when you're not automating and integrating and keeping people safe, what do you like to do? You have any hobbies?
[00:27:44] Speaker A: I like to read. I like to do a little bit of woodworking, landscaping around the house, hands on stuff. Usually it's stuff that gets me distracted a little bit from work. But like I mentioned earlier, I am a Sci-Fi closet geek. So watching shows and building things, making things go, that's kind of my jam.
[00:28:08] Speaker B: That's great. And how can people get a hold of you? They want to find out more about AGVs.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Yeah. They can find us on LinkedIn. They can find us on Facebook.
They can call their local sew sales rep and just mention that they're interested in some of our technology. And I'd like to reach out to the Max solution division, and we'll get connected.
[00:28:30] Speaker B: Our sponsor for this episode is Earhart Automation Systems. Earhart builds and commissions turnkey solutions for their worldwide clients. With over 80 years of precision manufacturing, they understand the complex world of robotics, automated manufacturing, and project management, delivering world class custom automation on time and on budget. Contact one of their sales engineers to see what airheart can do for you. Email is
[email protected] and Earhart is spelled Ehrhardt. And I'd like to acknowledge a three the association for Advancing Automation. They're the leading trade association for Automation, Robotics, vision and imaging, motion control and motors, and the industrial artificial intelligence technologies. You can find
[email protected] and if you'd like to get in touch with me at the Robot Industry podcast, you can find me Jim Beretta on LinkedIn. Today's podcast was produced by customer Attraction Industrial Marketing. And I'd like to recognize Chris Gray for the music, Jeffrey Bremner for Audio Production, my business partner Janet and our sponsors, Earhart Automation Systems.
