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).