Daniel Theobald of Vecna and Mass Robotics returns to share more of his story, and common misconceptions about the robotics field.
Danny:
Hello, and welcome to today's IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I am joined by the CEO and founder of Vecna Robotics, and also the co-founder and president of Mass Robotics, Daniel Theobald. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me today on IndustrialSage.

Daniel:
My pleasure.

Danny:
So before we jump into everything here, I would love for you, if you could just give me a little introduction about who Vecna Robotics is and Mass Robotics. What do you guys do? Two organizations that's got, some pretty cool stuff you got going on there. But what do you guys do?

Daniel:
Well, Vecna Robotics is the world leader in what I would call high-capacity AMRs, so autonomous mobile robots that move large items, pallets, what are often referred to as non-conveyables, so kayaks, tires, mattresses, exercise machines, all these type of things that our modern ecommerce society has going through shipping that used to be handled differently. So we are able to fully automate the movement of materials in a facility, taking them from point A to point B safely, reliably. And really exciting, the focus of the company is not just around these types of robots but also around the idea of, how do we really optimize the overall end-to-end workflow? One of the key learnings we had early on is that robots are just as capable of wasting time as human workers if not tasked effectively. So just trying to insert a robot into an existing process might not achieve the kind of return on investment a customer is looking for. So a big focus of ours through our pivotal software is around this idea of making sure that you've got the right resource in the right place at the right time and really optimizing the entire workflow through a facility rather than just trying to insert a robot into a particular spot. So that's sort of the headlines of Vecna Robotics.
One of the unique things about Vecna Robotics is that we are very active in the area of social responsibility. From the very beginning, we have paid our employees to spend approximately 10% of their workweek contributing to community service in our local and international communities. Well, several years ago, myself and a number of colleagues here realized that there was a need for an organization to really help move forward the adoption of autonomous systems in the industry in a more practical way. And there are a number of obstacles that were preventing effective adoption of these types of autonomous solutions. So we used our community service time at Vecna to band together with others in the industry and co-found this organization called Mass Robotics. Mass Robotics is one of the largest, fastest-growing industry associations for robotics, IoT-connected devices, and their mission is, essentially, to facilitate the adoption of this technology by connecting innovators and end-users and investors and equipment providers, sensor providers, in more effective conversations and also through working to establish practical interoperability standards that can help ease the adoption of these type of solutions, as well. I think the short version of that is that the robotics industry is really where the computer industry was several decades ago, where the mobile industry was a couple of decades ago. There's a lot of fragmentation, a lot of different people out there trying to build robotics solutions, but the standards and the interoperability aren't quite there yet to support easy adoption, plug-and-play adoption of this. And so those are some of the things that we're really focusing on.