Forklift operation by humans causes a death approximately every three days. So every three days a forklift is being operated and that forklift kills someone. If I made an autonomous technology and I said to you, every three days this thing's going to kill something, how would you feel about that?

Brian Heater (00:34)

Hello and welcome to Automated. My name is Brian Heater. I am the managing editor at A3. It is always an adventure speaking with international woman of mystery, Melanie Wise. In fact, I don't think that I have had a remotely dull conversation with her in the past dozen or so times that we've chatted over the years. The elephant in the room here, of course, is that Melanie is no longer at agility as of this recording. We're not entirely sure what's next.

Aside from hopefully a boat trip around the world, but it is a fascinating conversation nonetheless, and I'm sure you will get a lot out of it like I did. So I'm going to date this interview, the timeline immediately coming right out of the gate. But I have to ask you if you saw the race that happened over the weekend, the half marathon.

Melonee Wise (01:25)

Yeah, I didn't watch it, but I heard about it, know, the half marathon with the humanoid and with the teleoperator walking very awkwardly behind it the entire time. Yeah.

Brian Heater (01:39)

Yeah, there were 21 humanoids, think. I think a few of them actually completed it. This was happening in Beijing. And it was really like, I don't know. I get the sense it was China just saying, hey, look at all these humanoid companies that we have right now. Ultimately, something like that, obviously, it's a big novelty. But ultimately, something like that, you feel like good, positive, or negative for the industry.

Melonee Wise (02:02)

Indifferent. I mean, cool, flashy, but I don't think it demonstrates any kind of autonomy competency. And we've been past the point of hardware working for a while now. So I mean, great, you can do a half marathon. But I mean, that's nothing in the grand scheme of real operating hours. You know what I mean?

And it now if someone had said they did a half marathon with a fully functionally safe robot, then maybe that would be interesting. I mean, yeah, hardware walked continuously. It's like I took a joystick out and I teleopted mobile robot. I I don't know. I guess I guess I don't see it any more interesting than maybe a novel research paper that was done one time.

Brian Heater (03:05)

Yeah, actually I was thinking of you as I was reading up on it because they actually, and I think this was probably the right move, they separated the humanoids from the humans. They were actually running in the same lane. Yeah. One of them I think actually ended up like taking out one of their tele operators. But yeah, I I asked partially because obviously this is a moment of buzz right now. This is, you know, we're at the point right now where like my parents unprompted are asking me questions specifically about human noise and it seems like it's probably pretty easy to get lost or to get kind of caught up in the noise.

Melonee Wise (03:42)

I think that a lot of people are excited about the prospect of humanoids in their home or in their daily lives. But I think we're still struggling with the notion of autonomous cars in our daily life in terms of actually making that a practical reality. And humanoids are an even more complex activity than I would say, autonomous driving. And I know there will be people who will absolutely disagree with me, but the idea that you could have a baby free roaming around this device is terrifying, for example. Much less an adult human being. when you look at autonomous cars, yes, you have a lot of chaotic actors, but you still don't have an infant crawling around in front of it. That's just not a use case that you would have to account for in normal operation.

Whereas any kind of home robot would have to account for those types of activities. I mean, most of these companies that are doing these kinds of activities have kind of stated aspirationally that they are aiming at the home.

Brian Heater (05:01)

When you say most is agility not counted in that or is that like somewhere way down the roadmap for you?

Melonee Wise (05:08)

Yeah, it's way down the road back for us. I think that when you look at, know, competitive landscape for humanoids right now, you have like the pragmatic and there's a group of companies that fall into that agility as one of them. I would say Boston Dynamics is another that have a very long horizon roadmap but their first approach into market, their beachhead into the market is through an industrial space, which is pretty pragmatic. You have the aspirational. You have the people that are like, well, we're just going to go straight into the home, which I would say is extremely aspirational. Then you just have a lot of hardware focused people where they aren't really focused on autonomy. They're not really focused on a use case or anything. They're just focused on making really capable hardware, I would say.

A large segment of the humanoid companies fall into that, especially out of Asia Pacific markets. And then there's the wheeled. And that's a whole category that we don't really talk much about because when we talk about the humanoid form factor, we assume it's bipedal, but there's a fair number of people coming out with wheeled humanoid or I mean, this is the problem with the term humanoid in general is really what we're all talking about our mobile manipulation platforms and some variation of that, MMRs. But humanoids has become this like lexiconical thing that we throw around because it's like, well, you know, it looks like a human, but there's many morphologies. And if you look at like the progression of like industrial arms and AMRs,

Like the next logical thing should have been mobile manipulation platforms, but the hype of humanoids kind of outpaced the practical evolution of mobile and arm to mobile plus arm.

Brian Heater (07:14)

You went along with it, right? I mean, you jump from, from fetching zero. these, these AMRs in.

Melonee Wise (07:20)

But I had a non-compete.

Brian Heater (07:25)

We never talk about the kinds of innovations that actually come from signing a legal document.

Melonee Wise (07:29)

Yeah, yeah, like, let's let's be real, like, why didn't I continue working on mobile robots like AMRs? I couldn't I literally had a non compete. so this

Brian Heater (07:41)

I mean, in that case, it's good that we're defining that category differently so they can't make that argument.

Melonee Wise (07:48)

Yeah, no, I'm just being very like on the nose about it, right? Like, I think that is some of the innovators dilemma, right? Like once you hit some success point, there are a lot of innovators who get taken off the market for three to four years just based on their outcomes. So I think, you know, when we when we look at at some of the irony of success is.

Every time an innovator has a success or an entrepreneur has a success, many times it comes along with a lockup that basically prevents them from continuing to innovate in many cases for years at a time. mean, if you look retrospectively at like 2013 when Google bought all of those robotics companies, all those great entrepreneurs, it almost created for a four or five year period, kind of this dampening of the robotics industry. And you can actually see it, like suddenly all of the innovator entrepreneur people started getting sucked out in that brief period of time. And so you saw this kind of dip in robotics entrepreneurship in the 2013 time period because...there was that big acquisition of seven or eight significant robotics companies at the time.

Brian Heater (09:16)

Yeah, obviously the dampening or slowing of that to certain extent is due to the fact that Google didn't really do a lot with it. Certainly not at the time. We're finally starting to see some things from it and then other, let's say office related things that I'm not going to go into on the podcast as well. to a certain extent, is there an inevitability? mean, this is, I'm sure, something that you thought a lot about on selling fetch to Zebra, is there an inevitability that once you go from startup mode to being owned by a large corporation that there's going to be a certain amount of slowdown that happens?

Melonee Wise (09:55)

I think it depends. I think it can have that inevitable outcome. I think it just depends on how the businesses run post acquisition. I think that there's really good examples of companies being run well post acquisition and some that aren't. And a lot of it has to do with how independent that company maintains, is maintained post acquisition. And I also think about how knowledgeable the acquiring company is in the technology and in selling the technology actually. I think that if you have, let's say, a solution-based selling process for your technology and then you're acquired by a company that doesn't do solution-based selling, mean, yeah, that's going to have a significant impact in the way that the company is run and how successful it is long term. I think that that is true for a lot of robotics companies is that they have very particular ways that they need to go to market. And I think it's one of the more nuanced things that acquirers don't think about. They think about, you know, how are we going to keep the technology people?

How are we going to keep them motivated and incentivized to keep developing cool and interesting technology? But a lot of times they forget about the long tail. I've talked with like some of my other entrepreneur friends who have sold their robotics companies and they say that sometimes that's what gets missed in the mix is, you know, it's one thing to have the technology. It's another thing to keep.

To sell it and to sell it well and to keep the momentum going there from a sales and channel perspective.

Brian Heater (11:59)

Obviously from the outside looking in, Google was almost buying a lot of these companies as just the prestige of owning Boston Dynamics was enough in and of itself. there was no expectation that these things were going to be on the market in the near term. As far as I know, they didn't really start the process of commercializing, at least not maybe in a major way until after that had occurred.

Melonee Wise (12:27)

I think that depends on the company. think that some of the companies they did, but... yeah, Boston Dynamics. Well, I think that's a little bit of a complication because if you look historically, I would say that from an outside perspective and from everything I know about the company, they have their vision and no acquirer is going to be able to change their vision. And you can see that...

Brian Heater (12:32)

I just meant Boston, I am like specific.

Melonee Wise (12:56)

that being true through each of the successive acquisitions that Boston Dynamics has gone through.

Brian Heater (13:04)

But I mean, was there obviously like there was a change that occurred when they were part of SoftBank in that like, you know, I think it was that time period when they announced that they were going to be selling spot at some point. And, know, it's 30 years of them essentially being a research company making really cool robots, then to moving something really actually bringing these things to the market.

Melonee Wise (13:22)

I think that that was more of an outcome of DARPA dollars in the way funding was done. Because actually, I would have described Boston Dynamics for the first 15 years as a DARPA, like an arm of DARPA. They developed Atman basically solely for the US government for testing hazmat suits.

Brian Heater (13:48) Yeah, something I think people forget too is I think this is a story. Maybe, obviously, you were an apisodamics, maybe you can confirm this, that obviously they're making these like pack robots, right, to transport things around. And the hydraulic systems were just way too loud to have those things on a battlefield.

Melonee Wise (14:07)

Yeah, I heard the same thing. mean, I've never worked there, but I've heard that anecdotally from people is that they, I mean, if you've ever even listened to the videos, it's like, know, so it was one of the things that motivated them to build electric versions and things like that.

Brian Heater (14:27)

Obviously this predates your time at agility, it again from the outside looking in the research that Jonathan was doing specifically, it seemed to me pretty quickly from from Cassie to digit to that commercialization.

Melonee Wise (14:43)

Yeah, I mean, I think in the sense that it takes 10 years to have an overnight success, yes. I think that they've been, Jonathan and the team had been working on this technology for a long time. So I mean, I joined the company eight years in, six or eight years in. So.

And if you were to ask Jonathan, it's been his lifelong passion.

Brian Heater (15:14)

Yeah, of course. Well, his lifelong passion was like legged robots, but was his lifelong passion selling legged robots?

Melonee Wise (15:22)

I think his lifelong passion is to have his technology out there in the world having impact. I think if you get to the end of it for most roboticists, many of us start as researchers and we do research for a long time. We end up making cool videos, but one day it hits us like we're making technology for the sake of technology instead of the sake of...having impact. And most of us end up doing something to try and have impact. And I think this was Jonathan's push for having impact. My personal push was leaving Willow Garage and starting my own company. And so I think in many ways, Jonathan and I are very alike in that is that we both wanted to have impact in the world and, you know, Both of us, I guess it seems, decided that the best way to do that was to go create our own robotics companies.

Brian Heater (16:29)

Yeah, I actually wanted to talk to you a bit about Willow Garage because you were very, a very early employee. What was your number?

Melonee Wise (16:35)

I actually started on the same day as the first employee, January 20th, 2007.

Brian Heater (16:42)

You just clocked in a little bit later that day.

Melonee Wise (16:44)

Yeah, basically. think I just, I, you know, I think, if I recall, it was just random how the, think what's funny is the founder actually, I think his employee number was actually number nine or something. That's funny. Just never gave himself an employee ID.

Brian Heater (17:02)

Yeah, obviously to a certain extent, Will Garage's fate was, there were a lot of ways in which they were probably a little bit too early or a lot too early to a lot of things, but was an aspect of that, you think, at the same time that they weren't really actively trying to commercialize things the same way Fetch was.

Melonee Wise (17:20)

think historically that's complicated because when I met Scott in December 2006, Scott pitched me on Willow Garage being a company that was, as he put it, run by engineers who want to become entrepreneurs to basically build cool things and get to cool outcomes. Now, about four or five months after Willow Garage was like had a couple of employees, myself, Jonathan Stark, Kurt Myers, John Su. Those were the first four employees of Volo Garage. A couple of months later, maybe in May or June, I can't remember exactly when, you would have to ask Steve Cousins, but Scott hired Steve Cousins, who at the time was a manager, I think, at Xerox PARC, I think, or was it IBM?

I can't remember. But he, I think he was at park, but he, he came in and he decided to focus Willow on more research. And I think that there was some contention between Scott and, and Steve on that viewpoint of like, what is the ultimate goal of Willow garage?

And so for the first five-ish years of Willow, four-ish years, let's call it four-ish years of Willow, we were focused very heavily on research and creating open source software. And then there was this point in which we suddenly became more focused on maybe commercial activities or spin-outs, let's call it. That's when Willow Garage created spin outs, think that's around the time that the founder Scott created suitable technologies and spun the company out. And that caused a real like ground shift at Willow. Like we we suddenly started working on these projects where it was like, what can we build? And there's a huge internal battle about what industry we're going to focus on first, the home or industrial settings.

And we ended up focusing first on the home and we spent a year looking at like stuff for the home there. We actually have like these project books that we like are really nicely published. If you can ever get your hands on one, I have some. You should, because they're super interesting. Like everyone who worked on the projects at Willow has them. But the catalog, like everything we did at Willow. pretty extensively related to, so we did one on home automation, we did one on connecting with people for like the home. And then at the end of that, we kind of decided that the home, all the stuff that Willow would be best at for the home was just too far out, like building a robot to help you inside of your home. And so then we started focusing on industrial applications. So we looked at, hotels, grocery retail, warehousing, logistics. And that's actually what kind of got me excited. And it's why we ended up going off and starting our own company. And it's because it became very clear that there were real problems to be solved for mobile robots in logistics and mobile manipulation robots. It's actually one of the reasons I continued my journey.

After Fetch into Agility because they were focused very similar on the same market. It's a great beachhead market for robotics and automation. you look at Willow, like I think the problem, why Willow, think eventually ended up shutting down was largely because of a philosophical disagreement between the founder and Steve about what Willow Garage was supposed to be at the end of the day, ironically enough.

Brian Heater (21:46)

Yeah, and obviously, you know, being a Silicon Valley company and being funded that way, but at a certain point, if you don't at least have on your roadmap, some kind of profitability or some kind of, you know, market outlook, then the money's going to stop trickling in.

Melonee Wise (22:03)

I mean, Willow was always complicated because it was funded by a single source. You know, was funded by a single founder. And if it's what they wanted it, if it was doing what they wanted to achieve, they continued to fund it. If not, they stopped funding it. And that has its upsides and its downsides.

Brian Heater (22:24)

I'm going say we, and by we I mean most people, not everybody, but most people in the industry, it seems take for granted the reasons why the home is that much harder to break into than industrial. at the beginning of that journey, would you have thought that 10, 15 years from now, it would be more realistic that we would have home robots or humanoid robots in industrial settings?

Melonee Wise (22:54)

I still think it would have been more realistic to have industrial setting robots. Just even at the time, although I wasn't a safety expert, I understood the semantic complexity enough of the home that irrespective of the safety problems that get layered on top of it, the uniqueness challenges of our home and people's unwillingness to compromise on uncertain aspects of their home lend itself to being a very complicated problem. for example, I think that if you could find some subcategory of people who are willing to switch out all their dishes and switch out their furniture and a whole bunch of other things to make the home completely compatible with robotics technology.

Yeah, you probably could have had home robots a while ago, but that's a bridge too far, right? Like standardization in the home, I think would help a lot to making it go faster for certain applications. it's that and the other problem that I quickly found out while working at Willow on these projects was the value proposition that people hold in their heads around what technology or items in their home bring are very well calibrated. How much does your dishwasher cost? Like, it's more between three and $800, right?

Brian Heater (24:31) Sure, it was with the house when I bought it, I'll take your word for it.

Melonee Wise (24:36)

When you look at like, if I'm going to spend $500, then it has to have the value to me of a dishwasher. If I'm going to spend $1,000, let's say, you know, it has to have the value of, let's say, a very high end TV to me or or the capability or value of a washer dryer. If I'm going to spend $10,000, it has to have the value of a hard to be, you know, like that gradation is very, very well established for people. And so when you go and you talk to people and you're like, OK, let's talk about your robotic vacuum cleaner. And this is this is super hilarious. We we did this whole user study to try and understand like how people assess the value of their robotic vacuum cleaner. And this. Yeah. Yes. I'm like so.

Brian Heater (25:29)

Was that Willow?

Melonee Wise (25:33)

doesn't do a good job. And they're like, it does a good enough job. And we were like, did they replace your vacuum cleaner? And they're like, no, it doesn't replace my vacuum cleaner. But it's good enough that I don't have to vacuum a lot. And then we asked, well, you know, how much value did that provide to you? And they were like, well, I don't know. And we were like, well, you you bought it for some amount of money. You know, how much did you pay for it?

At the time, I think this was in 2012, approximately 2011, 2012, everyone was telling us that they bought their robot vacuum cleaner for $199. And at the time, you literally could not go and buy a brand new robot vacuum cleaner for $199. You literally couldn't. But so everyone had earmarked or pegged the value of what this service was providing at about $200.

But at some point they had bought this thing or got one of these things. I don't know how, either they bought it for $199 or they misremembered what they bought.

Brian Heater (26:39)

There's some black market going on that we weren't aware of.

Melonee Wise (26:42)

Yeah, yeah, or just a lot of deep discount bids. But people pretty consistently could tell you that they earmarked the value of their robot going around and cleaning their home for $199. And so when you go to them and you're like, look, I can give you a robot that might be able to kind of do your dishes for $10,000 $15,000.

They're like, no, thank you.

Brian Heater (27:12)

But also, let's say hypothetically that nobody had invented a dishwashing robot until right now, that would be different. People have an established value on what dishwashers cost because they know what dishwashers are and they've been around for a long time.

Melonee Wise (27:27)

But the problem is, is that you start running into these like weird jumps because we're not even close to the price point that would make it even reasonable for them to try, right? And I think that's the problem is like, there, and if you were to ask anyone, there's almost no value you can provide in someone's home.

That is like $20,000 worth of value. If you look at the cost of like having a service worker come to your home, like a cleaning person or something like that, or a gardener, all of those people are low cost enough that even at $30,000, like you basically can pay for 10 years of cleaning service at your home.

Brian Heater (28:20)

And $30,000 is like the low, low, low end of what a humanoid would cost.

Melonee Wise (28:25)

Right. And so that's and of a bipedal humanoid for a wheeled mobile manipulation robot, a wheeled robot, you could probably get into the $10,000 range. I don't think that that's unachievable. But then you have like stairs and other problems and none of this contemplates safety, right? Like we haven't even touched the safety problem here.

No matter what the form factor of the robot, good luck right now. And so I think that's kind of some of the gap.

Brian Heater (29:02)

That's interesting. Maybe there's an extent to which legs are actually even more necessary in the home than the factory because they're not controlled environments in the same way.

Melonee Wise (29:15)

Legs are more necessary, I believe, unless everyone lives in flat level home. I mean, right now I'm in a house that has three stories, so.

Brian Heater (29:21)

It's funny though, because I think part of that math that people are doing, obviously it seems like a lot of it is kind of as retroactive, right? Like, okay, I bought this thing, I invested in this thing. And now I kind of have to justify it to myself. on the same note, obviously, people didn't get rid of their couches so they could get a Roomba. But people for a long time and probably continue to do so were like, you know, moving things around in order to accommodate this robot.

Melonee Wise (29:58)

They still do. They still do. And remember, it wasn't until a couple of years ago that Roomba finally got a poop sensor, right? Like, that's not like smearing dog feces all over your home. I mean, I think that people did accommodate, do accommodate their robot vacuum cleaners quite a bit. But if you look at the product overall, over the last, what, 20-ish years, the features have evolved, but they haven't made giant leaps in terms of capability. Like I said, in the last couple of years, they finally added a poop sensor. Now they have automatic bin emptying, you know? But a lot of that is because they're constantly against the constraint of cost or value proposition, right? I mean, really think about the value proposition that right off that they had to make for like the robot to like build this complicated mechanism for the robot to empty its own bin. That's how like, how niche the like value proposition challenges are, where it's like, okay, you bought a robot vacuum cleaner that cleans your own floor, but now you just don't want to empty its goddamn bin. Sorry. you don't want to empty its bin, right? Like that's the problem instead of, know, like, okay, now I want it to like pick up my room or something like that. That's kind of where we're at because we can't get to more complicated tasks very easily.

Brian Heater (31:45)

This isn't a one to one, obviously, corporations have a lot more resources, but to a certain extent, they have to also be doing that math, right? If we're going to pay this much for these many humanoid robots, like at a certain point, it has to pay off for us.

Melonee Wise (32:01)

I think it's just really hard to make them safe. It's really hard to make them capable. It's hard to deal with like the semantic differences between home A and home B. The cultural differences are going to be a huge problem when these robots first start getting into the home and when they start getting into the home. There'll be some really weird cultural artifacts, things like that. There'll be, you know, other like real concerning problems about pets, I'm sure.

Brian Heater (32:36)

Well, yeah. the other thing is, mentioned babies before, but I always think about how many of these robots are like the Labrador. Obviously, it's not a dangerous robot in that it's a cart. But some of these companies are going after, we call it age tech now, what we used to call elder care. And those people are like every bit as fragile as the babies are.

Melonee Wise (32:55)

One of the reasons why I, some people asked me why we didn't go into like elder care service with our mobile robots when I was at fetch. And they said, well, the problem was, that when you look at the like survival rate of some of an older adult after a hip break, it's very low, right? their like life expectancy after a hip break, I think is under four years.

And one of the problems is that they have a lot of stability issues. And so the last situation that you want is the robot is stopped, an older adult leans on it for stability, but because it doesn't have appropriate sensing, it drives off. And so that in itself is like, that most likely will result in a hip break. It drives off while someone's leaning on it.

And you don't even know whether because the person's leaning on it, they caused the robot then to fall on them as well. And that just compounds the problem. And so in order to then make sure that that doesn't happen, how do you do that? Do you assume when anyone is too close to you, you just don't drive? Do you put tactile sensing all over the robot to basically sense that. But both of those, because they can result in what's called an S3 injury, where you have permanent debilitating damage that could lead to maiming or death, those have to be safety rated functions. And so, you know, how do you implement that in a safe way? And then

If no one can ever get too close to your robot, then what is the value of it? Right. And so you end up in these like paradoxical situations where if a person gets too close to a robot, the robot has to stop and not move until the person goes away. Then when can the robot be productive? Um, and so you, like, these are the problems that you end up having to solve. And what I think many, many companies in the space right now that are looking at these problems are doing a lot of things that, like I said, I think they're adding tactile sensors. I think they are adding extra sensing. I think they are adding a lot of capabilities. I don't know if they're meeting all the safety requirements for those products, but they are adding the capabilities. it.

You know, we, right now the population of testing is not large enough to see the efficacy and the, I guess the long-term outcomes of the safety technology that they're applying.

Brian Heater (35:54)

first time I think you and I really started talking about safety was at Automate last year when we did the human noise panel. And your sense at the time was that there weren't nearly enough people doing nearly enough to actually address the issue when it comes to human robots. How much has that conversation changed over the past year?

Melonee Wise (36:12)

I think that it's bifurcated pretty heavily. I think there's the group of companies that are just putting their hands over their ears and closing their eyes and being like, la, la, la, la, la, la. I am not focused on the real world anyway, so I don't care about safety. And then there's the people who, like I said, are in the pragmatic category, who are starting to come together as part of a coalition to look at safety in a real practical way.

Currently, there's a dynamically stable industrial mobile robot standard that's being proposed for the ISO realm to look at this problem, to start putting more permissibility out there in the market, most likely, and better requirements around what it means to have a functionally safe, dynamically stable system.

Agility has been working on that in conjunction with Boston Dynamics team. And so we put a proposal forward earlier this year. We're also looking to potentially update our 1508, which I think we'll be proposing that in the near future. So there is work there for creating more guidance for dynamically stable robots.

But I think that the big gap is that there's just not enough market education. Like, for example, I was with a customer the other day and they told me that as long as someone's tele-opping it, even if it's remote tele-op, it's safe and that's a practical safety mitigation. I said, no, it's not. It's actually not allowed under the standard. It doesn't mitigate.

It doesn't create safety. The only thing that's allowed under the standard is line of sight operation.

Brian Heater (38:12)

So as as a backup any kind of teleop even as a backup is prohibited by this

Melonee Wise (38:17)

Yeah, because it's not functionally safe. What if there's latency issues? Let's OK. Let's say you have your murderous teleop robot that has a knife in its hand. Right. And I don't mean murderous, but it has a knife in its hand. Right. It's teleop being there's a person nearby and you have low latent. You have like really high latency. Right. In your teleop. So if you have no safety regime on board the robot.

That robot while you're waiting for the next like, you know, update from your teleop loop, which is super high latency, let's say you've had tons of packet loss, it's arms flailing around with this knife. Like you wouldn't even know. Like that, for example, is like a perfect example where remote teleoperation, and I know that's an extreme example, but that's an example. The minute the arm does any kind of uncontrolled behavior.

That you as a teleoperator have no control over. And that essentially will happen during any non-safety rated remote teleoperation. You basically have this problem. As far as I know, there is no safety rated teleoperation scheme that I've seen for operating these robots. And if there was, I'm guessing that it would not be productive enough or meet the productivity rates that customers would care about. And so what a lot of customers are seeing today are like really like nice demos that don't meet any of the requirements for market. And that kind of misinformation, kind of misunderstanding of the capability of the technology and what's allowed like is going to cause a problem in the short to near term when eventually someone gets hurt. And the biggest problem is that many of these robots, we're talking about putting mass in the hands and the end effectors of these robots that are in the plus five kilogram range and they can move around upwards of a meter per second. That is definitely enough to hit you in the head or the throat and kill you.

And that's all it's going to take is one of those incidents.

Brian Heater (40:48)

You can mitigate them to a certain extent, is there, you know, people working in warehouses and factories, they bump into each other, you know, or like, obviously, there's a lot of infamously, there's a lot of forklift accidents that happen there as well. To a certain extent, is it an inevitability that if humanoid robots get rolled out in large numbers that somebody is going to get injured on the job by humanoid robot?

Melonee Wise (41:16)

All of that is an inevitability. The problem is, is do you want it to be greater or less than that of what it is when people do it? And forklift operation is a good example of that. Forklift operation causes, by humans, causes a death approximately every three days. So every three days, forklift is being operated and that forklift kills someone every three days. True facts. If I made an autonomous technology and I said to you, every three days, this thing's going to kill something, how would you feel?

Brian Heater (42:00)

Depends on the person.

Melonee Wise (42:02)

I'm just saying like

Brian Heater (42:05)

No, I know. know. It's the same with autonomous cars.

Melonee Wise (42:09)

Right.

It's same with autonomous cars, right? I mean, we deploy and when you talk to customers, people see autonomous forklifts as the route to having a safer warehouse, to making sure that, you know, like in all of forklift operation in North America, for example, we don't kill someone every three days. And the injury rate is even higher. mean, the injury rate for forklift operation is insane. It's even worse.

Yes, someone may not die every three days, but someone's definitely getting maimed or injured in a pretty serious way due to a forklift operation. And so now let's take it away from the death toll. Let's just look at like, we're going to injure across all of the United States, 100 people a day, with the forklift, autonomous forklift. Now, how do you feel about it? I've heard this argument before, right? People hurt people.

Why can't machines hurt people? Well, we created machine directives. We created machinery safety standards so that they wouldn't hurt people because the bigger problem typically when you put industrial machinery into play is, and this is even true with autonomous cars, is when it's good, it's good, but when it's bad, it's really bad. Like, it's, you know, like the outlying cases are like full death. Whereas like a lot of the times when you look at fender benders between like people, they don't result in fatality. But if you look at when autonomous cars mess up, they tend to mess up in a more fatal way instead of a less fatal way.

Brian Heater (44:02)

There's a reason why like so many industrial robots are are still like to this day are caged off. And I wonder how much of this this human to robot encounter these safety concerns are are somewhat short term concerns because ultimately is the goal to just have a fully automated factory.

Melonee Wise (44:25)

Yeah, I think that is the goal. I think that the problem is the cost of retooling is too high. Although, mean, from being really honest, I think China is proving that they're willing to throw away all infrastructure to go after that dream.

But if you look at it, it's very wasteful, right? You basically have to generationally, like, basically wipe this slate clean and then build it up from the ground up. But the problem is, it's really hard to predict your throughput. it's highly sensitive to product lifetime, machinery lifetime, things like that.

But I mean, yes, that is the goal, but I don't see it coming in a short-term horizon. think that for humanoids to get deployed in industry, they're going to have to go through a lit warehouse to get to a dark warehouse.

Brian Heater (45:39)

So we're coming up on time, but I'll close on this. speaking of throughput, what does success look like for agility in the humanoid robotics market five years from now?

Melonee Wise (45:56)

success for the humanoid market five years from now would be to be having the same traction that the AMR market had five years in. I think we're about there. think that that's really where if we're doing that, it means that the industry is going to be very successful. I think that it's going to be challenging to do that because there's a lot of safety hurdles to get over because remember, like if you look at the MR market, they came out of the gate fully collaborative, not even a problem. But humanoids are coming out of the gate basically back where industrial arms came out in work cells. And so we have to climb not only the commercialization fence, but the safety fence at the same time. But I think that when you look at, you know, like for agility in five years, I think being fully cooperatively safe outside the work cell and deployed in multiple countries, I think will be a big success. We plan on having our CE mark in two years with a functionally safe cooperative robot. And I think that is going to be a big determiner on our success. I think we're going to hit it, done it before, have faith that we're going to do it.

Brian Heater (47:19)

Yeah, yeah, it's funny. I've never thought of it this way. But you know, as comparing it to AMRs versus in industrial arms, it kind of feels like we're letting, at least in some instances, we're letting a lot of babies out into a factory and expecting them to kind of like grow up on the job.

Melonee Wise (47:38)

What's really interesting about the categories I told you about, the pragmatic, the aspirational, the hardware and the wheeled, is you'll notice that all the veteran roboticists who've deployed this stuff before are in the pragmatic category because we all learned how hard it is not to build the technology but to deploy it.

It's actually funny. you, if you ask most roboticists what they found was the hardest thing in, getting their product or their technology out into the world, almost none of them would say that it was solving the robotics problem. Almost all of them would say it was like, building the fleet management or building the, the IT security platform or dealing with like compliance and sock too. And, but very few would say, man, the hard thing was getting slammed to work. Like no one, no one literally is going to say that. Like it's going to be the long tail. And so when you, when you look at humanoid, it's like the people that I personally believe the people that are going to be successful are the people who get out there in the world and stop making videos. Like the longer you make videos, the longer you do all these demos.

The further you are getting behind in the realities of deploying the technology and dealing with the edge cases, the crappy problems that happen with reliability, the problems where you just don't know about when you go talk to a customer and they're like, look, all I need you to do is move a tote from there to there. And then you get on site and there to there is not the problem.

It's the fact that packout doesn't move fast enough and you got to put labels on the bin. And by the way, this person actually part of their job is rearranging everything in the bin to make sure that when it gets the automated process downstream, it all works. And that kind of stuff, no one is going to like find in a robotics textbook. And AI isn't going to AI it away, you know, because that's business logic, that's not technology logic. And I think people conflate the two things. They believe that because you can teach a robot to manipulate something very complex, that that's going to solve the problem of a large organization that built a workflow to do a process to achieve an outcome.

And those two are totally independent of each other. And like all the technology in the world can't solve those process problems.

Brian Heater (50:40)

Thank you so much, Melanie. We'll have to get her on again soon to discuss the boat trip that I made up at the beginning of the podcast. Thanks again for tuning in to Automated. If you made it this far into the episode, please like and subscribe and check out the Automated newsletter over at automated.org. Thank you for tuning in. We will catch you next time.