The Robot Report Podcast
00:16:10 · Steve Crowe
[00:16:10] S0: go. And they're also testing out in California as well in San Francisco and Foster City. I think Foster City is where the company is based. So they're testing there as well. I think the vehicles are only open to Zoox employees in those areas. So hey, they've launched in Vegas, maybe they'll be launching in San Francisco and Foster City soon. But we'll keep you folks updated on the latest developments around Zoox, but cool stuff there. Another story here that I reported on earlier this week, somewhat surprising to learn about initially. I don't know how we missed this, but it was announced like late last year that AWS was shutting down its RoboMaker robotics development service. So this was a service that offered, simulation and some other fleet management type services mainly used for cloud based robotic simulation. That was really sort of the main attraction to it. But they announced late last year that it was being shut down on September 10. So that was, of 2025, which was just two days ago as of this recording. So I talked to a number of people about this, Mike. I don't know if you ever had talked to anybody or knew of any, companies that used it. But shut down a couple of days ago. And essentially what I learned from talking to a number of folks, including couple of folks who used to work at AWS on the RoboMaker product is that it was just kind of doomed from the start. Unfortunately, one person told me that basically the product was developed for iRobot alone. IRobot, what do they have? 6,000,000 robot vacuums, something like that, that have been deployed around the world. And the interesting thing there is no house is the same, right? Everybody's house looks different, is laid out different, the floors are different, the lighting is different. Every house is unique in its own, which causes challenges for these robots to try to safely and efficiently navigate all these different environments. So what iRobot was looking for was a service that could quickly spin up thousands of random environments in simulation and allow them to test the robots and really generate basic pass fail metrics for those different environments. So Robot Maker was basically invented for them based off what I learned.
00:18:30 · Steve Crowe, Mike Oitzman
What happened was they didn't really do any due diligence with other companies to see, are there other companies out there that need a similar, simulation capability that iRobot does? And I think what they found out over, well, I think it was six, seven years of RoboMaker being in existence is that most companies don't need to generate simulations for, you know, 10,000 different environments, right? If you think about all the locust robots or any mobile robot in a warehouse or robot arm in warehouses, the environments are very, very similar, Right? So they just weren't able to get enough traction. [00:19:08] S1: Yeah. But ironically, we've got humanoids that wanna be deployed in homes. They're gonna need sort of a similar sort of simulation because the homes are all different. I mean, that's a basic truth. But the point was how many robots need to operate in the home? Well, now we've got humanoids that want to operate in home environment.
00:19:28 · Steve Crowe
[00:19:28] S0: Yeah. But again, I don't think that's don't think that's happening anytime soon. You know what I mean? Yeah. But you're right. Maybe maybe potential customers, know, some of the companies trying to develop humanoids for the home, 1x Figure has mentioned that. I think I'm not sure about anybody else off the top of my head, but I don't really think that's realistic at this point in time. But I also thought it was interesting. I talked to a couple of people from Amazon Robotics, obviously, you know, sister company, AWS. They didn't use this RoboMaker product either, never used it, weren't interested in it, basically for the same reason was, you know, they they kinda know the environments in which it's robot... The robots are gonna be operating. Yep. And they're not... They don't need thousands of different simulations or environments. Unfortunate for AWS, you know, we had Roger Barger, he keynoted the summit, man, back in, I think, 2019. We ran a workshop with them to help launch the Robomaker product. So unfortunate for them, I guess not everything works out, right? AWS is obviously a great company known for a lot of different tools that they help developers use in leading companies. And they're encouraging folks to pivot over to AWS Batch. I would be lying if I knew what that was. It's one of their other software tools that they're saying has all the capabilities and more than RoboMaker. So they have a blog, and we link to it in our report on this that people out there are still using or I guess looking for alternatives to RoboMaker. If you used it, they're encouraging folks to head over to AWS Batch, but you can read the report on this. We'll link to it in the show notes so you can read all about it. And then finally, and we're going to dive into this story more, in the coming days and weeks. But Mike, essentially we learned earlier this week through a new standard, a new robot safety standard that has been announced, Was it the revised, ISO 10,218 that a cobot is no longer a cobot? What the heck's going on?
00:21:30 · Mike Oitzman, Steve Crowe
[00:21:30] S1: Yeah. Well, the... Basically, the definition has has evolved. And so again, as you said, we're going to dig more into this in the coming week. But basically, the ISO standard has omitted any definition of a collaborative robot, and now they're using the concept of a collaborative operation or operation or application in the revised standard. So basically that means that collaborative now is about how humans interact with the robot and everything in the work cell, not just defining the robot and its characteristics. So, you know, this opens the door for all of those other tools that make an industrial robot you know, collaborative. There's been a number of tools, of technologies that you know, look at this environment, understand what's going on, slow the robot down when a human gets in the robot's work envelope. And you know, it's been that's taking like a decade now, right, that those technologies have evolved. And, you know, collaborative robots, you are they've been around for almost twenty years now. So it's been an interesting evolution. It's about time. So there's also the ANSI r I r 15 o six that's also been been updated. So that's basically the news and, you know, look forward. We'll have more reporting on this in the next week or so. [00:22:57] S0: Yeah. It is interesting. You know, the the it's been... There... There's been so much debate about how many of these collaborative robots from the leading companies are actually used in collaborative applications. [00:23:11] S1: Mhmm.
00:23:11 · Mike Oitzman, Steve Crowe
[00:23:11] S1: Mhmm. [00:23:12] S0: Right? And I believe the number is probably pretty slim as in how a cobot is actually interacting with a human often and doing whatever task that they are carried out with doing. Think it's probably very slim. I think there's other benefits that cobots have had over the years rather than actually collaboratively working with people. But this really points to, and I think Aaron had a picture of this in his newsletter this morning, is any robot can be unsafe. [00:23:42] S1: Mhmm. [00:23:43] S0: Right? Just... And his picture, and I've seen different iterations of this picture many times over the years, is if you stuck a knife on the end of a quote unquote collaborative robot arm, that robot arm is now very unsafe. Right? [00:23:58] S1: Could still slice you. [00:23:59] S0: They can still slice you. So, it was kind of a misnomer. And, again, these standards, man, they take forever to update. [00:24:07] S1: Yep.
00:24:08 · Steve Crowe
[00:24:08] S0: There's just so much that goes into this. There's so many stakeholders and players and people that they have to reach out to and talk to. And I can't imagine being a part of, you know, these standards committees. These people are saints who do this stuff. Roberta Nelson Shea, she recently won an Engelberger Award. So she's done a lot of that stuff. We're talking with A3 next week about this new standard here to learn more about the changes and the big changes and how this will affect or impact things going forward. But I'm also curious. I think I know the answer to this. I'm gonna hope... Hopefully talk to Universal Robots about this as well. You know, they are the leader of, leading developer of collaborative robot arms, But they've always taken a very honest, safe approach to all of their deployments. So I'm not really sure how much this is going to impact them. I don't think it's really going to change anything that they do. But just getting rid of like, does this term collaborative robot, does it actually go away? You know, I think that's kind of the interesting part of it. When you hear the word cobot, I think universal robots is synonymous with that. Yep. What does that do to their marketing capabilities? Do they change things up? I don't know. I'm kind of interested in hearing what they have to say about that. But yeah, we're going dive into this more next week. As again, we're talking to A3 and some other folks about this. So stay tuned on that. But, is this the end of a cobot? I don't know. I don't think so. But it's fun. It's fun to think about anyway. But, that's it for the news of the week. And again, we have you folks covered with our network of websites. If you want to stay up to date on what's going on in the global robotics industry, make sure you bookmark the Robot Report, Automated Warehouse, sign up for our weekly newsletters, follow us on social media, and then you'll never miss a beat. So, moving on here before we get to the featured interview quickly, just plugging a webinar that's coming up this Tuesday, September 16 at noon Eastern, where Mike's going to be, leading a panel that looks at robotics for small and mid sized manufacturers. We're going to be diving in to really learn how robotics can help these manufacturers boost productivity, overcome labor shortages and improve their bottom lines.