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Péter Fankhauser on Building a Fleet of Autonomous Robots at ANYbotics · Automated with Brian Heater

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, I'll call it nobody wants a robot.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: And you cannot, you know, they the customers are looking for a solution.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I don't know if I go that far.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't know if I'd say nobody wants a robot, but our customers, a robot is just another, you know, thing that they need to pay for.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's another moving, it's an expense, but it's also, you know, a risk, something is moving.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it's an investment, it's a tool.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: But that tool needs to serve a purpose, and that is solving a problem.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_03: Hello and welcome to another episode of Automated.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: My name is Brian Peter.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_03: I am the managing editor of the Association for Advancing Automation.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_03: We have another great conversation for you this week as we go international to speak with Peter Frankhauser, the co-founder and CEO of the ETH Dirk spinoff antibiotics.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_03: We'll dive a little bit into the European robotics community and a whole lot more.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: So stay tuned for that.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_03: And if you're enjoying the show, don't forget to like and subscribe, and we will see you on the other side.
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• 1:54
  SPEAKER_03: I know obviously this isn't my place.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um I'm not in marketing, but yesterday I was um I was thinking about some potential names for what antibiotics might call a humanoid robot.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_03: And I know like obviously you're not here to make any like big announcements, certainly not at the top of the podcast.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_03: That's the kind of thing that, you know, maybe like 45 minutes in when nobody's really paying attention anymore.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but but I landed on one.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_03: I feel like there's only one thing you could possibly call a humanoid robot.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure you've had these conversations.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I don't know how serious they've been, but I want to know if we're on the same page uh about this.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um, have you have you have have you had these like top-level discussions?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_03: And do you know what you would call uh a humanoid robot?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: We certainly play around with the any and we have any mal, we have any drive, we have all of these.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: We even have an any soccer club.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: One idea could be, you know, not genderizing our robots, but any woman would be pretty cool.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so so yours is gendered.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: I I I'm going with anybody.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_03: I feel like that's the only possible choice.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: I like that choice.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's better.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I don't I don't know.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_03: I uh to to me, maybe that that that uh is a sign.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe maybe you're like you're maybe not as far down on the road as this is uh as maybe uh I might have suspected.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_03: This is something that obviously like everybody is exploring some form of mobile manipulation, bidexterous manipulation.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_03: When it's really in the news like this right now, and when obviously a lot of funding has been being thrown at humanoid robots, is that something that all of a sudden that you you are taking a look at?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: In in general, bidexterous manipulation, general manipulation, um, it's a big topic.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And for us, we are a four-legged robotics inspection company for now.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's we need to be very focused.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: But our mission and vision, we call it creating a workforce of autonomous robots.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so starting to interact with the world and changing and manipulating the world, and especially where we work in the industry where it's also about maintenance and eventually repair, of course, the two arms or multiple arms are you know a great solution.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it doesn't though need to come in a humanoid fact you know form, meaning that two legs and the head and two arms, we can also strap two arms on a robot.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: So for us, we're not just running blindly behind copying the human form.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well I often observe now, you know, with all the humanoids companies, for us it's the function, what it needs to define to form.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the beauty of robotics that you can optimize the shape quite easily.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you don't need hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then again, if you want to change your body in robotics within a few months, we can build a new prototype, and every couple of years you can build a new hardware, but still being driven by the same fundamental technologies.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I'll leave it at that for the moment.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_03: I partially ask because, you know, I know like certain certainly here in the States, um, and and I know that obviously, you know, you a lot of uh uh the companies that that have back to you, like Qualcomm, for example, are US-based, but obviously there's a lot of trend chasing happening.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, AI is in the news, so all of a sudden everybody's got like AI in their pitch deck, um, humanoids right now, everybody's sort of like pushing, pushing that in as well.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I'm wondering if you backing up to your last raise or even moving forward to a future raise, when when you're having these conversations with investors, whether there is some external pressure to kind of push towards some of those trends.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, we're doing the right thing for the business, but we're not in a state where just, you know, we want to raise funds on hype, we want to raise funds on merit and business.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what we have been able to achieve over the last couple of years is to really build a solid business, showing tractions and actual commercial operational deployments with customers.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Our robots you know collect hundreds of thousands of autonomous inspection points a month.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: So we're starting to see you know the business outcomes.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the foundations of on what we're building our company, the usage and revenues we're generating with real customers and the scaling customers.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the foundations.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, on top, you discuss what's next.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: And there's several things that we're excited about that I'm sure we'll we'll talk about.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: One is you know, you have all this data of the robots, how do you make use of that?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: So generating going from data to insights, eventually recommendations, not only being a robot, but being you know a full solution that helps our customers.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then the second is certainly how do you expand to generate even more, tap into new value pockets.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And this means also different types of platforms.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, we are already building the next generation of robot, right?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Nimal X, fundamentally very similar, and it's going to come out next year, but then we look beyond that.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: So humanoids is one form, but strapping wheels on it, magnetic wheels, drones.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that discussion I cannot, you know, disclose too much.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: But yes, absolutely, we're looking at expanding the portfolio of different types of robots, but for very similar customers in the industry.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: I actually wanted to talk a bit about productizing because obviously, you know, in terms of form factor, I'm sure that you're sick and tired of getting compared to Basa Dynamics, but you know, quadruped probably comes up a lot.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_03: But I know that, you know, in my conversations with uh Mark Rabert, maybe their switch to productization wasn't the most natural for him, right?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, he's he's he's obviously he's an MIT guy, he's a research guy, he had been doing that for a long time.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_03: They bring Rob on, Rob becomes the the commercial guy.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm wondering, you know, over the course, obviously, NABOX has been around for a long time.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you've been doing this all the way back to 2009.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, whether you were a research company first, or whether the plan was always to move in this direction of actually selling robots?
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a great question.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And and for us, it was we came out uh of ETH Zurich, so the MIT in Europe, one of the leading robotics labs.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And when we founded the company, it was already clear that we cannot just continue what we're doing.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: We cannot be a research company.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's in Switzerland, we couldn't fund that.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so from the beginning, we said, hey, we need to be out there, we need to, even in very early phases, we need to ship robots, test them to POCs.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: I myself stopped, you know, I loved programming, I have a PhD in robotics, in motion control and planning.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: I stopped the day that essentially, you know, I started with the company.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it was clear, hey, we need to be out there, sell marketing, field engineering.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so I spent, you know, many, many weeks and months with customers.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm offshore certified.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that became also a cultural element at the company.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, high tech, we're pioneers in what we're building, but it always needs to have a real impact, right?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we take responsibility for technology.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of cultural elements that we baked in from the beginning uh of the foundation of anybotics.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of things I want to get to in there, but one of them is you said you're offshore certified.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_03: Does that mean you've been hanging out on oil rigs?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, offshore wind.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I could also go oil rigs, so that means you can transport uh with helicopter transfer, you know, all the emergency exits, fire fighting, all that stuff that you need to do.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_03: Even though you've done there's like a bunch of training involved in that, I assume.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's correct.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_03: What like what what did you have to go through in order to get that kind of certification?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a the basic health checks, uh, emergency response, health, firefighting.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: The coolest one that I enjoyed is the helicopter transfer.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: You have to assume that the helicopter will need to land on water.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you need to, it's a helicopter escape training.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: So they put you in a fake helicopter upside down, you sink, you have to release the vest, the breathing, open the windows, climb out.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it it's an intense, but I a very cool.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully you'll never use it, but an interesting experience.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah, exactly.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_03: Hopefully you'll never use it.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, is this absolutely necessary for the CEO of this company to have this kind of certification?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe not today, um, but in the beginning, yes, you built the company on knowledge on what customers need, the language, the problems, the specifications.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it was crucial um as the founders, um, and multiple people did this at the company to be out there and learn.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, offshore, uh especially oil and gas, but also wind, is one of our core industries.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it's good to have that in your back pocket and having actually been there.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_03: That's interesting.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_03: So it's twofold.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_03: So it's it's one, sort of like knowing through what they have to go through the process to get certified, but two, it sounds like you actually um early on when you were sort of I guess looking at use cases that you actually spent quite a bit on the time on some of these platforms.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, 100%.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, ultimately, I'll call it nobody wants a robot, and you cannot, you know, they the customers are looking for a solution.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I don't know if I'd go that far.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't know if I'd say nobody wants a robot, but our customers, a robot is just another, you know, thing that they need to pay for.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's another moving, it's an expense, but it's also, you know, a risk, something is moving.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it's an investment, it's a tool.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: But that tool needs to serve a purpose, and that is solving a problem.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so, what is that specific problem you're solving?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the robot itself does not solve that problem.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it's all about what do you do with the robot, the use cases, the applications, the data you're gathering, and how you're helping the customers to run their facilities more safely, high productivity, environmentally friendly.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, whatever they're solving, you need to be able to draw that connection from your basic technology to their needs.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: In between, that is a lot of innovation.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And to be able to do that, you need to speak the customer language and have gone, walked in their boots and have had their experience.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, that has been fundamental for us.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we have a significant team of customer success product managers, they are constantly out there with customers because we're not done in learning, right?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is a long, long journey, and we're still uh yeah learning a lot.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_03: Do you feel like there's one particularly surprising thing that you learned in the process of being out there in those rigs?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, as an optimistic and maybe naive engineer, you you think the world all figured it out and it's highly automated, you know, digital twin, everything is connected with IoT.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then you go and look, and it's often not always, but often very, very rudimentary.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: So they have cases where they ask us, hey, can the robot push this button because it's not automated and we need to restart here?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it's and automating will be such a hassle.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Or they use pen and paper, they put it in a folder never to be looked at again for data that they're collecting, isolation of data, teams not speaking to each other, and then, of course, you know, pencil whipping is a topic, people not even doing the checks of inspection.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: So there's so many things that are just in theory not necessary, but it's just a human factor.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, constraints of hiring people, constraints of accessibility, safety.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: The machines often tell you what's wrong, but the relevant data is often not collected and then also not connected to the relevant stakeholders.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, it's quite eye-opening once you actually spend time at these facilities, how rudimentary things are often still running.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's interesting because I I tend to think of like inspection um and a lot of what the robot's doing as being kind of like a fail-safe in case anything goes wrong.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_03: But uh the humans are there to occupy the space in order to.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, they need to be there.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: Like something needs to be there every single day, it sounds like, in order to just make sure that operations are working as expected.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I mean, these facilities, they are built often and still are built with you know with continuous human presence in mind.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, you can automate a lot, IoT, DCS, scale system, all of that exists, but still you cannot place for every single problem in every location a sensor, right?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: So you still have people either it's being ignored and you have reactive maintenance, you run into failures, or you do very scheduled maintenance out of fear, you overdo it, so it's a big investment, or you start collecting data either with humans, which is very cumbersome distance, or now with the availability of robots, you can automate that part.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it just provides you a 360 perspective on the outside of the facility, on the infrastructure.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine, you know, leakages, gases.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: You you don't know where they're gonna come from from liquids coming out, overheating equipment of pumps, generators, cables, transformers.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many things we can talk about, things that can go wrong.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately it's the peace of mind and knowing early enough that you have signals of the machines that are about to break, so can you react appropriately?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_03: I haven't actually contextualized it like this.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_03: When I think about uh greenfield versus brownfield solutions, I'm I'm thinking about um factories and warehouses mostly, right?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's usually what we're talking about when we talk about those.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_03: But I wonder if there's a sense in which something like uh an offshore wind or offshore oil, um, you can kind of look at one of these robots as being a uh brownfield solution where you're sort of slotting it into existing processes.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_03: Do you feel like that's a case where like eventually those systems are going to become fully automated?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: So brownfield, so existing facilities, it's a no-brainer, right?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Those facilities are built some decades ago, but still need to run for many, many years, decades, and also you want to expand the lifetime of that asset.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Second is greenfield.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Also, then we observe even the most modern, let's say offshore wind facilities.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: We had a case where some customers complained they had 40% false positives from their built-in automation.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: And in that case, you don't know is the sensor broken, is it actually a problem?
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: You don't know what exactly the problem is.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: So you're sending out people, and you always need to send out the crew with some tools without really knowing what spare parts to bring, etc.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very, very cost ineffective.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: So having the robot in those cases also as a backup and cover to see, get a situational awareness before you send in the person for safety, but also cost reason and transport makes a ton of sense.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: And now what we observe, what's happening is mobile robots in all shapes and forms will be a core citizens also of the Greenfield platforms.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we're actually speaking now to the builders of the Greenfield facilities who say, hmm, now with robots in mind, I can build my platform differently.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't need to build all the extra safety precautions.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um I don't need to build the sort of the survival, you know, the people are able to live there, the um water desalination, all those expenses that make sure that people can go there and you build it with robots in mind.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: So more confined spaces, more narrow, less safety, and ultimately more cost-effective because you can deploy robots.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_03: That's interesting, though.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I assume that like you still have to, to a certain extent, build it so that people can get there.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: People still need to be the ultimate.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_03: But not regular, not continuous.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_03: Um can can animal at this point press that button if need be?
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: No, that button.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we we're working obviously on manipulation solutions.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: That the frequency of ask for button press is not that frequent that we have said let's build a custom solution for that.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: We're really focused on data collection these days: visual, thermal, acoustic, partial discharge, you know, it there's a lot of data collection that we're focused on, and not only collecting, but also then interpreting the data, analyzing it.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because you know, imagine collecting all those thousands of points.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's no human that wants to look at that data.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, what operators want is to clearly flag them problems, anomalies.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: The green stuff, the green lights, that goes into archive, good to know, and good for historic purposes to dig deeper.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Orange, the amber lights, they go like, hmm, we might ignore that because it's not critical yet.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me what's red, what's on alert status.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: And this is what we're consistently flagging and helping them the operators take the decision and action.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: Something I wanted to back up to uh that you had mentioned earlier that jumped out at me as well, is you said uh when we were talking about producting, you said um I think something along the lines of in Switzerland, um, we basically like we can't just be like a research uh facility, which is interesting to me because like that's something certainly that I would say about an organization here in the States, you know, and a lot of that is up to kind of really the pressures of of of of late capitalism.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: Is it's are are you are you experiencing like similar pressures there?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_03: You feel like it's it's difficult to just sort of like survive and thrive in Zurich as a pure uh research organization?
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Since we're not a research organization, I I cannot comment on I don't see no, but but there was a point.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_03: I mean you made it clear that there there was a point when it was like, oh, you know, we kind of need to make and sell products in order to really go forward.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also what we wanted, honestly, right?
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: It it was financially something that you have to do.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, you you're at university, right?
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Or in academia uh or a research center that's state funded.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: For us, which is fine, but that's a whole different yeah.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Also, my motivation, the team the motivation of the team, you know, we always said let's be useful, let's take the robots outside into the real world, let's do cool stuff and let's make people you know successful.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: The moment of building a robot is very, very cool and you see it work.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: But the real success for us, what we're strive towards, is when customers use it on a daily basis and then give you two thumbs up and say, This is awesome.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: I want even more robots.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's why we're doing it.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that means you're becoming a product or even a solutions company, right?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because you know, robots today it's not that commoditized that you can say everybody knows how to use a four-legged inspection robot.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: No, we're going quite deep advising customers how to use it, which assets, how to optimize the reliability processes, how to make sense of the data.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: So this also, you know, part of the the sales, but also after sales advising the companies how to use robots.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's very rewarding because we help them essentially in their operations as a almost a traditional company in consultancy, but the difference is we're actually using robots to get the job done.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this is very cool for us because we often say we have you know 400 employees, 200 of them are human.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, and the non-human part, the robot part grows every week.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: So we're we're we're shipping a lot of robots, and that makes us very proud.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: The robots are part of our team as well, and we deploy them with our customers.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_03: So you come to uh ETH around what 2006, 2007?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: 2007, right?
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_03: From a bachelor's in the yeah, you come as a mechanical engineer, and this is something this is so this is my uh humanities creative writing major part of me, something that uh uh that I need to ask you.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_03: I'd feel very silly asking, but um how different of a major, how different of a focus ultimately really is robotics?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: Because it strikes me there's like probably a fair bit of overlap between mechanical engineering and robotics.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so mechanical engineering, of course, there's a lot of traditional mechanical engineering, but you have electronics um and a lot of software control systems.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I very soon moved, you know, into a lot of programming.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: I did that as a kid.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so for me, the control systems, planning, the software, that became a core part of my focus.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, then also in the master's and then eventually also in the PhD.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: And robotics is a core part of the mechanical engineering uh department.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it sounds like you were being, I guess, I don't know, obviously this this predates um the company, but it also sounds like you you were being pr very pragmatic in your choice of a major as far as like what can I Do what can lead to a career from here as well, right?
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: And and maybe no, okay.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe not at that point in your college career.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_03: I'm just curious from the standpoint of you know, like going back to 2007, I'm I'm just trying to think of you know the state of robotics at the time and whether it seemed then I know it it was and it wasn't all that long ago, but at that point, whether it seemed like feasible that you could make a career in robotics.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: No, probably not.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't do it for the career, right?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: I I go where the the creativity where you can create things and where your energy takes you.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think for a lot of the people um in the lab and co-founders, this is how we found each other.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: And for for me specifically, is I love creating things to be creative and building things, and robotics back in the days was so cool for me because it was so brand new, it was completely under the radar essentially, but it was such a vast open field, it's this big white canvas you can start drawing and painting on.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was fascinated, you know, by the sheer opportunity to do that.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, I'm very happy that that now it's becoming more and more the center of attention of and being able to build a company around it is a massive privilege.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I didn't think you know that was down the line an opportunity.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: How do you or can you, and obviously this isn't a problem specific to robotics, this is certainly a problem in any creative field and a lot of jobs in general, but when that is your passion and when you're so sort of excited and invigorated by the newness of it, you know, um like a decade down the line or so when you've made that shift, when you're not hands-on, when when, as you said, you're not really kind of like a roboticist in that same way anymore.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_03: Does the romanticism necessarily go away?
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_03: And when you're effectively kind of focused on the same product and because it's a business, are moving in a lot of ways at a much slower pace?
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: We are still in a market that's very, very quickly evolving.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: So for us, more than half, two-thirds of RD work on the next-gen topic, be that next software, next gen platform.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: So there's no end inside, and we're moving very, very quickly, and we have to, right?
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: This feels like the Nokia era of robotics, where yes, you have first devices, but you're gonna look back on those devices in a couple of years and you'll smile and go like, oh, that was that's old school stuff.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: So we're the world is moving very, very quickly, and it's still very exhilarating and exciting to move in that space.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: But you're right, I'm not hands-on programming or designing the robots anymore, but energizing the team, thinking of where do we play, what is the right investment in tech, still thinking about the right product to build.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that's still quite hands-on, although, of course, you're not doing the designs and the programming yourself.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, one of the things that that I really uh appreciated just being sort of in or in and around robotics people is that there just really does seem to be because it's it's uh robotics as uh as a career, it's both big and it's small, right?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_03: Like everybody to a certain extent does know everybody, and um there is to an extent some competition, but it it seems like people like largely are cheering each other on and are interested when they see progress from other companies.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I assume, again, that you're you're probably sick, especially from people in the US of the Basa Dynamics comparison, but you have to be sort of watching their progress from afar with some interest.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: No, of course.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so 100% that I'm you know, Bossa Dynamics is a great company.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very close to their leadership team.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: We often, you know, speak and compare notes on what do we see.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_03: Mark Mark seems to be yeah, uh the other Mark seems to be a big fan of yours, yeah.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, no, great guy and close exchange, but also with ex-robotics and others, right?
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: We need to build the market together, which means customer needs optionality.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: And while Boston Amix has a fantastic brand, right, and many more resources than we do, we are, I would say, more focused, we are more vertically integrated.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: So according to specifics, but customers often we are clear uh in the value proposition, but we're also you know working on a smaller market.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: So whenever we are direct, we have a very fair chance to win, even if um we're a smaller company.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it's interesting as the constraints of your brand, visibility, and financials also make you creative, how you can still play the game with a bigger company.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_03: I I partially ask because it's really interesting, and I advise everyone who's interested in the field and maybe who doesn't know a lot about the company to go take a look at this timeline that you have up on your site, like for 2009 until now.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_03: And we've got a very good editor on this program.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_03: She's going to be tossing up some of the uh earlier robots throughout here.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_03: But it is interesting to see what in biology they would call like a bit of like convergent evolution happening, right?
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_03: Like these two different product lines kind of happening in parallel.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there's a reason why the quadrupeds make a lot of sense in a lot of cases, and there's a reason why, you know, kind of certain aspects of them end up being somewhat similar to one another.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: And this is all driven by the environment and the tasks that a robot needs to operate in.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so for us, for industrial work, and especially, you know, if you think to be able to go anywhere where humans go means you have a certain leg length to be able to climb steep stairs.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: You have to need certain compute, they need to be autonomous, you need to carry sensors.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: That determines the shape and the size of your robot.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's a lot of you know differences in the uh in the details, but ultimately the the size and perform factors become very, very similar.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's true.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_03: What do you feel like in terms of like again being really focused on the industrial side of things?
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_03: Like from a hardware perspective, what do you feel like defines your robot versus other four-legged robots out there?
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so there's a lot of four-legged robots.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Almost every day you see somebody right uh also building one.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: So what we do differently is we're really focused on the industrial work, meaning that it's a ruggedized unit.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's less of a toy, but also when you touch it, right?
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sturdier robot, more powerful, a little bit heavier, but also completely water and dust proof.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: This is a key differentiator.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: Our robots are being used in very harsh environments, dusty, corrosive environments, outdoors, offshore, you can imagine it, right?
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: So the IP67 completely water and dustproof is a key differentiator.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Then certifications is a big topic.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: So the safety light, the e-stops.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: These are things that are not very attractive on YouTube, but being able to send in a robot into environments where there's explosive gases is unique and you know, by law mandatory.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why we also built the next generation robot Animal X.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's the world's first and only robot that can actually do that.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's a must for the oil and gas and chemicals industry.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_03: Did I detect a little bit of shade there when you said not very attractive on YouTube?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_03: Were you throwing a little bit of, was there a little bit of salt in your voice there when you said that?
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, no, it's you know, we're not hunting behind just YouTube clicks.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's not one of our KPIs, which I see now.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of humanoids companies do.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: Public attention, we want the attention of industrial operators, and what gets them excited is knowing that can that they can safely deploy the robot at their facilities, which are obviously, you know, hazardous environments.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: Explosive gases in there is no joke, right?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the last thing you want is being responsible for an explosion.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_03: I say this, but this was actually something that I want to talk about because we're at an interesting point right now.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_03: I wanted to get your perspective on this.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_03: You know, one of the things that's really happened, again, sorry, getting back to Botswanax, but something that they did really well in the early days was they really cornered YouTube, right?
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_03: That's a big part of their success.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: In more recent years, especially with humanoids, we've seen the line really then start to blur between, you know, I just wrote a piece recently and I said we're kind of at the point where it's hard to tell a robotics announcement from a car advertisement.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, I I get it.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_03: I get that there's a lot of money going into and coming out of these systems right now, but I'm worried that um, especially with the humanoid gap right now, that there's uh a lot of false expectations, that there's a lot of kind of like bending of the truth happening.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_03: As a company that one both has this like connection to ETH, has this research background, but two, has a cool looking robot and does like to put out cool looking robot videos.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_03: How do you balance the two?
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's an advantage because if you have a cool looking robot, it opens doors with customers, with investors, with employees.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: So to speak.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, yours doesn't quite open doors yet, but maybe in the future.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: But yes, it's your entry ticket, let's say it opens the doors for for the discussion, which is great.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: But then you have to be very careful because if you just go in and say, hey, I have this AI-driven robot, it can do everything, that just creates wrong expectations.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you want to open the right doors and have the right discussion.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: So we're very selective in which industries we're focused on, and we'd rather say no to a customer where we believe we cannot solve the problem.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so it it is an entry ticket, but also you need to use it wisely, that power.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: And for us ultimately, we're you know, in our storytelling and where we focus, it's the robot is not the hero.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I know in often in videos it's all about the robot, robot, robot.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, who is the hero of the story?
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's the people who whom life we make easier, right?
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: Where we provide additional safety to the operators, the reliability engineers.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: So we tend, you know, also marketing communications to shift much, much more on the impact we're having with those people.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_03: Is there a certain amount of like disclosure?
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I I don't know that there are like truth in advertising law, obviously, again, be different in the US versus the EU, but maybe standards for just like disclosure of what robots really can and can't do.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_03: I want people to read my stories to have more realistic expectations.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_03: And is there something that the people who produce robots do can't to help set those expectations?
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, for us, that's not even a question, right?
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: We show this stuff from real-world deployment.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, but yes, I I understand.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think people are starting to be very skeptical, even too skeptical.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now the pendulum is moving out of time to claim, hey, this video is AI generated and fake.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, ultimately show stuff that you can you can solve.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the trick with robots is if there's still a human in the loop, it's uh it's much, much easier than solving it autonomously.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: Even manipulation, even just navigating a robot through the forest, right?
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: For autonomy is actually not that easy to find the right path.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: As a human, you can see if the legs are stuck, you look at back and forth.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: You can so you're helping the system.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's a remote control tool.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: Also very cool, but the usage of it, people assume if you don't put the human in the video, they assume it's autonomous.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: So their transparency, you know, you can fake it for a while, I guess, but ultimately once you start shipping to customers, these these things yeah, will be very apparent.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: So leading through transparency, I think, is obviously very important and creates trust.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_03: The pendulum is something that's is is an interesting point too, because like that that's another interesting avenue of this conversation.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_03: Is I also don't want to I don't want people to fully discourage teleoperation because there's like a place for teleoperation with your robot too, I I assume as well.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_03: Like it when we're talking about these systems being in remote locations.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: There's no shame in helping your robot fleet out, and that's the path to you know, ever-growing fleet.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: There will always be a long tail of situations where the robot can get stuck or needs help, and that's completely fine.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, with autonomous driving, same thing.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so just recently I walked up, I saw one of my colleagues pretty much hanging in the chair like this, and and teleoperating one of the robots.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: I looked at the screen and it's completely offshore.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: Just a helicopter flew away, really nasty environment, going upstairs and he sits in the warm office.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason was why he teleoperated they had big construction sites going on, and he just wanted to make sure that it's all safe, right?
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: The robot um doesn't get lost or does anything it shouldn't, or trail off the path it's supposed to.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, they they told us it's constructions for a couple of missions.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: We did teleop and went back to autonomous.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: No problem.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way it should go.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_03: One of the things you mentioned when um talking to clients was uh obviously like only choosing clients based on problems you feel like you could really realistically solve, which you know make makes a lot of sense.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, I wonder with robots like this, you know, especially a lot of the news stories that we've seen over the past several years, um, at a certain point do ethical considerations enter into those questions as well.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: In what sense?
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: So for us, we don't any military, for example, weapons.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly the question.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: So for us, in the beginning, that question came up because you're still so broad figuring out what actually you want to solve.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we said the founders, it was important to us to set some guidelines.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: We said no active warfare or weaponized applications for a robot, and we held truth to that, also published with our friends Apostynamics and others, you know, the the responsibility, you know, that did the white paper or the letter um about weaponization, because roboticists carry a responsibility for what they're building, and so we keep up to that truth.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: The topic recently hasn't come up so much because we're seeing great traction and progress in the industrials, yeah.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: And also our product tends to be much, much more optimized for that user group.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: So there's less of distractions of trying to do something else.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe this is just as like my outsider bias, but I wonder how much like being in Switzerland plays a role in maybe not wanting to be involved in warfare as well.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly it plays um a role from our upbringing, yes.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I also understand, and I don't condemn, you know, other robotics companies that move in that space.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: The world is changing very quickly.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, ultimately it's your decision, but then you should also stick to it.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: Just doing it opportunistically, I don't think that's the right approach.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you do it then go all in.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_03: So something I heard you mention in a recent interview was this idea, I think the way you phrase it was um pioneering reinforcement learning for legged robotics.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, and I'm not I'm again, I'm not entirely sure where the timeline is versus other uh uh legged robots, but what what do you mean specifically?
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_03: Like what were the breakthroughs that were happening there?
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_03: How much of that was happening on the ETH side?
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_03: And like, is that is that a continued relationship between that research and what happens on the commercial side of things?
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: So we came out of ETH Zurich, uh ETH and also two professors, Mark Hutter and Ronald Tigwart, are both co-founders of the company.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: Also, Marco serves on the board, so there's a very close relationship, and we you know sponsor PhDs at ETH, so there's there's a a very close relationship um pushing the frontiers of robotics.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, to the story of reinforcement learning, and I personally don't take credit for that, it was really at ETH the research was there.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_03: You're the CEO, you can if you want to.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_03: I won't tell anybody.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'll I'll I'll tell you what I take credit for.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: But in in 2018 and 19, um, we saw first progress of deep reinforcement learning, the robot training itself in simulation, and then we were able to transfer that successfully to one of the robots.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so this was pioneering work, one of the first ones in the world to successfully do that and deploy it on a physical robot.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: And uh what we take credit for though is recognizing quite early on that this uh mix of AI and robotics was very powerful.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: So after the first experiment, I saw it.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we said we stop all the traditional model-based control at the team.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: We shifted the entire team, sounds big, it was five people, in the control space over onto reinforcement learning, and within six months we had the first robots walking in a way that we couldn't deploy to customers.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm very proud of the achievement there because uh traditionally model-based control where also bus dynamics has been leading for many, many years.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: Big team is hard to achieve, and we very soon met or even outperformed what you can achieve with model-based control with a very small team thanks to AI.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, this is really an S-curve of the next technology coming in, and we wrote that uh from the beginning.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_03: You alluded to this a little bit before, but uh, you know, to a certain extent, obviously the team's much larger now, but to a certain extent, especially early on, were there advantages to being a really small team?
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there's always advantages to being a small team.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: You're you you know, decision making, information, all of the things just don't slow you down.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: But eventually you need the muscle um to to and just the head count to to do more, right?
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's funny, the more people you are, the less you can actually do.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: You more you need to focus, slows you down.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: But yes, you need just you know, for for for sales development.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many functions that we cover.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: We are full stack, meaning we're building the hardware, software, and the software, not only the robot software, but the cloud software analytics as well, the production quality management.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it just adds up, and you need specialists for all of these roles, and the company becomes bigger and bigger.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, right now, at 200 people, we have found a pretty good groove on where we're at.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we're not looking to double every year, we're rather focus on hiring the right people, efficiencies, and you know, maintaining uh the burn within limits.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_03: I always want to know like people go full stack, you know, like and and and don't end up focused on uh just like a specific part.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um it was it was it just that the more you explored different aspects, the more you felt like they weren't going to quite do the job that you needed them to do.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: In the beginning, you really had to.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: There was nothing off the shelf that you could buy, even to the level of batteries, you know, we or motors.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: We looked around and looked at all the industrial solution, it was just nothing there.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we said, look, instead of here um trying something unoptimized from the industry, let's build it ourselves.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: We're engineers, we'll figure it out.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you're naive in the beginning, so it takes more time that you think, but ultimately a robot is a very integrated, lightweight, also thermally managed system, so a lot of optimization needs to happen.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: But what's happening now is that the industry is maturing, and also thanks to humanoids, more components and subsystems start to be available that are optimized for lightweight mobile robots.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: So whenever somebody can build something that we need, we're not gonna do it, right?
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: So we're not doing motors anymore, no batteries, all of these things we're completely outsourcing.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: So full stack doesn't mean for us that we have to own every single piece and design it, but be responsible for the value delivery and servicing towards the customer.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is for us, you know, we're moving up the value chain and we're very happy to buy any component that others do better than we do, and we we integrate them into a robot.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so right now, in terms of the different parts of the stack that you're creating, you're created them exclusively for your own robot.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: So in the beginning, we actually sold um a few hundreds of the motors that we have on the robot, which is a specialized design, we have a patent on it.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but quite soon we realized you you either you're a robotics company or a motor company, you cannot be both.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we decided let's go full steam towards robotics.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously, again, a lot of people get into this world, they you know, see a show like Star Wars, um, fall in love with robots.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't surprise me that a lot of people also had the ambition to be astronauts early on in their careers.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I believe that you were one of those people.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_03: And it seems to me, like maybe to a certain extent, that being on a uh a wind rig or an oil rig out in the ocean is maybe the closest you can get to being on the ISS.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_03: Is that fair to say?
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, that's fair to say.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: I I still have ambitions to, I don't know, fly helicopters, you know, maybe learn how to fly a plane.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: There's more things I I can do if I have the time.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: But yes, that was a very close experience.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the experience is some adventure, but also depending on technology to survive.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: When you're out there, you know, right, this is all artificial stuff.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: You depend on the power, on the water, the food, and just the infrastructure out there.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: You couldn't survive on the ocean by yourself.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that's probably the closest you can get to when you're in space, which is a very similar feeling.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_03: Is there a part of you like in the back of your head that realizes that, hey, we're doing these really difficult environments?
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe at some point down the line, like we can start sending these things outside of the atmosphere.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love that.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_00: If the market is big enough, we'll certainly go after.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, space exploration and all of that.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: Once it becomes you know, um feasible and there's actually a market, we're very happy to do that.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we had actually at ETA some of our robots that did some cool experiments of space hoppers that instead of wheels, they jump on the planet because it's more efficient instead of digging yourself through the sand.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: For the moment, uh, we're we're focused on solving the real world problems here on Earth.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Peter, thank you so much for taking the time.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: My great pleasure.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, love Prime.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much to Peter for the great conversation.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks to you as always for tuning in.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_03: Don't forget to like, subscribe, rate, and review.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_03: Please uh subscribe to the automated newsletter over at automated.nfm.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_03: We have a uh pack schedule coming up on the automated podcast.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_03: We've got interviews with uh the CEO of Fun Robotics, uh president of Matic Robotics, current CEO of iRobot, Plus One, Servontics, uh, a whole load of folks coming up.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's gonna be great.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, very excited to bring them all to you.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_03: So stick around because we are gonna be back just about this time next week with another episode of Automated.