[Podcast] Can the Robotics Market Survive Stagnation Without Addressing the Interoperability Issues?

Interoperability is everywhere and continues to enrich the robotic environment, creating new businesses and expanding existing ones onto new platforms and spaces.

Many warehouses, factories, logistic centres, and hospitals are deploying robots, often deployed by different manufacturers — which can lead to a variety of communication problems.

As interoperability is an absolute must for multi-diverse systems to operate together, it is without a doubt one of the most important aspects of IT nowadays. The two main reasons why interoperability is so crucial for the robot industry are the increase in demand and the specialisation of mobile robots.

On behalf of Meili Robots, our founder & CEO, Aldus von der Burg was invited to discuss this topic at the Robot Industry Podcast, host by Jim Beretta. Our sponsors for this episode is the Association for Advancing Automation, also known as A3 and Ehrhardt Automation Systems.

The episode is now available on YouTube or you can scroll down to the bottom of this page for the video.

Transcript

INTRODUCTION

Aldus: The robotics market may stagnate if the interoperability issues are not addressed!

Jim: 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, I'm your host and it's my pleasure to have Aldus von der Burg here with me today. He is the founder and CEO of Meili Robots. We're broadcasting from London, Ontario, Canada and Copenhagen, Denmark

Aldus, can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

Aldus: Thank you very much, Jim. As you said my name is Aldus von der Burg. My background is automotive engineering but I came into the drone /robot space in 2017. I founded Meili Robots in 2019 to get into the last mile sector and now intralogistics of mobile robots.

view about what's happening with autonomous robots inside of buildings

Jim: Can you give our audience your view about what's happening with autonomous robots inside of buildings, because I assume that's your focus?

Aldus: That's correct. We focus mainly on warehouses, 3PL, fulfilment centres, and distribution centres, where there are a lot of robots doing different tasks such as material handling, forklift, inventory scanning.

What's happening right now is really interesting, the adoption of robotics has increased significantly, especially last year, where the demand for goods being shipped increased and unfortunately a lot of human workers couldn't work in the facilities because of social distancing and stuff. So the supply decreased and to cover up that drop in supply of human labour, robotics was a perfect answer to that and now it's suddenly increased and we're seeing a huge rise of not just robots for material handling but different applications. However, there's not one manufacturer that is providing one or all robots for all the applications. So you're seeing a lot of mixed fleets and diverse or heterogeneous fleets

motivations when entering the robotics market and getting to solve some of the big problems

Jim: So when you were thinking about getting into the robot market and solving some of the big problems, what are some of your motivations?

Aldus: It was the challenge I would say. So our original concept was actually

to be a third party courier company, for example, starship, but we would source the robot for the right application, for example, this type of robot for the grocery and this one for takeaways. But we had a lot of difficulties trying to launch it in Denmark. We were a couple of years before the regulations caught up to allow us to enable this so we were trying to find the use case and also try to find a way to get a permit for the use case. It was a total catch-22 that kept going around in circles.

Then what happened was that my team attended a conference for mobile robots in healthcare in Odense — the robotics centre in Denmark. This is when the topic of interoperability between two robots or two robot brands for a project in a hospital really came up. They explained the difficulties of how to connect the two robots and how the project eventually turned pretty much into the summary of saying there is a need for a universal fleet manager to connect these robots. We looked at that and brainstormed a little: looked at markets and we visualised how this is a big issue just on two robots, one from each brand, and how is it going to work in huge deployments say warehouses or manufacturing facilities. This is where we realise the scope of that problem and how it's going to be growing unless no one is tackling that and that was what really got us excited about being a little bit of an early mover but also being the one tackling this problem.

I kind of like to look at it as a bit of the JFK — we choose to go to the moon

not because it's easy but because it's hard.

Meili RObots’s GO-TO-Market Strategy

Jim: That's good. You're right: interoperability is one of the big challenges when you're putting in autonomous forklifts, autonomous robots, all kinds of autonomy in the factory. So where do you see yourself fitting in? Do you see you getting involved early or a little bit later or how do you kind of see yourself fitting?

Aldus: That's a good question without going into marketing or sales, kind of pitching.

I think there're several angles we can be looking at. One would be if we work with the robot vendors directly and we try and provide a sort of platform or coding or a system that connects the robots without having to interfere with their current deployments. Because obviously, we would be quite scared if we say we're a universal fleet management system when they already have deployed their own fleet management system. That does seem like a competition.

However, we want to see ourselves as more as a complementary or supplementary solution that can help their end-users utilise robots more effectively and collectively.

Hence, we can see ourselves in being a partner to connect robot vendors with each other at deployments to help them still be able to deploy robots and sell robots without having to fear that they might be replaced.

The other angle is to look at ourselves as a foundation solution or an umbrella solution, where we would be that one connector to the warehouse management system and then we distribute the tasks to the individual AGV fleet managers or AMR fleet managers and then also pick up the location of each of those to be able to inform that they will meet each other at the blind intersection: the one has higher priority can go ahead first. So there are different angles.

It's difficult not to be able to show a graph or a hierarchy chart but those two are the main routes that we're looking into.

Problems that Arise when businesses decide to diversify their fleets

Jim: So these are kind of the issues that arrives when businesses diversify their fleet in maybe one small area of their factory or their distribution centre, and they put in autonomy and then all of a sudden, someone else comes in and says “hey listen we really have to do this as well or this is what is going to be!”. What are some of those problems that arise?

Aldus: I think one of the common ones that we were experiencing, when speaking with the end-users, is that they've purposely separated environments. So they've separated these robots for only picking or packing in the packing centre. Hence, there are very few environments, where robots crossing into each other and even in some environments, they won't even let human-operated vehicles in, just because they might interfere with say a shelf-picking robot. So that's one of the problems that has occurred.

This is definitely the easiest fix right now. We'll just separate them or isolates them but in reality, you don't want to start isolating because then you're kind of creating barriers and essentially in a way you're going to need a bigger facility to isolate. While in reality, you should be able to have a smaller facility and make it much more streamlined and efficient in the way that you transport goods or do your operations.

Jim: Yeah, and you could see how that would happen right? You kind of lose your flexibility in automation, all of a sudden when you're using what. You are letting the control systems control your business, right?

Aldus: yeah, I think one really good example is Autostore, where the grids are stacked. It’s not only just shelving but also the picking is all in one grid. Before you might have to have a thousand square meter facility now you pretty much bring it down to a hundred or like a tenth. But I think we could be able to do that with current built facilities by onboarding new equipment. Just utilise AMRs or AGVs, do the same thing, just make it more efficient and more connected

The rise of robot adoption and the fleet diversification trend

Jim: And that's kind of your advantage? Your thought would be like “hey we're gonna be the control system for the autonomous fleets, it doesn't really matter to us what brand it is, we'll just plug it into our system”, “when you bring in a new robot or new robot style or brand”

Aldus: Yeah we want to see it that way, I’ve got to use the pitch of saying: when you buy a new Bluetooth wireless headset, you want to just be as easy as to connect it one two three, you don't want to buy new systems or new hardware or new software just to connect that system.

So we want, on a various basic level, to say we are completely agnostic, we don't really care: what the robot is transporting or what the robot application does, we generally just care does it move, is it on tracks or is it on the wheels, and you need it to be orchestrated.

Advantages of a universal fleet management

Jim: So the advantages of a universal fleet management system from my perspective is like a distribution centre or a factory, one thing is I probably can save space I will probably save costs. What are some of the other advantages of a universal fleet management system?

Aldus: I would say visibility. If you have three different types of robots, AMRs, deployed in the same space, they all are different applications, when you're gonna have an overview of your entire fleet, you're gonna have to jump back and forth between those fleet management systems that are exclusive to that brand. Well, in reality, the way you should do is that you use one platform that gives you a full overview of your fleet such as the localisation, the map, the tasks, the analytics, the errors as well. For example, if a robot encounters an error you want it to be flagged up on your one and only platform, so you know okay that's where it is rather than having to switch back and forth all tabs between different applications.

So it has been a very interesting point with users that we've been talking to. They want to have the visibility of their fleets. And it has been one of the advantages that they can see.

The other advantage is connecting them for traffic control. Now you have one system that's actually monitoring and notifying each robot of their locations and you can even go further by if you are able to pick up localisation of a human-operated truck or forklift in the yard or within the facility: The robots can be made aware of those vehicles so you bring everything closer together by using a universal fleet manager rather than staying with the individual systems.

Data visibility

Jim: And what about data? Is data kind of one of those motivators or advantages to having a universal fleet management system?

Aldus: I would definitely say yes. Data has a lot of value. We see a lot of interest in data from the warehouse managers perspective: how many operations have been done, what's the state of the robot, what's the number of minutes or hours collectively has the robots been idle, both on a task and off a task. Most of them are business-minded sets of data.

In fact, we haven't had a lot of interest in technical data, which does surprise me as an engineer. But it's as saying what the customer wants is what the customer wants.

But it definitely feeds into a lot of the conversations that we have all the data of the operations, and how it can be fed into another system that has the overall data. So you can see in a full overview of the efficiency and performance of the facility not just breaking down by verticals but as an overall. We haven't done much work into this yet but we find it quite exciting to look into.

The future of autonomous fleet communication systems

Jim: Yeah I suspect you will be because I think that one of the challenges is collecting maintenance out of this or whatever data out of this system versus that system and so it is really nice I think to have those types of overlays.

What do you see in the future in autonomous fleet communication systems?

Aldus: I would say a lot of cooperation between companies.

I think the days of one service provider provides all is going away. Obviously, I wouldn't say this as a startup but the reality is that we're becoming such an interconnected industry — the industry 4.0 kind of approach — that we will be working with collaborations with vendors with other system providers.

There'll be a lot more partnerships and cross-deployments or even joint-deployments. We're seeing a lot of this now that a lot of companies we're talking to, really want to get involved. We can fill this one gap that they don't really want to start working on because then they're becoming a company that doesn't really do the main products but becomes an overall software company. Hence, they can focus exclusively and it's the same for us like how do we create a better integration to these systems, how do we create a better control by utilising these robots.

I would believe that the future of the robotics world will be a lot of collaborations. I also see that there will be a lot of new developments with crazy ideas coming out.

I would probably gamble that a lot of AI decision making is going to be one of the new hot topics maybe next year because now we can start doing machine learning: “oh we could do this operation but the AI is like how to make it even more efficient, more intelligent”.

Jim: Yeah I'm with you on that I think it's going to be a very exciting time for autonomy and for our factories and distribution centres as they get pressure to do more with less and do more with less space too.

Aldus: I also think there might be some other developments in communications and connectivity because latency obviously is a huge factor of deployments. What happens when the robots go down or what happens if you have a disconnection. So I think that might be some cool advancements there rather than depending on simple wi-fi or 5G.

Involvement with hardware integrators, robot companies, and end-users

Jim: I forgot to ask you this but where do you get involved with hardware integrators, robot companies, and end-users? How do you see yourself getting involved?

Aldus: We're like an octopus, we're connected to all of them.

I was trying to remember the name of that group from James Bond in Spectre where his fingers are in every pie.

We have quite a lot of conversations with the vendors and other system developers. We also have a lot of interactions with other startups, both from a road manufacturer position to a warehouse automation system. This kind of goes back to my previous points of collaborations: you could provide one system but essentially the customer doesn't really want to pay 15 invoices when it can be deployed as a collector as one package.

So we talk a lot with startups, a lot of developers, and we also talk to the end-users, who have deployments but they don't feel enough. There's not so much I can actually go into details, without revealing too much, but it's a lot of learnings: you've used robots maybe two or three years, it's been working but you have now realised, it could be better. And that's where we come in and learned what they are really wanting and what we can think from a fresh mind, the startup's mind, the young mind: what can be solved, how can we make it much better for you.

I think there are some huge advantages to being a startup in this industry right now because you get to listen and you get to hear and you get to kind of creating solutions that solve a lot of problems.

Contact INFORMATION

Jim: How do people get a hold of you?

Aldus: They could either contact us via info@meilirobots.com or visit our website meiliobots.com as well, or on Linkedin and just search @MeiliRobots.

Just let us know either through direct email or through a web form and we'll get in contact with you as soon as we can and yeah find out your needs or your interests what you're looking for.

Jim: Well, thank you, Aldus and Meili is spelled m-e-i-l-i.

About Meili Robots

Meili Robots is developing the next-generation of mobile robots fleet management, called Meili FMS. A universal digital solution, an all-in-one platform that is capable of handling different kinds of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) and Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs). Enable traffic control, empower interoperability and facilitate automated task allocation — all via intuitive UI. Check our website meilirobots.com/product to learn about our products. Contact us to find out more: info@meilirobots.com.