YouSaid · the spoken record

Melonee Wise

lines on the record: 18
first: 2020-07-28
most recent: 2020-07-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“If you look back in the last 30 years at how life has changed, I would say that from the digital perspective, we've seen unbelievable transformation, right? Smartphones, the internet, and everything that that has enabled. But if you think about the physical world with mobility being a piece of that, things haven't really changed that much. The chairs that you're sitting on, the table that you're sitting behind might be slightly different, but fundamentally, not much has changed in the physical world in the last 30 years. If you fast forward from today another 20 to 30 years, I think we're going to see drastic, drastic change.”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Might see the beginnings of some home robot applications beyond vacuum cleaning robots, maybe robots that have the ability to manipulate the environment, but it's hard because the componentry sensors that we need to make this technology work are pretty expensive and hard to make. I mean, if someone suddenly came up tomorrow with a reality sensor, robotics would have a very different timeline and execution model. But until we have this magical sensor that can measure all of reality, it's very expensive to build robots and to make technology at the price point that people are looking for. It's important to remember that a cell phone costs $1,000. And the cell phone doesn't have any actuation in it other than a vibrating motor. And the problem is that there's a big disconnect because if you go and you say to someone, I'll give you a robot that'll clean your house and fold your laundry. And you ask them how much they think it should cost, they're going to say,”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say the next 20 years is really around the expansion of practical applications of this technology. You know, I would say that until 2010, it was pretty hard to deploy robotics technology outside of very rigid industrial applications. Right now we're entering the next phase of collaborative robots, and it took us about 60 years to get through the industrial robot phase. Now we're in the collaborative robot phase. So I really think that the next 20 to 30 years is going to be really the expansion of the collaborative robot phase. I think near the middle of that, so in the next 10 to 15 years, we might”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Smaller versions of cars that only deliver groceries inside of them because they're using the infrastructure that was built for road transport and they're not taking over a public sidewalk. But we'll see.”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look at some of the robots that have been deployed in grocery stores, children run up to the robots and hug them. That's actually a pretty difficult situation for the robot. Now as you get further and further away from buildings and into the outdoors, it gets far, far more unstructured. And those are very, very, very difficult problems to solve. If you look at it, you have lots of participants. you have lots of different things moving at lots of different speeds, especially for on the sidewalk delivery vehicles, they may have to cross a street where cars are. They're very low to the ground. They're hard to see. People like to play with them. People like to take pictures with them. I would say that ground-based vehicles have a lot of challenges unless they use the roadways because the roadways create some norms. And that's why I think some of the more promising delivery vehicles are ones that are”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a difficult one. Outside is pretty hard. I think that when you look in the robotics space, we talk about going from structured environments, which are easy, to completely unstructured environments, which are very, very, very hard. So structured environments would be a large empty space with nothing moving. Typically your standard research lab. Semi-structured environments are things like warehouses where they have a lot of fixed infrastructure. The people in those facilities are trained and they have a specific job that they're going to do. Now less structured environments like grocery stores, retail, that's when you start blending into unstructured. The facilities look the same. The infrastructure is there, but the participants are less trained. They have different agendas. They have different social norms. Like if you”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ability to create a cloud platform. So that's one of the things that Fetch does is we use the cloud to basically deploy. So the coordination and the fleet management aspects of the robots are done in the cloud. The robots are still autonomous units, but there's this partnership between the cloud and the robot. So, you know, people talk about the fog where there's edge computing. Well, robots are basically the edge in some ways. And so, but I would say that it's getting there, but I don't think you'll hit like a certain ubiquitousness in the technology that we're deploying today, probably for another five to ten years. It just takes that long for the technology ramp to happen in our space.”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To do with autonomous mobile robots. And around 2010, 2015, you started seeing more and more companies being able to produce these autonomous mobile robots. So AMRs have been around since around 2012. I know that still is a long time, but it's a little bit different than 1980. And I think the thing is, is that if you look at it, robotics, it takes decades to have an overnight success in the robotics technology. And I think that that's something that's kind of hard for people to understand how long it takes for the technology to evolve. We're still running on the machines that we have today algorithms that were basically thought up in the early 2000s and the late 1990s. So the technology moves very slowly, but the technology is evolving. It's definitely driving progress. But I would say that the biggest thing that I think has helped with autonomous mobile robots in general is”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I guess one thing I'm going to put out there is so the types of robots that Amazon actually uses, they're not AMRs. They're AGVs. So they follow guidance on the floor. So AGV stands for automated guided vehicles. So it has something on the floor or in the environment that it's guided by. So they have little stickers on the ground. And yeah, they do have two or three hundred thousand of those vehicles doing delivery. And so if you look at it AGVs came into the scene in the 1980s and those vehicles were predominantly guided by things in the environment. You saw them in car manufacturing plants. You see them in e-commerce fulfillment. They've become pretty prevalent. But one of the challenges with that technology was it wasn't as flexible. And so one of the limitations before 2000, 2005 was we didn't have the computation power to do a lot of the things that we want.”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so autonomous mobile robots have AMRs have been at work in fact freeze and warehouses for a long time, including yours. Amazon alone reportedly has over 200,000 in their fulfillment centers. When you look at the cutting edge of where the technology is, where it's going, the advancements that you're making, how would you describe it?”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do that. And before the pandemic, we were predominantly doing very long runs, so several hundred feet that took people those distances so that they could focus on doing assembly tasks or boxing or some kind of quality inspection. Today with the pandemic, it's shifted a little bit. Now we take over most of the movement, even movement between short movements between stations so people don't have to interact with each other. And so that's something that we saw very quickly after the shelter and place orders happened. A lot of our customers changed what the robot”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so if you look at our customer base, they're predominantly in two verticals, fulfillment, channel fulfillment, e-commerce fulfillment, and manufacturing. So today, Fetch makes three autonomous mobile robots or AMRs that can move goods from anything from 100 kilograms to 500 kilograms to 1,500 kilograms. So that's like a tube of toothpaste to a pallet of toothpaste. And when you look at what happens in most of these facilities, they're moving goods to be operated on. That could be in the case of fulfillment that's picking it off a shelf and putting it into a box. In the case of manufacturing, that's taking a raw good, like a nut or a bolt or an engine block or parts of a dishwasher and bringing that to an assembly line to then be assembled. And sometimes we end up moving the whole finished good, like a dishwasher across a facility. And so we use the robots.”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More flexible for the day to day changes that have to happen due to staffing changes, new cleaning schedules, how we introduce cleaning robots or disinfection robots into existing customer sites to make them effective. So a lot of it is around that.”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seeing a lot of big business from segments that have been stimulated by the pandemic and specifically work from home. So that's in anything that's related to work from home, PET care, shopping at home, work from home supplies like electronics, laptops, those things. And then a lot of the more staples for things like a pandemic medical suppliers, things like that, they're also growing. And fetch is being engaged with those. But one of the new things that it's definitely shifted some of our focus is we've had a lot of inbound around disinfection and we've been working with a lot of partners in the last three months to get disinfection products off the ground. And so we've been developing some new features in our software to help support the pandemic, a lot like contact tracing, social distancing tools for looking at where the robots can do short runs, things like that, new and easier ways to make the system.”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Melanie, we've obviously seen it in the last few months of this pandemic, this incredible explosion in demand for e-commerce and delivery at home. And obviously it's coming in even with all kinds of challenges for companies trying to do fulfillment. How have you seen that impact your business here in the immediate term? And I guess maybe longer term, how is it impacting the way that you're thinking strategically about the future for fetch?”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what I was about to say, A, that might be changing, and B, COVID might be forcing it, right? Meaning that it's actually hard to have high density in a warehouse right now. It might be for the foreseeable future.”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can tell you that every scale e-commerce company is looking at robotics, is going to have to look at robotics. Well, it's not just robotics, it's automation, right? So robotics just implies the pick and pack. And in some cases, that's actually, it's fine for Amazon at Amazon scale, but for lots of companies, like it's not economic to use robotics for pick and pack. Like you're actually, it's easier to use humans for pick and pack in certain categories depending on the size of the company.”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll speak from my personal experience ordering from Amazon in the middle of March was not a good experience. I had lots of things that took two weeks, three weeks, four weeks to show up where you could actually go to Walmart or Target or other places and get that product a lot faster. It was an unprecedented situation, an unprecedented time. So, you know, certainly Amazon got it passed. But my point is that I think it's a situation where many of the offline companies are going to really have become better competitors over this period of time.”
2020-07-28 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Automated Robots are Supporting the Surge in E-commerce · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT