The Robot Report Podcast
00:00:52 · Steve Crowe
[00:00:52] S0: Just over a month away, RoboBusiness. So, you know, looking forward to seeing everybody there. It's shaping up to be hopefully our best one yet since we acquired the RoboBusiness brand, geez, back in, I think it was 2000... Late twenty nineteen. So yeah, right before the pandemic happened, great time to acquire live events brand. Yeah. As the world was getting ready to shut down. But, no, this is a great show. It's going be a great show. Again, it takes place October fifteenth and sixteenth out in Santa Clara, California. We'll be out there a few days early, obviously getting set up and getting ready for the show. So people who are in the Santa Clara, San Francisco area, you know, we'd love to see you, love to get together, come out, visit different offices. I'm hoping to take my annual Waymo ride before the show. That's always part of my annual trek out to RoboBusiness. But should be a great show, man. You know, we're crossing all of our t's, dotting all of our i's, but we're gonna have over 2,000 people there, over 100 exhibitors on the show floor. We'll be talking developing humanoid robots and field robots, looking at how physical AI is improving the capabilities of all sorts of different robots that are out there. We'll be talking design best practices, enabling technologies, startups and challenges in the business climate. So really everything that's related to developing a commercial robot and running a robotics business is the focus of the show. We have a startup competition, obviously plenty of networking activities. So if you want to come, there's still plenty of time to get your tickets. You can head over to robobusiness.com. If you want to learn more, you can reach out to any one of us here at The Robot Report as we are the producers of this show. This event was it 2004? I think this event was founded Mike. So it's been around for a minute and, we hope to see you guys all there, but it's going to be a fun couple of days for the robotics development industry. And again, hope to see you at RoboBusiness out in Santa Clara. Have a great show today. We'll play an interview later on that my colleague Eugene Demetri and I did with Scott Kuindersma. He's the VP of research at Boston Dynamics. We talked a lot about how large behavior models are helping the Atlas humanoid become more capable.
00:03:11 · Steve Crowe, Mike Oitzman
So they released that video a couple of weeks ago now, Mike, where Atlas was picking up and moving pieces of the Atlas, excuse me, of the Spot Quadruped and putting it in different bins, face plates and legs and all that kind of stuff. And we thought it was a fascinating video at the time and it was, you know, finally good to get a chance to catch up with Scott and get his thoughts. But just quickly to recap your thoughts on that video. [00:03:37] S1: Yeah. Well, it's... Again, it's... It... Things keep moving forward so quickly that it's that the the robot can interact in such a realistic way to disturbances in the environment. So they're sitting there with a hockey stick moving the bin around, right, trying to mess with the robot. It keeps changing its behavior to continue to do the task that it's trying to do, the goal that it's trying to reach. And again, you can't program that stuff. So it's what's interesting about AI today is that, you know, you're able to inject those disturbances and the robot's able to react in real time to it. So that's what I thought was most interesting about the behavior of the robot.
00:04:22 · Steve Crowe
[00:04:22] S0: Yep. So it's a tremendous interview for... With Scott over at Boston Dynamics. Make sure you stick around for that. But first, we will recap like we always do the news of the week. And we have you covered with all the latest news and information from the global robotics industry with our network of websites, The Robot Report and Automated Warehouse. Make sure you follow those sites on social media. We have weekly newsletters for each of those brands. So if you haven't subscribed to those, there's no better way to catch up and stay up to date with what's going on in the world of robotics by subscribing to those websites. So we hope you can do that for us. But starting here with an acquisition that you wrote about earlier this week, where Serve Robotics acquired Phantom Auto for just under $6,000,000 in one of its subsidiaries, where they're adding some basically improved video streaming capabilities for their fleet of delivery robots.
00:05:15 · Mike Oitzman
[00:05:15] S1: Yeah. The store goes... Serve announced the acquisition. They actually completed the acquisition earlier this spring and kept it quiet for six months while they integrated the company. But they acquired the assets of Phantom Auto. And Phantom Auto included a subsidiary called Voices AV and basically the technology that they were looking at here is a low latency video streaming capability which is very important to Serve's business for their robot wranglers sitting back at the home base watching the operations of the robot in real time while it's driving down the sidewalk. So they had built technology of their own and what Voices had was a much better solution. They were actually a customer of Voices when Phantom Auto declared bankruptcy, and it was at that point that they attempted to complete the acquisition. And so that's basically, you know, the gist of all of this. And so I had a chance to catch up with Ali Kashani, CEO and co founder, as well as a part of this story. And I asked him if Voices is going to continue to operate as an independent entity or if they're going to continue to sell that software. And so let's hear directly from him what he had to say about the acquisition.
00:06:37 · Ali Kashani, Mike Oitzman
[00:06:37] S2: I'm really excited that we can actually offer this now to other companies in our space, in robotics, in AVs. It's a moment where a lot of technologies are being deployed into real life, and you have to solve this problem of connectivity. Now, we've been facing it a bit longer. I would have been happy to use another technology if it was scaled in a different application first, and we got to kind of come in and enjoy the benefits of that. But unfortunately, or fortunately, we are actually the ones scaling before everybody else. So we have to solve this problem. But now we get to offer this to everybody else. And look, we are building a robotic platform that others can also use to build robots for other applications. To us, the Sidewalk delivery is the book to our Amazon. And there's going to be a lot of other places where robots need to move around people, which is the problem we are solving. So this is a good way for us to start partnerships, because everybody starts with Teleop, then they see everything else we have to offer. And it's kind of a torridion horse. We can kind of get that in there and then start integrating and building on it. [00:07:45] S1: And then I asked Ali where Serve is on their roadmap, because one of the things I was impressed with my conversation earlier in the year with Ali is that they are on a roadmap to deliver 2,000 robots by the end of the year. And so this was his response.
00:07:45 · Mike Oitzman, Ali Kashani, Steve Crowe
[00:07:45] S1: And then I asked Ali where Serve is on their roadmap, because one of the things I was impressed with my conversation earlier in the year with Ali is that they are on a roadmap to deliver 2,000 robots by the end of the year. And so this was his response. [00:08:00] S2: We you know, we shared this during our earnings recently. We are on track. We are doing quite well. I think the last number we shared was 400 robots in the first half of the year. And by the end of the year, we are still projecting 2,000 robots, which was what we had shared in the past. So it's scaling very, very rapidly right now. [00:08:22] S0: Yeah. Interesting stuff. Serve also, they've made another acquisition. Was it last month? I think they acquired an another company, Vayu Robotics, that's working on foundation model. So they're they're making some serious moves here, Mike. [00:08:33] S1: Yeah. Well, don't forget, Serves a public company. So, you know, you can participate in their their future if you want to. So, yeah, it's... I think they're they're making waves here, and certainly, they're they're still planning to deliver 2,000 robots by the end of the year. So I think that's a significant goal for any robot. We talk about large fleets. Right?