IndustrialSage

IndustrialSage


IAM Robotics: Tom Galluzzo

July 12, 2020

Tom Galluzzo, Founder & CEO of IAM Robotics, joins us to explain how vital robotics is in supply chain– especially as ecommerce continues increasing. Danny: Alright, so let's jump into today's Executive Series interview. I have Mr. Tom Galluzzo, who is the founder and CEO of IAM Robotics. Tom, thank you so much for joining me today. Tom: Thanks Danny really appreciate it. Danny: So I'm excited to jump in and into this episode and learn more about you and about IAM Robotics. So for those who aren't familiar with IAM Robotics. What do you guys do? I have a venture I have a guess but-- Tom: Yeah, so we do autonomous robots for warehousing. And our robots are designed. We have the only robots that are what we call autonomous mobile manipulation robots. The robots are able to drive around the warehouse, and they can actually find and grasp things. So they travel around the warehouse just like a person would when you're walking around trying to find items to pick when people order things for ecommerce and so forth. The robot actually goes to the individual location, grabs an item, picks it off the shelf. And that's amazing basically IAM Robotics and that's so. Danny: Awesome. So we're going to jump into all the... there's a huge growth obviously right now, huge talk about automation, digital transformation, all that good stuff. And we'll get into that here a little bit but before we jump into that I want to learn a little bit more about Tom. I want to learn more about you and your backgrounds. How you got in this industry. Take me back take me take me way back. Tom: Way back. Danny: How did you-- Tom: Way back. Danny: How did you get into this? Tom: So I started out my career as an aerospace engineer. I went to school at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Danny: Oh, nice. Tom: I thought I wanted to go planes and rockets and stuff like that. I did my first internship at Boeing. And that was a great experience, but I got to realize that these aerospace projects are really huge. And when I was at school I got a chance to work on some club robotic stuff and we thought we were going to do this drones. We called them UAB back in the day. But we were too afraid of flying and crashing a drone. So we got into these robots that would actually just drive around the ground, basically like miniature, driverless cars. And I just fell in love with the challenge and difficulty of the problem and how much you had to use robotics, AI, computer vision, all that stuff. So that set my career on a course for robotics. And I went to Grad School in robotics where I got to really work on some amazing, really amazing stuff. Back in 2004 and 2005 there was this really huge competition in robotics called the DARPA Grand Challenge. I don't know if you've ever heard of it but it's basically it was the first big step into driverless cars. And so my school was one of the schools participating. I was at University of Florida at the time and we actually decided to enter the DARPA Grand Challenge. So it was a really big milestone event in robotics in general. And that was very exciting. And then I ultimately went to Carnegie Mellon University after school to work on more projects for DARPA and then just fell in love with really hard challenging product problems in robotics. Danny: That's awesome. So you are from- good story, but what I heard is that you basically you're a rocket scientist. Is that is that what I heard?