Manifest 2026 Recap

(upbeat music) - Welcome to episode 231 of the Robot Report Podcast. I'm your host this week, Mike Guetzman, senior editor for the Robot Report. Thanks as always folks for tuning in. Join again this week by Gene Demetri, editorial director for the Robot Report and automated warehouse. Gene, hey, we both got, just got home from our adventures in Las Vegas earlier this week. I hope you had an easy travel day home yesterday. - Yeah, I mean, I was in took a while and probably still a catch up on sleep, but it was great. I was certainly happy to be out of the snow in the Northeast if only for a few days. And I've been going to manifest just about every year. So it was great to have you along this time to see a lot of the same things. There were so many people to talk to. I couldn't have done all of my own. So I was definitely happy that we were able to go there together and we'll get deeper into this plant chain and logistics event in the moment after some news and announcements. But while I left Las Vegas a little bit earlier than you, you got to ride in a Zoot's on Toddman's vehicle. - Yeah, I'm so bond that you weren't able to, we weren't able to do this while you were around. I had an hour to kill yesterday afternoon before I had to bolt for the airport. And so yeah, I was able to pick up a Zooks across the street at the wind. We were at the Venetian for the manifest event and the Zooks runs out of the wind. So I was able to catch one out of there and drive about four miles across the freeway over to Area 15. So I documented that gene. So it's up on YouTube now and folks can go look at it and yeah, it was a fun time. - So overall, once you're impression of riding in Zoot's, we've all written on an editorial team, we've all written Waymo's multiple times and I had the unfortunate riding in on Toddman's vehicles now several years ago around the EAS and Manifest. But how is Zoot's compare to the other, these other services? - Well, you know, it wasn't my first ride. I had a private beta ride a year ago when I rode with Mike White, he's the chief product officer at Zooks. And so, you know, in that one, we, he and I have a conversation about the whole design of the product in the network and everything else and you can go back and watch that one. It's also on YouTube. But this was my first public ride. And so it was an opportunity to experience the app, ordering Zooks and you know, if Gina was fine, I had to wait about a half an hour actually. So popular for folks to, for my Zooks to show up. I was fun watching all the other folks experience it for the first time. So the general public, there are families, young family jumping in with all the kids and they were squealing when they got into the Zooks and you know, all kinds of couples, friends jumping into this solo player. It was just interesting to sit back and watch everybody's interaction with the, with the Zooks for the first time. And you know, I think it's a much different, it's a much different experience, I think, than the Waymo, which is just a quote, normal vehicle, a normal taxi ride. Zooks gives you that face to face for four individuals. I really think that, you know, if you had a ride where you want to get something done, even have a meeting, you know, you could, you could sit in, in drive for an hour and have a business meeting in there. For example, face to face, get something done or in a city like Las Vegas, where you're going between a restaurant or an event or, you know, something else, a great way for, for you and a group of friends to, you know, to experience that. So it's, so again, if folks are in Vegas, it's now open to the public. It's, you don't have to pay anything to ride the Zooks. You just have to download the app. They do have a limited service area. You can't go everywhere, can't pick it up. It's necessarily everywhere. But if you get to Vegas for any reason, here in the next six to nine months, or in the future, download the Zooks app and give it a ride. - Hopefully I'll get the catch it next time. - Yeah, for sure the next time you get through town. So anyhow, as Gene said, we'll be back in a minute here. We're going to cover some of the big news stories this week and then we're going to decompress from our trip to Manifest and we're going to hear from a bunch of folks that we got a chance to talk to during the show. Before we do that, Gene, we'd be remiss. We didn't talk about the upcoming Robotics Summit. It's coming up May 27th and 28th in Boston. And registration is open now. So again, I want to encourage everybody to join us for that big event and party in Boston. Your neck of the woods later this year will have over 250 exhibitors, over 6,000 attendees. And we've got several keynote speakers announced and we were just on Slack before this talking about finalizing the last couple that we'll be able to talk about here in the next week, I hope. But so far we've confirmed Rustger Jake from TRI. He's going to be doing one of the keynote sessions. Also Michael Taylor from GM, very interested to hear her set a presentation keynote as well. And then we've also will be closing up the keynote session with Nolan Barbaugh. He's the world's first neural link user. And again, it's going to be something unique and novel really looking forward to that session, Gene. And so again, I hope everybody will join us. You can go sign up or register now at roboticsummit.com. And again, a reminder of folks that may not be familiar. We've got you covered with all the latest news and information on our network of websites that include the robot report and automated warehouse. - Well, and speaking of news, it's been a busy news week. While Mike, you and I were hanging out in Las Vegas, Stephen Brandt were holding down the fort. There was a lot going on. One of the big items is that apptronic has brought in another $520 million to ramp up production of Apollo. So Apollo is the awesome based company's humanoid robot. And we obviously covered the ongoing race to develop commercially viable humanoids and total capital so far in the series A for apptronic is 935 million, which brings it to nearly a billion dollars, which yeah, it's a lot of money and going to this development, but also shows how hard it is that they're still raising money, they're still developing things. I try to explain to people that you think a robot arm that costs $30,000 or $50,000, that's complicated. Imagine two arms and two legs and a head. And it's got to be able to do multiple things. There's a lot of work going into that. And company actually extended the round because there's so much interest. It's closing at three times the amount of its original valuation. I think this is something that bears watching because we even had a few humanoid related conversations at Manifest. And while everyone thinks it's a little bit further down the road, they all, everyone we talk to is that like, we're all watching this based pretty closely. Yeah, I think that's where having a work just like this is important because again, it is a long ramp to success to it. And all of these companies need to be able to button down hatches and you know, stay focused as they finish all the engineering and then begin to build a channel and the team necessarily to begin selling and supporting these systems and yet that's not going to happen in the near term. They still have several years down the road to get to, you know, the production numbers that I think they're expecting at some point. But again, Kudos to the team in AppTronic. We've been following them since they decloaked several years ago. They got an amazing team there. So again, congratulations to that team for all the hard work. - Another item of news that's a little closer to what you and I were doing. Mike is a symbolic acquired autonomous forklift maker Fox Robotics. And in fact, I talked to people on the show floor about this. Symbolic is known from providing mobile robots in warehouses and Fox Robotics has been doing forklifts. Fox doesn't necessarily have a lot of customers that are well known yet. That company has said it hasn't been out of 100 or 400 employees at 54 sites across North America. But the one thing that is noteworthy is that both Fox and Symbolic share significant customer in Walmart. And obviously Symbolic is looking to expand distribution and expanding its product line. And I think that's really the deal here is autonomous material handling requires dynamic portfolio. If all you're doing is selling one type of robot, that's difficult to sustain in the long term. And we're going to be doing this. I've seen that with AMR providers across the board in the past year or two, but I think it is interesting to see that Fox has these customers and pilots that are gonna obviously expand now with symbolic and then symbolic has a broader set of offering. - I think this is indication gene. This consolidation like this means that the market's maturing the applications for warehouse robotics is maturing, a lot of these companies that started with a single workflow, a single type of vehicle, a single application. Now, customers, it makes it easier for the customers to buy from a vendor that's got multiple products in its product line now. And again, the other conversations that we, some of the conversations we have talking about orchestration, fleet management, being able to control the workflow, passing things off between the various platforms at the various stages, that's key. And this is one way to achieve that, of course, is to, you know, through acquisition and bringing product lines together and, you know, cementing how they actually operate together tightening up the loop there. So, you know, it'll be interesting to see where this goes in next year too. - And then another big item of news this week is that Boston Dynamics CEO, Robert Plater, and stepping down, he's retiring. He took over as CEO in 2019, and he lent the company through its acquisition by, and I'm a motor through in 2020. Before that, Plater was the company's chief operating officer. So, obviously, we wish, Robert a happy retirement at the end of the month. That's, it's a big deal. And Boston Dynamics has been a leader in certainly R&D around Legged Robot for some time. But also, under Plainers Watch, they moved significantly toird commercialization. Obviously, went the stretch truck on Legged Robot. And now we have Atlas moving into trials. So, I think that's really an interesting changing of the guard there, quite literally. A mandemake master, Boston Dynamics chief financial officer will take over as interim CEO until the board finds under leader. But, you know, even just a shift, I think we've talked about this before, from Atlas being a hydraulically powered humanoid being electrical, as a big step in terms of making it commercial viable, making it smaller and lighter and more capable. And so, all of these developments under Plainers Watch, I wish the next person, like, keeping the pace of innovation there because we definitely watch Boston Dynamics very closely. - And I think probably one of the most significant things, if we remember the path that Boston Dynamics has taken through a couple of different organizations in the last 10 years is that they've actually commercialized several products. And you described in there the commercialization of spot now as an industrial inspection platform. It's probably best use case at the moment. You've got stretch with the warehouse unloading use case, again, one of the early innovations for there. And then finally, now, in the humanoid market, a platform in Atlas Electric, which will be the platform they take to commercialization as well. So, you know, Robert can really put his fingerprint on, you know, that commercialization effort in the latter parts of the last decade. - And I'd like to remind everybody that the robot reports state of the robotics industry report for 2026. It's now available for download from our site. And examines where are the market stands today where it's headed. Our coverage draws on reporting interviews and analysis from across the global robotics ecosystem. It's fanning industrial automation, mobile robots, humanoid, autonomous vehicles, investments, and emerging technologies and applications. And then you can download it from our site. Just go to the robotreport.com and you'll find it under reports. - Great, yeah, and just a reminder, you know, we've got you covered with the latest news and information from the robot report in automated warehouse. Our gene, well, hey, let's get on to the recap. Again, I haven't had very many hours of sleep since getting home close to midnight last night. Nor sleeping well with the rock band playing outside in the hotel room all week. So I'm a little bit lax on sleep, but it was still a great show. I'm sure glad that I was able to go. You've been there multiple years now. You've actually seen this show grow in evolve. - Yeah, I will say one of the things that I think is really impressive. Again, my hands off to all the organizers and manifest as they had continued to grow year over year. Despite all of the economic uncertainties in the wider world, manifest has grown from probably a thousand people or more when it first started to 6000 this year, right? And that's a testament to the strong content, the strong exhibitors that they have. Mike, we saw a lot of interesting robots on the floor. Did you have any favorites? What were some of the things that you saw that caught your eye? - Yeah, well, we're gonna talk to a couple of representatives from these companies in a few minutes. But I think when I sort of step back and look at it, there's a couple of startups that were presenting for the first time at the show, including a company called Ultra. This was one of the things we talked about. It was a bi-modal robot arm at the end of a six axis, a larger six axis arm. So imagine the six axis arm started the body to rotate it around and it had the two arms and grippers in the 3D sensing sensor to see the workspace. So Ultra was holding boxes, it had a crowd around it every time I walked by it. So that was an interesting one to go check out. We still have lots of work to do to commercialize the product. The other company, a company that we dropped the story on Monday at the Bay Area company called Auto Palette. This unique palatizing robot that runs a little AMR on a steel magnetically affixed to the steel plate. And it's magnetically affixed to that on the roof over top of the palates. Drops a gripper down, picks up boxes, transports them around to another palat location. So that was also a unique and novel solution. And then we also had a chance to talk to Kevin Demoa from Glide Technologies, a unique rail freight, autonomous robot in Mobile to hear from Kevin in a minute as well. So it was interesting to actually see that vehicle lie, it didn't move, but man that thing's huge. Very interesting to see where they're going to take that technology. So those are a couple of the startups that I saw, Gene. The other big pivot that was at the show company we've been following for multiple years now called Piazio Fast Forward. They've had several attempts at delivering a consumer robot. Well, they've pivoted to the warehouse and they now have a robot called Kilo, a little mobile robot, very simple to interface. You push a button, it sees you, it starts following you around or walking in front of you. And so that seems to be their core technology now is this very robust follow me technology in the form of this new commercially available robot called Kilo. Well, my interest in the mobile robot is that you mentioned what's interesting to me is that they're all dealing with these different types of challenges when they were taught not blind, which is outside the warehouse. It's a rail to road, it's moving larger loads. It's not just moving a pallet or a box and moving entire trailer's worth of material. So I think that's impressive. And then Kilo can follow you around. Obviously, you can think of a lot of applications where that would be useful, where you don't have to hold the onto something or you have a load of a certain size to move. And we saw other robots as well, where there are different levels of autonomy, different types of payloads. And then I grew with you, the ultra with the two arms at the end of one larger arm. It's not humanoid, right? But it was a really interesting application because it was able to do a more complex assembly task than we generally seen. And they were programming on the floor as we were watching. So I thought that was really cool too, that we have to understand, oh, this is something that there's training and a lot of software work involved. But again, I think of a lot of applications for vimanual manipulation. Yeah. And Gene, the other thing that I really enjoyed was we had a chance to meet up with Cam Myers from CreateMe. Cam was on the podcast earlier last year. This very unique clothing assembly. I can't call it a sewing robot because it doesn't sew necessarily. But it assembles clothing using adhesive. And Gene, Cam had some samples. And we had a chance to actually sit down and touch and feel and play with the samples. And wow, I mean, it's really amazing when you put it in your hands to. to really understand how this assembly happens and now I'm convinced you're in before. Maybe a little skeptical about how the end product would fill in my hands or on my body, didn't try it on, but the point is that I think this is a really credible technology now, what were your thoughts about that create me, so products? - Yeah, you and I technically, interview it create me previously. And so we already then thought it was a really novel approach to clothing assembly or clothing manufacturing, which is still around the world largely automated, largely not automated rather, because we think, oh, it's robots putting everything together. And in fact, it's humans stitching together the majority of clothing, which is why so much of it went overseas over the past few decades because it was cheaper labor and to sweatshops, you know, in the not great conditions. Whereas, print me not only does it assemble the clothing as panels, so that's more like traditional manufacturing, which can and precision, but it does so in a way that is literally almost seamless because they're using adhesive and using high grade adhesive. And you know, that was our first question towards how I can hold up to washing and wearing and all that. Having seen it now, I agree that for performance clothing, for underwear, for certain types of clothing, it actually won't provide a better experience than traditional stitching. And in fact, it can use it to replicate, you know, if you wanted something to add a raised portion, you can do that too. But be able to manufacture at scale in a modern a really new way and maybe bring some of that production back to the US. I think that's a win-win on multiple fronts. And that was one of the more interesting things we saw. - Yeah, and another interesting display and robot will hear from these guys in a minute, but the slip robotics had their new robot demo there. And boy, they were surrounded by people the entire show. I think there's, you know, a crowd that was around that, that booth, the entire show with their new slip lifts and slip carrier. And really what's interesting, you know, hear this in the conversation, they'd listen to their customers, what they wanted different in this generation of the product, you know, addresses, with really what they thought was a gap, with the original product, the fact that the robot had to stay on the truck the entire ride until it got off at the destination. Now, slip can drive these slip carriers, these little platforms onto the robot and then tunnel back out and actually stay on the dock. And again, keeps it at the facility working, you know, the next truck that comes in. So they've really changed up their business model, their application quite a bit using the same core technology and experience now from the last couple of years. A very interesting solution. What were your thoughts about that? - Yeah, I like slip robotics. I think it was interesting, is that they didn't listen to their customers and it's a great pivot, decoupling the platform. And then we're talking container load size platform from the on the directional robot. And that will increase utilization rates, it will make loading quicker and more efficient. And it's something that I think won't be interesting to see because it was one of the larger robots that was actually moving on site. And you're at a train show and you're at 10 by 10, 20 by 20 booths. And there's not a whole lot of room for robots to do their job. And so it was great to see them actually demonstrating it moving smoothly and moving these massive loads. So that's quite promising. But Mike, speaking of bigger and sometimes better, Dexterity was there with its scanning robot, its telescoping tower. And the latest version of Dexterity View can get up to 60 feet tall. I think it was 18 meters. It couldn't even get to the full height in the conventional that we were in the beginning. But when you see the thing lit up or when you see how the cameras lights a line as it telescopes up, without really increasing the footprint from the previous model. So I can still fit down warehouse aisles, but really get maximized. In this case, the use of vertical space and being able to scan a large number of shelves and items at a time, super impressive. - Yeah, it was. And I spent quite a bit of time sort of trying to back in reverse engineer the whole design that they put together for this to build the telescoping extension. And they've done quite an amazing job. Stuff and all of that into the space that exists in to be able to go all the way out to 60 feet. And as you said, we weren't able to see that demonstrated at the show, they lifted it as high as they could. And you could imagine doubling it once again to really get to the top of those high racks quite an interesting application. So, very cool there as well. And then Gene, of course, there are a couple of drone inventory suppliers. Cold chain seemed to be the word of the day. I think there was a cold chain track, say that three times fast at the show. So as one of the reasons they were marketing the new capabilities for both Corvus and Gather AI, the ability for their drones to fly in the freezer and fly around and actually do inventory in that space. So, set some new functionality for a couple of vendors who we've been following tracking for the last couple of years, right? Yeah, it's interesting. Cold chain is something that robotics has only recently really moved into, whether it's automated storage or retrieval systems, which we talked about in last month's report, but also we're now looking at drones running in these facilities. So imagine you have issues in refrigerating or not ambient storage when it's for farmers and in schools or for food where you have humidity, you have temperature, which is not normally friendly to electronics. And being able to operate and collect data reliably is obviously an improvement across the industry. With Corvus, we ran their release on the automated warehouse recently and I think it's again interesting that we have to see their drone in action at the show. Whereas Gather AI, which aren't raised $40 million this week, they took a slightly different tack in that they're looking more at not so much the platform but really again, they're focusing on the data and AI and that can enable. And so we had conversations with them and other companies as well. Yeah, Jean, so you had a couple of other sessions that I didn't shadow you on. What were some of the other things that sort of recapped some of the other conversations things you saw, things you learned? Yeah, well, some of the things that, some of the bigger trends maybe that I noticed that manifests this year and I have the image of having, can compare it to previous years, is one, you and I arrived there first thing Monday morning right when mostly exhibitors are still signing up and they had sessions and they were crowds everywhere. So again, that's a good sign of growth. I think it's also a sign of the strength of the industry. A couple of people told me that the man has gotten to the point now where whenever concerns or might be about tariffs or supply chain issues or other things going on, the man and the labor shortages are so powerful that people realize and they just need to move forward with automation and if they don't, someone else will. So that was certainly one of the big trends. Something else that I noticed is that there were fewer individual robots on the floor than in previous years and that might be as a proportion of the overall exhibit space, right? I mean, the space is continued to grow and so part of that is the number of robots shrinking and being more of everything else. We saw fewer truck unloading systems for instance. You mentioned SLIP. We talked also at Pichel, Robot. There were fewer autonomous mobile robots or AMRs on the show floor, Locus being a noteworthy exception and there are only one or two humanoid or semi-humanoid since time, like Ultra, which you mentioned. So I think that's a trend. What that means, it's too soon to tell. I think a lot of companies will see at Monix or Automate but I do think that certainly we know that the AMR space has had a tough goal of it the past few years and they're probably saving their exhibit money. But what made up the volume of the space on the show floor was there were more software and AI providers. Mike, you mentioned pivoting before. Gray matter, five gray orange is certainly one of those pivots, when gray orange is no longer making robots, they're focusing on software. But we also talked to Destro and Fio, there are a bunch of other companies that aren't trying to apply software to different aspects of supply chain management. Although we didn't hear some people say, you know what, a lot of this AI stuff is still hype. We want to make sure that we're talking to companies that are getting real results or doing real things with their AI. And so people that I spoke with at lunch on the show. floor, they're actively looking for solutions. They're not just kicking through tires anymore. >> Yeah, well speaking of software and AI, you led a panel on a GenTik AI, another term diger at the show we talked about a GenTik AI and what it really means in quite a few places, how did your session go? >> Thanks, it went really well. I was fortunate to speak with Christoph Fizz and Jennifer Miller of DHL Supply Chain, Palafox, CEO of Happy Robotics. We talked about how a GenTik AI is actually being developed and used. What is a GenTik AI? Is it pieces of software bots that go off and do different things? Is it the management of different agents using AI? There's a lot of things that are floating around that the panel has really helped to crystallize, I think, for the audience. The good news is, DHL and others are actually applying a GenTik AI to multiple processes. It is a real thing, it isn't just a buzzword. However, the panelists still need to change management. You still need to understand that you have to bring this thing in, you have to understand what you're trying to fix with it, and apply the technology appropriately. That's where a lot of up and coming companies like Happy Robotics come in because simply wanting someone to AI in the name is not enough. You really have to know, one of my trying to make more efficient. We discussed how shepherds and logistics providers are made sure they have the right data because underlying all of these models and process changes, you need to have the right data at the right time, but with it, and the GenTik AI, it can now really reimagine, re-engineer workflows, manage operations and close it to real time. Ultimately, the goal of a lot of this is to set up those feedback links where not only are you finding out what's going on in the warehouse or across your network of warehouse, but then you're also able to affect operations with the people in the equipment involved with the product flow and have the AI take a greater role. The other thing that all three of the panelists known in Christoph Jennifer and Pablo is that there's always going to be a human in the loop. I thought that was actually interesting to hear that from that. We're talking on the one hand, Lights Out Warehouses, and on the other, the current process of most warehouses is very, very manual. There is something in between where a lot of the difficult work is being done by robots and AI, but you still want some human creativity, human oversight, human input. Yeah, really that's a core to the definition of an GenTik AI is an agent that can make decisions and make decisions in act around a given situation. When you talk about the processes that happen across the entire supply chain, there's lots of those opportunities for that type of operation. It's an area we're going to continue to follow and report on opportunities. Pretty cool that you had a chance to lead that session, Gene. Thank you for that. All right. What we're going to do now is I was able to have several conversations. You're in this first one, Gene, where we caught up with some folks on the show floor. We're going to bounce through a couple of those for the remainder of the show. The first one that we're going to play for you right now is a conversation with Gather AI's CEO, Sandcap Aurora. We're going to reunite talk to them about the $40 million fundraise, what's going on there, a little bit more about the cold chain and how their system is evolving. Let's listen to that conversation now. Let's start with the great news and the lead. Congratulations. Thank you. On the $40 million fundraise in the talk a little bit about how that came together. We've been obviously observing the federation of your company, also in market. Yeah, so I think let's talk about the maturation of the market because that has played a big role into it. When we started, this was really starting setting the solution in late 2019. At that time, there was a lot of education that needed to happen for the customer on why they want real time visibility into their operations, why they want end-to-end digitization. It was very hard for them to make the leap between how but I'm fighting label challenges, what will visibility do for me. Now, customers come to us knowing that that's what will solve their challenges across the board and have them make better decisions. So the uptake of the product has become quite rapid. So we grew about 2.5 X last year in our sales. So I think that has been the key thing with the fact that now we are a trusted name in the domain. So when people come to us, they come to us with confidence that they are buying a solution that actually solves their problem. One thing that we do really well and I want to keep doing it as we scale because we are scaling quite fast is we tell customers fairly quickly whether we can help or not and then let them know if this is something that they should go to someone else for. And I just want to keep doing that because I think that's how we maintain our trust. It sounds like we got contraction in March and now with the reference customers in case they don't get their happy share. But in terms of investment, what are you looking for when you go out to them? Because presumably, I want to see that as a success and traction. But they have other things there. I look forward to seeing. Well, as a growth is a weakness under solution because at this particular show, we want to run. There's a lot of companies, AI in the name. There's a lot of business and they provide business goals, some level. So how do you stand out to death? I'll introduce that now to them in this one. The first and foremost is business fundamentals have to be strong, which is our growth rate, our customers continuously increasing their business with us are their happy adults. Once those fundamentals are checked, next is what they look for is does this business have an unfair advantage? Our unfair advantage is our technology, which is we are right now, the only stack in the world that you can put on a camera you buy out of best buy and turn it into effective data gap. We're not tied to drones, we're not tied to just photo-acquisites. And with that, with that generality of technology in the unfair advantage, 10 comes how big is the addressable market and how quickly can we capture it? So it's just checking those boxes, but none of that happens without business fund awareness. In terms of the invention obviously that hardware and the odds difference in how do you give it to different hardware suppliers, so which are more or less common opinion that some which might require more or less integration or more. But how do you manage that? Is it something that you have right here and then? Yes, so we actually take all of that pain away from customers, all customers care about data and operational insights from that data. So what they get from us is an end-to-end managed service including the hardware. And that's all rolled into the cost of subscription. And in terms of managing, you know, managers as well as the challenges that come out scaling. And so your scaling, not only your own operation, within their operations, is that a challenge or is it a matter of why we've already learned because your scaling now not just across the customer, because of the within customer. Yes, you're absolutely. And yet, most facilities are not identical even within one, right? So I think that's the main reason that businesses like ours take time to really hit that action. We've been around, I can't believe now it's around seven years now. And now we're at a stage where we're going to a warehouse. We know this looks like another warehouse we have deployed at. And we can just basically copy-based the solution in scale it. But it's taken us seven hard years to get to that stage to be able to say it. I think integration is all of the major business systems now. That's hard work spend on. You can replicate that. Right. We can replicate integrations. We can actually, what we learned from the field is integrations are a bottleneck because I, he teams in these companies are heavily overstressed. So now there is a solution starter pack that starts with no integrations at all and starts providing that. Just with CSE exchanges. Okay, so you get it up, put in here. Yeah, get it in all the import just to do so. Yep. So you can start there. And then as we go across the network, then we start doing integrations. That is something a lot of our customers have done. What used to take three months in a warehouse we can do in roughly two to three days. So it goes some quarterly to five weeks, sort of once, twice every week. Are there certain customers in our world? A lot of trash in this market. Yes, that's how cold storage came about. We just saw two things. One thing is people operating in cold storage. There's just a lot of pain. There's a massive label shortage and every mistake in cold storage actually costs four times more than mistake in ambient just because it takes longer to drive down. There is you have to put more labor onto it because people can only stay in for two hours and have to come back. Now with forklifts we are monitoring and digitizing movements. From inside the truck to wherever that thing travels in the warehouse to back inside the truck. So not just the inventory but the movement of it as well. And then that's the domain we are going deeper into with more and more modes of data gathering. So in cold storage it's either food like produce or pharmaceuticals and both of them high value conditions. So that there we serve in help customers enforce fee for which is first expiration first out. The crux of it I'll boil it down is anyone who cares about getting there on time in full percentages high. We serve but someone who says no it's okay I'm a real way. Things can be sitting for five years. We are not a great. Well great Jean I want to thank Senkov for making time for us on a busy week for him but yeah he was gracious and insured quite a bit inside with us there as well. Next I had a chance to catch up with our friends at Robust AI. They were there had several of their cards, Carter carts on the floor. My favorite feature Jean was the new Jedi feature. You can put your hand about three feet away from the from the cart. The camera sees it, sees your hands open and drives the handle right into your hand just like you're you're recalling your sword. So if you didn't get a chance to play with that Jean that was a fun little feature and I got a chance to sit down with Ben Groutner. He's the chief revenue officer until a little bit more about their business and how that's evolving in their relationship with DHL. So what we do is we do full solution analysis simulation. We'll understand what the environment is and we can deploy a number of different workflows so that could be serpentine with a robot depending on how much travels involve a lot of them. A lot of the robot serpentine we can do the typical zone pit but if a picker if there's not a lot of time in between picks a lot of time they're traversing the entire pick grade anyways so a zone pick just does it make sense. What we're going to do is we're going to recommend the option that gives them the most productivity. We stamp that as part of our agreement so what we'll say is we all agree current state is 100 LPH make up numbers here. Future state with robust AI we believe it be 150 LPH years of simulations and validation. We all agree on that we actually put that in the SOW we don't turn on monthly billions until we hit it. So it's on us to really find the most productive flow for the picker. Locusts are a really good job and I'm not trying to mention them but they've been a really good job of like getting the market thinking about zone picking so like it is a battle we have to sometimes get over to showcase like we're happy to do the zone picking but it might not be the most productive solution for your environment with this type of robot. And then you scan your badge is there any wearables that you expect the what? So where are most of our deployments right now completely the skaters built in there and we want hands free and that helps with that that seek and pick right you can grab multiple items. So picking your goals at the standard. We can definitely do a wearable in the cases where we're doing that cascading where robots are leading them to the next location. It's not necessarily needed. I mean but again you know do you know who picked though? Yeah yeah absolutely so like in in our core workflows where robots are working with pickers one picker will have three robots assigned to them and at the end of the pick two are those robots will go take everything to pack out new robots assigned to them and meet them and they're okay and so we know who's picking but also like we're they're picking and like so that's your close move on that did they die to go on the list again. Yeah and this is more of a demo to showcase like we're just scratching the surface of what we can do with the vision like our roadmap is really focused on how do we optimize this and how do we get things like scameless picking and safety and security and ergonomics theft right because we can see everything some light cycle counting I'm naming a bunch of roadmap items but like that's that's really what we're focused on as we continue to grow. I mean the other thing back to Locust they gamified the whole thing which is trying to encourage. Yep hustle. Yep and we want to do the same things like we we we are trying to get pickers picking as quickly as possible in an optimized way. Yeah exactly right we want them to not be thinking and and eliminate all the unnecessary walking but also the unnecessary just like that seeking picking and placing other big things will focus on. So so DHL what's what can you talk about in terms of the nation that formation. Yeah so we've been working with DHL for a couple of years now. Awesome partner like like I would say this this robot walks the way it does because of DHL. We started with them with our prototype robot and they had almost an overwhelming amount of feedback of what they'd like to see. We took that into account along with our other customer sites we're working on and put that into the production version of Carter. We're live now in multiple sites. With DHL yes correct our Las Vegas sites on their website. Yep yep that site we've also on the record from productivity gains standpoint. Past acceptance immediately provided 60% productivity gains. We just went live in a non-integrated site in Pennsylvania. We put 20 for robots there. It's not necessarily public but they're posting it all over Lentans so it's like you know right public enough we have a site in Mexico city that is live now with them as well so they're expanding us in the Latin America and we have two of the deployments we're in process of going live with 34 robots going to be an appless in a month of for scaling with them rapidly. Saddle Creek we're on the record with as well we've just went live and had our first deployment and this is all configurable right so we can move more shelves less shelves, slats, slats, slats, slats, to be customized. We need any. Yep the figure issue. Exactly. Saddle Creek is the other we've talked about with large semiconductor manufacturer live now in Austin and then a couple of really exciting three-piled ones we can't quite talk about yet but like we're getting close to the end. We know it's the sweet spot. Why is the sweet spot for us in my opinion is they need a solution that they can drop into existing infrastructure. Their customers are constantly changing profiles are constantly changing and they need something they can drop in and provide immediate results and that also they can have the exact customer potentially leaves or the business changes they can deploy these in different use cases so that at flexibility, scalability, all the buzzword stuff it's actually like for breakeel it's really what they need. The other piece for us is they have like DHL has hundreds and hundreds of customers. I would like to be deployed with all of those customers so there's a lot of scalability for us to be able to prove ourselves find the right partner, continue to grow. The sweet spot for us with breakeel is also we can help them with new business. Like we can showcase that they are forwarding with technology standpoint, provide something that their competition can't and hopefully win new business together. And it's a way for sites that typically would have said like we can't do automation to actually get automation in and it can be a great solution overall or it could be like that crawl walk to run. Yeah and remind me again are you selling this as a rass or are you selling it as a service? So even there in that case for you is capital outlazed the same but you're getting a foot in the door with no capital outlazed at the park. We can utilize it and you can find the right price point for that. It's a function for them. There's some cases too where the absolutely the some cases too where integration takes a long time or knows that in space right. So we can get robots in and actually still providing value quicker. All right so thanks to Ben for that conversation and the unique demo I got a chance to drive it in one of our sales persons was there as well she had a great time playing with it the cart also. Next up Jean a friend of the show a friend who's who we've gotten to know over the years because he always comes to the robotics summit that's Owen Nicholson from slam core and you know they're talking about Pibits Jean you you talk we're talking about some of the Pibits earlier in the show. Owen's going to talk to us a bit about the decision they've made in the last year to move away from pure robotics perception and how their new solution is really has become a black box for a manual driven fork tracks Jean and then also you know pivoting back to now from all the data that they've collected with tens of thousands of devices. deployments, you know, back to bring that to their core product for AMR perception. Okay, so we're here at Manifest. I'm here with Owen Nicholson with Slamcore. Always fun to catch up with you Owen. It's a great, it's a great show like this and you've got the booth here. So first of all, how's the show been for you guys this week? It's been good. It's been good. I like this show. We do this one and we do Molex and this is the way where you get some really high quality people coming through here. Like lots of strategic high-level business people say. So getting some good relationships, a bit built, some good deal-flop. Great, you were just talking to me about sort of the product pivot that you've done last year or so. We packaging the system for manual fork trucks to help alert drivers and some other use, should tangential use case to talk to us about how that market opportunities go. Yeah, so I think traditionally people may have come across us before we experts in visual slam using camera to position machines in 3D space. And we used to sell this mainly to robot companies, people building robots, maybe looking for an alternative to LIDAR. But we found, we had lots of success. We got into a lot of robots but it's quite hard business model to make money selling algorithms to robotics companies. So we found actually a really interesting use case whilst we were doing that. There are a lot of the manual fork lifts that are being used within these factories and warehouses working alongside the robots. They're completely blind to the facility managers. They just don't know where they are. They don't know what they're doing. And a lot of the intelligence we have, we take for granted in a robot, is actually super valuable for the manual vehicles. Not to make them autonomous. That's going to happen. Don't worry, at some point they will become autonomous. But even now, just being able to tell the driver if they're about to crash into a person and set off a buzzer, that's really, really, really valuable. In ADS system for fork truck drivers. And ADS would be a retro fit, easy to install without having to do the go through the complexity and the liability of actually slowing it down. Just make a light lighter. And so we've started selling the actual algorithms that we designed for robots as a, literally a black box. So we have a black box, it's all pre-baked in there. You stick the box on top of the fork lift and you plug it into the power supply. And it takes about 10 minutes to sit up and entire million square feet sites. And it starts tracking that fork lift to about 10 centimetres accuracy. It exposes that position to the fleet manager so you can start to coordinate them much more intelligently. But also because we have this perception stack, every time the driver goes past the person, we can detect how far away they are. Because we have the positional information, we can know how long it would take if they were going to be to hit them. So it doesn't have to be based on distance, it can be on time to impact. And you can alert the driver to stop them from, well, intervene before they actually do hit them. So it's kind of a nice benefit of being able to track the fork lift for operational efficiency, but also track the people around the fork lift to help drivers have less accidents. And that's been a really good pivot for us, so it's worked out really well. And as we were talking, you're also gathering data, so it's helping build your models and improve your models. And this is like the amazing thing about this is, like, back in the day selling robots, doing 100 units is a big number. We've got customers, 1000 units, 10,000 units, kind of, like there's 15 million fork lifts on the planet. And so, and we should be doing hopefully 5,000 units this year alone. So these, and we've got cameras on forks driving around an operational environment. And we have access to that data to improve our products. And as we enter this new world, a foundation model where you need good quality data. And it needs to be operational. It can't just be from a simulation or some kind of idealised environment. We've got this in the bucket loads and we're building this. We've got, we've got, like, we'll have petabytes soon. And that's going to allow us to be able to provide either to build the models ourselves, but in reality, I think with the amount of money that takes, we'll partner with the people who are doing that. And we provide the data to hopefully power the next generation of robotics coming full circle, which is quite a nice kind of story for us. So that's a, yeah, that is a great story. And thanks for sharing it. And it's good to see again and good luck with the rest of the week. Cheers, mate. Thanks. Thanks. We talked earlier in the show about slipbott. I had a chance near the end of the show to catch up with Mason Cole. He's a VP of sales from slip robotics. It was near the end of the show. So one of the things we're going to talk about here in just a moment is, you know, the not only the new slip lift and subcarrier platform, but also, you know, what the show meant for them and the, you know, the next stage of growth for slip. All right. I'm here with Mason Cole with slip robotics. Mason, man, I, we, it's the end of the show. And I finally got a chance to corner one of you guys. You guys have been slammed. Yeah, it's been a busy two days for sure. Showing off the new product. So why don't you tell us about the new, first tell us about the new product and then tell us about the interest. It's generally pretty. Yeah, absolutely. So our new product is called slip lift. And we have, it's essentially a decoupling of payload in the robot. So if you are familiar with slip, the previous version of the bot was called slipbott. And essentially with that, the slipbott would stay inside of the truck. And we really had a specialized use case of short haul high frequency shutters. Yeah. And apparently that's where it's going to make the most sense to longer the bot stays in the truck, the less value provide. So when you are doing those short haul routes, that's kind of what we were limited to. So obviously customers wanted to expand use case with us. And so we went to the drawing board. And that's when we developed slip lifts in slip carrier. So again, with that, we're going to decouple the payload in the robot itself. So the bot will actually stay on dock and it'll actually lift what we call the slip carrier, which will then be autonomously loaded into the truck. So three slip carriers stay inside of the truck and the robots actually stay on the dogs. So just describe it again. We're here in the realm of audio. So describe the slip lift. What's new about it? I can see some differences from the prior generation. Describe what's different with the big mechanical wheels now. And then also with the describe how much cargo fits on top of the platform. So the form factor itself of the robot is inherently different. So it is a smaller bot. So for your listeners, I'm sure they're familiar with Geek Plus or Keva systems where it is a tunneling, essentially an A-R that will lift a rack. Same concept for us. Now our bot is obviously on a bigger magnitude and we're lifting a much larger payload. But our carrier again is the same size actually as the current slip bot. So payload capacity wise, each slip carrier has a 20,000 pound payload capacity, which gives us 60,000 pound payload capacity inside of the truck. So that slip carrier is roughly 17 feet by 8 feet wide. It holds up to 10 pound positions. And so what that allows for again is heavier payloads. But we're fully keeping out the trailer still from a lengthening with perspective. So again, the slip lift will actually tunnel underneath of the slip carrier. It'll lift it up. We have a mechanism inside of the slip lift. I'm actually lifting the carrier up again at that full 20,000 pound capacity if needed. And it will all turn up to then drive into the trailer, set the lift down, and then I'm sorry, set the carrier down, and then the slip lift bot will actually exit the trailer and stay on the top itself. And then on the dock, the actual dock, you bring the carrier off or the carrier stage before the truck actually gets there. And it's accessible on both sides with the manual or autonomous truck. That truck's now to absolutely. Yep, absolutely. So essentially again, the same premise of the slip bot as previous. Think of us as the mobile staging lane. Right. So your slip carrier has essentially become your staging lane. You stage that product and then you never actually have to touch it again to get inside the truck. So the slip lift will then lift the slip carriers and not honestly answer them. And again, I know it's still early days, but you've got the experience with the prior generation. What's sort of the ratio of the slip lift per docking length? Yeah, no, that's a great question. So again, inherently with a lot of these regional networks, specifically medium hall, last mile deliveries, that ratio is going to be very dependent on use case. But again, what was kind of prohibiting us from some of those applications previously was because of the number of slip bots that would be required to grow in those kind of networks. Yeah. Obviously with the slip carrier and the slip lift, that's a much more achievable outcome because you can have your slip carrier quantity scale with your network where your bot quantity actually stays relatively low. So applications that we're looking at, we're seeing ratios as high as four slip lifts. So two at two facilities and up to 150 trays that are moving between these regional networks. So you can have eight facilities, two bots at each facility and several hundred trays if a filled movement between those facilities. And so finally, what's been the response this week to the community? It's been very, very good. We launched the product last week and what's been very interesting is this is our third time at Manifest. And we have a lot of people that have seen us before that the previous version of the product just wasn't necessarily a good fit. And they've come back and said, this is perfect. This is now what we need. And so it's re-sparked a lot of old conversations for those use cases that against slip bot just wasn't previously good for where we can now address those problems for those customers that do want to automate their docs. It's slip lift is going to allow them to do that. So it's been received very well as you noted. We've been slammed the entire show and it's, we actually were talking with the team and when we first launched publicly from our go-to-market strategy and commercializing it kind of gives us vibes of our first time at MoDex where everyone's like, oh look at this cool thing. That's kind of how it today felt for us. So we were kind of swamped the whole time the last two days and we felt a lot of good conversations. Well great. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, absolutely. [Music] Let's take a quick break for a minute and remind folks that we've got a webinar coming up next week. I'm leading this webinar for the robot report on next Wednesday, February 18th, the topic is digital twins simulation to optimize robot performance. We're going to talk all about, you know, where digital twins are on the scope of a productization here, why it's useful, how to be used. I've got a couple of speakers lined up for this. Graham Blatch, he's the director of business development visual components and 10 May, ArgoWall CEO and co-founder of parallel, parallel X worlds. And you can go sign up for these webinars at the robot report.com/webinars. And I hope to see many of you there live. You can always re-watch them if you can't attend live. You can re-watch it with your leisure. Now, Jean, wrap this up in the last couple of discussions here. Another good friend of the show, we've had these folks on many times from Ambby Robotics. I had a chance to sit down with Steven McKinley, this Chief Operations Officer and Gemlea for CTO with Ambby Robotics. They have recently launched Ambby OIS. It's an AI skill suite. And again, back to the theme you brought up earlier about AI software and the opportunity. Ambby has shot at that with this new product. And this guy sat down and gave me an in-depth look at their vision behind this product. And what the opportunity is for someone that might want to leverage all the amazing data that they've been able to collect over the last couple of years. All right, so we're here to manifest with folks from Ambby Robotics co-founder and CEO. Hello, Steven McKinley and Gemlea for Ambby Robotics. Welcome. Nice to be here, Mike. Great to be here, Mike. So background, after all of our years in production, so over five years of production and operation now, we've built this operating system platform that now has the ability for specific AI skills that can be spun off of it, licensed to other people who have a different kind of complex problem. A different kind of AI? Not something that our robots are solving for can be something completely different. Item intelligence, for example, if they're trying to figure out what's the orientation and the dims of a package, what are the labels on a package and where are they, we can solve those kind of skills for people that can license from the platform. Thank you, David. Different kinematics. Just like we're transferring learning from the Ambby Sort Machine to the AI stack machine, which are both robots doing picking, but very different kinematic modes. You could imagine the skill of picking being transferred to other types of robots. And alongside that, could be packing, placement, fill detection of anomalies, all sorts of other things like that. So your packaging and licensing this is the AI skills suite. Correct. Is it a foundation model play in a sense? In a way, yes, we have our own foundation model called Prime One, which is specific for picking. We're doing this skill suite to be the App Store or Marketplace for different AI models. Foundation models going both directions so that others can use what we've built and then we can use what others have built on our platforms. Which are the AI skills? Yes. All the data that we've collected and as well, we have certified configurations for hardware. So different kinds of hardware types, cameras and robots and things like that. So the entire platform in its entirety can be licensed as a skill that goes together for again, some other complex problem to be solved. So it's entirely hardware agnostic in this case? Exactly. Yes, but we have reference models where we know these systems work really well. Is AI at a state today from a perception standpoint, I mean, calibration of cameras certainly for different mechanism kinematics and even dimensional lenses and aberrations and all those sort of issues that exist in sort of physical imaging aspect? Is that a part of the model, is that part of other? That's part of the operating system. Okay. So we've built this operating system like Jim mentioned after five years of deploying robots into the real world and some of the key pieces of the operating system from that is my perspective. Are all of these hard parts around the AI that make the robot useful in the real world? So that includes things like calibration routines or support hand was within the logging systems of this system and then logging the data as it happens, pushing that into the back end somewhere so that you can retain to them, use later for more debugging or learning. It's everything else that goes around the AI that actually allows us to be have an uptime of 99.99% in the real world with our customers. And as these new companies are coming out to the market, we've noticed that there is a big need to be able to deploy with reliability and others don't have the trust built with large customers with the way that we have. So I mean again, as a, it's a different kind of product and a different audience than from your classic, and the robotics customer. Those end users in terms of the types of applications. Now you're selling to other developers, other, but it's complimentary. Yeah. I guess what I'm getting at, what have you had to build, how have you had to add, evolve the team, add to the team to build a different, there's a whole different support line, model selling software, software system, as opposed to completely integrated solutions that are production ready the way you've done for up to this point in your life. It's very similar to what we're currently doing. So the first instantiations of this will be the ambient vision system. So that's a smaller piece of the ambient stack system. So I think just the scan tunnel and then looking at objects, identifying characters, reading text, figuring out if there are anomalies here. So that would include the hardware there. It can, or it can be deployed on third party camera systems. So we're peeling off those pieces of the existing solutions that have many different facets to solve that robot configuration problem that we're solving right now. So we're taking off those pieces of TNC, your question about the team. We're leveraging the same resources that we have within the organization to start this new way of, it's revenue, right? This licensing skills, the margin is a lot better. Of course. That's all, that's good. But within the confines of the robot configuration business, those are the data collectors. Yes. Even when talking about with the platform, we have 250,000 hours of data that we've collected. This year we're on track to have a half a million hours of data, right? So it just gets stronger and stronger and it's all part of the flywheel. And then, I mean, again, I think when I think about AI, there's a cloud element to this. And an endpoint aspect of this, how much of this then gets deployed or encapsulated in I would guess an individual box or some of the specific hardware on the edge and what's that? It doesn't explicitly have to be on the edge, but we've noticed that all of our customers want edge compute so that this processing is not happening continuously in the cloud and their data is not moving back and forth. Right. So we can deploy this on basically any generic gaming PC, gaming style industrialized PC. Yeah. Generally, we put it on Nvidia G4's platform graphics cards. We're not picky there. So Jim, what do you see then as what's the ANB secret sauce in terms of the part of your whole ecosystem that you think is the crown jewels and how I'm assuming that I want to preserve that? Aside from our people. Yeah. Well, that's a great answer to you. Yeah. Yeah. The operating system. So the NBOS system, because all that platform has run all of these production systems for all these years. And that is really the crown jewels. There is also, I want to say, the specific configurations, like the modular hardware that we built around it, because for the physical world, you need both of those things. So those things together, but definitely the NBOS platform is where the jewels are. Yeah, I want to add to that, the reference models that we built that Jim mentioned earlier, the physical hardware systems. We have a lot of expertise and intellectual property around physical systems like grippers, configurations of the machine, again, to base to palatizing systems. The robots that are able to grasp unknown objects and clutter, we can provide those pieces as well as needed. So that's your rolling tape, too? Yeah, we can make that. So that's the aspects as well. So I want to say one more part of it. I mean, it made it so that this earlier, Steve and I was talking about trust from customers, that's what a 150 million production transactions get for you. And this full circle of where we are now is a company. It's really all because of that journey out there in production with customers. And here we are. Excited about the next phase here. One of the things we talked about at the top of the show was Corvus. The fact that they had a live demo running the drones and it caught everybody's attention when those drones started doing their thing, right? That was a fun experience. I had a chance to talk to Jackie Wu. He's the CEO of Corvus and we talked not only about their cold chain but the next stage of growth for Corvus. I'm here with Jackie Wu from Corvus and we're on the floor of Manifest. Jackie, have you ever talked to you for a while since you gave me the tour of the Phil's facility? Probably six months ago. Lots happened since then. So give us an update on what's going on, the latest Corvus product wise, customer wise and the market. I think we may have, we are close to outgoing that facility. And happy to share with you more when the time comes. There's been a lot. We're turning out, we're building these in-house here in California which is pretty rare for drones and robotics generally but we're shipping them out as fast as we make them and customers are happy and growing which is really the thing that drives us, motivates us. So a lot of stuff is happening. It's happening very quickly and it's very exciting. So Jackie, one of the new features that you guys are showing off here is the cold chain. Our drone inventory in the cold chain talks to me about that whole application, that market opportunity. Yeah, so we just announced the world's first fully autonomous drones for cold chain. And so the use cases, these are drones that are flying fully themselves. There's nobody else in the facility. And this isn't just refrigerated 50 degrees. It's going down to freezer, zero degrees and also deep freezer minus 20 degrees which is really some of the coolest environments that anything really can be. This is like being half a north pole in these heavy parkas and these mittens and everything. There's frost on your eyelashes. We've actually seen that. And so there's been some engineering challenges we've made to have these robots actually work in these environments fully autonomously including battery management, thermal management, being able to deal with the frost from the materials, not weakening in these environments so that they can actually fly without anybody in there. So since the drones are in the freezer for their entire life, they're living there, they nest there, they treat sharks there, they took off and fly and we turn. Yep. And if you've got to build up, is it a whole new generation of drone for this? Yes, it's our cold chain drone. It's the blue drone, it's the most sophisticated version of this yet, dedicated specifically for everybody who works in deep freezer and in refrigerated environments. I think part of the promise of automation is to take people out of these dirty and dangerous jobs. When I step into these freezers, add negative 20 degrees and dude, it hits me within a second. It's like getting hit in the face with this wave of cold and it just feels really bad for people to be in there. People don't want to be doing these jobs. And so we have these robots to do them to take people out of these environments that people don't want to be in. How about on the actual imaging inventory side? I would imagine some of these products, the product gets frost on it, maybe including barcodes. What's that environment like and what changes you just have to make to any of the perception in the rest? Yeah, that's a really good question. There's some changes to the perception models for how we deal with these types of glare and also frost in the barcode labels. Ultimately if something is truly unreadable then the drones aren't just an organic solution. We will report back on it. But there are these changes that we make so that the drones are adapted for these cold chain environments to be able to hit those barcodes and these labels fully out of time to stay without somebody else being in the facility. What about other unintended or opportunities for, I mean, spoilage or maybe warm zones or other things where the product is not being kept in the right environment. Is that another aspect of what you're surveilling the whole? Ridgid. Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good point, which is part of that ROI and business case for these customers is the spoilage and is especially for perishables. You talk about the ag industry, growers, food, meat, grocery. You can't uniting this like melted ice cream. Having performance intervals and life saving drugs that need to be kept on these really cold environments where else they can't help the people that they're supposed to get to. And so to be able to find all these environments before they go bad in a way that's 10 times faster than people so that people don't have to go into these environments helps these businesses make more money and also save more money and helps ultimately get food and life saving medicines to the people who need them most. I think you brought up a point that wasn't obvious to me to talk to your team about this, which is I think freezer ice cream, but you bought a pharmaceuticals, probably a bigger market opportunity than the food, or maybe I don't know which is bigger food. A pharmaceuticals seems to be a big opportunity as well. Yeah, pharmaceuticals are important. I mean food is something that we all need. It's the food that we put on our tables. But a pharmaceuticals like one pallet of expensive drugs is worth all pot of money. Vaccines have to be kept at certain times. Exactly, absolutely. And so if you lose even one box of this stuff expires, then it's a loss for the company. And so we want to prevent that wherever we can. So looking ahead, 2026, what can you share at this point about the year ahead for you in terms of where you're going and growth for the organization you're in? It's really exciting. We're growing faster than we've ever grown. I think this year we will grow even faster than in previous years. And both in absolute amounts and also like percentage amounts. So it feels like we're really on the cusp of this physical AI revolution based on the hard work that we've been doing for R&D for eight years and now is the time to kind of capitalize on this. So we'll make a few more announcements later this year on sort of company growth customers and all these other types of things. And we'll love to talk to you again then. So thanks to Jackie for that and look forward to catching up with them as their product line continues to develop. I expect they'll be moving to a new facility here with their their significant growth. So Mike, I know you talked with a revolt taught with Kevin Demomo from flying technologies. And one's interesting is that he has taken his experience as a US veteran with logistics, right? And you know that that's actually a huge part of really having a successful defense is you know what kind of move things around. And I always think it's so fascinating that he took that and applied to something that nobody else was really automating, which is that that rail to road transition. And you know, it's again a really cool massive mobile robot. Yeah, you know, all stamps, steel and that's you know impressive hardware. But tell us a little bit about your conversation with Kevin. Yeah, well, Kevin was just on the show a couple episodes ago. So if you want a deeper detail, go back and replay there. But I think you and I both had a chance to meet him in person. I mean, Kevin is just got the huge heart. He's an amazing individual for you. And then he goes back and follow his path. So it was fun to just meet him face to face live for the first time. And here we'll talk to Kevin really about the experience of presenting here and how they're really trying to innovate in the road to rail space. All right, so on the floor with Kevin Demomo from Gly technology on the floor, Manifest, Kevin, how's the week going for you? It's going absolutely amazing. You know, the vehicle that have our vehicle here in Manifest, Las Vegas is an absolute dream. The amount of customer float is coming in at a conference where all of our customers on the trucking side and in the rail side come to converge. And then the customers on the other side that provide logistical solutions to the world. And to provide our product at first glance, our vehicle's on the floor is absolutely a blessing. So talk to me about some of those light bulb moments for people coming and look at your vehicle and say, oh wow. Yes. So I just sort of begin to realize the niche that you're trying to fill with this solution. Yeah, of course. I can't tell you how many times a person that says, why doesn't it exist already? It just makes sense. It's so simple. I think I've seen it before, but I haven't. It's that aha moment where we've built something so elegant and so simple that people can adopt it so easily. And now for us, it's like, now we just have to execute. It's one thing to show and be on the floor, but now it's time to get out in the real world and really solve these problems. Yeah, so it's been a month or so since you were on the podcast. Yes. And thanks for doing that. Hi, it's my honor. And so again, just recap for us again, where you are in terms of the productization of this, the two different vehicles. And again, the opportunity that you're taking away from a show like this to that next step of commercialization. And of course, so we're out in Kansas right now at Great Plains Industrial Park in Parsons. We have two of our beautiful Glatterhams, Betty and Bo, ready to deploy and support those folks with contentization. And then we're standing here with Raiden. Raiden will be tested at Travis Air Force Base in the next couple of weeks just to show our capabilities on base, put a pallet on top of it and show that we can do it. and go from point A to point B. And then we'll put the next phase of the product and production so we can start to push it out to the world. - Yeah, Kevin, look, I think the thing that I admire about you is just how pragmatic you have been with your roadmap here in terms of pivoting from the initial design to adding Glider M to your roadmap, something you never anticipated when you started, right? You wanted to be full and autonomous because most robotists want to do. But you've realized that there's an interim path here while you continue to figure out all of the edge case elements for the fully autonomous vehicle moving from fully electric right to hybrid. Again, understanding the market and pivoting your roadmap along the way. Again, talk me from a startup executive, how important it is to pay attention to those market signals and scrap your planes and rethink it. It's not a simple process. - No, it's not simple at all. I think it goes back to year-you-go, right? You create a product because you want to build a really cool solution for the world, but you have to go back to your thesis. You're building a solution for the world. Where does the world really need and where it's going? You know, when I first started as you alluded to, I wanted to be a straight transformer, robotized and that's it. But I brought it back to the core of my thesis. We need to move road-based freight on to road. And how do you do that? It doesn't matter what it looks like. It can look like a regular truck. And that's not sexy or attractive, but the movement and the thing that we're solving is attractive. Because it saves lives, it makes things safer, and it clears congestion and utilizes infrastructure that we invest in. So yeah, it starts off not looking great, but you eventually get there. And then we found another niche with the world going to contest in environments, in Ukraine and other places where we could use robotics to solve the save the warfighters life. Where we can put that robotized, that futuristic product in the warfighters hands in order to solve those problems in parallel. So you solve for the community on the commercial side, and then you solve for the community on the defense side and you meet them both in the middle because we're here to solve for the community which is humanity. So yes. Well, Kevin, it's been great to meet you in person after all the conversations we've had over the last year. So I wish you all the best and good luck. Likewise, likewise. Thank you so much, brother. The last interview we're going to play here in just a minute, had a chance to stop by the auto-palette booth. At the end of the show, they were wrapping things up. We broke this story on Monday, the new auto-palette solution. It's a young team of entrepreneurs. And Eric Miller is the CEO. So I caught up with Eric and asked him about his experience of demoing for the first time at a major trade show. So we're going to hear his experience. So for many of us who have been in the industry for so many years, we always sort of think back to that first big trade show. You got to show off your exciting new product. And Eric sort of relays that even the least horse is being tired of talking after two long days on the show floor. Let's hear from Eric and Anopilot. All right, so I'm here with Eric Miller, CEO of CoFounder of Auto-Palette Robonics. Near the end of Manifest, how's the show been for you guys? Oh, this has been awesome. This is my first time running a trade show. It's been incredible doing a product launch year, right? I think there's so many people who are here, who are really experts in the space of warehouse robotics. And so when we show up with something truly new, with some capabilities people haven't seen, right? Higher throughput, palatizing and deep palatizing than anything else in the world. We get really positive reaction to that. Yeah, we broke the story earlier in the week about your application and solution on the robot report and automated warehouse. And every time I've come by the booth, Eric, it's been back to back people. I think you've been talking-- you must be tired of telling people about the solution. Oh, I've gotten through so many coff traps. I think it's been great. We've gotten interest from chippers who maybe need the technology. We've gotten interest from robot companies. You may be we want to partner with. We've gotten interest from reporters like yourself who like covering things that are due. So definitely thank you for helping us out with the story earlier this week. And that's been awesome. So like you said, the first time in the trade show, first time putting a demo together, it seems like it's-- I've never seen it stop. So you could host to you and the team for building a system that's run for the whole show. But what do you think you've learned about the trade show demo production for the next time? Well, next time I'm probably going to pay someone to ship our product instead of driving the truck out myself. 10 hours in a box truck from San Francisco to Vegas is doable. And great shout out to my girlfriend for coming along with me for that. But next time we'll pay someone to ship it. I think from the booth itself, it's been awesome. This is something we've pulled together to show people here. The robots have been running pretty reliably. And there's just been so much interest. It's been-- we've been busy all the whole time talking to people. Great. Well, congratulations. And here at the end of the week, look forward to watching your success in coming months and year. Thank you so much, Mike. It's been awesome working together and looking forward to talking some more in the future. All right. So again, thanks to everybody who took the time out of the show to talk to us. Jeannie was really a fun week in Vegas, even though it went by very quickly. And we're both exhausted here looking for a long weekend to get caught up on our sleep. But again, thanks for being my side man on the show. As we made it through the floor, it was fun. Yeah, matter of how it's sort of in some way, as we've already had CES, but it's one that kick off to train show season. And we'll be out in the world going to more things in the coming months. Looking forward to seeing as many of you as we can. Certainly thanks to everyone who stopped to talk with us or who made time when it was on the show floor at one of the many networking receptions. And now we'll be more coverage to come as we digest all of these conversations, whether it's here in the podcast or certainly in articles on the Automate Warehouse and the Robot Report. Once again, let me remind all of you that the Robotics Summit and Expo is coming. Registration's now open. Our first set of speakers is online. The whole agenda will be coming soon. Now, are still opportunities if you want to exhibit on the Expo floor. The event is on 27th and 28th in Boston. We're expecting over 250 exhibitors, more than 6,010 knees, which is no more than we're growing at close and rate is manifest. And again, take advantage of early event registration while you can definitely sign up at robotics Summit.com. Well, Gene, that's going to do it for episode 231. Thanks again to everybody for tuning in. And too many folks to name who were on the show today. So thank you to everybody who took the time this week to spend a little time catching us up and relaying it to all of you. It was a fun week, and we look forward to the next opportunity to see you all in the field. New episodes of the Robot Report podcast drop each week. You can find us anywhere you get your podcasts. Please subscribe, leave us a rating, and give us a review. Tell your friends about us. This episode was produced by me and edited by Tyler Kubisti. Our executive producer is Amanda Buna. Thanks, everyone, for listening. [MUSIC]