Connecting islands of automation with Dexterity Robotics
We talked with Mike Hyslop, the VP of Business Development at Dexterity Robotics, a Pick-and-Place warehouse automation startup that just came out of stealth.
Read on to understand how they differentiate themselves from competitors, how long a deployment takes, and the three questions you should consider before thinking about robotics!
FORGE: Congratulations on coming out of stealth! What does it really mean, to come out of stealth? And why make the decision now?
Mike: Well, candidly, I think we stayed in stealth as long as we did just because we were quite busy. There is tremendous demand for robotics, especially AI-powered, machine learning-powered robotics.
That's a good problem to have! Has something happened in robotics for them to be in such demand now?
Robotics has been around for 40 or 50 years, they’ve been the backbone of manufacturing. What's changed is that robotics is making a transition from manufacturing to supply chain. The problem with supply chain, unlike manufacturing, is that everything is highly unstructured. You have a lot of portable automation and ever-changing business strategies in supply chain. Then there are those islands of automation.
Islands of automation?
If you go to a warehouse or a distribution center you'll see the most sophisticated setups - a big retailer might have an Automated Storage/Retrieval System, or you might see some AMRs or AGVs buzzing around. One might go right between your legs! The AGVs are hauling boxes around and you might have a sophisticated packaging machine at the end.
Each one of these items exists as an island of automation. Everything in the front-end and back-end of it is highly manual and there is a cluster of labor there, why? There’s some kind of dexterity required- picking, placing, retrieving, shelving. Dexterity plans to connect the islands of automation.
So this is where your demand is coming from?
It's very easy for humans to pick shelves, retrieve, and organize things, but it's very difficult to automate for robotics. As a result, this has historically been a very labor-intensive part of the process within a supply chain. At Dexterity, our full-stack solution can provide the type of dexterity that's required to connect those islands of automation.
At Dexterity, our full-stack solution can provide the type of dexterity that's required to connect those islands of automation.
What would you like our clients to know about the Dexterity value proposition?
There's a lot of robotics noise out there. Our company's vision is to not just give you "robotics in a cage", we want to make robotics super smart. We want to transform our client's warehouses by seamlessly connecting them with robotics. We provide a team of robots that operate well with humans, and our solution is very portable and flexible. You can add robots on-demand, and we can scale with you during peak seasons.
And how does Dexterity differentiate itself from competitors? As you said, there's a lot of noise out there.
If you think of a triangle, in the bottom left corner, you have some companies that are very good at hardware - they provide a robot, computer vision, and a user interface. In the other corner of the triangle, you have the software provided by the AI/ML guys. But there's still something missing, and that's a sense of touch - contextual awareness for robotics. It’s that sense-of-touch that allows a robot to learn on-the-job and get better over time. That's the third point of the triangle, the missing delta. Instead of being focused on one point in that triangle, we deliver all three points. We are a full-stack solution.
But there's still something missing, and that's a sense of touch - contextual awareness for robotics
We also have a different way of looking at the marketplace. We're trying to have robots operate as a team, and also network them closely to humans, so we can seamlessly coordinate the inbound, the pick and pack, and the outbound. We take a more strategic view of the warehouse.
Can you elaborate on this sense of touch?
We put really sophisticated pressure and force sensors in the gripper or end-of-arm-tooling. Add that advanced sensing to some really smart software and you get great pick intelligence! So then the robot can feel - Is this delicate? Is this hard? How rigid is this object?
One of our deployments is in the baking industry. You can imagine how delicate and perishable an item that is. You don't want to crush it, and you also don't want to upset the marketing team by damaging the plastic or the wrap.
Mike, thanks for your time!