Gentle grippers can handle flaky croissants - Or why Adept bought 2 companies

   Last year we sat down with John Dulchinos, CEO of Adept Technology, to learn about how his company's Quattro robots are revolutionizing the food handling industry. Since then, Adept has acquired 2 companies, InMoTx and MobileRobots, which are aimed to further it's attempt to cultivate new markets for industrial robots.

  We had the chance to talk with John again to get the latest on these strategic acquisitions. (This interview was originally conducted for a robotics column on the Wall Street Journal Japan. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.)  Photo : John holding the InMoTx grippers.   

Q. Why did Adept acquire InMoTx?

A. Last time, we talked about Quattro. Since then, we've done very well and we’ve got some very exciting design wins in that product by major manufacturers to use it to package their products.

 But in the three years we’ve been selling it, the biggest constraint to the robot performance and applications has been the grippers, which is what touches the products. To date, it’s all custom work done by custom integration companies and the solutions aren’t very flexible. They’re not very reliable nor scalable. And it’s created a real limit in applications.

 Adept is focused in primary food handling, which is why we developed our USDA version of our Quattro last year. The challenge with primary food handling is that the product has huge variability. You try to pick up a chicken fillet, and there’s a lot of variability in the shape, the mass, the size and consistency. Moreover, you have to deal with them fast and hygienically. Right now, there are very few machine builders in the world that really understand that market and have the capability to build stuff that can handle products fast and flexible enough to deal with the variability and also meet the regulatory requirements of the industry. InMoTx brings all that technology to us.

Q. Tell us about InMoTx. 

A. InMoTx was founded in 2006 in Denmark and was a customer of ours. They have very innovative grippers and vision technology to identify and handle odd-shaped products and they built some standard cells around Quattro utilizing them. We sold them the robots and they built the solutions to customers, but InMoTx was a little company and they didn't have the resources to capture the real big opportunities.

 Video of InMoTx grippers handling chicken fillets:

 So by combining Adept's worldwide resources and the gripping technology and natural product domain expertise of InMoTx, we can build very neat solutions. And we can do it in a much more integrated fashion than the way traditional robot companies work. We can build very well-integrated software and hardware solutions that optimize the performances of these applications.

 The deal closed in early January and we already have orders together. The InMoTx name will go away, but we’re keeping the OctoMation product line, which will be our platform for natural products handling.  This is focused on handling unwrapped products such as meat, poultry, seafood, fruits, vegetables and dairy. Those are our primary targets. 

Q. Describe the InMoTx gripper (photos below).

 

 

 

A. It's made of food-grade silicone rubber and there are 5-6 different types, each optimized for various products.

 They are all air-driven. Most are suction and they’ll draw vacuum like a vacuum cleaner. There are some that use vacuum to create a gripping force and that’s very novel and there are a lot of exciting applications that we can do with this. Application examples are handling cheese, donuts, cupcakes, and croissant. If you use a normal gripper, you’re going to break these products. Our gripper can hold them gently.

 The beauty of this is that we have a process where we can build a brand new gripper in a day.It is being done in Denmark (where InMoTx was founded).

 In addition, the InMoTx grippers are consumable and require replacement approximately every 2-4 weeks. While replacement cost is minimal in terms of overall cost to the customer, it is a high margin and recurring revenue stream that's expected to grow substantially over the next several years.

 Q. How is this different from iRobot’s "jamming" gripper? 

A. First off, that’s a research project. It’s a proof of concept on technology and it's a long ways away from having a unit that is actually usable. I think it’s a very neat idea but it will never have any applicability in the kinds of applications we’re applying to.

 Our gripper fails every million cycle. These have to be and are highly durable devices.  

Q. Is the technology patented?

A. Yes.

Q. In general, how much investment do customers need to install your solution?

A. These things range from 150,000 to 300,000 dollars depending on a host of ways they’re configured. Typically in the installations, they pay themselves back in less than a year. 

Q. How big is the potential market?

A. We think that there are roughly 75,000 lines worldwide that are targets of this technology. The lines can have anywhere between 1-10 robots depending on what the requirements are.

Q. How will you be competing with the larger industrial robot companies in the world? 

A. It you look at packaging, it’s broken into three sections. You have primary food handling or packaging. You have boxing. And then you have palletizing - putting boxes on pallets. Big industrial robot companies like Fanuc, Yaskawa and KUKA have been working from the back to the front. They make excellent robots for palletizing, they make good robots for putting things in boxes and they have product offerings in the primary food area but not very competitive. 

 Our competitors' parallel link products aren’t USDA accepted. And because the vision requirements in natural products handling are very difficult, our competitors don’t have that technology that allows them to deal with the variability. Last but not least, Quattro is still the fastest robot.

 So we’re uniquely qualified for that space and we’re going to invest our effort in that area. The acquisition of InMoTx is a commitment to not being a general purpose robot company but being a domain expert in that space. We’re not just going to sell robots, we’re going to solve problems in that market.

 
 
(Photo: Quattro plus InMoTx gripper)

Q. What is the purpose of the acquisition of MobileRobots? 

A. InMoTx was a vertical market acquisition. It’s very crystal clear the problem it solves, the target application and it’s got a very narrow set of technology focused on solving that problem.

 Meanwhile, MobileRobots brought us technology and access to some markets that we will be building businesses around.

  I would break mobile robots (applications) into three buckets. One bucket is outdoor - largely used in military and some security surveillance. That’s one segment we’re not focused on. Then indoor (use) is generally divided into 2 categoreis. There is telerobotic, where an operator is going to drive them around or there’s going to be  a predefined path that they’re going to follow. We're not interested in that category either. 

 What Adept is interested in is the third category, and that is autonomous navigation and mapping. And what this means is that our robots can go wherever they want. They’re smart enough to navigate through doors and not hit people. They have a level of sensing and awareness of their environment that they can work their way through it.

 Where that is an enabler, is a lot of applications. You look at logistics and you got the ability now to dynamically move boxes and materials around the factory.

Q. Like Kiva Systems? 

A. Kiva is not an autonomous solution. Kiva robots follow some well orchestrated grids. Kiva is a great vertical application, which is order fulfillment. A warehouse is a big space with lots of applications and Kiva has picked a niche that they are focusing on and I think they have a good solution. I think the downside of Kiva is that you have to start from the ground up and build a warehouse purposefully for their technology. If you can do that, it’s a very nice solution.

Q. So what area does Adept want to go into?

A. Production logistics. We want to support the factories that we sell our robots into. Getting materials to lines, getting materials from lines and moving materials around the factory. Normally things are moving around in a factory in a pallet. What mobile robots enable is the ability to move in much smaller lot sizes.

 For example, we’ve seen installations in tire factories. Robots are moving tires from location to location dynamically based off of availability of a molding machine and the timing of where they are and where they are going. And all that is automatically scheduled by the robot system. It allows you to have a completely flexible environment.

 You think out long enough, flexible assemblies will be based on mobile robots. You won’t buy a conveying system to transport products from one robot station to the next. The product will be built on a pallet that sits on a mobile robot and that mobile robot will go from station to station dynamically. 

Q. MobileRobots had revenue before you acquired them. What other kinds of factories are these robots already being used?

A. The majority of their revenue came from the research community, but they had a number of OEMs who were selling them into hospital logistics, industrial applications – like the tire example - and in warehouses and distribution centers.

  The real competition for mobile robots is conveyors. When you get to some of these warehouses, you could build millions of dollars of conveyor systems around the facility. The problem is it’s all fixed and expensive and you can’t change it around. In a lot of warehouses, stuffs come in on pallets and goes out in boxes, and there’s a large labor pool that’s breaking down pallets and reallocating products to trucks. And that’s all done by people and conveyors. The future is going to be done by robots.   

Q. What industries do you think will most benefit from mobile robots?

A. It’s industries that need flexibility. Consumer goods, food, hospitals.  I think electronics is not quite there, but will be in the future, although we already have applications in semiconductor and even disk drive. In the industries where they are clean, you want people out of the clean room. There are still many material handlers that are in the clean rooms. Even though you may be building a consistent product, there is still a dynamic flow of material that occur in the facilities. You need to gown up people that are inherently dirty or you can use clean equipment to move stuff around.

Q. You mentioned about the "evidence of pending convergence of packaging and logistics" in your earnings conference call. Can you elaborate on this?

A. We’ve got some customers in packaging assortment products or value added food products such as sandwiches, pizzas and convenience meal kits you get at the supermarket. Stuff that get kitted together. Assembling those kits is a packaging problem, but then you have the enormous logistic task surrounding that to get material to the line to allow you to run it at the rate you need to. It’s really a convergence of logistic and packaging to solve those difficult problems.

 You can take InMoTx technology and MobileRobots technology and deliver a more comprehensive solution to a problem like that. And we have a lot of interest from customers in this area. I think we’ll see more of it as time goes on.