Interview with Adept CEO John Dulchinos - Quattro robot widens appeal

Adept Technology, the largest U.S.-based manufacturer of industrial robots, is on a quest to move its robots outside of the factory floors into packaging lines, food handling processes and beyond. The company’s key product, the Quattro robot, is currently the fastest packaging robot on the market and is being designed to fit into various applications around the world.

GetRobo sat down with Adept CEO John Dulchinos to learn about the newer and fascinating ways that his clients are utilizing Quattro. The following is an excerpt from the interview.

(This week is National Robotics Week and Adept is having an open house on April 16to celebrate. It will open up its laboratory and GetRobo highly recommends a visit to see the Quattro and other robots in action. You can even control a Quattro yourself with a Wii remote!=video after the break)

  

 

(Photo: Adept CEO John Dulchinos with a model of Quattro) 

Q. What is special about the Quattro?

A. Quattro is the only parallel robot in the world that features a unique four-arm rotational platform. All the parallel robots from other industrial robot companies have a three-arm design. The advantage of having four arms is that it offers faster cycles and can carry heavier payloads. Moreover, the four-arm design is mechanically more efficient so it uses 25% less energy than the three-arm design.

 Since we brought the Quattro to the market in 2007, we’ve targeted at applications that are very high speed and have a large work envelope. These applications include food handling, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods and even as far reaching as solar (cell manufacturing).

 And now, the Quattro has become one of the very few robots accepted by the USDA. As a matter of fact it’s the only high-speed parallel robot accepted by the USDA and it enables us to sell the robot to the meat and poultry market.

Q. How significant is it to be USDA accepted?

 

This market requires robots to be specially designed. The big difference is that in meat and poultry plants there is a high risk of bacteria growing. Every night, those plants have a wash-down process using chemicals and high-pressure hoses, so it is an impossible environment for a normal robot. The coating on the casting and the materials on the platform are different and they need ot be accepted by the USDA. The electronics have to be tightly sealed. These are tough requirements especially for a sophisticated piece of equipment like a robot. But Adept was able to meet that and we introduced the product last Oct. And we shipped our first set of robots this March quarter to customers in meat and poultry handling in the U.S. and France.

 It’s important to note that automating meat and poultry applications is very important because there is a lot of labor involved and the working conditions are not conducive to people. There are contamination risks when people are involved in packaging. So robots bring delicate product handling, the dexterity of touch labor with the efficiency and consistency of machines.

Q. How large is the market?

A. In the food market, there are about 250,000 packaging lines in the world. Of that, I would say meat, poultry, dairy and fish, is probably 20-25%. So it’s hard to put into dollars but it’s a sizable piece of the market.

And now that we’ve been accepted by the USDA, we can sell it globally. Because the way it works is that while USDA has a formal and stringent acceptance criteria for this kind of robot, other countries don’t. So once it’s USDA accepted, it becomes acceptable in Europe and in Asia. We’ve got a number of customers in both Europe and Asia including Japan who are very interested in the USDA Quattro.

 (A demo of controlling the Quattro with a Wii remote.)

  

Q. What other segments of the food industry are starting to show demand for your robots?

A. Certainly confectionery. And then there are frozen foods and vegetables.

  Let me give you an example of a very interesting application in Spain. The Quattro is being used to sort fish. In fact, it’s not only sorting them, but determining the sex of the fish. This solution has a little camera which is stuck into the fish like a needle so that it can look if the fish were a male or female. Then the robot sorts the fish accordingly. And the robot does this at a rate of 120 fish a minute.

What’s remarkable about this is that this fish is plentiful but the fishing period is only 8 weeks an year and it’s not feasible to sort it by hand because there is too much volume and you have to get through it in a small amount of time or the fish will go bad. The robot runs 24 hours for 8 weeks and then is shut down for the rest of the year. And it pays for itself.

 The key was this camera technology and we partnered with a European research consortium called FATRONIK. They are in Spain and they worked with the fishing industry in Spain to be able to solve this application.   By the way, FATRONIK is the organization that developed the mathematical algorithms to control a four-arm parallel robot. It’s patented globally and is exclusively licensed to Adept and we developed the Quattro based on it.

 Other newer applications would be cheese, yogurt and vegetables. Our robot is used by a company in France that sorts cucumbers. It only operates 12 weeks a year. They sort it by size, color and shape. We have a partner in Denmark that builds solutions around our Quattro robots and they have a lot of experience in the poultry industry and fish sorting.

Q. Compared to the U.S., is Europe more advanced in terms of automating their food processing systems?

A. Yes. Europe is the most advanced in the world on packaging machinery due to a combination of two things. One, there is a strong machine building competency in Europe and secondly, the package of the product is very important to Europeans – just like in Japan.

Also in Europe, it’s very difficult ever to let employees go (due to employment regulations). So there is a lot of motivation when setting up a new plant to automate it from the beginning because if you ever hire employees, you will never be able to let them go.

Q. In general, in the US, there is this notion that robots take away jobs from humans. What are your thoughts on that as a supplier of robots?

Did you know that today there are a billion cell phones per year being made globally of which 200 or 300 million are sold in the US but not a single one is built in the U.S.? Ten years ago that was not the case. So one piece of my answer is that if the industry can’t remain competitive, then there are no jobs.    

And robots are going in and automating certain functions. I wouldn’t call them jobs. They are doing certain tasks. Those tasks are no longer done by hand but almost in all cases those people are redeployed into other applications in the plant and allow the plant to grow without adding labor and get much more efficient.

The second perspective that I would give you is that in the 1900s, over half of all people in the U.S. were involved in farming. Today it’s a few percent. Yet we produce many many times more food output. And if we didn’t have the tractors and combines and everything that mechanized the farms to make them productive, we wouldn’t have iPods because we would still be farming. I think that robots doing certain manufacturing functions are no different than tractors doing farming.

Q. Is Adept interested in developing robots for tasks other than packaging and sorting?

A. Yes. Packaging is a good first step where we deal with variable products. When you go further down the line, there are distribution centers and applications in the health care industry. Also robots in the general services such as a telepresence robots working as office assistants. We are interested in business to business applications because there are a lot of areas where automation can be helpful. But not consumer and not humanoids.

 

 An update on this interview can be found here.