00:10:05 · Katie Prescott, Brennand Pierce, Danny Fortson
[00:10:05] S4: So that sort of work is is five years away, but still we have advanced so much from where you started out getting those deliveries from Japan building your little mini robot. Just tell us about that journey and Bear Robotics and and what you're doing now. How did you go from those mini robots to considering putting your robots in factories? [00:10:26] S9: Yeah. Because when I finished my master's in in robotics, I looked out into the field, wanted the job, didn't want to stay in academia. But at the time, it's just like factory arms. It was very boring. So I spent the next, like, I eight years in academia at Carnegie Mellon, Technical University of Munich, really working on humanoid robots, getting them to just walk and, you know, balance. And some people even trying to get them just to stand on a skateboard was was bleeding edge like ten years ago. About ten years ago, I looked at the field. I wanted to go back and do another startup. There was a lot of people I knew setting up like Fetch Robotics and a lot of these companies. I would have loved to do a humanoid robot, but back then, it's very impractical. So I went to use a lot of my research in, like, navigation, SLAM, things like that, and actually founded Bear Robotics, which was doing delivery in restaurants. So that was just doing a very mundane, repeatable task. You take the food out of the kitchen, put it on the robot, it takes it to the table. We've been doing that now about nine years, shipped like 16,000 robots, and [00:11:28] S8: doing very well. Where?
00:11:28 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott, Brennand Pierce
[00:11:28] S8: doing very well. Where? [00:11:30] S4: Is it is that not... And is it a novelty thing? [00:11:32] S8: No. It's... Yeah. Where where is it? Where is it? Where [00:11:35] S9: are the I think it's a very... Going back to... I think it's a cultural thing. We sell them all in Asia. [00:11:41] S4: Right. [00:11:41] S9: Like, I think that is where the big dominant Japan, Korea, they love it. America, the up teeth is a lot more. Europe, no one buys it. It's it's just a culture no one thinks about. We try to sell into here. [00:11:55] S8: Bunch of luddites. [00:11:55] S4: Like like like talking to our waiting staff. It's a profession in most European countries. [00:12:01] S9: Yeah. We've been we've been trying to get into Nando's for, like, four years, and it'd be a perfect thing where you order at your table anyway on a QR code, and your chicken turns up. But England, well, no one likes it. Apart from my parents are very happy, you know, randomly in Guildford. One of our robots there, and my parents had to go there to try it out. They tell all the wait staff that, you know, their son designed it. All of these robots always in the West get shipped to Japanese and Asian restaurants as well, Koreans.
00:12:01 · Brennand Pierce, Danny Fortson
[00:12:01] S9: Yeah. We've been we've been trying to get into Nando's for, like, four years, and it'd be a perfect thing where you order at your table anyway on a QR code, and your chicken turns up. But England, well, no one likes it. Apart from my parents are very happy, you know, randomly in Guildford. One of our robots there, and my parents had to go there to try it out. They tell all the wait staff that, you know, their son designed it. All of these robots always in the West get shipped to Japanese and Asian restaurants as well, Koreans. [00:12:29] S8: Fascinating. So can you just give, like, the two minute history of your company and what the last few years have been? And and then, again, to kind of Katie's point, talk about, like, what is the environment now in terms of, like... You're running a robotics company. You probably need to raise venture capital. What does the world look like in this world... In this kind of AI boom where everybody's getting excited about AI AI, everything? How does this fit, and is it hard to raise money?
00:12:29 · Danny Fortson, Brennand Pierce, Katie Prescott
[00:12:29] S8: Fascinating. So can you just give, like, the two minute history of your company and what the last few years have been? And and then, again, to kind of Katie's point, talk about, like, what is the environment now in terms of, like... You're running a robotics company. You probably need to raise venture capital. What does the world look like in this world... In this kind of AI boom where everybody's getting excited about AI AI, everything? How does this fit, and is it hard to raise money? [00:12:56] S9: Yeah. So about three years ago, going to some of the robotic conference, I was just blown away by the actual state of robotics. Well, AI to be precise. Finally, you could actually train the robot to do something. So I decided to set up another robot company, Kinesi, very much to follow my passion, which is humanoid robotics, and take these foundational models and actually make them a practical reality. So the last three years, we built a very mature now hardware stack, and only just in the last, I say, year or six months has this software actually come mature enough that you could actually start using it. [00:13:31] S4: Just to translate out of techie speak a little bit, when you say the foundational models, taking what is happening in AI digitally and bringing that into the real world.
00:13:39 · Brennand Pierce
[00:13:39] S9: Exactly. So this is why robotics is now doing so well. So we've actually been able to, as an industry, piggyback on the work that's done by Google, Meta, these big hyperscalers where they train these large language models and also with the vision backbone, which effectively, if you take a photo on your phone, it can tell you exactly what the objects are. With these two technologies, it actually unlocks the brain of the robot. So now the robot can finally know that a cup's there. You can say to it, where is the cup? And it can point to it. This was really missing. The control side, I. How to move the arm, how to control the robot, and how to balance the stuff, that is done still primarily with classical control that's been just like incremental improvement over the last twenty years. But it's really been this understanding of the world and getting a robot to actually know what it's doing. Before that, you would actually have, you know, 20 roboticists who would have to sit there for like three months and hard code every single line of code like do this, do that, do this, do that. Now with a mixture of using like ChatGPT or Claude, you can just tell it like this is what we want to do. Amazing. It can write half the code and the other half is what we call a foundational model. They're like these big hyperscalers like Google, Nvidia, they train these models by collecting hundreds of thousands of hours of a robot actually doing a task. So you have a human in the background teleoperating the robot. So they'll wear gloves or there's different ways of, like, teleoperating the robot. And someone will just, like, pick up a glass 10,000 times and then use this massive amount of data to then teach the robot how to pick up a glass. And the idea is if you pick up enough glasses in the world, the robot then knows how to pick up a glass.
00:15:23 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson, Brennand Pierce
[00:15:23] S4: Is it? No. That's really well explained. Thank you. [00:15:25] S8: And is this like... Is it effectively like the Tin Man? [00:15:28] S4: Very rude. [00:15:29] S8: But, like, it finally has a brain. Right? Like, the Tin Man can go out into the world and actually start to do stuff. And the reason I ask is because the Figure Robotics, speaking of very, very hyped humanoid robot companies, They announced something a few weeks ago where they're like, hey. Who wants to sign up to wear, like, a camera on their forehead and just record themselves doing tasks around their house so that we can use that data to train our robots? Was that what has been happening kind of... But on a very large scale throughout the industry? Like, is that... Is... Like, I'm just... Because it seems almost ridiculous, but I don't know if that's actually the way this has to develop. [00:16:07] S9: It's even more ridiculous than that. So for the last couple of years, you would literally have a room of three, 400 people holding grippers and manipulating objects and collecting. That's how you... We've collected. [00:16:19] S8: Oh, you mean... So you'd be like that, like, you'd be holding them as a person? [00:16:23] S9: No. You'd literally have, like, a pair of grippers in your hand, mechanical grippers, you just pick up objects. Or other ways people have been using it is literally like controllers. So you just control the robot like a puppet. [00:16:36] S4: Oh, right.