Latest / Bloomberg Intelligence / Locus' Welty Builds Warehouse Robots to Work With Humans(Audio)

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Locus' Welty Builds Warehouse Robots to Work With Humans(Audio) · Bloomberg Intelligence

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  Speaker 1: Broadcasting live to New York, Bloomberg eleventh to Washington, d C.
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  Speaker 1: This is taking stock. Coming up on taking stock Locusts Robotics.
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  Speaker 1: Locust Robotics. And if you've purchased anything from Amazon, chances
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  Speaker 1: go to Charlie Pellard in the Bloomberg newsroom for Bloomberg
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  Speaker 1: Joachim Phelps his Fells, his global economic advisor at PIMCO.
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  Speaker 1: for a twenty five basis points cut. So I'm not
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  Speaker 1: see a bigger move like forty or fifty basis points
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  Speaker 1: in August. Another option for them is to do more queue,
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  Speaker 1: Ten You're down seventeen thirty seconds. Looking at the yield
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  Speaker 1: offer for Monsanto and a bid the value shares of
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  Speaker 1: after being rebuffed in its initial efforts to combine operations
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  Speaker 1: Monsanto shares up today by two point eight percent. JP
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  Speaker 1: Morgan Chase beat analysts estimates it shares up now by
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  Speaker 1: two percent again. Recapping stocks, Hire SMP up ten to
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  Speaker 1: sixty two, a gain of point five percent, The Dow
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  Speaker 1: up one thirty three, a gain of points seven percent
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  Speaker 1: Charlie from the Bloomberg News room. I'm Matt Miller. Conflicting
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  Speaker 1: I'm Matt Miller. This is Bloomberg, Charlie, and we thank
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  Speaker 1: you and again recapping move higher for US equities SMP
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  Speaker 1: five hundred index up ten now two, a gain of
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  Speaker 1: five tenths of one percent. I'm Charlie Pelerton. That's a
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  Speaker 1: Bloomberg business flash you're listening to taking start with Kathleen
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  Speaker 1: Hayes and Pim Box on Bloomberg Radio. Sales Days, Amazon
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  Speaker 1: Prime Sales Days, perhaps netting the company over a billion
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  Speaker 1: dollars in sales. A lot of those products come from
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  Speaker 1: where houses. For e commerce retailers, warehouses are essential to
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  Speaker 1: getting their products to the customer at the right time.
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  Speaker 1: One of the things they use our robots. And here
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  Speaker 1: to tell us more about the use of robots in
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  Speaker 1: logistics and warehouse operations is Bruce Wealthy. He is the
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  Speaker 1: founder of Locust Robotics. Locust Robotics is our featured company
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  Speaker 1: today for the Weekly A Small Business segment. Bruce Wealthy,
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  Speaker 1: thanks for joining us. Nice to be here. Tell us
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  Speaker 1: what is a locusts bot like a robot but with locusts.
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  Speaker 1: What did you do to build this robot? But a
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  Speaker 1: mobile robot. It's autonomous. It rolls around, um a warehouse
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  Speaker 1: floor and it maps the floor so it can recognize
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  Speaker 1: obstacles and racks and people and UM it positions itself
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  Speaker 1: in front of a pixelot where there might be an
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  Speaker 1: item that we would like to us to see still
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  Speaker 1: in order. And uh. It's about two in the round
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  Speaker 1: and ways about eighty pounds and interacts very very closely
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  Speaker 1: with people. UM. We actually empower people that do the
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  Speaker 1: work with with the robots. Now you have described it
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  Speaker 1: in the past as how these robots operate in what
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  Speaker 1: you call a giant dispatch system. How does that work? Well?
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  Speaker 1: The robots are given a task and that task would
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  Speaker 1: be to go position itself in front of every single
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  Speaker 1: slot in a warehouse where a pick is required to
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  Speaker 1: fulfill a specific order, and that could traverse the entire warehouse.
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  Speaker 1: In fact, we expect that robots to be traveling between
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  Speaker 1: ten and fifteen miles a day or actually I'll say
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  Speaker 1: a shift, and they're all um working off the same
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  Speaker 1: pool of orders, which is optimized to make sure that
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  Speaker 1: we get the orders out the door when they didn't
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  Speaker 1: need to go out to fulfill things like the next
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  Speaker 1: day air and same day shipments you've described in the past. Also,
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  Speaker 1: they work that the robots have done at two warehouses
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  Speaker 1: in Boston about five hundred thousand square feet, shipping about
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  Speaker 1: a billion dollars worth of products annually. You say you
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  Speaker 1: used ten robots in those two facilities. Is that the
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  Speaker 1: kind of robotic headcount we can count on? Well, actually,
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  Speaker 1: I'm not sure where those numbers came from. We intend
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  Speaker 1: to use considerably more robots than that. We currently have
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  Speaker 1: two facilities. One runs robots made by Coming called Keep
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  Speaker 1: the Systems, which is coming that Amazon bot and we
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  Speaker 1: have two hundred of those robots in one facility and
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  Speaker 1: the other facility we've partially automated and we have right
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  Speaker 1: now about twenty operating in there, and we anticipate that
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  Speaker 1: that will go to about a hundred maybe a hundred
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  Speaker 1: and twenty five. And how much do the robots cost
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  Speaker 1: all in? If you add all of the software until
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  Speaker 1: on divided by the number of robots, it comes to
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  Speaker 1: about each And you mentioned that they work side by
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  Speaker 1: side with humans. That's correct. They make of human much
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  Speaker 1: more productive. In fact, we see improvements and productivity in
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  Speaker 1: the range of five to seven times, which is a
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  Speaker 1: very big improvement. I would say five hundred seven and
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  Speaker 1: that significant in this industry because we've been working with
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  Speaker 1: incremental improvements in the past and the range of ten
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  Speaker 1: and that was considered a material improvement. So these really
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  Speaker 1: truly are a big improvement over the state of the
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  Speaker 1: art today. Can you describe what a warehouse or logistics
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  Speaker 1: operator needs to do in order to prepare their operation
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  Speaker 1: for using these kinds of robots. Well, these robots are
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  Speaker 1: actually very non disruptive to an existing environment. In fact,
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  Speaker 1: we anticipate that are the only modification we have to
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  Speaker 1: make to the environment is to place a two dimensional
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  Speaker 1: barcode that we refer to as a locust point wherever
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  Speaker 1: you want the robot to be able to navigate to,
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  Speaker 1: and that makes that point at a point of interest
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  Speaker 1: and that will represent the locusts of a bunch of
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  Speaker 1: pick locations. So that's where the word locusts came from.
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  Speaker 1: And tell us about your company in terms of funding
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  Speaker 1: and what you'd like to accomplish in the next six months. Well,
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  Speaker 1: we've got a couple of customers. We UM operate within
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  Speaker 1: our own warehouses. We own a number of warehouses under
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  Speaker 1: the our company Quiet Logistics, and in addition to that,
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  Speaker 1: we've signed our first non Quiet Logistics customer UM. We
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  Speaker 1: anticipate very fast growth because these are quite easy to deploy,
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  Speaker 1: and we think you'd take about five weeks to implement
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  Speaker 1: uh a pilot, and then once the pilot is running,
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  Speaker 1: then the system can be u enhanced and expanded really
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  Speaker 1: at whatever pace you want. We anticipate at a typical
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  Speaker 1: warehouse will need between a hundred and two hundred of
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  Speaker 1: these robots, between one and two hundred. Yeah, and of
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  Speaker 1: course if you have a million square feet it will
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  Speaker 1: be a much larger number than that. But our typical
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  Speaker 1: e commerce warehouses in the range of two five square feet.
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  Speaker 1: And just finally, I mean some of the examples of
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  Speaker 1: companies that use your products, Guilt Benobos, they're all being
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  Speaker 1: shipped using these robots. Correct, that's correct, We're using We're
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  Speaker 1: shooting about thirty different customers in our warehouses. Thank you
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  Speaker 1: very much for spending time with us. Bruce Wealty is
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  Speaker 1: the founder of Locusts Robotics, joining us from Boston, of course,
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