Speaker 0 00:00:00 At rabbit bots ambition is to brings to the real world to unlock humanities potential with a hyper focus on autonomous cleaning.
Speaker 2 00:00:16 Hello everyone, and welcome to the robot industry podcast. It's my pleasure today to welcome Pablo Molina. Who's the chairman CTO and VP and product co-founder of avid bots. Pablo's vision is to live in a world where robots and humans work together in everyday life. He's been building robots since the early days of his undergraduate program at the university of Waterloo. After graduating with a bachelor of applied science in mechatronics engineering with a physics option, Pablo received his master's degree in aerospace engineering from Carlton university in space robotics. He quickly applied his space robotics knowhow working as an autonomous navigation designer at net tech design group before co-founding avid Botts with phon chic in 2014, when Pablo isn't working with robots or thinking about tasks to automate, he enjoys playing keyboards in music bands, working out and playing soccer. Hey, welcome to the podcast, Pablo, glad to have you.
Speaker 0 00:01:15 Thank you very much, Jane, for the invitation.
Speaker 2 00:01:17 And of course we've worked together in the past. So I just wanna make sure that we got that out in the open and great to talk with you again. Can you tell our listeners about Neo your floor scrubbing autonomous robot?
Speaker 0 00:01:29 Yeah, of course. So Neo is the world's best self-driving floor scrubber and Neo is powered by our Abbot bots, autonomy, which combines sensors and advanced AI as well as remote assistance to deliver a truly SIM is experience to our customers. Uh, you just have to press go and the robot takes care of all the scrubbing without any interventions. And he also comes with our, you know, our ABUS command center, which is our fleet management tool allows our customers to basically look at reports of how the robot has cleaned as well as manage clears.
Speaker 2 00:02:04 And we know that cleaning floors is like a perfect match, right. For robotics and automation. And have you seen more interest in Neo, especially post pandemic?
Speaker 0 00:02:14 Uh, yes, actually for sure, we have certainly seen a wider adoption for our robots plus pandemic. We have over hundred percent year of year growth that I was, which is like good overall. I would say though, even the general public are just more accepting of robotics in particular cleaning robots, since I think they have seen how robots really stepped up during this pandemic to complete very dirty, dull and dangerous tasks now such as disinfection and cleaning. So I do think the general public seems to, to trust robots a little more. So yeah, we, to give you an example, we have some of our robots in extensive care units actually cleaning next to the patients. So it is certainly a, you know, they're dull, dirty and now dangerous. So it's great to see, to be able to contribute to this, to this big, uh, big effort to improve the situation around the pandemic. Also, of course, uh, there's the whole labor shortage that's going around the world and, uh, the great resignation. So certainly robots can help, uh, bring some stability cuz uh, you know, it's something, a tool that is going to continuously operate. So certainly that has not to some other facility managers to, to look into automation
Speaker 2 00:03:22 And cleaning floors. And I think we've talked about this before, when I was doing work with you, cleaning floors is like one of these jobs that people will actually quit like mid shift. So it really is kind of a, a dull and dreary and, and boring task for sure. And you're on the eighth edition of the robot that you've built from scratch. Is that the correct version?
Speaker 0 00:03:42 Uh, yeah. It's about the eight, I guess it depends how you counted, but yeah, it it's, we, the general consensus is the eight version. Yes.
Speaker 2 00:03:50 Okay. Well, I'm glad I got my numbers straight on that. Can you tell us maybe some of the recent advancements for Neil
Speaker 0 00:03:56 First and foremost, Neil, we signed it from the ground after via cleaning robot and really just a robot. So we do see it as a platform. So certainly Neo is Neo two. The new version is been designed from the ground up to be a multi application robot. So that's certainly, uh, a big differentiator. We also recently released our disinfection add-on that goes on top of the robot. So basically, and Neo can clean and also disinfect also you can do it at the same time. So it is certainly an interesting innovation for sure. There Neo two, again, compared to our previous versions, we've spent a lot of time is designed to clean really tighter spaces, more compact spaces. So it has, uh, basically industry leaving coverage of sensors. So 260 degrees on the lighters and 270 degrees on the 3d cameras. So we really know where the robot is cutting and we can detect any kind of obstacles from any point of view. So that certainly helps in those really tight, small environments. And also, yeah, of course, avid bots. We are familiars and safety. So Neo has some great innovations around safety bumpers in the front, in the I'll send the sides as well as the detection of, of the squeezy when it falls off. And things like that that really resonates strongly with the customers.
Speaker 2 00:05:12 And your focus has kind of been on like clean warehouses and airports, the retail malls and, and universities and, and just larger retail space. Is, is this still the case or has your customer target changed in the last little while?
Speaker 0 00:05:26 Yeah, no, it's pretty much similar to what you described. We, we clean, uh, many transportation facilities, warehouses, retail malls, education as well. Certainly what we are focusing on a lot is retail stores. So now this is a place like a super center, a Walmart super center or those kind of locations. They're certainly smaller. And so that's a big focus that we we have right now in addition, warehousing is, is a very interesting vertical it's very, very wide, very, very large. There's all kinds of different warehouses, as you can imagine, PL versus permanent storage. So we are learning a lot as we get deeper into the vertical and tackling more complicated environments,
Speaker 2 00:06:06 You're actually building the robots in Kitchener, Ontario still. And can you talk about your Canadian and global reach?
Speaker 0 00:06:12 Absolutely. Yeah, so we, we do, uh, we based the sign, everything we designed the call robot and it is built basically in Kitchener. It's a sample and Kitchener. We leverage the great Southwestern manufacturing ecosystem. Uh, a lot of the parts are basically coming from this and suppliers in the area and yeah, again, we assemble it, we test it, we, we calibrate and everything and then we ship it actually most of our sales international, which is great. We're, you know, certainly helping the community economy from that point of view. And yeah, we also first have quite a bit of sales in Canada, uh, and the us, but a lot of it is really also exported.
Speaker 2 00:06:50 Like I have not seen a Neo in action in a while in a retail environment, but I could go to Toronto Eaton center or so, and see one in opera if I was there maybe by closing time or something. Correct.
Speaker 0 00:07:00 Yeah, that's right. We are in many, many retails like that. We are Anton center in Yorkdale mall. A lot of the small locations are, are again, anything that needs frequent cleaning. Yep. In fact, yeah. We're very well connected to a lot of the boxer group and all those kind of companies. So we have a very direct line site to a lot of the malls in Ontario. If you're in the four one, you can probably within five minutes reach one of our robots.
Speaker 2 00:07:24 Yes. And obviously airports are gonna be, and you know, as we all start flying again, uh, I, so I'd love to take a selfie sometime when I happen to be near in an airport where I can see a Neo.
Speaker 0 00:07:33 Absolutely. There's quite a few airports as well. We have a very big presence in a also, yeah, certainly north America's growing and DFW also Cincinnati airport, quite a few airports they're in right now.
Speaker 2 00:07:47 So what are the big motivators for your customer base? What's their ROI? Is it around cleanliness? Is it staffing or is it a combination of the two?
Speaker 0 00:07:57 Of course this is about ROI. We, we have many different types of customers. It really depends on how you use it, but if you use it quite a few hours, like four or five hours every day, we see our ROIs of under six months actually. So they're really attractive, really, really positive. In addition, I think in general robotics again is certainly exactly about whether you spoke about the labor issues. So the robot, of course, it comes in every day and does the job precisely what it was told every single time. Uh, so that's certainly that stability, certainly something that's quite, uh, helpful. The other piece as well that we have that has never been possible before is traceability. So with robotics, you actually can, you know, you get a very detailed report of exactly what was clean and exactly how it was done. So you're really assured this is exactly how it happened. This is something that the industry never has had before. And yes, I think this is really, really the main motivators for our customers.
Speaker 2 00:08:52 Thank you. There are a lot of sensors in Neo, as you mentioned, uh, early on what's most important. And what other sensors are you thinking about for the future?
Speaker 0 00:09:01 Yeah, so definitely, you know, Neo is pretty special in compared to, uh, the rest of the solutions out there. Uh, we do have, again, the, the most comprehensive sensor set in terms of coverage. And so the machine really can not safely in any kind of environment. So we're, we're really proud of that and certainly works really well. Again, our robot, you press play and the machine does this thing. You don't have to go and, and babysit it or, or do anything with it. It just cleans. We are also taking things a bit to the next level, as you know, the industry is all moving towards some sort of more computer bit based like deep learning based techniques. But the real world is really messy. There's things like cables in the floor or like cell phones or like very, very small forklifts of the forks, the times of the forklifts. So the, yeah, we're certainly taking things to the next level and working on solutions for those kind of problems and using cameras and, and deep learning basically. So that's, I do think that's where a lot of the industry is heading towards as we move forward.
Speaker 2 00:10:02 I imagine you probably take a lot of direction from your customers who may have those peculiarities in their warehouse or in their hospital or where, wherever, where you just don't have never had to clean before. So, okay. Which sensor or what, what can we do to help this customer out? Right.
Speaker 0 00:10:16 Absolutely. Um, even with the forklift tiles, it's funny, we, we will go to different locations. I'm, I'm constantly blown away by the very different types of forklift tiles. There's some that are very, very thick. There's this one that look almost like a spatula and there's really, really skinny. And again, this is the kind of thing that any kind of active of measurement systems wouldn't be able to solve. Uh, you really need like this contextual understanding that deep learning can provide. So yeah, we absolutely, we go, we learn from our customers, we gather data in our customer side and then improve the algorithms to, to truly deliver our working solution.
Speaker 2 00:10:53 I'd like to switch the conversation a little bit to ask about data. And we talk a lot about data on the, on the, uh, podcast. How important is data to your customer base?
Speaker 0 00:11:03 Yeah, it's really important. Again, it's one of the big differentiators of ABUS or ABUS command center is truly the, the best tool in the market right now, when it comes to data, it is quite important. Again, the cleaning industry has never had this access to this little of detail of how cleaning is done. We provide our customers with a detailed report of exactly where the robot has driven every night and that has even helped them in some disputes at times where people are like getting clean here. And then you have a report from a robot robot that tell you what it did exactly at one or 1:30 AM. Right. So it it's, it's really, really wonderful. The other thing that, that we are working with our customers to leverage is really for managing a fleet. So now if you own say 2030 scrubbers, we have very nice, very useful tools where you can see how they're being used. The number of hours are being used to productivity. So you can really track the metrics and you can really manage the fleet. Uh, so you can, you know, work with your operators. If a certain road is not being used or the, the hours that are being run less than expected. So you can constantly quickly learn that and then actually act upon that data. So that's certainly something we're seeing to be, be quite helpful for our customers as they scale.
Speaker 2 00:12:15 So you can optimize your fleet then because you know, which maybe robots aren't being used at certain times of the day, you can tell maybe where your, where the dirt is in your mall, right?
Speaker 0 00:12:26 Yeah. Well, we're working a little bit towards that. That's not something that we have yet, but what we do sometimes is we have a wind versus summer cleaning plants. So they would run in the winter. We would run certain areas with more water, more pressure say in the winter when there's salt. So you wanna clean a certain area more often. Yeah. That's certainly something we're looking into though, like in a way to, to dynamically estimate where most of the cleaning happens, that's a feature that, for example, IRO has already some other floor cleaning rubs for the house. Yes. They have a way to detect the dirt. So that's certainly something that we're looking into. It's a bit more complicated as you can imagine for commercial. Cause there can be a lot of more different pollutants and things.
Speaker 2 00:13:10 Yeah. There's a lot of dirt out there that's for sure. And, and I think that's why it such an exciting industry for you. Can you talk a little bit about kind of who purchases the robot and maybe the purchasing journey for a floor scrubbing robot?
Speaker 0 00:13:23 Uh, yeah. That's uh, certainly something that our sales team has been improving since the inception of Levi bots. Uh, we're seeing, you know, the speeds of closing the funnels, uh, to accelerate. There's no number of personas. Certainly the facilities managers is one of the main people that, that are the, the main decision makers. Also sometimes we have innovation managers as well, like bringing on new, innovative solutions into the market. But yeah, basically most of the times we get an inbound request and then we, we actually implemented a new, we call it evals. So we basically allow the customer to evaluate the product. So we deploy it for about a month and we had a set of metrics that, that we need to fulfill. And then they, the customer actually gets to test drive the system and really see it in operation. And that's something that we are seeing success with because it, it really lets you see how the robot is gonna in your facility with your operators. And it really shows the value then becomes very apparent. So that's certainly something that has been helping us later.
Speaker 2 00:14:24 And I just wanted to clarify cuz you said test drive, but there's actually no driving on a Neo. Right. A Neo is self-driving it's autonomous, but it does have a, um, manual over if you need to go and, and manually clean something, you'd walk behind the robot. Is that correct?
Speaker 0 00:14:41 Oh yeah, no, sorry. Maybe that was a bit confusing. Yes, of course. It's fully autonomous test drive. I meant like you get to actually run it in your facility and see it do its thing and you get to really see the productivity, the coverage, the performance of the machine and really test it in your facility and verify that it works. Uh, yes, but also Neo of course has a manual control. So you can absolutely clean by hand with Neo it's certainly, you know, not as easy as a manual machine, cuz it's not designed to be cleaned by hand for hours and hours, but it certainly, you can, you can absolutely do that for a small pick job or things like that. You can absolutely use
Speaker 2 00:15:16 Robot. So you've got total flexibility, which is kind of the point. Right?
Speaker 0 00:15:20 Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:15:22 And can you talk a little bit about the rise of multifunctional robots?
Speaker 0 00:15:26 Yeah. That's a topic that we really, uh, we're very excited about at IBOs. We are firm believers that that's where the industry is gonna go. So certainly it's something that we're seeing now more and more certainly Abba. We have a solution, we have Mia that is multiplication, but there are also other companies out there that have similar again, a machine that was for one purpose that can do multiple purposes. I think the, the really the value comes and we ROI. I mean to what it really means for customers, because if you have to buy like maybe an example of cleaning and this infection, if you were to rent, for example, this infection and rent a cleaning, you're gonna be looking at in the three thousands or so range for both. However, with, for example, with Neo, you can do the, say that your rents were cleaning.
Speaker 0 00:16:14 Then for this infection, you will have to pay probably $300 a month. So it's almost like a, a 10th of the price that what you will normally see if you have to have two systems or the human, of course. So I think that's, that's where it gets really, really interesting. I, I wouldn't be surprised if the future there's like four applications in each level that's doing advertising or is doing shift scanning and is doing hazard analysis and is also maybe cleaning. I think it's, it's uh, is an interesting, it starts to become a lot like computers in the seventies, a little bit like mainframe versus, uh, you know, the common computer where you can have all these applications, then it is actually beautiful because it starts to become, there are applications today that arguably you will never pay $3,000 for like say a reception is like, or I don't know what that even looks like, but that's where, you know, if it was just a hundred, few hundred dollars a month and why not.
Speaker 0 00:17:09 Right. So then a lot, a lot of, uh, the, the barrier to entry and the, I change this completely. So I do really think that's where this industry's gonna go. Where in the future, I hope when you wanna buy a, any robot, any cleaning machine or anything that you wanna buy, you're gonna think about, okay, maybe I should look at something that I can buy many things for. Like I think facility management, the future gonna be faced with this challenge and this analysis they're gonna have to make, it's not gonna be just about the one application it's gonna be about what else you can do
Speaker 2 00:17:39 Beyond that. How does the commercial AMR market evolve and challenge the status quo to make robots more accessible?
Speaker 0 00:17:47 Yeah, that's a great question. I, I think it's all related to kind of what I just said too, as well with multi applications. <laugh> if we, if we stay, we need to start, I'm a firm believer of lowering the customer automation based exactly what I said earlier. There are many applications that the ROI will happen at maybe one hour a day or maybe half an hour, a day. Uh, you know, as we, as an industry work hard to lower the customer automation, that's when you're gonna start really seeings in the terms of thousands of units every year in the millions of units. I know we all wanna get there, but I do think, yeah, figuring out ways to lower the customer automation also figuring out ways to doing multi application robots that of course bring the saving that way. I think those are really important steps to really make sure the robots are, are everywhere among us helping us and, and doing test for us. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:18:37 And of course that puts a lot of pressure on you guys to make sure that you are stacking as much technology as you need to in your robots and listening to your customers and, and being innovative. Correct.
Speaker 0 00:18:48 Yeah. As a know, the, our companies, we, we really, the more robots that we make that are like $200,000 and like, you know, that that's, it's just not gonna go anywhere. We're gonna stay in this whole research stage. We're gonna, we, we need to pay attention to the ROI. We need to realize that that at the end of the day, it has to make sense for the customer. It has to have a, a payback and, and that's where really we, we see that that's when things are gonna explode and it will start making a lot more sense. That's what happened with computers. And I think there's a lot of analog between we are very similar, we're in this kind of a exponential growth right at the beginning. And then I, the do thing that for us to bring it sooner, that's how we should, I'll be thinking.
Speaker 2 00:19:32 So I did want a personal question and I know we touched on this at the beginning when you're not thinking about floor scrubbing robots and about the next generation of floor scrubbing robots, what do you like to do?
Speaker 0 00:19:42 I have been working too hard lately, but I, I do have a side project. I don't wanna clean the snow. I really don't. I hate it. <laugh> and so I'm, I'm working on a snow cleaning robot for my backyard. Nice. Uh, so that's something that, yeah, I really, really wanna do. So yeah. I do play a little bit of robotics in general. Yeah. I also from south America, so I do play, I was born in south America, so I do play soccer and yeah, I'm into martial arts. So I, I practice Kung Fu as well.
Speaker 2 00:20:10 So that keeps you busy.
Speaker 0 00:20:12 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:20:13 Pablo, thank you so much for coming on today. Appreciate it's good to see you. Of course I can see you, but our audience is listening on a podcast. If people wanna find out a little bit more about avid bots, how can they get ahold of you?
Speaker 0 00:20:24 Awesome. Yeah, please be our website, www avid bots.com or emails
[email protected]. That's a really good way to get a call with us.
Speaker 2 00:20:33 Thanks again, Pablo for coming on.
Speaker 0 00:20:35 Awesome. Thank you very much for the opportunity Jim, enjoy the conversation. Thank you.
Speaker 2 00:20:40 Our sponsor for this episode is Earhart automation systems, Earhart builds and commissions turn key 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 Earhart can build for you and their
[email protected] and Athar is spelled E H R H a R D T. I'd also like to thank our partner, a three, the association for advancing automation. They're the leading trade association in the world for robotics, vision and imaging motion control and motors, and the industrial artificial intelligence technologies. And you can visit them at automate org to learn more. And I'd like to thank painted robot painted robot builds and integrates digital solutions. There are a web development firm that offers SEO, social, digital marketing, and can set up and connect CRM and other E R P tools to unify marketing sales and operations. And you can find
[email protected]. If you'd like to get in touch us at the robot industry podcast, you can find me Jim Beretta on LinkedIn. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. 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, my partner, Janet, a three painted robot and our sponsor Airhart automation system.
