Speaker 0 00:00:00 At Artemis robotics, we believe that to enable truly flexible automation, the flexibility should start with the hardware.
Speaker 1 00:00:11 Hello, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to the 83 robotic industry podcast today. This is the podcast dedicated to advanced manufacturing capital equipment and the robotics and automation industry. And we'll be covering trends and topics important to advanced manufacturing and industry and we'll interview guests in our series of podcasts. Today's podcast is sponsored by Earhart automation systems from granite city, Illinois. They're a robot systems integrator and custom machine builder, and has just recently celebrated their 80th year in business. Earhart is spelled E H R H a R D T. And their website is Earhart automation.com. My name is Jim Beretta, and I am your host. I'm also president of customer attraction, industrial marketing. Our guest today is Tim Morrissey. He is the CEO and cofounder of Artemis robotics, a robotics hardware startup in Boulder, Colorado. Tim has been leading Artemis since its inception in 2018. He has over 10 years of technical research experience with a BS in ceramic engineering from Alfred university and an ms and PhD in mechanical engineering from the university of Colorado Boulder. He's also spent time in Oak Ridge national laboratory in Tennessee, as well as course tech in Colorado. When not dedicating his time to Artemis, you can find Tim exploring Colorado's mountains with his wife and son skiing every month of the year and making YouTube videos all about it. Welcome to the podcast, Tim. I'm happy to have you.
Speaker 0 00:01:41 Thanks so much, Jim. I'm really glad to be here.
Speaker 1 00:01:43 First. I'd like to introduce artists' robotics. I'm going to give this a try. Artemis robotics is enabling the realization of robotic enhancements in the physical world. Your actuation systems are electrically controlled and feature muscle like performance designed and manufactured to allow you to automate your most difficult motion challenges. So this is hard to explain in a podcast without the advantage of using YouTube or video. So imagine you're, uh, electrostatic forces to a hydraulic fluid to create change in a soft, flexible structure. So I'm wondering Tim, if you can kind of augment this to people who might be on a treadmill or commuting to work. So I can imagine myself an application like picking a soft style, a gripper, uh, like picking a piece of fruit, like a strawberry, am I correct?
Speaker 0 00:02:31 Yeah, you're definitely on the right track there, Jim. And I think before we talk about how the technology works, it's really important to explain why, um, let's think about automation on a big picture, right? What's automation always just trying to do, it's trying to recreate the ability of a human. And so Artimus, we take that human inspiration, that nature, inspiration to try to recreate motion, right? And so look at yourself again, we don't need video to do this. You are a skeleton structure with a and flexible muscle on top of it, right? Reach over, grab your bicep. It stretches, it moves around in your hands. And so arguments work trying to recreate these soft, flexible muscles. And that's what we call Hazel artificial muscles. We use the term artificial muscle really intentionally think about where the advancements in automation have come recently. It's from the computation, from the artificial intelligence at Artemis.
Speaker 0 00:03:23 We're trying to create this same analogous technology to artificial intelligence for the physical world, right? If, if we want automation to really be impactful, it needs to interact with the physical space. Uh, it needs to do this task, whatever it might be, whether it's picking the fruit like you described before or moving a box, whatever it is, where often the end goal is to get this physical automation. Um, and so Artemis, we really operate in this field of compliant or soft robotics. Um, if you've been to a recent trade shows like automator pack expo, you've probably seen a couple other big players starting to get into this space as well, um, to use these compliance structures, uh, to do a specific technology. So let's talk a little bit more about how the technology works now, uh, for the listeners at home. What I would encourage you to do is take both of your hands and put them out in front of you.
Speaker 0 00:04:11 Uh, like you're about to squeeze a sandwich together, right? And now if one of those hands was charged up to a positive voltage or really high potential, and one was charged up to a low voltage rated low potential, uh, from high school, uh, physics, we know that those two things would be attracted to each other. And our arguments, what we do is we put unique things in between those electrostatic forces. We put plastics and fluids, and that gives us really interesting motion. Um, so we can make these diverse, different actuators that can do all sorts of different things. Uh, we can drive shape, change to make things along gate. We can drive things to contract. Uh, we can make really compact actuators, really large actuators and everything in between. Uh, we have incredible flexibility in the things we're able to do. Um, I know that on a podcast, it's hard to explain this. So I would just encourage folks to head on over to Artemis, robotics.com. We've got some great videos like picking the right Bradbury or providing continuous displacement modes, analog, displacement modes, and everything in between. So it's a really diverse technology that can give you all sorts of different motion solutions. Thanks for that, Tim. Um, of course. So I've got a question for, uh, a lot of them
Speaker 2 00:05:16 Startups that we talked to in the, on the podcast.
Speaker 0 00:05:18 How did you get started? Like what was your motivation? Yeah, for sure. So Artemis was really born out of the PhD work that I did at the university of Colorado Boulder. Along with my co founders, my co founders are really influential on this company. We've been working in the field of soft actuators since actually 2015. So quite a while now, uh, in a young research group called the Caplinger research group, which was founded by one of my cofounders Christoph Caplin, or who continues to live in the academic community. Christoph had worked on a variety of different soft actuation technologies prior to theorizing Hazel actuators. And what he did was look to merge a few of these complimentary technologies, uh, really distilled the best of these, uh, down into a new technology, which we call Hazel. Hazel is actually an acronym. We won't get into the technical acronyms here today.
Speaker 0 00:06:04 Uh, but, but that's where the name comes from. And I would admit in the early years back in 2015, 2016, we were really more focused on academic success, right? Uh, we're focusing on publishing papers, not necessarily making it a commercial impact. Um, but sometime around early 2018, we actually got some great press in outlets, such as like wired or national geographic and even NPR. And with that press came all sorts of interest in commercialization. So we got a lot of inbound interest from big fortune 100 companies that saw, uh, immediate use cases for our technology. And when that happens, the, the seed for Artemis was really born and the guys and I, we started to come together, uh, and think about how we could, could stand up a commercial entity around this. Uh, we're really fortunate that we're located in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, where there's actually a very diverse and vibrant ecosystem for, uh, startups and, and commercial entities.
Speaker 0 00:06:57 Uh, even more specifically, there's a really great robotics ecosystem out here. Uh, whether it's the guys at canvas technologies, left-hand robotics and robotics, just to name a few, a lot of great robotics startups out this way. Uh, and so with that, we were able to get up to speed really quickly to start to connect with customers, uh, start to identify use cases. And we took this young, but extremely talented team that we have. Uh, and we got right out there currently where we have about six or six or seven key partners that we're working with today. Uh, all of them have slightly different use cases, which we'll get into in a little bit. Uh, but so, so that was the origins of Artimus and we've really hit the ground running in, in just less than two years that we've been
Speaker 1 00:07:35 Well. That was a great description. And you know what I think being, uh, in a place where there's a lot of, uh, young robotics companies and a lot of talent really, really does help propel you along. So what problem are you trying to solve? And what's your bullseye customer look like
Speaker 0 00:07:53 For sure. Yeah. It's, it's all about the problem. It's what that technology is able to solve. And so holistically big picture, what Artemis is trying to do is to automate a physical task that's that some customer was not able to automate previously. Um, and what that means is that different customers are solving different problems for us as a, as a component supplier. The problem that is solved is really defined by the customer. Um, customers, our customers usually find that value by combining a handful of the features that we offer. So whether it's that we are electrically controlled, so you don't need airlines, whether it's that we can offer a diverse or customizable geometry. So we can make them an actuator that fits just what they need, rather than giving them a standard two inch, three inch actuator. Uh, it might be that integrated feedback so we can get really great information about the state of our actuator at any given time and to some of our customers that's really key.
Speaker 0 00:08:46 Um, it could be that they're silent to operate. We have incredibly low noise. Uh, they could be that it's highly compliant. And so the fact that our actuators can easily deformed that's what gives someone the ability to pick a ripe raspberry. Some of our customers find that really valuable. And then overall the diversity of the actuation modes that we can, we can offer. We can operate just as well at DC as we can up into the hundreds of Hertz. And so some of our perhaps like human machine interfaces, which is not an industrial application, so we won't get into it here today. They really value this high bandwidth actuation modes. And so what we often find is that our customers identify one or two of those features, put them together in a unique way, and that's what brings them value. So let's get a little more granual of what that means to certain folks.
Speaker 0 00:09:28 Um, what we make is essentially often a bladder or a Balogh like actuation. And so some of the listeners might be used to seeing a pneumatic Bello operating as some sort of actuator, but maybe they've had some sort of issue with that, or they can't take that technology into a certain environment. There's some environments where, where pneumatics aren't appropriate. You can't have the air systems in there, or maybe it's just inconvenient to run an airline way out there in the factory floor or something like that. And so we can offer very, uh, standard bellow like actuation, but electrically controlled. So our customers find that really valuable more. So I would say that a lot of, a lot of customers don't even realize, uh, that, that air supply that they're providing it, it's, it's really adding up in cost. There's an electrical costs to running those air systems, those pneumatic systems.
Speaker 0 00:10:15 And so by, by offering them fully electrical systems, uh, that's a real benefit to them to get into that more. I would say that our bulls-eye customer really is the machine builder, the automation engineer, or the system integrator. That's trying to branch out of applications that they've already automated once or twice before and enter new areas. So they're doing something new. They haven't picked this fruit before, for instance, they haven't moved this product in such this way. Um, and we've seen that because if you go to one of these trade shows, you see, there are a lot of really impressive technologies out there today. And those are really good at traditional things, picking up a box, for instance, suction works phenomenally well for something like that. And we're not trying to recreate that. What we're trying to do is be another tool in these machine builders or system integrators tool chest.
Speaker 0 00:11:06 So they can start to automate more and more opportunities moving forward. Thanks Tim. You've got some very interesting customers. And so what are they trying to solve with using your technology? Yeah, we do have some really interesting customers. We're super fortunate that we have a diverse customer base today already. So Artemis does operate kind of in three distinct areas. We operate in the industrial automation sector. We operate in the human machine interfaces or haptics area. And then we also have some, uh, pretty impressive defense customers as well in today's conversation. I'll focus much more just on that industrial, uh, facing area, because I know that that's what our listeners are interested in. Um, let's talk a little bit about use cases. One of those is in the conveyor space specifically in accumulation technologies. So stopping the flow of product from moving down the, for some reason, uh, so that way you can either interact with the product or just, or just slow it down as things move through your factory floor.
Speaker 0 00:12:00 These, uh, accumulation technologies need a compact actuator and traditionally that's a pneumatic, uh, solution. But the problem with pneumatics is that, uh, it, it's only binary control it's usually on or off, right? And so let's think of a simple gravity roller conveyor. You can only turn that thing all on or all off and, and to replicate or to demonstrate how that's problematic. Imagine trying to drive your car when you could either go all gas or all brake, uh, it would make for a pretty hectic experience for yourself and definitely for everyone around you. And so that's, what's happening with these rollers today is that they're there, they're just binary. And so some of our customers have identified that if they can slow, instead of fully stopped their conveyor, they're better able to meet her, their product that they're conveying and better able to increase the overall effectiveness of moving product through their line.
Speaker 0 00:12:50 More. So there was kind of an additional benefit that because we offer this feedback, we're sensing in our actuators, our customers are able to get more intelligence about how their systems running. So that's really valuable to them as they're trying to get more connected hardware and more places. And then lastly, I brought this up earlier, but by eliminating those air systems and compressors, there really is a value to be had on reducing your electrical costs. Now I know electrical, consumption's not top of mind for a lot of our customers, but it's still a nice to have. Everyone's kind of trending that way. Uh, we do believe that the future, uh, automation systems are gonna be fully electric. And so we're one more tool that can help people move that direction.
Speaker 1 00:13:29 Yes. And we kind of talked a little bit about end effectors and kind of how the industry is seeing some huge changes in the last couple of years. And what are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 0 00:13:38 Yeah. And effectors is a space that we're really interested in wealth. This is much more in development, but something we're actively developing, uh, go to our website and you'll see us picking a ripe raspberry with a very delicate touch. Was this a certainly a challenge for a lot of folks, we pick eggs, things like that. And I think one even more pressing issue around end effectors is these high mix areas. So current technologies, you can get them from all of them, major robotic companies. They're great at automating a single parts, uh, over and over again, specifically Richard parts, like I said before, picking up a cardboard box pretty well solved, but picking up a hundred different objects, not boxes that are loose form in a mixed bin, that's still a problem. And you see that, uh, you see folks trying to solve that problem. And so with our soft compliant actuators, they can give you the ability to form around different objects.
Speaker 0 00:14:30 So now all of a sudden, a if two objects are, are pretty different shape because they're actually just the form around them. So, well, we can pick that up and even more so because we offer integrated sensing interaction, winters, we can get confirmation of grasp, or maybe even learn a little bit through that tactile information about what we're picking up. So all of that combines to a really nice end solution, uh, that that's able to do some things that we haven't seen on the market before. Uh, this is still an early development. Uh, like I said, with demonstrates some raspberries and some eggs and things like that, but I would encourage if anyone's interested in, if they have a grasping solution that they haven't been able to find yet we are actively developing that and looking for partners, um, our engineers are developing it already. Uh, but, but if you have a very specific use case of grasping, um, we're looking to identify more areas. So, so I would hope that people would feel confident in reaching out to me.
Speaker 1 00:15:20 Thank you for that. And so you've mentioned this a couple of times about Hazel actuation technology. So what is Hazel?
Speaker 0 00:15:28 Yeah, so, so Hazel actuation technology is really our platform actuator technology. And I got to do it just once because of my academic background, but it's an acronym that stands for hydraulically amplified. Uh, self-healing electrostatic actuators, that's where the H E H S E L comes from. Um, but what's really unique about our technology is the way we combine electrostatics and liquids and plastics. And that gives you this really impressive feature set that some people use all these features, and some people use one of these features, but the fact that it's electrically control the fact that it's soft or highly compliant. So the actuators deformable, uh, the fact that you can have high variability output. So we have an analog device, the larger amplitude signal you give it the more it moves. And that's really valuable for a lot of folks. The fact that we can get integrated information, excuse me, integrated feedback and sense and get that information back home.
Speaker 0 00:16:19 The fact that it's silent, uh, like I said before, it's made out of plastic and liquid. So it's actually very lightweight. We do really interesting geometries, which makes it a highly compact. Uh, but most importantly, it's highly customizable. And so where most folks might be used to saying, I need an actuator that is X a X much in length. We can give you X 0.1 or whatever you need. We actually are, have an incredibly flexible manufacturing process for these. And we are more than willing to make these customized geometries exactly for your use case. So if you come to us and say, I need a, a stroke of this with a force of that, uh, we could do our best to recreate that really quickly, get that turned around, get that shipped out to you so you can start testing it. Um, so that high customizability is really impressive. So that's what Hazel actuation technology is. It's, it's really this platform technology. Um, and the use cases, like I said, I hinted on some of those before, but we're really just starting to scratch the surface on where we can put it.
Speaker 1 00:17:13 So this is really fascinating stuff and very innovative. Um, but let's talk about some of your partners. So how do you become a partner?
Speaker 0 00:17:21 Yeah, we are extremely fortunate to have some partners and customers that have already identified some unique motion challenges they needed help solving. Uh, we are currently positioned as a component supplier, and so we know that our value only comes once the customer's integrating it into a solution. And that's why we partner deeply deeply with our partners. Uh, one partner that I'm particularly proud of is the U S Navy. Uh, we're integrating our actuators into a very unique robotic system, uh, that they use to, to assist our armed forces. And I think it's a real honor to work with the us Navy like that on such an important mission. Uh, more directly towards this audience. We have partners such as Festo, the German automation company, uh, Google, and also a handful of car manufacturers. We're always looking to expand our partners and our customers. Um, and so there's a handful of ways that folks can interact with us and become a partner.
Speaker 0 00:18:13 The first thing is that we offer a development kit. So it's a turnkey platform designed for engineers at other corporations to get hands on experience with our technology. Uh, so we can give you, we have some standard sizes and development kits, but we can give you custom development kits as well. Uh, it comes with everything you need. So it comes with your power supply. It comes with a really nice, uh, little front end software to control it. And it's really designed. So engineers can start prototyping and designing solutions for their applications. And so that's, that's a way to get it into your hands. Um, you know, in motion technology scene is believing. And so we'd like to get it over to them so they can, they can understand how it works. Um, and then the other thing that we do is that we have partners that actually, uh, hire out our engineers to develop those solutions in house at arguments.
Speaker 0 00:18:54 Um, and so we're building that out more, we're more than happy to do these custom solutions for our partners. We do think it works better sometimes in development kit, when they need a bit more integration or they have a really unique thing that's a little off from our standard offerings. Um, and so that, that's some ways that we do it through either joint development programs or anything similar like that. Some of our partners, especially in industrial automation have found some real value in these opportunities. Uh, it's all about identifying early stage technology like this. Okay. Could it be used in this use case? Let's just test that out. Let's do some feasibility studies. If it's starting to look good, then we moved down to those bigger projects together.
Speaker 1 00:19:28 I mentioned before earlier that we're in a very interesting time for end of arm tool and accessory technologies for robot. It's such a huge industry with lots of innovations of late and a productized nation, uh, that we're seeing from some of these industry innovators. And have you seen any thing that has changed your business model a little bit as our, uh, has COVID been something that has touched you?
Speaker 0 00:19:54 Yes, absolutely. So, uh, it is an incredibly interesting time for end of our tooling, uh, robotics, industrial automation, all of those things. Um, as soon as COVID happened, we saw that, um, any labor shortage that a customer might have been facing previously was just magnified to the nth degree. Um, and so folks are looking to automate things as fast as possible. And one thing that I think is really interesting about this automation COVID or not is that if you walk around these trade shows or you go see what's going on in the industry, you see these two seemingly conflicting situations happening, but at the same time supporting each other. And that is that applications and tools and technologies are getting more and more niche. So these end of arm toolings are doing this exact thing, uh, for this, for this very niche application, but then at the exact same time, the industry is asking for more flexible solutions, broader applications.
Speaker 0 00:20:47 And so that, that's a really, it's an interesting thing for a small company like ours to understand, but I would say what's, what's incredibly exciting is that Artemis has really positioned itself to be at the crossroads of this, uh, both niche applications and diverse applications. It's that flexibility of our technology pun intended both the, the physical flexibility, as well as the flexibility of the capabilities, uh, that allows us to really identify some, some really exciting use cases. I would say that one area that I think is most exciting is that automation is starting to expand outside of where we traditionally thought about automation. Uh, COVID might be encouraging this, this was happening regardless of COVID. Uh, previously we, we thought of automation as maybe packaged goods or high volume things like a canning facility. If you've ever been to a ball can of soda, it's extremely interested.
Speaker 0 00:21:36 One of the most automated facilities I've ever seen. Um, but what's exciting is that this automation is expanding outside of these areas. It's, it's opening up into new industries with, COVID almost everyone's interested in automating something, right. We need to protect our people. So, so we need to, to keep them off the line, keep them home if we can. And so that's an exciting time for us, because I would say that as, as automation expands and these new use cases, that crossroads of niche and flexible applications becomes greater and greater, and that's why automation Artemis is positioning itself there.
Speaker 1 00:22:10 That's great. And I'm, I'm kinda with you on that camp about how important it is for customers to be putting in automation so that they can keep their workers and keep their talent and all on a hundred percent. And so that's a segue into my next question for you. What are some of your challenges as a startup? Is it talent, talent, attraction? Is it customer education? Is it investors? Is it, is it all of them?
Speaker 0 00:22:32 That, that is a, a great question. And luckily as an early stage hardware company, I am fortunate to have a variety of challenges that I can constantly keep interesting. Um, there's a reason folks say hardware is hard, uh, and I'm learning that, uh, as I go, I would say though, our largest challenge is one that you identified there and that is communicating and educating our customers. I'm very open that we are bringing a very different actuation technology to them. Uh, folks are used to using hydraulic actuators, uh, maybe electric servos or pneumatics. And now all of a sudden we're saying, Hey, here's a fourth category that we think could be really powerful to you. And so we need to educate our customers, not only on what we can do, what we could do, but then also why it's powerful to them. Why do they want to use this flexible electrically driven, smart actuation technology? Um, and so then that goes back to why partners are so important for them. If our partners are honest with us about the challenges they're facing in their automation, uh, we can be honest with them about how we might bring them value. Cause that's all we're trying to do is bring our customers value, help them automate difficult things. Um, so absolutely that customer education has been one of our key challenges and actually why I'm so that you invited
Speaker 1 00:23:46 Me on this podcast because I know this will reach a great audience and I hope I have helped educate folks on what we're doing. Um, and then towards that line, I can't get away from this without saying it, but in terms of, uh, educating customers COVID is certainly introduced a new hurdle there. Um, trade shows and face to face interactions are critical for these business to business interactions. And the absence of those in the past months has definitely been felt so, so we are looking forward to getting back, uh, in face to face contact with our customers as quickly as possible. Yes. I think we're all missing that trade show experience, and we're, we're all on zoom calls and listening to podcasts and, and webinars and such. So it's, uh, it, we can't wait for this thing to be over for sure. Yup. Yup. For sure.
Speaker 1 00:24:30 Well, I'd like to thank you, Tim, for taking time out of your day to chat with the audience. So how can people get in touch with you? Yeah. Um, I am active and so is Artemis on most traditional social media outlets? Uh, LinkedIn would be our big one. So Artemis robotics on LinkedIn Artemis spelled a R T I M U S. I also encourage people to reach out to me directly. My name is tin Morsi. That's Morrissey, M O R R I S S E Y. And my email address is simply
[email protected]. Again, Artemis a R T I M U S. I would like to thank and acknowledge our partner. <inaudible> the association for advancing automation. A three is the umbrella association for the RIA AIA MCMA and <inaudible> Mexico. And these four associations combined represent almost 1300 automation manufacturers, component suppliers, systems integrators, end users, research groups, and consulting firms throughout the world that is driving automation forward.
Speaker 1 00:25:29 I'd also like to thank and recognize our partner painted robot painted robot builds and integrates digital solutions. They're a web development firm that offers SEO and digital social marketing and can set up and connect CRM and other ERP tools to unify marketing sales and operations as web and digital is changing. Painted robot is helping advanced manufacturers stay modern and competitive in the space. If you've got to get in touch with us, our email address is the robot industry
[email protected]. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. If you have an idea or interesting company or technology, you'd like to be a guest or nominate someone to be a guest, please send me an email. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening and be safe out there. Today's podcast was produced by customer attraction, industrial marketing, and I'd like to thank my nephew, Chris gray for the music, Chris Colvin for the audio production, my partner, Janet, and our sponsors <inaudible> and painted robot.
