Speaker 0 00:00:00 This is Jeff <inaudible> out from techno robotics. Uh, we take material handling equipment and bring it to life.
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Hello everyone. And welcome to the robot industry podcast. We're glad you're here and thank you for subscribing. My name is Jim Beretta and I'm your host, and it's my pleasure to have Jeff Horta from vector robotics with me today. We're broadcasting from London, Ontario, and Waltham, Massachusetts. Jeff brings more than 15 years of automation leadership experience to vector robotics with a strong track record of building world-class operations prior to joining now, Jeff was vice president of north America sales at Valeo, where he led the go-to market strategy for the company's self guided trucks. Previously, Jeff has held sales and marketing position with sick, or he managed and developed the OEM packaging sales team for the north American market. Jeff, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 0 00:00:54 Thanks, Jim. I'm glad to be here. Tell
Speaker 1 00:00:57 Us a little bit about Beckner robotics. You're a startup, but you're kind of a mature startup. Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:01:02 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So veterano robotics. We've been around for a little over 20 years in robotics and being in Boston, you know, a strong calling to MIT and, uh, you know, trying to put robotics in different industries. It was it in healthcare and doing stuff for the department of defense. Uh, those are, you know, past histories that have evolved us into focusing on material handling equipment and the logistics environment. So
Speaker 1 00:01:29 What exactly are you selling these days? Like what's typical.
Speaker 0 00:01:33 Gotcha. Our focus is what we do is we take a standard for truck or material and any equipment, and we tape put our technology on top of it, technology being hardware, and then software. We're a software robotics company and putting our technology to make it not just driverless, but fully robotic.
Speaker 1 00:01:52 So let's talk about fork trucks because you know, it's one of those things that they're kind of ubiquitous, but let's talk a little bit about the history of fork trucks and you must know a lot about those.
Speaker 0 00:02:02 Yeah. The history of Ford trucks. Yeah. So that's a good question. Uh, you know, Ford trucks have been around for, you know, a very, very long period of time. People have been moving material around for many, many years and, uh, the equipment has evolved from a lot of it being mechanically hydraulically, driven to electrically driven, uh, electric, electronic power steering, and assist, as it evolves, let's say in the past 20 years. And that allows people like us, it's put our technology in and allow software to drive the trucks rather than having, you know, a human turn, the steering wheel to power hydraulics and things like that. That's how, you know, it's really evolved the industry of material handling equipment.
Speaker 1 00:02:48 So what's keeping you busy from like the industry types and your customers and, and the applications.
Speaker 0 00:02:53 Good, good question. I mean, so customers call us and, um, they're looking to move material throughout their building. And one of the needs really drives on, uh, lack of labor, um, is such a, every one of my customers bring up the fact of not having enough labor in their building. So looking for us to take very non-value added tasks of moving pallets from one side of the building to the other and allowing us to do that because they can't keep people in that role because they just, sometimes they just can't get the labor force for it.
Speaker 1 00:03:29 And so from that perspective, like who is your bulls-eye customer?
Speaker 0 00:03:34 Great question. Um, you know, people in manufacturing, uh, retail distribution, e-commerce, you know, more and more people are buying product online to, uh, consumer goods, you know, part of the manufacturing, but you know, food processing and things like that, people that, you know, make their product and people that just move their product for logistics are great customer examples. And who
Speaker 1 00:03:59 Do you sell to, is it, is it, uh, the sales like a CEO or CFO, or is it health and safety or operations? Like, who's that person that you most want to talk to in, uh, in these, uh, distribution centers and other factories and such
Speaker 0 00:04:13 Great question. I mean, here, every one of the people that you just mentioned are involved, so health and safety, you know, what makes the product safe, um, operations, you know, how is it going to work within my operations? Uh, the finance piece, you know, the CFO wants to understand what, what is my return on investment? So they all have a, uh, a place because it's a, it's a product they've never used. Uh, they want to know how it can make a difference. And it's like everything that's, you know, when you come across a topic, that's unknown, everybody has interest. So we have to make sure we, we talk to each one of those individuals to make sure that they're all comfortable in their own way to say, yeah, let's, let's, let's dive into this type of technology
Speaker 1 00:04:57 And let's talk about workflow automation. What do you mean by like follow the pilot,
Speaker 0 00:05:02 Follow the palette. It's great. Uh, tool I learned from a colleague of mine that I worked with for a, say a five years at my previous life using fork truck industry. And they used to, you know, there's a term that they used to understand where to put just certain types of fork. Trucks is just brick, you know, understanding where pallets come in, how they go throughout your building. And, uh, you know, what are the processes around that, you know? Okay. W we take pallets from, um, a semi-truck we bring them in, we, we floor stage them on the ground. Well, why do we do that? We do a quality assurance check. Now, where does it go? Does it go to racking or, uh, does it go to bulk storage or is there cross-docking and we, what we do is follow the pallet throughout the customer's facility and understand where there's low hanging fruit of opportunities for our type of technology and say, this is a good starting point for us, for you to get your feet wet in the technology, uh, show your operations that it's working, make sure that, you know, people feel safe around it.
Speaker 0 00:06:08 So we've used the term, follow the pallet to look for the best opportunity for us to, you know, our entryway into robotics for that specific customer.
Speaker 1 00:06:16 I bet you that's a good study, right? Because I bet there's not a lot of people who actually think about following the pilot when they're operating a manufacturing or distribution or warehouse or whatever
Speaker 0 00:06:27 It is. Great. You know, what's funny is, uh, a lot of our customers, they live in that warehouse day in and day out. Right. And they've been doing things the way they have for sometimes 10, 15, 20 years. And sometimes we, we bring up certain questions when we teach this technique and we ask them, so why do you move it this way there? And sometimes they say, we don't know why we've just been doing it for a long period of time. And then we, and then sometimes there is an adjustment to the process, right? It's not just about, you know, adding robots because of lack of labor, like I mentioned, but it's also creating an efficiency, right? So this gives, it gives us a perfect time to really help them understand, like, maybe there's some other inefficiencies that we can, we can take advantage of when we apply our technology.
Speaker 1 00:07:13 Yeah. It's cause the other guy did it and that's why we're doing it too.
Speaker 0 00:07:16 Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's one of those things like, well, the guy previously, heres thought this was a good idea. So that's why we kept doing it. So you must
Speaker 1 00:07:24 See, oh, I'd like to talk a little bit about the culture of automation. I guess this question is more about the culture of autonomous automation in a, in a big warehouse or a factory, because this is a different thing.
Speaker 0 00:07:35 Yeah. It's um, so automation, um, you know, we, we like using the word autonomous mobile robot AMR, and I imagine we'll come back to that in a second. But automation, automation has been around for a long period of time. My father used to work at, you know, a custom automation house and, uh, you know, it was very, um, uh, process driven where it's like, it's going to do this. It's going to do that. And that's all it's going to do. Right. That's automation concept as a whole is, you know, there's some if then thought, but that's really the logic behind automation. The why we always like to use autonomy and autonomous mobile robot is allowing robots like ourselves to make judgment for themselves. Right. And a safe environment. And safety is always number one, but understanding its environment as we travel and making the decision to say, let's deviate the path a little bit, because we understand there's an obstacle here and really giving it the ability not to take the same route just over and over, but put deviations to that route because it's actually thinking. And
Speaker 1 00:08:37 So what are some of the common questions that you get from the prospects? You're talking about this automation with,
Speaker 0 00:08:43 Uh, common questions, um, you know, what makes it safe, right? Like let's assistant tax safety first, um, you know, the, uh, autonomous mobile robots AGVs have been around for 50 years. You somewhere like rail guided, right? Like they were on a rail within a building moving from a to B. So like any technology, eventually standards come out, right? So we lived our, we live our life right now by an Anderson commander called antsy beef, 56.5. And for people listening, uh, your manual fork trucks are under another antsy standard called eight antibi, 56.1. It's a, just a derivative of that. That really focuses on safety being the core of, of allowing this type of technology be in your building. And what makes it safe is this, this, uh, standard tells you what type of redundancy, uh, what's how far away you have to be from a stop, uh, how close you can be to hard structural elements. I won't give you all the details, but it allows it to put our technology in and give that customer that sense of comfort. Like after they read the standard, they're like, okay, we get it. Yours is designed to this level of safety that gives them the, you know, the feeling like, okay, now I can really let's put safety aside for a second, even though it's number one, let's really understand now how it can work in my building.
Speaker 1 00:10:10 And so let's talk about safety for a second. Like what type of technologies are you using to guide the forklift? Gotcha. So do you, or do you call it a robot? We
Speaker 0 00:10:20 Call it a robot, to be honest. I, you know, we call them robots. Um, you know, uh, they, that we w we can talk about naming structures, a lot of customers name on it, put the little life into that robot. But, uh, coming back to your question about safety and navigation, um, safety, there are sensors that are called LIDAR they're safety, rated safety scanners. Um, I think you had mentioned my history. I came from, uh, a sensor component company that really focused, it focuses on safety, sick, um, and those sensitive components are rated to a, what they call a performance level, uh, the raid to performance level D which says that there's redundancy built into these sensors. That if there, if for some reason it were to fail, it will shut down the system and won't run autonomously, but saying that they're up and running and looking, and we shouldn't have to worry about, uh, the sensors failing they're there, they're working in it's environment and always checking.
Speaker 1 00:11:15 And I think we should clarify, uh, Jeff for the listening audience, you actually only deal with brand new forklifts. Like, so a typical application might be, Hey, I want to automate, I've got a hundred forklifts, I'm buying 15 new ones. Can you take us through that a bit?
Speaker 0 00:11:30 Yeah. So just like your cars, right? When you buy a certain model of car it's there, the wiring might have changed over years past, or, you know, uh, even a used car, you know, there's certain unknowns. You wouldn't know about it. The fork truck industry has that same problem. Right. You know, taking a used vehicle would be difficult just because of, you know, you don't know what, how it was treated before slash how the wiring really was done for that specific model. So we really, we really, uh, work with the Ford truck manufacturers to understand its wiring. We only take new vehicles and apply our technologies to those types of vehicles. That, that makes sense that we understand the wiring too.
Speaker 1 00:12:12 And so then, uh, what is the ROI conversation look like when you're talking to the, usually the CFO, what's the what's kind of that look like?
Speaker 0 00:12:22 Gotcha. So you know, where they're looking for, you know, people in this industry want to have usually under a two year return on investment, ironically, uh, some other customers are coming out where such and such lack of labor shortage. I'm willing to live in a three, four year return on investment, but typically our products in that 12 to 24 month return on investment with a, a tour two plus shift model. So if you know, you have, you're working around the clock. Sometimes that's like three or four shifts. That's probably getting closer to, to a 12 month return on investment,
Speaker 1 00:12:58 You know, and that's kind of typical from your dad's life and the capital equipment, like in the, in the harder automation, the two year number just seems to have something has been around for a long, long time.
Speaker 0 00:13:08 Everyone's all we play. I always said, you know, if it's under 24 months, I'm willing to look at it. Right. And I think they're just understanding, um, depending on what they're trying to achieve, some are willing to extend that life of that three to four year because, um, labor shortage or, and, you know, I've hit that one, but let's talk about the others, um, uh, ergonomics and, uh, safety in just material handling equipment. Uh, you know, you're, you're getting new, uh, new generation driving forklifts, uh, don't have experience it there, your risks go up. Um, also sitting on a fork truck truck all day and all night. It is a, it's not ergonomic it, you know, when everyone started working from home, I remember during the pandemic, we're telling our staff, you, Hey, you got to stand up more move and, and whatnot, same thing applies to the fork truck industry. It's not, you know, you're sitting in a chair or you're standing on a vehicle. So these are other reasons on top of the labor shortage, why people look at autonomous vehicles like this is because ergonomics, it does it doesn't help. And the state of, of new drivers, new fork, truck drivers in your warehouse,
Speaker 1 00:14:32 It's truly, it's a really hard job. That's for sure.
Speaker 0 00:14:36 Yeah. Uh, you know, it's, um, I had a customer gave me, given me this analogy song I'm gonna, I'm gonna borrow it from him. Um, a, you know, it's the opposite of an Uber driver. I'm an Uber. Why people liked driving Uber's is they're talking people, they're working outdoors. They're making their own hours, uh, living your life in a warehouse, in a fork truck. And you're an air conditioned, right? You're sitting in an air conditioning, a warehouse, typically isn't air condition. You don't make your own hours. And if you're talking to somebody, you are, you know, you're not moving product for them. So our philosophy is let's put those people and keep them in your building and do something where they put some thought, have the ability to communicate with people, um, do something that they, you know, quality inspection things that we know they need. And for those, those main Dane dirty demeaning task within your building allow me to do, I'm just moving pallets all day from one side of the building. And the next, that's really a great job for autonomous autonomous mobile robot, because it's a job that not a lot of people want to do because there's not thought to it.
Speaker 1 00:15:43 And do you have some examples maybe of a recent customer where you've implemented your robots? Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:15:48 Yeah. A good question. So, I mean, um, and align food production, uh, they palletize product, uh, you know, you can be, it could be boxes of crackers or boxes of, uh, you know, uh, biscuits or it doesn't matter. But at the end of the day, the process is very similar. They, they package the product, they palletize the product, they stretch wrap the product and then they store the product or they ship it outbound. So part of that, those applications is taking the product from once the pallet, when it's done from the palletizer taking it over to the stretch wrapper, and then taking it out for off the stretch wrapper and drive it to a storage location, or drive it to the outbound dock, that little, those steps in between, or that long drive from the end of the stretch wrapper to the, you know, the warehouse location. Those are things that I would like to do with our robots, with our customers. So those are, that's a, that's a great application for us. So
Speaker 1 00:16:46 One of the things that we haven't talked about yet is one of the beauties of using automation and robots is that we're collecting data. And sometimes that data is something that they've never really had before. So how important is that
Speaker 0 00:16:59 Data is, uh, I think we all, all businesses are becoming more and more data-driven right. They have the ability to collect it, learn from it. And then once you learn from it, you, you understand how your business is progressing from that. So we, we do that same philosophy. We have the ability to give you data of throughput within your building. If there's any type of congestion that we're seeing from our, the robots, we, we understand that real time and to have that are and are able to pass that information to the customer and understand with them, like, is it is if we see the efficiencies drop, is there some something going on in your building and something changed? Is there something that maybe we can help you with, or, or maybe throughput has gone up? And we, we realized that you're getting the most use out of your vehicles and maybe your fleet needs to increase, because right now is a e-commerce stream. Everyone's buying, people are buying product off of e-commerce, so we can work with them real time to add it more robots into their facility.
Speaker 1 00:18:04 And how long does it take to actually tool up a robot after you get it from your, uh, uh, forklift manufacturer? So
Speaker 0 00:18:11 From like a retrofitted up to a, a robot taking a standard truck and making it a robotic is the question. Yep. Okay. Um, you know, it can take a day or two, um, and we can do, you know, if we have multiple at a time, in some cases we keep stock of these view. Sure. So we can move quickly with customers. And then if we start noticing certain customers are, you know, are needing demand, we can, you know, ring them up and say, Hey, there might be a potential need for you here. So allows us to work quickly.
Speaker 1 00:18:41 And what do you see in the future for autonomous? I mean, you've kind of got this, uh, uh, competitive edge, right. Become a coming from the, the sensor world. And CIC is one of the previous, your previous employers, uh, uh, w what do you see in the future for autonomous?
Speaker 0 00:18:56 So, two things always change directions with robotics, it's sensor technology needs to change. Um, and then the software, you know, as we're getting deeper into the software and understanding our capabilities and our limits, not from a hardware software standpoint, so the sensors are getting smaller. Let me, let me answer the hardware question. Then we'll come to the software question. Sensors are getting solved, or they can do more. They're more reliable. So with that allows us to put sensors on these fork trucks in different ways that we couldn't in previous, previous years. Right? So now we have, uh, let's just say eyes in specific areas and look for specific things that allow us to do a new application for that customer that we couldn't do in past it, because we couldn't put a sensor there. And if we can't send something that I can't offer to go against it.
Speaker 0 00:19:44 Right. And now, so does that answer the hardware question now jumped to the shop? Absolutely. So let's go to the software side. Um, you know, we're, we're learning, uh, what's real time with our software, with our customers, you know, fringe cases, Hey, for some reason, the truck may not be able to see this. We have the ability to remote assist our vehicle in some cases, and learn and learn from that data, right? Pull that data. That's not proprietary. It's just sensor data. It's stuff that doesn't make sense to you, but makes complete sense to our engineer and, and says, okay, now if we can adjust our, our, our software algorithms, we can do something that we couldn't do maybe 3, 6, 12 months ago. So put those two things hand in hand. The technology now just keeps developing on the same thing that the customer always loved. The standard forklift. They get, you know, reliable source of the primary hardware. Now just allow us to add small changes in sensing components and allow the software to grow you.
Speaker 1 00:20:48 Uh, thank you for that, Jeff. So did we miss anything today? Anything else you'd like to chat about while we got ya?
Speaker 0 00:20:55 Yeah. Things that you, um, things that customers always want to know. I think you mentioned right. Safety, um, understanding the it elements of the, of the vehicle. Um, how does it financially feasible for me? Those are things that people want to know about. And, and, and why people don't go to this technology. Is there the fear of the unknown? So I always like, you know, having conversations like this because it's our job to educate people. So my request to the market out there is called us up. Our first goal is to educate, give people more and more comfortable with the technology and the industry is going to grow for everybody. And in getting that fear out is the number one step.
Speaker 1 00:21:37 So Jeff, how can people get ahold of you if they have more questions,
Speaker 0 00:21:41 Great question, please visit
[email protected], come to our website, explore what we can do for you. Please go to our contact us page. We'd love to have a conversation with you. If you could start there, we'll make sure that you're well-educated about our product.
Speaker 1 00:21:58 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 manufacturer, 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. An Earhart is spelled E H R H a R D T. I'd like to thank and acknowledge our partner, a three, the association for advancing automation. They're the leading automation trade association in the world for robotics, vision and imaging motion control and motors, and the industrial artificial intelligence technology visit automate.org toward more. And I'd also like to thank and recognize our partner painted robot painted robot builds and integrated digital solutions. They're a web development firm that offers SEO and digital social marketing, and can set up and connect CRM and other ERP tools to unify marketing sales and operations. And 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 tanked my nephew, Chris gray for the music, Chris Colbin for audio production, my partner, Janet, and our partners, a three painted robot and our sponsor Earhart automation systems.
