Speaker 0 00:00:01 This product strategy idea at pickle was let's eliminate customization so we can pass on much lower cost to our customers. And let's focus on retrofit opportunities in buildings that are already totally operational.
Speaker 1 00:00:16 Hello everyone. And welcome to the podcast. We're glad that you're here and thank you for subscribing. My name is Jim Beretta, and I'm happy to have AIG from pickle robot on this edition of the robot industry podcast. Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 0 00:00:30 Thank you very much, Jim. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 00:00:33 Hey, can you tell our audience a little bit about you and how you got started in this industry?
Speaker 0 00:00:38 Sure. So, uh, I guess it goes back to my undergrad days. I went to MIT a million years ago and in the early two thousands, I was really fascinated by how machine learning might interact with controlling robots. And we did some projects in object recognition and some walking robots and some flying robots, but it was all very nascent space. And I didn't see any immediate commercial applicability in 2008. So we put, we put a pin in it. We started another company. That company went on to be a, uh, an R and D firm called leaf labs that basically does science projects for Fang. So we've worked with, with all of the major tech companies on some of their most advanced and highest risk programs. And after a decade of that, we started to get a sense that, you know, there's like billions of dollars being invested in autonomous driving tech right now.
Speaker 0 00:01:34 I wonder if we can harvest any of that tech to go back to robotics right back to my, my roots. And, uh, I think the key problem has been for robotics startups to get really excited about a particular algorithm or piece of technology or somebody's PhD thesis. We didn't want to do that. So we spent about six months or so, just exploring different customers, different markets with different problems might be, and we eventually wound up taking a tour of a parcel processing plant where they sort packages. And we watched people spend hours at night, unloading these trucks, uh, like there's no HVAC in these trucks, uh, in the wintertime it's, it's in the negative. And the summertime in California can be 130 degrees in the trailers and you just have to move the material. It's it's really back-breaking. And, um, man, we just didn't watch that and thought, you know, I think that with 2020 technology, this is solvable in a way that it was not with a robotic solution in 2010, uh, and that was the Genesis of the company.
Speaker 1 00:02:42 And so the problem you're solving is what,
Speaker 0 00:02:45 Oh yeah, sure. The problem we're solving is we're trying to load and unload trucks with robot arms. Uh, frankly, if we can figure out how to load and unload them without robot arms, we would do that too. But really we're trying to, to amplify a person's ability to move that material through the loading dock. So let's say right now a person can unload, I don't know, a thousand cases an hour from the back of a truck, uh, and you know, mind you, there's like almost 20 billion packages get delivered in the United States this year. So, um, you know, it's a lot of material going in and out of the backs of trucks. So a person can do a thousand. Is there some way that we can have a person do 5,000? Uh, and what would that look like? And so the solution that we've come up with is to take a robot arm and Mount it on a mobile base and it drives into the truck and it uses a vacuum type gripper and it picks up packages and puts them on a conveyor belt and gets them out of that truck at a little faster than a thousand pieces an hour.
Speaker 0 00:03:44 Now the trick is to realize that because we've pretty much cribbed all the tech from self-driving, it doesn't work all the way, right? The, the robot has, uh, an issue every few minutes where, you know, drop something on the floor. It doesn't know how to pick up a car tire. The shape of the thing is weird or it doesn't hold vacuum. And so we, the mansion that there's going to still be a person, but that one person might oversee five robots. So now you've gone from a thousand, picks an hour for a person, a to 5,000 an hour for that same, that same person. And we hope it's a much more interesting job as well. Uh, leave the, the hard back breaking parts of the robot and the kind of problem solving finicky parts to people which they're best at.
Speaker 1 00:04:29 And that's a really cool idea. And let's talk about the challenges of unloading trucks from a human perspective. You've already said, this is really hard, terrible.
Speaker 0 00:04:38 Yeah, well it, um, oh man, we're we're where do we start? So the first concern is just the repetitive stress injury aspect to it. And they think is more seriously in Europe than they do in the United States. But just because the regulations changed doesn't mean that the worker experiences is any different. Uh, if you've got four hours, uh, in a, in a stretch where you're just picking up a 50 pound box, turning 90 degrees and putting it down on a conveyor belt, uh, I've done this job very briefly and I'm thankful that, that, uh, I don't have to do it in more than I already have. One of the funniest things about this business is when people find out, uh, that, you know, we build robots that unload trucks, so many industry professionals, they might be engineers or executives. Uh, I've met people in marketing and they say, oh, you know, when I was this and this age at a different time in my life, I did that job. Um, and it's a really, really hard job. Then another problem, uh, is just the conditions in the trailer are really extreme. Uh, you know, they don't put air conditioning or heating systems back there. And so it's not at all atypical to walk into a trailer and you open the door and it's 130 degrees Fahrenheit back there. Cause they've been driving around the desert to get to the warehouse. So it's, it's a very hostile environment. What's
Speaker 1 00:06:00 Cock a little bit of a loading dock cause I I've never had that job. And so what all happens at the loading dock, certainly the packages are coming in what's what are some of the other things that are happening there?
Speaker 0 00:06:10 Sure. Well, you, the interesting thing about the loading dock is that it's, it's a part of the operation that almost everybody has, right? So whether you're in manufacturing or you're, you're, you're sorting packages or you're fulfilling orders, you're like an e-commerce warehouse or some kind of three PL everybody's got trucks pulling up the loading docks that need to get, get a material taken in and out. So the types of things that you see there, uh, first of all, it's it's worth, uh, in disambiguating between two types of loads, you have, uh, pallet loads, which they don't use the space in the back of the truck very effectively. It was like maybe you only get 60% utilization of the volume of the trailer. Uh, but they're really easy to move in and out of the truck. So just imagine a pallet, it's got a bunch of stuff on it.
Speaker 0 00:06:56 It doesn't matter what the stuff is. It's usually wrapped in cellophane and then somebody can forklift all that material out of the internet of the trailer and then stage it in the loading dock. So one thing you're always going to see lots of around loading boxes, like staged pallets, uh, another type of load is called a loose load. Sometimes it's called a floor load or a fluid load, the various different flavors of the word, because it's, it's, it's, uh, there's so many different segments of the industry that has a similar looking situation. They'd give it a different word, but basically what we mean is just boxes stacked up on the floor. And sometimes they're all the same box and sometimes there's two or three different kinds of boxes. Or sometimes if you go to a FedEx or ups, something in the parcel industry, it's just every type of object you can imagine, you know, little boxes, big boxes, small boxes, canvas bags, plastic bags, car tires, uh, fire extinguishers, right?
Speaker 0 00:07:49 So, um, and maybe one way to think about it is as you move from a manufacturing context to a, uh, last mile delivery context. So the item is getting made and then eventually you ordering on the internet and then it arrives at your house. At some point, as you move down the supply chain, the trailers trailers get messier and messier, and it's, it's pretty easy to understand why that would be, uh, because when they stuff comes out of the factory, it's, you know, 5,000 boxes of all the same object. Uh, and then as they go through layers of distributors and ultimately to the, to the final shipper, you're mixing all different kinds of objects. Cause I can be buying anything from my house from all different distributors. Um, so what else happens at the loading dock? You're moving pallets around you're moving boxes and other material into and out of trucks.
Speaker 0 00:08:38 Um, kind of the final variation that we see across customers is whether or not they hook the trucks directly up to their conveyor belt network. So really automated buildings or large operations have many tens of millions of dollars in some cases and it's than that of conveyance and sortation equipment and other automation. And sometimes they Jack this stuff directly into the back of the truck. So what you'll see whether it's an unload or a load is a conveyor belt that goes all the way inside the truck. And then you have an employee whose job it is to, to pick boxes off the conveyor and stack them in the back of the truck or pick boxes from the back of the truck and put them on the conveyor belt. Uh, and then the conveyor belt will then whisk the package away, uh, into some, some automated sortation equipment or something like that. Um, so those are the, it's kind of like the environment that we, that we come into. And we looked at that environment and decided that the best, uh, product that we could ship into this environment that would solve the biggest problem for the most number of people was a robot that would unload the, the loose loaded trailers, uh, directly onto a conveyor belt.
Speaker 1 00:09:45 Nice. And then from an automated perspective, is there anything that's happening in the loading dock? Like you mentioned conveyors, uh, is there a scale scanning or wing or cameras or what what's,
Speaker 0 00:09:55 There's everything. I mean, it depends on the customer, um, but sometimes you see six sided scanning tunnels, uh, that, that will look at all the labels find which side the label is on dimension, the package. Sometimes you see scales so we can measure the weight of the package as it goes in or out. Uh, you see a lot of equipment related to, uh, dealing with with different types of exceptions. Uh, and these can be really simple. I'll give you an example. Um, let's say that I'm trying to take a package from a truck into a conveyor belt and then onto what's called a tilt tray sorter, which is, uh, a big racetrack. I mean, we're talking potentially thousands of feet in some cases. And every section of the racetrack has a little one foot or a two foot little, uh, uh, it's a tradition and you get a little, then you put the box on the tray or the conveyor belt dumps the box on the tray.
Speaker 0 00:10:47 And then the tray gets synchronized with a bunch of other bins on the floor and it dumps them into the bins on the floor. So this is how you sort packages are one, one of the many ways to serve packages. And those trays are really finicky. There's a lot of moving parts. So if you get the box kind of it's the wrong size, or it's not aligned on the belt well, or it's turned around the wrong way or the labels not facing them. There could be a zillion different reasons why the interface between this, uh, this belt and this tilt tray system is going to fail. And so upstream of that, you're going to catch those they're called exceptions and bump them off. So, you know, typical conveyor automation system looks like, uh, a series of checks to try and filter out all of the things that are going to break it. So that by the time you get to the work, which is the sorting the package or whatever, um, it's not going to break very expensive. Uh, hopefully what I'm describing sounds very expensive.
Speaker 1 00:11:44 So this is a big business. How do you like segment your customers?
Speaker 0 00:11:50 Great question. So it's, it's, it's really complicated market and I, I don't know that this will be our forever segmentation, but I feel like we've done a pretty good job of simplifying the map. And here's how we think about it. Imagine a, a quadrat diagram, you know, like a big plus, and so on one axis, you're going to say, uh, I'm interested in parcel. Sortation like delivery packages coming to your house, or I'm interested in fulfillment, uh, like orders being packed and shipping out from a distributor or an Amazon or something like that. And then on the other axis on the Y axis, we're going to say there's enterprise customers, big multi-billion dollar, you know, ups, Amazon has kind of, and then on the other axis, we're going to have everybody else. Mid-market customers, you know, a billion dollars in revenue or less and less goes way down.
Speaker 0 00:12:39 I mean, you, you have customers that, um, that are doing very useful work in e-commerce, but they only have 200,000 square feet and one warehouse and 50 employees and perfectly viable business that, that, that pack orders and sort of packages. Um, so those are the four quadrants, you know, enterprise parcel, imagine ups, FedEx, DHL, um, mid-market parcel should be like a laser ship or an OnTrack maybe Pitney Bowes a little bit is kind of on the line. Uh, then enterprise fulfillment is like your Walmart, Amazon, maybe XPO, like a really big three PL and then mid-market fulfillment, which is where all of our first customers have been so far. Um, and, uh, you'd be surprised when you order something online, the scope of different companies that collaborate to get that order to your door. You had this imagination, that's like you hit a button and Amazon just figures it all out. And they are very vertically integrated, but there's plenty of packages on Amazon prime that are being fulfilled from, from third party buildings and little startup companies and mom and pop three PLS and large street deals. Uh it's it really takes a village to do this whole next day delivery thing.
Speaker 1 00:13:49 And you're pretty focused on your offering. Uh, like you're, you're unloading trucks, not loading trucks. And can you, or can you tell our listeners a little bit about this and why you're, why you're so focused?
Speaker 0 00:14:01 Yeah, great question. Um, long-term we'd like to do both and not only do we want to load and unload trucks, we also want to load the last mile vehicles like the delivery sprinter vans and the package cars that come to your house ups, big brown that's those cool custom trucks. Um, and also, uh, there's air freight containers. We'd like to load and unload. Sometimes people call them igloos cause they either shaped like the bottom of the airplane. Um, so we want to load and unload everything. What we started with unload. Why is that? Um, number one, it's the easiest, uh, it's, it's only slightly harder than picking up packages from a pile, uh, and you can just demand it. And the reason it's harder is because I can't pick up any package that I can see if I do that, like the whole wall will fall down on me, so I have to expect them in a certain order.
Speaker 0 00:14:46 Um, and so it was a natural next step. When we were doing our roadmap, we started by picking up packages off a conveyor belt, and then we learned to pick them up off the pile. And then now that we can become a pile. Now we're unloading them from a wall, you know, a stack of packages in the trailer so that the technical roadmap had to advance in a reasonable way so that we could put one foot in front of the other and not spend five years in R and D trying to figure out loading, um, the next interesting lens through which to view this, uh, I dunno, hopefully most of your listeners are familiar with the word entropy, right? There's, there's a lot more ways to unload a truck than there are to load it. And, uh, I remember having an investor once asked me, I don't understand, like the demo for unload is coming along. Why can't you start taking on load projects? It's just the same thing in reverse. And, you know, the immediate thought that popped into my head was, um, yeah, I mean, if you can figure out how to take the heat in your house and turn it back into natural gas, you know, that's kind of the same physics that's happening when you're loading versus unloading a truck. Um, but you'll see in, in a couple of years we'll be loading them as well.
Speaker 1 00:15:56 Ha you're positioning your solutions as a
Speaker 0 00:15:58 Product. Yeah. So what does that mean to have a product approach to the market, uh, versus, you know, project approach? I mean, most of automation is project solutions or you go visit a customer. They have a very complicated series of processes that have been working for them, or maybe they're designing a new building from scratch. And it has to do, you know, 10,000 things, uh, in order to be a viable plant. And you work with that customer sometimes over multiple years to design a series of, of solutions that are going to link together. You know, they call that system integration, um, to, to solve whatever the problem is, you know, sort of packages more quickly, uh, fill more orders, more quickly reduce the square footage of the plant, increase the throughput of the plane. There's all these different goals that the customers would choose. And most of the costs of those types of engagements goes to the customization and the architecture and the integration.
Speaker 0 00:16:58 It's not the equipment. The equipment is like 20% of the crops. So what we realized was two things. Number one, we could deploy stuff way cheaper if we got rid of a lot of that customization so that the cross really was the equipment as opposed to a bunch of customization. Um, and the way that we were going to eliminate customization was by focusing, not on doing every task in the warehouse, but by doing one task in everywhere has right. And that task seems to be loading and unloading trailers. I mean, everywhere has got Dockers. And so because it's so, you know, standardized the thought was that we could usefully solve a problem for people with very little customization and keep costs. The other insight that we had was that most automation is not, not serving old buildings, you know, in the brownfield call, there's Greenfield, new projects is brownfield old buildings, and there are loads of logistics, infrastructure, you know, warehouses that have been functioning for decades without much modification.
Speaker 0 00:18:02 And the reason is that if you want to start doing a little automation, it quickly ends up being a lot of automation with belts, uh, and lots of integration and sensors and a Wes system, software upgrades, and all this stuff you end up just like saying, you know what, let's focus our capital expenditures on new buildings and leave the old ones as they are. Um, and, and not do too much with, you know, uh, retrofit projects. So, okay. So if your market is only new buildings is not a very big market. How many buildings get built, you know, in a typical month, um, if we could design robots that would retrofit in a cost-effective way into existing operations, where we could then sell them thousands of buildings, instead of know, just the one that happens to be, uh, under construction right now. Um, so those were the two, uh, insights that drove this product strategy idea at pickle was let's eliminate customization, so we can pass on much lower cost to our customers. And let's focus on retrofit opportunities in buildings that are already totally operational. Um, now that's easy to say and very hard to do, but, uh, that's what we're doing.
Speaker 1 00:19:14 And you talked a lot about cost ha what, what is the cost people are looking at? I'm sure people are thinking about, oh my gosh, it sounds expensive.
Speaker 0 00:19:21 Yeah, well, you know, it can be, and it also can be cheaper than you expect. Uh, the, the least expensive systems that, that we expect for customers are about $3,500 a month. Everything that we do is on a lease model and we maintain everything for that price. And we upgrade the software for that price and we do all the customer service and telemetry and keep these things running. Um, and then it costs an additional $30,000 as a setup fee, uh, to, to kind of cover the cost of us coming out to do the installation. Um, and everything is month to month. That's the least expensive system that we do. Uh, the most expensive systems that we specked out are closer to $60,000 for an implementation and more like $9,000 a month. Uh, and you can imagine at least some of the differences between the cheap and the expensive is, uh, things like payload speed, the type of robot that we're working with. And also just the amount of hours that you're planning to put on the thing. So as a leased model, it it's going to depreciate, you know, parts wear out, um, you know, motors need to be replaced. So if you're running it 20 hours a day, uh, you know, six days a week, you're gonna end up paying more than if you're a 40 hour a week kind of operation.
Speaker 1 00:20:34 What are the things that you're doing as a byproduct is you're going to be creating a lot of data. And I wanted to talk a little bit. I have you talk a little bit about that, about the value of the data to,
Speaker 0 00:20:45 Well, we've already been creating a of data. So we, one of the interesting things about pickoff cause some of the other robotics companies in this space have just spent enormous amounts of money trying to get started. I mean, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars. So we actually got past our 500,000 production pick at our fourth fully operational customer site before our series a, you know, 10 people in the whole company, putting robots out in the field, uh, and gathering all the data from the picks. So what do you do with that data? Well, the first thing you do with it is you give it to the customer. The customer really likes to see it. They want to know things like, did I pay too much for shipping? You know, the label says that this pound weighs in this package weighs a pound, but I didn't really weigh it.
Speaker 0 00:21:29 I'm just going off at a skew, but the robot can weigh it. Right. And we can put that in a, in a database somewhere, the customer can look up. The customers also are trying to improve their, their own processes and numbers. And one of the greatest things about the loading dock and part of how we chose it. So strategically is that it is either the input or it's the output to the entire operation. So if your goal is to improve the, um, the kind of operational flow of your building, you know, so instead of having spikes where you're going a thousand packages an hour through your building, and then that drops to a hundred, and then that goes up to 2,500 and that goes down to 200, all that variation is expensive and it's hard to manage. So the way that you fix that is by starting either at the input or the output, if I can unload a trailer, you know, right on cue all day long at a let's call it a thousand an hour, just every, uh, five seconds we're gonna, we're going to do a package or every three and a half seconds, we're gonna do a package that's way better than bursting.
Speaker 0 00:22:30 Right. Um, and so that's the second thing customers want that data for. They want to see that real time. What is my throughput through the, through this work cell? And, uh, and what does that mean for how I need to manage the rest of my building to try and smooth out these, these peak and trough cycles? The third we do with the data is we use it to improve the product, uh, greatly. I mean, I'll give you a good example. We were having trouble in production earlier this summer, where if the robot picked directly onto a shipping label, particularly if that shipping label had just been printed. And so the adhesive was still kind of warm. We'd pull the label off, which is a disaster right now. You've lost the package. You can't do that. And so we decided to, uh, create a slight, uh, new feature on, on the AI side of the product so that we could understand visually we could understand shipping labels, where are they on the package and try and tell the robot to make a slightly better decision about how to pick that up, pick up that package so that it wasn't gonna gonna peel the label off.
Speaker 0 00:23:35 And we were able to, to execute that and really just two and a half weeks or so from soup to nuts, because we have thousands of images coming in every day of packages that we can train off, right? And we can, we can even write new code for, uh, making different picking decisions and ship them to the field where only maybe 2% of the picks are gonna run the new code. And 98% of the picks run the old code. And so if you make a mistake on your new code, it doesn't bring anybody down. It just, the numbers go down a little bit. And if it works, you know, you expanded from 2% to 10% follow,
Speaker 1 00:24:11 Why are your customers buying? Like you must be having these conversations and you must get a huge variety of reasons.
Speaker 0 00:24:19 Yeah. I mean, first off it's different in every market. And the only market that I'm intimately familiar with is the United States. And we've been careful to, to, to stay in, uh, in our own backyard, so to speak so that, because we're just so small, we can't can't sustain projects internationally. Um, the labor crunch situation right now is very real. I think, depending on, if you look at a large enterprise customer, they're still more interested in throughput and operational, uh, you know, KPIs that they're trying to juice, because think of if you're Walmart and you can push more packages through a building or more orders, you don't have to build as many buildings. And the buildings are really expensive if you're Walmart hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases. So pushing more material through the building is still more important to some customers. I don't know if Walmart would count them among this, but some customers than the labor crunch situation for other customers.
Speaker 0 00:25:16 The labor crunch is just insane. I was talking to a, a distributor recently who imports goods from overseas and they unload eight or nine containers a day. Um, they've been doing this for years very successfully. And they said that when they try and get 20, uh, what are called lumpers, these are people who professionally unload trucks as a staff, like a staffing agency that specializes in unloading, um, to show up three would show up not eight, not 10, not three at a 20. And, and so you've designed your business around the assumption that you can put a certain number of packages through the loading dock in a given, uh, shift. And if you can't get anybody to show up for work, um, your whole business falls apart. So that's really scary for a lot of operators. Um, the good news is that puts a lot of upward pressure on wages. And I mean, if you, if you are looking for a part-time job that pays really well, you can walk into any of these warehouses and try and do this, but I warn you. These are really hard jobs.
Speaker 1 00:26:29 The, uh, what's their ROI then. I mean, a lot of types of, again, it's a pretty wide question. Is it measured now in probably months?
Speaker 0 00:26:37 Yeah. So you asked me about cost a minute ago and I gave you real numbers and like thousands of dollars, I think a much better way to think about cost is just in terms of ROI. That's how the customers think about it anyway. And so if you have a sophisticated, large customer looking to make some big investments on, on, on improving their business, think like an enterprise at Walmart or ups, you, they really want something that's going to pay for itself three years or faster. Uh, maybe maybe two and a half years would be a really nice sales pitch for an enterprise customer for a mid-market customer. They don't, they don't want to sit around on a three-year investment. I mean, the end they're taking a flyer on a startup company it's already high risk enough. You really need to be able to argue that this thing's going to pay for itself in a year.
Speaker 0 00:27:22 Now, the good news is that there's a lot less customization and cost that goes into serving a mid-market customer than an enterprise. You can show up to a mid-market customer with a robot in a crate and set it up in an afternoon and turn it on. You spend a couple of days training and you go home and now you've, you've substantially automated a process in their building. Very easy to get a sub one year payback when that's what it looks like. As soon as you engage with, with a big multi-billion dollar behemoth, um, there's just no way around custom software integrations, 3d modeling along sales cycle, et cetera. So we've really been focused on these, these middle market customers that can just execute so much more quickly than, than the big guys. Um,
Speaker 1 00:28:05 I would think too, that there's a big benefit to getting trucks like getting a third parties truck in and out of your facility, uh, on their side, right on the third-party truck side.
Speaker 0 00:28:16 Uh, yeah. You're talking about the, uh, the, the fees for when you, when you get stuck with a trailer sitting on the dock door for too long. Yeah, absolutely. Um, and, uh, you know, there's more ways than just labor that this costs you, right? So, you know, we've been talking about onload because that's the flagship activity for, for pickle right now, but we do have a first product, which is a, a sortation product. And it picks up small packages, you know, less than 12, 13 pounds depends on the, on the customer and sorts the, uh, and we've been doing that for about a year in production now. And, uh, you know, if I miss sorta package and I put it, you know, I put it in the wrong bin, I just cost my customer like five bucks, maybe more, right. They slip their SLA. A customer was expecting the package to arrive next deck next day.
Speaker 0 00:29:03 And it's not going to, because it went on the wrong trout. Um, so that's a really big mistake. You can actually end up spending more money in sort defects than on the labor itself. So, and that's just one example. So you gave another good one. If the trailer can't get unloaded on time, it sits on your dock door. I spent eventually you start racking up fees to have it sit there. Um, if you are not using your building efficiently, uh, some, some companies have what are called straight line sort of. So we talked about tilt trays as a type of that. They're really expensive. And so if you're keeping it 20% loaded, you know, you're a $20 million machine is just not being used. Uh, but it's still depreciating. You know, all the parts are still moving. The maintenance staff is still there keeping it running.
Speaker 0 00:29:46 So all these little bottlenecks really create a lot of costs. Um, not to mention just like the turnover, uh, if somebody comes on the job works for three days and then disappears, um, yeah, you, you just blew thousands of dollars in onboarding fees and training and other things for, for, uh, for a relationship that didn't work out. So you really want to reduce employee turnover. And we think that the best way to do that is besides paying more is by making the jobs more interesting. Uh, and so rather than have the person do the rope part where you turn off your brain and just use your muscles, let's switch that the other way around. Let's let the robot do the part where it turns off it's brand new sits muscles, and the person does all of the exception handling, uh, which is surprisingly the exact opposite of how most of this stuff works.
Speaker 1 00:30:38 I'm a big believer of, uh, you know, if I'm looking for a job and I'm looking in warehousing or something, and I get a chance to work for a company that's mechanized that has automation in it, or, or not, I will actually have more for the company that invests in automation. So I think it's a great, uh, uh, example. Um, you mentioned about the, the difference between kind of Europeans and north Americans purchasing automation. So why do Europeans purchase automation differently than north American companies?
Speaker 0 00:31:07 And I, you know, I feel a little under qualified to answer that just because again, our focus area right now is in the United States, but from the customers that I've talked to in Europe, you're really top of mind for them is regulatory compliance. Uh, and so they have all kinds of, um, you really serious concerns about safety, about repetitive stress injuries. And they're willing to spend a lot of money to, to just try and reduce a person's exposure to physical risk. Now they care about that stuff in United States, too. And if you tour, you know, large, large plants, they take safety very, very seriously because it's just the most expensive problem. And, and, and, and, um, and honestly, I think there've been good role models there in the United States. Amazon is a great role model. They take safety incredibly seriously, which is maybe surprising given their, their reputation in the public. But anyway, so, so in Europe, they just have, uh, uh, uh, uh, big incentive because of the regulatory environment to reduce the likelihood that anyone can, can get hurt, um, and picking up heavy objects and moving them around all day. It's a really easy way to get her,
Speaker 1 00:32:17 Which a robot companies are you working with, or can you talk about that?
Speaker 0 00:32:21 Sure. Uh, we use two robot platforms now, so we have two products, right? The package sorter, and they unload, and the package store robot is based on you, our platform. And we have a very nice close relationship with UAR. And, uh, and, uh, I assume that, that, uh, that product is going to stay, uh, in the URA ecosystem, um, you know, through its next generation and you are, has been, uh, an awesome partner. I think they're one of the few robotics companies that really understands, um, that the key market for them is logistics. Um, right now robot, arms, and warehouses. It's an idea. It's an exciting idea. It has a lot of venture capital behind it. I have some of that venture capital, right, but it's still very early days. Um, but if you fast forward, 10 years, robot, arms and logistics is going to overtake robot arms and in automotive. Uh, and there's a lot of market research to back that up. You are gets it. Um, and a lot of the other arm companies are struggling to understand that, uh, and we can talk about what that actually means, but our other robot vendor, uh, is KUKA who have also been super supportive and, and we love working with them. We use the for the, uh, for the unload robot. It's got loads of payload it's very fast. Um, and we've just gotten great, great support from the engineers at KUKA. So those are the two vendors
Speaker 1 00:33:38 Aja and our pre-call. We talked about the big project that you're working on, which sounds kind of exciting. Can you let our audience know a little bit about what that looks like?
Speaker 0 00:33:46 Well, so it's, it's certainly our, our, our, uh, biggest event right now. So we've been slowly building over the last few years towards own loading a trailer in production at rate where rate is like 800 or a thousand packages. Now our, uh, over the course of an entire shift, average down, uh, so that is rapidly approaching, uh, Q1 of 2022. We have our first production pilot lined up, uh, out in California, and then we have four, four more production pilots, like every month after that. So by the summer of 2022, you know, we think that we should be reliably, uh, unloading trailers for customers in, uh, in multiple different production contexts. Um, now as you improve the product quality, the size of your addressable market goes up. So some customers are perfectly happy to let you unload a truck at 600 pieces an hour. So you serve those customers first, but other customers, it needs to be 1200, or it doesn't work for them. You're forced to modify their other processes too much. So as the robot gets faster, um, you can serve more customers. And so the treadmill that pickle is putting itself on is to put one robot out in the world, use that production data to improve the metrics like speed and ha you know, error rates. And then now with the improved metrics, you get to put more robots out in the world and so on and so forth until you are solving, you know, the 80% of the use cases, uh, and you have a really big business.
Speaker 1 00:35:18 So I know that you're just getting started, but what's kind of next up for pickle.
Speaker 0 00:35:24 Yeah. I mean, so we're, we're just totally focused right now on, uh, on keeping the, uh, the production systems. We have thriving, uh, and, uh, and getting the unload system out in market through it's a alpha pilots in Q1. Um, you know, we're still more than a year away from kind of general production, you know, not often not beta, just buy it and we ship it to you, uh, for unload, we have loads of customers that, I mean, hundreds of customers that have been, uh, calling us up and saying, you know, how do I get one of these unload robots sooner rather than later? You know, my, my CEO tells me that, uh, automating the loading dock is our number one automation priority. You know, how do I, uh, engage with pickle? Uh, and the answer is, uh, two ways, you know, we have a deposit program right now where you can put your name down for a very reasonable thousand dollar fee and engage with us to say, uh, you know, robot number block is going to go to this location.
Speaker 0 00:36:21 And we want to really deeply understand with our deposit customers. What is the use case in terms of payload speed? Do they want the packages to be gapped on the conveyor? If so, what's the gapping. Is there these be left, aligned on the conveyor? Is there any software integration that is mandatory? You know, ideally there's not, but some customers have, so let's work through the needs, um, and get you on the schedule and make progress on your automation goals. The second way to engage with us as a pioneer customer, and we have several already is, is much more, uh, deep type of engagement. We're looking for customers that have credibly a 50 plus unit use case. Uh, and we're interested in trying to find one in each segment, which, which we already have. So we're probably looking for two of these segment, uh, and we talked about the four segments, right?
Speaker 0 00:37:08 Enterprise parcel, mid-market parcel, fulfillment, uh, and mid-market fulfillment. Um, and so for those larger use cases, we're going to come on site and we're going to spend a lot of time gathering data about, you know, what are the trucks look like when they arrive in your building and what are the loads look like, and how does this hook up for the rest of your automation and, uh, and, and really take a more solutions oriented approach just for those pioneer customers, uh, while we boot up. And then, and then hopefully we will, uh, have enough representation in that group that everybody else can, can, uh, reuse the effort that went into those relationships on a more product off the, off the rack kind of basis.
Speaker 1 00:37:49 And Jay, thank you for this. Uh, it's been very informative. Uh, did we forget anything?
Speaker 0 00:37:56 Uh, well, we are recruiting like crazy. So to the extent that you have, uh, industry professionals and, uh, an engineers that are interested in, in, in coming, uh, to work at pickle, I mean, truly every, every function in marketing and sales, operations, uh, we've really interesting things going on and deployment operates. So we get to travel all around the country and play with robots. Uh, certainly in engineering, if you work in a self-driving car industry, um, yeah. All across the board, we're gonna, we're growing 10% a month, every month for the next two years.
Speaker 1 00:38:35 Exciting times. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:38:36 It's very exciting. Um, and I think also that it's just the coolest industry. Yeah. Like a few years ago, uh, I was talking to a professor, uh, in a group of other students and this person was involved in the AB industry. Uh self-driving and he says, if you're not working on self-driving and you're skilled in the art of AI and the relevant engineering areas, you know, you're doing your career wrong. This is the most exciting thing, you know, and that rang true then. But now that we understand how hard 99.99, 9% reliability really is in self-driving, you know, the, the place where that actually changes the world, and it will, by the way, right. But if he keeps getting pushed out, whereas the frontier of AI it's right here on the loading dock, it's robot, arms picking up packages in warehouses. And because we can make mistakes, you know, we don't need 99.99, like 98%. Reliability is fine. Five minutes of uninterrupted, uh, robot time is fine. Um, that means that we're going to change the world right now. So if you're excited about, uh, robotics and artificial intelligence, the future of work, um, I think you should come visit us here in Boston.
Speaker 1 00:39:49 Thank you very much for
Speaker 0 00:39:50 Saj. Thank you so much, Jim.
Speaker 1 00:39:53 Our sponsor for this episode is Earhart automation systems, Earhart builds and commissions turnkey solutions for their worldwide clients. With over 80 years of precision manufacturing, they understand the complex world of robotics, automated manufacturing, and project management, delivering world-class custom automation on time and on budget contact one of their sales engineers to see what Earhart can build for you and
[email protected] and Earhart is spelled E H R H a R D T. And I have to thank our partner eight three 3d association for advancing automation. They're the leading automation trade association for robotics, vision and imaging motion control and motors, and the industrial artificial intelligence technologies visit automate.org to learn more and like to thank our partner. He did robot painted robot builds and integrates digital solutions. There are 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. You can find
[email protected]. If you'd like to get in touch with 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, Chris Colvin for audio production, my partner, Janet eight three handed robot, and our sponsor Earhart automation systems.
