Speaker 0 00:00:01 So we think workers shouldn't have to think about batteries and charging for the robots. The robot should take care of themselves. There's no way that robots are ever going to be intuitive enough for everybody in the workforce to use until we can start abstracting things that are complicated. Warehouses are moving past proof of concept stages, and trying to figure out how to scale up autonomous systems, reliability and minimizing unexpected downtime are crucial to their ability to scale.
Speaker 1 00:00:36 Hello everyone I'd like to welcome you to the robot industry podcast today. This is the podcast dedicated to advanced manufacturing capital equipment and the robotics and automation industry. My name is Jim Beretta, and I'm your host. And we are recording this podcast from London, Ontario, from Seattle Washington, and from Nashua New Hampshire. We're going to talk about optimizing autonomous robots in your factory, and I'm happy to welcome my special guests. Jason Walker from Waypoint robotics and Ben waters from why Baltic Jason Walker is the CEO and co-founder of Waypoint robotics, which develops and manufacturers fully autonomous mobile robots that are easy to use industrial strength and designed to be set up and used by the workforce that is on the job today prior to founding Waypoint, Mr. Walker was the co-founder and director of operations at Saifai works, where he served as lead roboticist and principal investigator for Saifai works contracts with agencies, such as DARPA NIST, and the national science foundation Walker helped grow Saifai works into a leading tethered drone supplier in North America before co-founding Saifai works.
Speaker 1 00:01:46 He was in the quality, reliability and testing manager for the Roomba vacuuming robot at I robot Walker received a BSE with a concentration in robotics and control systems from Kansas state university and is a lifelong entrepreneur. Ben waters is the CEO and co-founder of Y biotic, which develops wireless charging hardware and fleet energy management software for autonomous systems. Why Baltic is based in Seattle, Washington and spun out of the university of Washington in 2015, where Ben received his PhD in electrical engineering with professor and co-founder Joshua Smith. As a graduate student, Ben developed the free di system, a wireless power system for implanted medical devices. He's worked at Intel and Bosch on wireless power transfer related products. Ben holds a BA in physics from Occidental college, a BS in electrical engineering from Columbia university, MSN PhD in electrical engineering from the university of Washington. So welcome to the podcast, Ben and Jason. Thanks for having us. Thanks Jim. Hey, it's my pleasure. Hey, so what is happening in your area of the autonomous robot? Ah, well,
Speaker 0 00:03:02 It's getting traction. Uh, people have been having a very difficult time finding enough workers, hiring enough folks to meet the demands of manufacturing and logistics. And so they're really moving out of the pilot phases of kind of figuring out what autonomous mobile robots or AMRs can do. And they're starting to move into deployments. So things are starting to take off in a big way across the industry.
Speaker 1 00:03:30 And what are you finding Jason, in some of these deployments, are people starting with one or two robots? Are they starting with 10? Are they, are they thinking big and doing whole facilities and factories?
Speaker 0 00:03:40 Well, we always like to encourage people to pick a reasonable attainable task and get it done and, and work with it and live with it so they can really understand what the robots can do and what they can't do, and also to help socialize things within the company. So most folks are, are following some sort of recipe like that. They're getting a robot, they're working with it, they're picking a battle and winning it and then rolling it out more broadly. I will say in the decision process, leading up to the decision to buy a robot. The contrast to what I just described are people who sort of have an escalation of, of requirements or scope or expectations before they even get a robot. And that's something that we really try to guide people towards, you know, pick one thing, get it done, right. And then go from there.
Speaker 1 00:04:32 So kind of quick wins or, or something like that.
Speaker 0 00:04:36 Yeah, exactly. You know, it's easy to say, well, if it can carry a box, maybe it could carry a box on a pallet and pull a cart. And if it could do that, then maybe it could make my coffee. And then all of a sudden, if it can't do everything, nobody wants to do anything. And the reality is whatever the first task was that led them to think about an AMR in the first place is still, still totally valid and has a great ROI on it, but they, they kind of blew their own mind before they had a chance to, to really execute on the first thing first.
Speaker 1 00:05:06 And I'd love to chat with you sometime about the culture of automation and the culture of putting robots into, into facilities. Because I think that's a very interesting topic as well.
Speaker 0 00:05:17 Yeah, I completely agree. Um, we, we have very deliberately and very early in the process of designing our products. We baked in the, the workers, the folks who are on the job today, um, in terms of ease of use. And we've thought of them every step of the way with the intention, being that if you have a hard time finding someone to push a cart, you're going to have an even harder time finding a robot assistance. So you've got to make a tool that is useful to the people who are on the job now. And if you don't, then you just change the problem for your customers. You don't solve the problem. And a huge part of that is making the people who are going to be working with these robots. And we think the robots are going to work for them. Other other companies just want to have robots beside them, but either way, if they're not included in that process.
Speaker 0 00:06:08 And if they're not part of the automation revolution that goes on in their facility, they are very understandably going to feel worried. They're going to, they're going to feel like, you know, the robots are coming for their jobs, even though in most cases, the robots are saving jobs. So, you know, it, it, it's very, very understandable human nature that if you're not including somebody in a decision that's going to directly affect the way they work and the place they work there, they're going to push back on that. And so I would love to have that conversation.
Speaker 1 00:06:42 Yeah. It's all perception, right? Because their perception is their reality. Absolutely. Let's talk about wireless. So why is wireless important and Ben, let's chat a little bit about what your systems do.
Speaker 2 00:06:54 Sure. I'll, I'll give that answer and then I'll turn it over to Jason and hear his perspective as well. But why biotic systems? My botics mission as a, as a company is to power the world of automation. We believe that robot companies and the things that are important to businesses around automation ought to be able to focus on those things and charging, and power and managing the logistics of how robots are charged and how they need to be serviced over time from a battery perspective are not necessarily the things that people should or want to be doing with autonomous systems. So I bought it has really made it our mission to focus on this problem. And we provide wireless charging hardware that can be quite easy to integrate, operates autonomously in and of itself. And we provide software and API APIs that operate on top of that hardware to enable the robots, to communicate with the systems, to enable the fleet management systems, to have a lot of insight into the availability of the charging stations and really trying to create a comprehensive solution that works for any type of robot or autonomous vehicle for this industry.
Speaker 1 00:08:17 Jason, your thoughts on why, why wireless?
Speaker 0 00:08:21 Yeah, this goes back. My, my CTO and co-founder, uh, Patrick, he and I worked together at I robot on the Roomba. And in my bio, you mentioned I was doing quality and reliability testing and building out that whole capability with, with the team at I robot. And one of the things that was just a constant consideration was, was the autonomous charging system that Roomba uses. And it uses a first of all, room is a great product. The dock is great, the system's and for the price point, it's kind of miraculous and I'm very proud to have been a part of it. But the fact is when you have conducted contacts and a mobile robot driving around in the world, especially one that's down on the floor, scooping up dirt, you're going to get contamination on the contacts and that's going to lead to a premature wear relative to other more benign contact charging situations.
Speaker 0 00:09:23 And because these things are mobile, sometimes something causes them to dock imperfectly. Um, and then that leads to batteries not getting charged or, or maybe somebody walks by, or maybe the dog walks by and nudges the robot. And it breaks the charging connection because it moved, you know, a millimeter or two. And so the end result of all of these little edge cases, and there are many more is that you end up with a dead battery and you end up with that. Won't do its job when you expect. And so if you're talking about changing the way you do business as a factory or a warehouse, and you're going to rely on autonomous mobile robots to move materials for you, then you've got to make sure you've got to trust that that robot is going to be ready to work when you come in in the morning.
Speaker 0 00:10:14 And so having had the experience of, of the largest scale deployment of, uh, autonomous robot on earth and knowing what edge case is going to affect conductive charging, we really wanted to take that problem away from our customers. We wanted them to be able to absolutely count on the fact that when they show up in the morning, the robot will be charged. And even if somebody bumps it a little bit of misalignment, isn't going to hurt it. We didn't want them to have to maintain, uh, contacts and clean them and replace them. You know, we wanted that whole experience to be abstracted for our users. And we wanted to have a charging solution that was safe and intelligent and, and wireless ticks all those boxes. So there's a lot of things that you can do in robotics. Well, once or even for months, but then when things start to wear out, you start to have problems and that's a black eye for the whole industry.
Speaker 0 00:11:14 So we just wanted to get that right, right out of the gate. And we wanted to make sure that our customers weren't dealing with robots that weren't charged. And then the next layer of the onion is how much does it cost? If you deeply discharge a battery, that's insanely expensive from a hardware standpoint to do the replacement, but also from the loss productivity, there was a Boeing plane. I think that was grounded because the battery system wasn't working properly. So it, everything that has a battery like the battery is the most expensive and most, uh, Achilles heel part of the whole thing. It seems so why wireless, because we felt like that gave us the best chance we could to completely abstract batteries and charging for our customers so that they can count on these robots to do the tasks that they expected them to do.
Speaker 1 00:12:06 I think you nailed it on the Achilles heel, right. Is the one thing, if it's not charged, it's not going to work. And all the reasons you bought robots is just not going to dock there's no ROI anymore. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:12:18 And it's worse than no ROI. It's, it's, it's not just the absence of better financials. It's the needle moving in the opposite direction because you're not doing work that you would have done. If you hadn't put all your eggs in that basket
Speaker 1 00:12:37 With all those benefits, why aren't more people doing it.
Speaker 2 00:12:42 Yeah. It's a good question, Jim. And why biotic as a company has been, I think in a unique position to have learned a lot about this answer. We've, we've worked with companies across a variety of different industries in robotics and automation, and we see a lot of encouraging trends towards why this shift is changing, but I'll talk a little bit about why it's been a challenge in the past and, and where we think it's going wireless charging, I think has come along in the last several years with the connotation that it's slower than plug-in charging. You still have to have the device in pretty close range if not in contact with the charger. And so is it really that much better than plug-in charging and, and it it's expensive. And a lot of those things are not fundamentally true. They are true based on how cell phone chargers have been designed and the power level that they've been designed for.
Speaker 2 00:13:39 But from a fundamental perspective, there's no merit to that. And my body has tried to fill the void of having higher power, more off the shelf systems available for these robotic applications. And as businesses have in, in robotics in particular have had to navigate these decisions. Do we build the dock? Do we work with the contact doctor? We work with the wireless dock. I think historically companies have, have not seen off the shelf systems and therefore they've trended towards building their own contact based charging system. But as companies like robotic have worked to make these systems more readily available, businesses have been coming to us. I mean, in, in, in first sales calls that we have, we rarely get the question anymore. Why should we work with wireless over something else? It's almost always companies coming to us with, we've used a contact system or we've heard contact systems have challenges.
Speaker 2 00:14:38 And so we just want to go with, with wireless. And that was similar to what, what Jason was saying. And I think the other thing that we've learned is that the sales cycles in this industry can be long and the development can be long and robots don't get made overnight. They get built and optimized over the course of several years. And the way in which the charging system is defined drives, or is driven by how the robot operates, how it is designed from a mechanical and industrial perspective. So a lot of these things, you know, once there's a design decision made it it's a long time before that would be, that would be changed. So I think we're at an interesting time where a lot of companies who have been in this space for a while now are coming up on their second and third generation of devices and looking towards a better way to deal with, with charging, uh, both from a hardware perspective and from a logistical perspective in terms of how long the batteries last, how they would be serviced and maintained and so forth. So we see a lot of encouraging signs towards that and those negative connotations around wireless charging. I really think are a thing of the past with, with the systems that exist today. And I think we'll continue to see a lot more wireless charging for robots and autonomous systems in the years to come.
Speaker 1 00:16:01 And so it's just for you a matter of education, right? Of letting more people know more about the advantages of wireless,
Speaker 2 00:16:08 Right? Yeah. I think as we, as, as we learn about some of the Jason mentioned the edge cases, there are so many edge cases when it comes to autonomous charging compared to standard old charging, I'll use just one example, right? Consider a cell phone. When you're dropping your cell phone on a wireless charging pad, you are the operator of that cell phone. Right. And you can move the cell phone around until you see the icon on your phone, say that it's charging. Now imagine an autonomous robot, right. If you're going to have that same capability, you have to have a whole communication ecosystem between the charger and the robot. There's not just like, look at it and know exactly what to do, type of a thing. What happens if the robot stops a little bit short, it might think it's in the perfect position, but what if it's not?
Speaker 2 00:17:02 Um, so dealing with all these edge cases on how to attempt to re doc how to deal with that point that Jason made, where what if the charging station moves by a foot or two? Cause the warehouse worker moved it incidentally, you know, these are all the types of things that I think we've, we've, we've learned about. And as we get into discussions with folks, we hope that the feeling on their end is, Oh yeah, we experienced that. You know, we, we know that that's a problem and it's so great. If we don't have to deal with that ourselves, we can just rely on this, the system that exists. So that's really the space where we've been excited to learn as a business and, and improve our products to solve some of those challenges.
Speaker 1 00:17:42 Thank you for that. This question is kind of for Jason or maybe it's for both. Can you give me a recent example of where a customer is benefiting from wireless and autonomous charging?
Speaker 0 00:17:52 Yeah. Uh, I, to jump to mind, um, one of them is that, uh, we delivered our robot and an end zone wireless charger to a customer that's, uh, working with, uh, nuclear waste facility. And so having a no-touch reliable wireless charging system in those kinds of conditions that have weird and wonderful benefits that, you know, people wouldn't even think of otherwise, but, but definitely actually have analogs, um, in, in the rest of the world. Uh, another one is a fleet of robots. We just deployed at an e-commerce facility and these robots run, I think, two shifts a day, especially in peak. Um, and so, uh, because of the, because of the wireless charging architecture, it's, it's what, why bought it calls many to many, uh, meaning that you don't have, you know, one transmitter per robot, it's more like a gas station. Um, any, uh, any robot can pull up to any end zone and, and charge up. And so it's part of the cycle that, um, the robots cycle through the end zones to keep their batteries charged in between pulling carts around and, and doing, picking. So it's another way that, you know, the, the people who are doing the picking and that warehouse and the packing, they don't think about batteries. They don't think about charging. What they know is that when they need to pick an order, a robot shows up and when they need to pack an order, a robot shows up and they just keep coming.
Speaker 1 00:19:30 So what are some of the other ongoing kind of technical challenges in the industry? Like you've got battery life, which I assume is somehow affected by the number of times the battery charged cycle happens.
Speaker 2 00:19:42 Yeah. I'll, I'll, I'll start in Jason, chime in if you have any thoughts, but one of the, the biggest challenge, I think overall for Y biotic as a technology provider has been reliability, right? When you think about charging batteries, whether it's on your phone or your headphones or whatever, you don't think that, Oh, in the morning it might not be charged. Like it just has to work. Right. And as a startup company and developing new technologies, we've of course go through all kinds of iterations and we discover problems and we have to fix things and so forth. And hardware is hard as everyone says. And so we've, we've really made an effort at Y biotic to not get too far ahead of ourselves in developing too many products, developing lots of other things. We've, we've really tried to stay focused and build a great product that we have today.
Speaker 2 00:20:41 And then we can go build other things. And so with reliability is a focus we've been very fortunate to have worked with with companies like weigh point where they've helped us navigate some of these challenges. And even some of their customers have, have been patient with us as we've continued to improve things. But I think we're getting pretty close to the core product, being good at charging batteries reliably. And as we've navigated these discussions with our customers, we've learned about a lot of other things that the charging stations could do or other problems that might not be huge top of the list challenges today. But in a couple of years, they will be. And for example, you know, Jason mentioned the battery life and the battery longevity, well, it's pretty well known that the faster you charge a battery, the shorter it's overall lifespan is going to be.
Speaker 2 00:21:41 And it's kind of an interesting question just to think about what's going to happen when there are hundreds of thousands or even tens of thousands of, of robots out there, and all the batteries start to reach the end of their life. Just like your cell phone stops lasting a full day. You know, what's going to happen. Are the robots going to have to get shipped back to the OEM to get battery replacements? Are batteries going to be able to be dropped, shipped to the warehouse? And a technician is going to have to know how to swap batteries out. You know, all these types of interesting things that we expect will continue to be challenges in this space. We're trying to figure out what role we can play. And so we have some methods in our system that can enable charge scheduling. You can charge fast during the day when the robots are active, you can charge slow at night, some simple things like that to some more complicated things that we're researching at Y biotic around four different chemistries of batteries, are there better ways to charge that can either charge faster without sacrificing battery longevity or charge at the same rate, but allow the batteries to last longer?
Speaker 2 00:22:54 So, so we're really looking into a lot of those things from what can we do and how can we make that data available for the robot to make a informed decision. And, um, those are some of the things that we think are, are, are good challenges, you know, in the products that we're building today. Jason, did you have some thoughts on that as well?
Speaker 0 00:23:13 Yeah. Um, you know, there's, there's a lot of ways. One could, I guess, frame an answer to that question, but top of my list is challenges in the industry are, as, as people are moving forward with figuring out how to use mobile robots and where the ROI is right now, the technology to, to build a great autonomous mobile robot is, is relatively expensive. And so you need a good ROI or you need, you need to be able to do a lot with that robot. And so the ability to have a reliable charging system that can do opportunity charging in an elegant, reliable way and take care of the batteries in terms of long life, and also in terms of daily readiness, those are the things that, that allow people to maybe deploy fewer robots. And there thereby keeps the total cost of the transition down.
Speaker 0 00:24:12 And, uh, when you're trying to figure out as a company, if you want to take that leap, anything that can make it more economical and, you know, be able to do more with fewer robots is, is a way to reduce the barrier to entry. And if you can get past the barrier to entry, then you can start to reap the benefits of robotics and automation, and then you can earn more money and you can capture more business when the demand is there and that causes things to grow. And then hopefully we'll sell them more robots later. But you know, the ability to do more with less, I think is, is a general challenge in the industry. And it's one that pertains directly to batteries and charging. But very quick example, we build mobile manipulation platforms here at Waypoint. And if you're a failure, a machine shop and you have a robot that's doing machine tending the way it's been done for the last 10 years or so is that you park a cobalt or a industrial robot in front of every CNC machine, and you have those expensive fixed assets, you know, every 15, 20, 30, 60, 90 minutes, they do an operation to swap out some parts and take out finished parts and put in new blank billets.
Speaker 0 00:25:33 And we did an analysis the other day, um, and it's anecdotal, but we were talking with a customer who had eight machines and two of them had really fast cycle times. So the idle time of the cobots was practically nothing, but the other six machines could be serviced by one mobile manipulator. Uh, so one cobalt on a vector and it could serve a six machines, uh, on the duty cycles that were provided to us as an example. And the only way that was possible is if they had an end zone at the machine that had to be serviced the most often. And so being able to pour energy into the robot fast and conveniently and opportunistically is critical in making that possible. But instead of buying six cobots, they can buy one mobile manipulator and an end zone and do the same amount of work.
Speaker 1 00:26:25 And that's very exciting. There's nothing worse than watching a robot, not work
Speaker 0 00:26:30 That's well said.
Speaker 1 00:26:33 Um, when, you know, we look at the manufacturing challenges of, of a specialty labor and this big cloud of, of unskilled, or, sorry, sorry, I'm going to do that again. Uh, the manufacturing challenges of labor, uh, is certainly something that's driving autonomous robot. What about your own talent attraction for why Biotics and for way points?
Speaker 2 00:26:55 I can, I can start. And, um, you know, we, we find ourselves kind of joking about this at <inaudible>, but, uh, we have our own challenges with manufacturing systems that really consist of mostly electrical components. And sub-components, we can only imagine the challenges that companies like Waypoint face, where there are those same components and then lots of other mechanical parts and probably much longer lists of bomb materials and things. So manufacturing, you know, anything in hardware I think is just, it takes time to really establish the processes, to build things consistently. And we've just had to focus on this. Even when we were a three person company, we had processes for our documentation and you're not allowed to work on anything new until the documentation for what you just finished is complete. And I think establishing that into a culture of a company first and foremost just has to be there.
Speaker 2 00:28:06 Otherwise, it's just always chaotic trying to manufacture things. So why Baltic has made a point to manufacture our products here in the U S we, we work with a great contract manufacturer in the broader Seattle area who manufacturers our circuit assemblies and helps us with some of the box builds. And as we complete a lot of our product certifications, there's again, more process involved with how things get built and what needs to be made available to the certification agencies and homologation and all these, all these things that go along with building hardware. So for us, you know, the challenge has just been staying consistent with what we do, improving areas that we know are bottlenecks in that process. You know, testing our systems is something that still requires a lot of manual oversight, but, you know, working through those, those challenges now, too, we have a job posting up as we speak for a manufacturing engineer. So, you know, we've, we've, we've really focused on, on this, on this problem. And I think the reason why we want to do it well is so that companies like Waypoint can just take what we have and fit it into their system in a way that is easy for them. Doesn't take a ton of their engineering bandwidth to figure out and allows them to keep focused on what's important. So that's been, what's driven a lot of the way we think about manufacturing challenges.
Speaker 1 00:29:45 Thank you, Ben. Jason, what about you with your own labor and talent attraction?
Speaker 0 00:29:50 I have to say, uh, I feel incredibly lucky in our experience here at Waypoint, that we've always had more people waiting to join, uh, than we've had openings for. And that's kind of why you never hear anybody say that. And I feel just extraordinarily grateful for that. We've, we've always had kind of a queue of, of really talented people that we want to make a place for. We're a company that has grown substantially through the profits of selling robots and from private funding. Um, we haven't taken any VC money at or, or any other kind of investment. And so I think that's part of the reason we were able to do really methodical organic growth. And, and more importantly, when, when we've met somebody that we really want to hire, we're able to, uh, to make a position for them, uh, when the opportunity presents itself.
Speaker 0 00:30:49 And so the, the team that we've built is just extraordinary. It's great bunch of people and the people who, uh, are anxious to join are also great people. And we can't wait to bring them on board, but sometimes when you take VC money, there's an expectation that you, that you go spend it as fast as you can and hire a team and, you know, whatever it takes, just grow, grow, grow, grow, grow for the sake of growing. And we've really been extremely methodical about it. Um, and we're in the greater Boston area. We design and manufacture the robots, uh, here in Nashua, New Hampshire. So, uh, one of the reasons we love working with white bottle, cause it's another us company. And, uh, if you're a, if you're a company and in North America and you need robotics and automation, it's really nice to have somebody in your own time zone and, uh, you know, somebody who can give you a quick response and, and, uh, get you what you need, you know, in, in hours or days instead of weeks and months. So being in Boston, having access to that pool of talent, being a us manufacturer, working with other us manufacturers, all of that is really working well for us.
Speaker 1 00:32:05 Yeah. That's all, that's all good news. And Ben, I forgot to mention, you've just released a press release and I'm tying this back to talent attraction. Uh, can you tell the listeners what, uh, what's happened recently at your place?
Speaker 2 00:32:18 Yeah, we, we had some exciting news release just yesterday about a, a new robotics industry that, that why biotic is excited to be a part of, and that is space. We've worked in aquatic systems underwater and, and mobile terrestrial and aerial drones. And now adding the fourth dimension of, of, of outer space. And for us, what, as a business, we really have not taken on too many projects, you know, in the form of grants or anything else like that, which I know are great. And a lot of companies really benefit from, but just for us, going back to what I said earlier, we we've really tried to keep a narrow focus and do what we do well. So as we have had some of these other opportunities come up, we always think about, you know, how, how well aligned are they to what we're doing in our commercial markets today.
Speaker 2 00:33:21 And a couple of the things that we know are important to our customers that we're excited to work on are pushing the power level higher. You know, batteries are getting better and robots are getting bigger and everybody wants to charge faster. So higher power systems has always been something we, we are working on at Y biotic fan lists, systems fans make integration challenging because you have to accommodate airflow and they're noisy and they can break. So getting rid of fans and adding passive cooling has always been something that on been on our roadmap and in space, those are all things that they need as well. And we're super excited about, you know, all the work that NASA has been doing around pushing technology companies to apply commercial systems to these space markets and with NASA initiative through the Artemis program, to go back to the moon, there's a need for a lot of robotic systems. There's a need to survive the lunar night and survive regolith and wireless charging is a great compliment to what has historically been used for charging batteries in space, which is solar power when there's no sun or when things are really dusty and connectors can break and become very challenging. So for us, we're, we're super excited about it, but nothing will change, you know, for us business business as usual. And we'll, we'll be able to continue to grow our team well while focusing on, uh, this new industry as well.
Speaker 0 00:34:57 What's very exciting. Congratulations. So what do you both see as some future trends that are happening in the industry, maybe with some new products? Uh, well, I guess I'll go first. Um, the, uh, I, I think in, in the autonomous mobile robot industry, I think we're going to get more deployments. Um, I think things are going to trend towards being easier to use. And I think that, that our relentless focus on that I hope is, is kind of drawing the rest of the industry with us. I think what's what's next is you, you get basic autonomous mobility solved in a manufacturing. The next logical question is what about the applications or the top modules, or, you know, further integration or automatic loading and unloading of materials. And so I think the, the next wave, uh, in the industry is going to be about top modules and the applications that they solve for.
Speaker 2 00:35:58 Yeah, from our perspective, we, I mentioned higher power. I mentioned fan lists designs and things like that. So those are things that, that, that we see as, as key trends towards, towards the future of, of what we can contribute to robotics. Some of the other interesting things that we've learned about and are seeing what we can do to help communication and data handling, I think has become one of the big necessities for these autonomous systems, lidars and cameras can collect such a massive amount of data in a short period of time. You know, it almost becomes a challenge to just figure out how you offload all that data from a device. Wifi is good, but you can talk to pretty much any robotics company and they'll have horror stories about wifi connectivity and some of the challenges with sustaining that in, in different industries and different facilities.
Speaker 2 00:37:02 And so we've looked at initially for the drone market, but perhaps in the future for, for robotics as well. What better time to do this data offload than while it's sitting still not moving, not transitioning between wifi routers and just sitting there at a charging station. So, you know, we look at that and, and think about, okay, how can we make simple API APIs and simple communication protocols for which our system can help robots with some of these other tasks that, that we think are coming. So that's just one example. And, um, we, we, if I take a step back and just look at the industry as a whole, I think especially with this year and the pandemic and everything else it's come very much to the forefront for a lot of businesses in terms of how much automation is needed, both from a logistical perspective of sustaining their operations, or in some cases like e-commerce where there's just been a boom handling more, how do we handle more? How do we keep up with what other big companies are doing, you know, with warehouse automation and so forth. So we think industries will be accelerating even more so than they were before their need to scale up robots. And with that just comes the need for them to be reliable and ready to be scaled up. So we're, we're excited to see that come together. And I think it's going to be an exciting next few years in the world of robotics.
Speaker 1 00:38:42 When you look to the future of robotics, automation and charging, what are some of the other thoughts that come to mind? Well, I,
Speaker 0 00:38:49 It's been a real push for interoperability as a focus of the robotics industry, um, this year and, and leading into next year. And we're a part of a few projects that are working on interoperability, but one of the things that has always been important to way point and Ben and I have talked about this, and the two companies have talked about it a lot is that we don't just want to make the end zone wireless charger for Waypoint. And while it's nice to have that as a really great differentiator right now, it's much more important to us collectively that we try to create a wireless charging standard for the mobile robot industry in the same way that if there's the cheap wireless charging standard for cell phones. So if another robotics company wanted to buy an end zone transmitter or end zone receiver from Waypoint that uses Y biotic technology, or if there was another charging system that was already installed in a facility that used Y biotic technology than one of our robots could pull up to it and use it. And so, uh, you know, we've, we've had that shared vision and, and Ben, because you have so much, you know, interaction with all of the other companies and industries that are also working on the interoperability problem, I would love to hear, you know, your, your thoughts on, on how, how that's unfolding and, and you know, how we're doing on that vision to create a wireless standard for everyone to use.
Speaker 2 00:40:20 Definitely Jason, I'm glad you brought that up. And it's certainly something that we've thought about as well as a company, and even from a very technical perspective, just as a specific example, my biotic from day one have designed our systems with the ability to accommodate charging any type of battery. And we have a programmable interface for which you can specify the battery chemistry that you've got. You can specify the voltage that you want to charge up to. You can specify the charge rate. And the whole point of that is that any robot could be equipped with a N a Y biotic onboard charger. And just like you said, could go charge from any charging station that is compatible with that. And as we've thought about standards, if you look back at what happened and what's still happening in some cases with the cell phone wireless charging standard, a lot of that work started as early as like 2005.
Speaker 2 00:41:26 And in between 2005 and 2015, there were like eight different wireless charging standards. And that created a lot of headache. Uh, it created a lot of challenges for semiconductor companies who are trying to build chips to put in cell phones and to put in charging pads that they could sell. And until Apple really picked, I mean, Samsung and some other phone manufacturers had, had started to integrate GE and then Apple integrated. She, and now she is really the de facto for, for wireless charging for phones, but there are still other standard bodies pursuing standards for, for other applications. And if you look at what drives a lot of those standards, it's, it's, it really just comes down to end user demand. Number one, and the needs of the supply chain, number two. So consumers wanting to buy any kind of phone and they wanted to buy low cost charging pads.
Speaker 2 00:42:23 They didn't just want to have to buy them from one OEM. You know, they wanted to be able to buy whatever, and it would charge your phone. And I think we're now starting to see that same type of thing happened in robotics. Jason and I have both talked with end-users of robotic systems, and many of them will say the same thing. They'll say we are planning to use different robots to do different tasks. One robot can do this task really well. One robot can do this task really well. And gosh, it's a pain in the butt when we have to have five different charging stations and manage each of those, because each one comes with its own unique thing. So agreed that, that I think the time is ripe for thinking about this and why biotic has been working closely with a couple of these wireless charging standards out there.
Speaker 2 00:43:17 Um, an example of one, that's also thinking about these higher power applications for wireless charging standards is called the air fuel Alliance. And those groups are working hard with regulatory agencies around the world. They're trying to bring together technology providers, manufacturers, end users to drive the requirements for these, these standards. And so while it takes time, I think it's a, it, it's definitely a good time for as many folks interested in this topic of interoperability to consider joining some of those groups to consider contributing ideas and even IP to this effort. And that's how these standards come together and that's how they happen. So for sure, it's something that's on our radar. And I think between Waypoint and Y biotic we'll hopefully be strong contributors to how these standards evolve in the years to come.
Speaker 1 00:44:23 I think it's a great idea. Thank you, uh, Jason, and thank you Ben, for that very thoughtful, uh, challenge and problem for us to solve it gets out of control. So Jason and Ben, thank you. And how can people get in touch with you?
Speaker 2 00:44:37 So this is Jason, I'm my handles I'm robot mechanic on all the social channels. And, uh, I'm on LinkedIn. Uh, we can make
[email protected] and at Waypoint robo on all the social channels. And this is Ben with web biotic. And the best way to get in touch with us is through our website, or you can email us
[email protected]. We also are on LinkedIn. I check LinkedIn pretty frequently. So feel free to reach out to me or check out our website. And we look forward to chatting with you.
Speaker 1 00:45:18 Thanks very much. And I like to thank and acknowledge our partner, a three, the association for advancing automation three is the umbrella association for the RIA AIA, M C M a N <inaudible> Mexico. And these four associations combined represent almost 1300 automation manufacturers, suppliers, integrators, and users, research groups, and consulting firms throughout the world that are driving automation forward. And I'd also like to thank painted robot painted robot builds and integrates digital solutions. They are a web development firm that offers SEO and digital social marketing, and can set up and connect CRM and ERP tools to unify marketing sales and operations as web and digital's changing. Painted robot is helping advanced manufacturers stay modern and competitive in the space, and you can find
[email protected]. And if you'd like to get in touch with us at the robot industry podcast, we'll our email address is pretty simple.
Speaker 1 00:46:16 It's the robot industry
[email protected] or 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 Chris gray, my nephew for the music, Chris Colbin for audio production, my partner, Janet, and our sponsors <inaudible> and painted robot. And our sponsor for this episode is Earhart automation systems, Earhart builds and commissions turn key solutions for worldwide clients. With over 80 years of precision manufacturing, they understand the complex world of robotics, automated manufacturing, project management, and delivering world class automation systems on time and on budget contact one of their sales engineers to see what Earhart can build for you. And that's Earhart is E H R H a R D T banks, and be safe out there.
Speaker 3 00:47:15 <inaudible>.
