Actuator: Interoperability, the robotics investing climate and walking the balance beam.
There are about four duck boats lined up directly across the street from this coffee shop. Boston has a knack for reminding you where you are, should you get bonked on the head and suddenly forget what city you’re in. This is a far more truncated visit than the last time. Most likely as you’re reading this.
I carved out a bit of time on either side of the event to meet some of the folks I didn’t get to see last time. I’ve got a few universities, research institutes and startups on the list. I’ll jump at pretty much any excuse to get back to Boston and Pittsburgh these days (let me know if there’s a good one for the latter in the next few months).
Oh, and I’ve recently decided to swing by Detroit at the end of next month, so if there’s anything I definitely need to check out, let me know (accepting that our definitions of “definitely” may vary a good deal).
Heading over to MassRobotics shortly, after a recent Zoom call with Tom Ryden, the org’s executive director. I’d been wanting to talk interoperability since my recent trip to ProMat. It’s something I’ve regrettably not yet managed to highlight in any sort of meaningful way in Actuator, so we’ll be making up for that today.
As discussed the other week, along with autonomous mobile manipulation, cross-platform interoperability is a major holy grail for the industry. As companies increasingly push toward fully autonomous warehouses, the realization is no doubt quickly dawning that the goal can’t be achieved by relying on a single company.
Will the day come when robotics firms will offer true top-to-bottom solutions? Maybe? Getting there would take a long time and a hell of a lot of money — be it through in-house R&D or acquisition (likely both). From what I’ve seen, most ARM firms in the space are largely focusing on their current addressable market (which is admittedly massive), rather than rushing into additional segments of the market. Amazon’s certainly pushing for it, but economic belt-tightening aside, a fat lot of good that’s going to do all of the non-Amazon companies out there.
For the foreseeable future, increased automation means working with more robots from more companies. That presents the very real problem of interoperability. Put in the plainest language, you don’t want to suddenly find yourself tasked with running a warehouse of robots that don’t know how to work together.
There are a lot of companies working on fleet management software, which we’ve talked about in the past and will, no doubt, talk about again soon. This week, however, I’m interested in something I’ve written about a lot with my consumer electronics hat, but very seldomly with the robotics one (it’s shaped like R2-D2. Got it on discount after Halloween). So we’re going to be kicking things off with the Q&A, then some more VC survey results, job listings and then back to your regularly planned roundup.
Q&A with Tom Ryden
TC: Why did MassRobotics take this problem on?
TR: We took this on a couple of years ago, when we were talking to a lot of the manufacturers and customers of AMRs. It was clear that there isn’t going to be one solution. There isn’t going to be one AMR that does everything. We were starting to see things like AMRs and robotic floor cleaners get out there and we heard from major customers saying, “This is a problem. We have all of these platforms. We have to somehow manage them all in a better way. They’re all independent and they don’t speak to each other.”
So we looked around and didn’t see anything. [We asked if] we could help and create a very low lift, very simple standard. It’s really a data exchange standard. Here’s a common way to broadcast information from each AMR and then we can have other companies develop software packages that display all of the different platforms and give you statistics on the systems and how they’re performing.
We released that about a year and a half ago. It’s a pretty simple standard. We’re working now on the next vision. That will add complexity. What we didn’t do in the first one is task management or “tasking.” There was no ability for third-party software to go in and control any of the robots. Part of that is because none of the AMR vendors wanted that. They all have their own traffic management systems. They all believe their traffic management systems do the best for their systems and are optimized for their systems. I don’t disagree. Now we’re trying to work on a way that there will be some ability to manage different platforms without interfering with their set directions.
You’re creating both the standard and the software?
No. We are trying to provide software only as example. Sometimes it’s helpful to get example code for how you would implement this. Our standard is more guidelines. If you adopt the standard, you can interoperate with other systems that are operating in the same area that you are.
What does it mean for them to communicate? I assume it’s not robot to robot?
They’re not doing it robot to robot. They’re just sending a broadcast for anybody who wants to read it. We have a standard communications protocol, so anybody that has the ability to gather that data can.
So I’m running a warehouse and now have something that allows them all to appear on the same map.
Correct. And you can see how all of the different vendors are operating on one system. The people who are developing the third-party software are getting a lot of different information about the robot. They can show how things are performing in your warehouse and gather different things that are helpful for the warehouse operator to understand.