00:21:07 · Katie Prescott, Brennand Pierce, Danny Fortson
[00:21:07] S4: I've long thought the leg thing. It's just completely ludicrous. [00:21:11] S9: It is cool, though. It is cool. To what end? It is. I don't know. It's... It it it raises you a lot of money in the VC industry. [00:21:19] S8: It's not the it's not the answer to the idea that, like, we have built... The built environment is for bipedal humans. And if you're trying to drive mass adoption, you need to just drop a robot into those environments where they can walk upstairs and walk downstairs as opposed to having to, like, remake the built environment to accommodate this new army of droids who are gonna pick up our stuff and crush our grapes. [00:21:45] S9: Yep. That is actually a true argument. I do think there will be a a a need for a humanoid with legs, but then you also go... The environment also built for people with wheelchairs that can get around quite happily. Right. And it's much simpler. And it's also just, I think, my experience... [00:21:59] S4: You should be using them in factories. [00:22:01] S9: Yeah. Exactly. It also just comes down to just me as a founder, what do you want to concentrate on? The hardest part is the manipulation. Can you pick up an object? Can you, you know, make a box? Can you do the task? Why overcomplicate it with the legs? [00:22:16] S4: So you've got arms? So yours doesn't have... You've you've got a wheel? [00:22:19] S9: We got two wheels. [00:22:20] S4: Two wheels. How high? [00:22:22] S9: It's about six foot one eighty high. [00:22:24] S4: Almost Danny height, not quite, reaching [00:22:27] S8: the But
00:22:27 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott, Brennand Pierce
[00:22:27] S8: the But [00:22:28] S4: but two arms. [00:22:29] S9: Two arms. [00:22:30] S4: With five fingers? [00:22:31] S9: No. That's another thing. Alright. It's like, keep it... I I would love to have a five finger hand if it's cheap, but they're about £30,000 straight dollars each. [00:22:40] S8: For each hand? [00:22:41] S9: Per hand. Per hand. Yes. That is how much these expensive hands are. Yes. Whereas... [00:22:47] S4: God. So they have pin... Did two fingers? [00:22:49] S9: Two fingers pinchers. Brilliant. Eventually, I'd love five finger hands as well, but it also comes back to what do you concentrate on. At the moment, if you just wanted to pick a lot of items up from a from a tote or do a lot of this manipulation, it's incredible what you can do with just two fingers. [00:23:04] S4: Yeah. Amazing. [00:23:05] S9: Pick up cups. You can pick up... [00:23:06] S4: And a flexible arm? [00:23:08] S9: Oh, yes. Seven degrees of freedom. So it's you've an elbow? Yeah. It's the same articulation as a human arm. [00:23:13] S4: Okay. And then on the head? What does that look like? [00:23:16] S9: Very very droided. It has eyes? I mean, you can't... Has eyes. Yes. It has eyes. You gotta, you know, make it semi look like a person.
00:23:16 · Brennand Pierce, Danny Fortson
[00:23:16] S9: Very very droided. It has eyes? I mean, you can't... Has eyes. Yes. It has eyes. You gotta, you know, make it semi look like a person. [00:23:26] S8: So getting back to, like, the actual use. Right? If you talk to people out here who are in this world, they're like, look. We have, I can't remember the number, many hundreds of thousands or even millions of open factory jobs, like work in warehouses that they can't fill with actual humans. Is that the the the entree? Is that realistic? Is that where, like, we... When you hear Elon Musk be like, oh, by 2031 or whatever, we're gonna have a million or maybe a billion humanoid robots or whatever his crazy numbers are. Is that where we start? Is that there is a real need, and you do actually have companies who are like, yeah. Yeah. Give us all the droids. We actually need this.
00:24:10 · Brennand Pierce, Katie Prescott
[00:24:10] S9: I think a lot of companies speak to a very interesting... This because it's... To start with, just boring repetitive task. You know, one of our customers is doing beer bottle recycling where they're just, like, sorting beer bottles and wine bottles, and no one really wants to stand there doing that all day. You also just get warehouse work where you're just picking up boxes, driving around, putting boxes down. You started to get into more automation. So some of our customers have a factory. They've looked at putting in, a proper... What you see as a classical robot with an arm and conveyor belt, and they're like, this is gonna cost us 500,000 to automate this line. If we could just put two humanoids on it, then it's much easier. You don't have to run cables, and it's just like self sufficient. We just replace the people. But at the end of the day, you are replacing people generally. [00:24:59] S4: And what is stopping people adopting it at the moment? [00:25:02] S9: The technology isn't isn't reliable. [00:25:04] S4: Okay. [00:25:04] S9: This is where you get to, you know, can you do the task 99.99%? Because if you're working in a production line and you're, say, doing a 100 tasks an hour, if you're only 99%, then once an hour, you you can't do the task. [00:25:19] S4: So it is the tech. It's not that people are averse to having... [00:25:23] S9: No. They they would love it. Right. It's... I think we're probably maybe a year away for these earlier tasks to get it completely nailed so you can actually start ramping up production.
00:25:23 · Brennand Pierce, Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott
[00:25:23] S9: No. They they would love it. Right. It's... I think we're probably maybe a year away for these earlier tasks to get it completely nailed so you can actually start ramping up production. [00:25:32] S8: And in terms of the China piece, I was at an event last year with the CEO of Boston Dynamics, and he was like, if you look at the scale of what is happening in China and also, like, the state support and kind of requirement that has come from the, you know, the government in Beijing, he's like, we are so far behind. Like, they are just gonna build way more robots for way cheaper. Like, can you give us a sense of what... Like, the comparison between the kind of UK slash Western state of the actual ability to make these things compared to what is happening in China and what that looks like going forward? [00:26:13] S9: Yeah. So luckily, I had firsthand experience like a bear. We we sell a lot of robots, and our two main rivals are actually Chinese. And this is where you see... When it comes to just pure bill of materials, you just can't compete with them because you get all the way from the bottom to the top Chinese sponsorship or subsidies. So they will get free land, they get free patents, [00:26:34] S4: they get... Cheaper hands.
00:26:34 · Katie Prescott, Brennand Pierce, Danny Fortson
[00:26:34] S4: they get... Cheaper hands. [00:26:35] S9: They get cheaper hands, but it it... It's the whole supply chain. It goes from subsidized batteries to subsidized raw material to factories given to them, to even the exporting. They don't... Maybe they do what they don't, but they probably don't pay as much export. It's just like all of this ecosystem where they can build robots about 30% cheaper. You know, as a Western company building in China, they could build it 30% cheaper. [00:27:00] S4: And do you have any advantage over people wanting to buy British technology? No. People being scared. Right. There's no sort of... Well, we hear from other tech companies that, you know, that because of the geopolitics at the moment, there are some people who try and avoid buying... [00:27:14] S9: No. It's funny. You hear a lot of companies will say, we'd rather buy Western because of security, and then you see six months later, they bought a Chinese robot because it's 40% cheaper. Yeah. And then I think it also comes down to the government's decided robotics is very key to their, whatever you call it. [00:27:33] S8: It's accorded their five year plan. Yeah. [00:27:35] S9: Yeah. So you you get the state where we talked about, alright, you need, like, hundreds or thousands of people to collect data. There's videos coming out of China where this Chinese government's like, great. We're just gonna build a a massive warehouse and put 5,000 people in there, collect data, and just give it to the robotic companies. And they have the