Robot Safety Is a Survival Skill—Not a Perk. Vecna Robotics Aligns People, Process, and Tech for Scalable and Safer Automation

Alright. Let's get going here. Welcome to episode three of Robot versus Wild. I'm Josh Kavenko, chief marketing officer at Vecna Robotics, and I'm joined by my other trustee pal. I have a lot of trustee pals. Mike Bierman, our chief administrative and safety officer at Fecna. Mike, how you doing? Doing great. Pleasure to be here, Josh. Awesome. You may remember we had a a little safety webinar last year in Mythbusters where Mike joined us and talked a little bit about robot safety. And, just overwhelming feedback, we said, okay. Let's bring Mike back here, and let's talk a little bit about safety from a different perspective here. And today, we're gonna be talking about robot safety, is a survival skill because this whole series is really all all about, okay. I've I've deployed robotics, or I'm contemplating deploying robotics, and I wanna learn about how to get to scale. And what are looking around the corners about how to get my robot, or my automation program to scale. So before I get going here, a quick setup, and then we'll hand it off to Mike. Just a reminder, all of these webinars are recorded, for future consumption. And, if you've registered, you should be given a link after the, after the webinar so you can watch it on replay. They're also all hosted on our website. And new newly, newly produced. Our brief versions, one to two minute versions of all of our webinars, have been uploaded to YouTube for your viewing pleasure. Alright. So let's get to it here. So just to set up this whole series, this is not new for for this webinar. It's really just the whole series. You know, our take on where automation technology maturity is today, really focused on ground to ground, horizontal transport. That's where we believe there is, there's opportunity today in terms of maturity. Right? And then near term, where we see technology maturing for near term, mass adoption, case picking very narrow aisle. And then perhaps this might be, a little conservative for some of you out there, but we believe that some of these technologies that you're seeing perhaps in the news recently, the humanoids, and others, while there may be tremendous, advancements that have happened in the market and amazing technological leaps that have happened in the market to produce things like high reach and bulk stacking and trailer and humanoids and outdoor robots, we believe those are really downstream technologies for the mainstream for the mainstream. So we really here focus on techno technology that you can adopt today and deploy at scale today. And our focus really is on ground to ground horizontal transport and and low lift. Okay. So let's let's level set here about what we're talking about. The current state of automation adoption, it's still early days, in the warehouse. So thirteen percent fully deployed, thirty percent are in their first deployment, thirty one percent are beginning implementation, nineteen percent piloting, and eight percent still can't believe it, but eight percent have absolutely no clients, which is amazing. Right, Mike? Just you're you're laughing at that. It's like, wow. But it's still early days. Early innings, I wouldn't say call it the first inning, but we're definitely not in the seventh inning, right, of this technology. And this is core according to Gartner's latest research on building a robotics competency center from from earlier this year. And so my wrap around this is, okay. I'm deploying or I'm piloting and I and, or I've already deployed. Now what? Right? And and so that's the thrust of the whole series for this year in robot versus, versus wild. And so I guess before we get into it, you know, what what's the burr in my saddle, if you will? Right? What is the angst that I I wanna bring to bear here representing a lot of you out there that are are are are speaking with our our teams and are engaging in the market at, writ large, in terms of trying to determine how to choose the the best technology for the long term to scale and to grow with your business. And so I think some of the concerns that that that we know that that exist out there, we'd like to share with you here. Right, in terms of not necessarily the first deployment because that's sort of a limited scope. We're talking about getting to the point where you're scaling it. And so, this is an amalgam of different sources here, our own our own experience, but also from, outside, outside experience sources as well. So the common pitfalls are poor requirements gathering at the beginning of the project and really understanding what your IT infrastructure is to be able to support a scaled, program. Wi Fi being one of a few concerns that usually we we try to address early on in an engagement. Understanding the solution flexibility. So just because it could be deployed fast and cheap doesn't mean that it's it's flexible to your changing needs and can integrate into other systems that you may want it to integrate with. Support. Right? Notwithstanding perhaps what some of our competitors do or others in the market claim that it's just sort of drop provision and go. There like, a lot of technology support is required. I wouldn't say it's with a heavy hand. It's a light touch, but certainly support is an important part. And for those of you that have heard us before or engaged with us, historically, you know that we've got a command center that have that, amongst, other things that we have to to manage support that, that monitor, customer need twenty four seven, three sixty five. Underestimated the, impact of deployment, on your operations. We're not we're not we're not suggesting massive disruption. I guess if you're doing implementing an ASRS, there's gonna be a massive disruption by definition. But when you're when you're implementing an AMR or an AGV, there is sort of a, there are impacts to the changing, to those change and then the changing scope of the project, but also cultural factors, how how the technology will be received within your operation. Goal alignment. If you're like, well, what do you mean goal alignment? I'm buying the technology. I I should be able to implement it the way I want. Well, obviously, there are variety of constituents, and we see this every day, a variety of constituents within your operations. We're experts at at hand holding that and making sure that there's alignment there. It's a very important part, for the automation program to be successful, that you have goal alignment within your operation and also with your vendor. Right? What are my KPIs? Make sure that the technology can hit those KPIs and we're all speaking the same language. And then, failure to forecast a changing warehouse landscape. Right? These are living, breathing environments. We had David Rabinovic and Mick Clark talk a little bit about that in a previous webinar. And so having technology that can be flexible enough to, to handle those changes or, at very least, your your, your company being able to be amenable to change over time is an important part to scaling automation and driving success. Okay. So we're talking about safety today. Right? We're talking about safety robot safety as a survival skill. I just wanna level set everybody here. We've got a whole research, paper on the hidden costs of manual labor, which we feel very passionately about. And one of those are the cost of safety. We think that, operations massively underestimate the cost of safety in their manual operations. And, you know, we think that it should be part of the calculus when you're investing in an automation program. And those costs industry wider can can range approximately two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per warehouse per year, but it could be more. Right? So if you're interested in learning a little bit about how to assess those hidden costs of labor and in particular safety, you can hop on our website, go up to the, the menu and have a look at the hidden costs, of labor or also called soft costs. We've got a whole white paper. You can download it and and, have a have a read on what we're talking about here. Okay. So with that, that's just general safety issues in the warehouse. I think we're we should be familiar with them for the most part and the cost related. But now we're really talking about, robot safety as a survival skill for your automation program. Right? So, there are many pitfalls along the way that an automation program can run into. Our job as the steward of our automation is to really help make sure that you avoid those pitfalls and that we're we're championing the program with you along the way. But let me play this video again. I mean, look at this environment. Mike, the this is one of our robots. This is an APT actually running through, a facility. Look at all these obstacles and people, and you got other robots, and you got pallets in the middle of the floor. This is crazy. Yeah. And I think in reality, this is cleaner than a lot of warehouses that we operate in. The warehouses, by their nature, just have a lot of changes going on. They're dynamic. They have, things there today that aren't gonna be there tomorrow and vice versa, and, just manual vehicles and just people walking around. Manual vehicles, other robots. Here's a broom. You see that broom there in the middle of the the path? I think the robot went right by that. So that's good. Right? Navigation works. Awesome. Good. So Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So but once but you say this is a I mean, you could look you could eat off these floors. These are crystal clean floors here, and so the technology is working working really well. But as you say, this doesn't represent sort of every environment that we operate in for sure. Okay. So let's get going here. Mike, let's talk a little bit just to make sure everybody knows our orient our orientation. Why is AMR safety different? And then we'll get into the, the the meat and potatoes of the, of the topic. Absolutely. So, historically, the the the older version of the automation is AGBs, and they are literally following a virtual line. And so as long as nothing's in that line, it will repeat that exact same path every single time. Incredibly predictable. Obviously, it has challenges in environments that are dynamic because there is, almost always something going to be in that path. So for AGVs, when something's in that path, it'll just stop and start making noise and wait for somebody to move that obstacle out of the path. Difference of AMRs is they are actually sensing the environment. They're they're seeing obstacles and they're planning paths around obstacles. It's something that is absolutely necessary for dynamic environments. But because of that, you don't have that very, very predictable path. AGVs will literally wear a line into the floor where we're we're using the entire space to navigate to get to our objectives. I guess it's really critical orientation here for why we bring this up. Right? A g EMRs are delivering massive value. They're more intelligent. They're going in less predictable places to deliver that value. Right? Choosing optimal paths, going around obstacles. And so I think it's really critical that, we evaluate safety in a different way here for AMRs versus AGVs. So here it is. We finally got to it. Why is robot safety a key survival skill for scaling your program? So let's let's talk about this a little bit, Mike. Yeah. So like we just we're talking about warehouses are chaotic environments. And and chaotic in in a good sense is that they're dynamic is we have, you know, the warehouse fills up. You're gonna have to start storing things in miles. You know, things like that happen. And so it's it's important to understand that robots really do operate differently than humans. You know, humans, they'll they'll they'll look, you know, two manual drivers will look each other in the eye and one will nod and and and then the other one knows to go. You know, the robots, they're looking for obstacles in the path. And so they're, they're they're they're they're following their program, path, and they're also, you know, looking for where they're going. And so sometimes that leads to misunderstandings. So, you know, robot safety is built in, but it it really isn't, perfect in the in the sense that it's still interacting with, humans. And, humans sometimes are are difficult to predict. I I joke around that, you know, we we go into warehouses and and the the drivers say, oh, no. We never have safety incidents. Then you look at all the dents on the manual vehicles. And, they happen. You just know about it. And and and so when the the robots have a, you know, an incident, usually it's just a tap and there's not even a dent, but we know and we make a report and and we share and we we look to use those to to improve the overall safety. Another important oh, go ahead, Josh. Well, I that one, you didn't even get off bullet one. Looks like my video went off. Okay. You didn't even get off bullet one where you already sort of peeled it back a little bit and suggested that that or offered up that, the stakes are a little higher for rope to scaling an automation program. Right? A human on a forklift can have a dent, and it really doesn't sort of muddy the waters. It's sort of an expected human error. If those types of things happen in, with robotics, we take that very seriously. And, you know, frequent events like that could derail an automation program that's trying to get off the ground, that's trying to get to scale. Right? Isn't that the point here? Yeah. Absolutely. You know, it's it's one of those programs that generally has a lot of scrutiny throughout the organization. And, a a little tap is is much more of a a concern sometimes for, leadership or other parts of the organization than, you know, kind of the regular everyday, you know, fork, you know, manned forklifts running into one another and that's why it's super important not to kinda take those safety shortcuts but to to really, you know, apply the program, the safety program throughout the organization and, you know, be aware of, you know, kind of that that worker turnover, and so you're able to to get folks trained. Alright. Okay. So we've talked about AMRs and AGVs, right, already. Shortcutting. Right? We you there could be a tendency or a, a, some sort of motivation to shortcut safety process, no good. No good when it comes to robot safety. Right? Yeah. I think there's it's it's important to realize that the robots have, all of their safety systems, but it's it's critical that there is also a safety culture and an understanding of automation within the the warehouse. And it's it's in some sense definitely a a skill that needs to be built. And you really can't shortcut on that if you wanna have a successful program. In fact, it can set back progress. Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. That's why yeah. Go ahead. Mike, go ahead. No. No. Just just, you know, one minor incident of a a manual driver not paying attention and and, you know, rear ending an automated vehicle or or colliding with it. And, and then, you know, the the whole program may be may be put on hold while there's some kind of investigation. And the reality is, you know, those things are so easily avoidable. Right. And I think that this sort of underlines why we believe that our robot as a service program is really and that mission alignment of having to earn your business every day really does support and run and run congruently to the these, the the the, the idea that safety has to be sort of top of mind. Right? And and and so we wrap that wrap that robots as a service program with the support, with this customer success that ensures and the training, which we'll get to in a moment, that really ensures that the shortcutting and the, the, safety program is really top of mind. All really because at the end of the day, to scale your program, you need internal buy in. Right? And that's and we've seen when it works beautifully when you have that internal buy in because everything's everything's moving wonderfully, and safety protocols are being followed, the program just flourishes. Right? Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So, we've talked a little bit about why it's key. Thanks, Mike, for that. Alright. So what are some of the considerations, the nuts and bolts of it that you run into as our safety officer on cost at customer sites consulting with them? What are some of the considerations that they have to keep in mind when scaling their program? Absolutely. It's it's in some sense a little counterintuitive, but, safety risk actually tends to go down as you expand expand the automation. What we've seen is that, when you have just one or two robots in a pilot, you know, the the team isn't really interacting with them often. They don't really understand, you know, how how to interact with it, and the training really isn't there. And so they tend to actually have more, safety incidents rather than those that have really kind of expanded and, scaled, in which case, you know, they have those processes. They have that culture. They have that training. And they're interacting with the the automated AMRs on a regular basis. And so because of that, they really understand, hey, how how these these systems work. And they're able to, because of that, be safer, have higher throughput, have have much more success than, have that. And the other problem of it, obviously, is you get more automation. You know, you in some sense, you also reduce the the, you know, the number of drivers that are that are doing the risky work. And so it's it's a kind of a win win as far as increasing safety as you scale. Interesting. So let's let's just make sure we don't talk past that. The more automation you have, the the the less risks there are is what you're saying. Right? Be because I'm saying it in lay layperson's terms. Right? I'm speaking for the audience here, Mike. Yep. Absolutely. Because the more familiar they are with it, that's number one, because it's around. It's not just isolated in a corner or in a pilot somewhere. It's it's living. It's breathing. It's operating in the wild, and folks become more familiar with it and learn how and, learn how to interact with the technology. That's one. And two, I guess, by definition, the robots are safer than the way that humans operate forklifts. So the more robots, by definition, the less safety incidents. Is that what you're saying? Exactly what I'm saying. It's it's a, it is a skill to be able to automate successfully. And so, you know, getting past that pilot into the into the scale, you you you definitely see an improvement in the safety and and, you know, automation overall is is is much safer than than humans doing the ground to ground. Got it. Alright. The big one here, right, we see almost all of our customers, not all of them, almost all of them run into this one, seasonality. Right? That's an interesting, interesting topic. Let's talk about that. Yeah. Seasonality. You know, there is, we have a lot of customers that, the volume that increase when they get into their peak season is just, you know, hundred, two hundred percent of what they have at their lows low times. And, that that creates different challenges for the organization. Part of it, it may be that they're hiring temp workers. Another part of it is sometimes they run out of rack spaces, so they start storing a lot more, goods, on the floor. And, and so those all present safety, challenges that are are you know, if if you're aware of, you can definitely, you know, get ahead of. But, you know, the importance of of training those those temporary workers. Understanding of kind of visibility if you're, you know, if you're putting a bunch of things on the floor on the normal travel routes, you you don't want people jumping out from behind those pallets, you know, if you have a double stack pallet, just like even a manual driver would run into. Those are things that you just need to be just have heightened awareness when you're in that peak season and you know, you have new people in there and you have just a lot of, you know, pallets on the floor because the racks are full. So we're not just talking about being aware of it, which we all are. We're talking about, more fundamentally, Mike, choosing technology that can be flexible enough to handle the safety concerns that could arise in in in with the seasonality of your business. Yeah. Absolutely. There's a lot of technology, frankly, that once you once you block off the travel paths because you're sacking it, that that technology's done. And so clearly, you need to have a technology that can handle, the increased manual traffic, the increased, house, you know, put on the floor. That's an important part of of of the solution that you choose. And then as you have that solution implemented and you think about it, you need to, you know, plan and understand and prepare for, that peak season. And, you know, automation is a great way in some sense also to to be able to because because of the flexibility to be able to handle that peak season. It's a lot easier to to Right. Got it. We gotta move along here, but midlife safety spikes, what is that about? Right? Yeah. Last week. Yeah. Little little midlife crisis, and this tends to be, you know, related to turnover. And so midlife is is is really related to kind of the turnover cycle of each individual warehouse. We recognize that that's something that is always gonna occur. And and if you're not proactive about having continuing education training, you'll end up with a whole new staff that has never received that initial training. And that's why it's super important to, you know, not just drop it off and forget, but to have that continued relationship and engagement, going on to ensure that all those new people coming in get the training. The training is not something that's an event really as much as it's something that is something that is always thought about all the time, for your implementation of these, you know, these these AMRs. Okay. It's the robot's fault. You know, that's really sort of an interesting one. Right? When when a safety incident occurs, some some some of our, some will sort of naturally default to blaming the robot. But is that necessarily the case, Mike? Yeah. So I think it's, I I've had very few instances where the the the manual driver said, hey. This is all my fault. It's it's always the robot's fault. Nice thing is we do have, like, the kind of the sensor data to, in some sense, kind of recreate what occurred. And, you know, we see those safety incidents fall into very typical categories and it's, you know, it's understandable. You know, humans get distracted, they have, different things going on, and, they're able to, you know, they just they just lose track of things. And so that's, you know, like I said, there there's very, very specific things that we see frequently. I think we cover them on a later slide. And we have sensor data that shows, hey. This is exactly what happened. Right. And then expanding to new sites. Right? I think this is another one. So you've got a successful program and then, you know, you're like, okay. Let's repeat this at another site. What are some of the safety considerations there? You know, expanding to new sites, when you've successfully implemented it at one site is actually there it is so much faster. It's so much easier just because there's a lot of things that have learned both from our side and kind of what we how we how the organization works and also, at at the organizational side of, hey. How how do you do automation? How do we make this successful? And, the the just because you've done it before doesn't mean you don't need to do, a very specific risk assessment for that, that site to understand, hey. What things are are different? What things are, very specific? And, we wanna make sure that those folks are trained and that we have signage that's appropriate for that site that's that's unique. And so those are all different things that it's it's expansion is much easier than initial site, but you still need to be aware of safety of that new site as well. Got it. Okay. What does the future hold? It's always good to talk about futures. Let's be quick here because we're running out of time. Absolutely. New safety standards. So r fifteen o eight part three, which is the automation standard, which is actually user guide. So part one was for manufacturers. Part two was for, implementers, integrators, and part three is for users. And so this will be great, great information. We're meeting again in September. So expect to have something, at the end of this year that's going to give, you know, really good guidelines for users on how to safely implement automation. Maybe just jump on to the next one that are sensors. We expect, in the near future, there's gonna be some, safety rated three d, three d lidars, which are, something that's gonna be really exciting to, you know, increase the the the state of the art as far as being able to and the nice thing about better sensors is what they enable really is faster speeds of the robot. So you can move faster when you have better sensors. So the the robots are safe. Their performance level d, they're inherently safe. But better sensors means you can do more things and you can do them more quickly. And so we're excited about that. And then finally, jump into interoperability. It's going out to international ballot. This is a standard that allows robots to communicate where they are, where they're going, and to manage intersections, which reduces risk and increases, you know, the throughput. There's a lot of different solutions out there and not every not one solution can do every single task. And so, we're seeing, some of, other robotic solutions out there, and just being able to interoperate is something that just is benefits to to to the customer and to the entire, robotics industry. Great. Great. So maybe more on that at another webinar. Let's shift gears quickly for a minute or two and just talk about our our approach to safety, in our in our own right with our with our system, and then we'll have to wrap it up. That sounds great. Yeah. So, so three layers of safety, and it's smart and adaptive. So, the faster we're going, the farther ahead we're looking. So it allows us to to to hit industry leading speeds. And, when we're going slower, we're looking closer. So we're not gonna, have stop unnecessarily. That allows us to, you know, instead of having to stop for an obstacle, to be able to plan routes around it adaptively. And so that's that's an important part of it. It's, kind of the base layer is is, you know, performance level b, which is aerospace grade performance. And, because of that, we're able to to go faster. And then we have additional layers of safety. We have self diagnosis on the robot. You know, if there's any system that isn't functioning properly, it stops, and we're able to remotely diagnose it. And then finally, just navigating smartly. Our goal is to never actually engage the low level safety system by allowing our high level safety system to recognize obstacles and navigate around them instead of having to throw an emergency stop. And so those three levels of safety, that's what keeps the robot safe, keeps the employees in the in your organization safe, and, allows us to to move move move your move your goods quickly. Very good. And let's just skip ahead and conclude with this one. In the field, like, literally in the field, what are we doing to help our customers along and have drive mission alignment around this topic? Yeah. And this is part of the r fifteen o eight part two, kind of the implementation integration. We do a predeployment risk assessment. So that includes videos and training, signage for marketing, and, making sure that we're doing annual review. So all these things are really to, inform and to, allow those those the the workers in the warehouse to understand how the robot operates and to identify any risks that that need to be mitigated that are, you know, very specific to to the particular warehouse. And it's a big part of, setting a safety culture with the with the with your organization as we look to scale. Very good. And then, of course, the lightsabers. They see the illumination kits. Those are cool. Yeah. Love love to see it. This this is super helpful as we're coming out of aisles, after picking up a pallet that, the the manual drivers know, hey. It's an it's an AMR coming out of there. I need to yield. They'll cross those those, those lightsabers, those red lines, as it's moving. Okay. Well, very good. Mike, let's wrap it up here. We're over time. Just wanna remind everybody well, first of all, thank you, Mike. Great job. All of our just to repeat, all of our webinars are available on our resource hub, so go there. Of course, we promote everything on LinkedIn. That's where we spend most of our time. Thanks, Clint, for for taking care of that. So hop hop on and join us on LinkedIn. And then I mentioned before, here's a visual of it. Our series, Robot versus Wild and Mythbusters, are both available on YouTube in short form. So if you just wanna watch a two minute capsule of the, of of each episode, you can do that. And then the links over to the full episodes on record if you want. Okay? So with that, just wanna thank everybody here. Mike, a formal thank you. Thank you very much. Hope you have a great weekend. You too, my friend. Oh, great. And then on behalf of everybody at Vekner Robotics, Josh Kavinko here from Vekner Robotics signing off, and see you next month. At the end of next month, we'll be joined by a special guest who's never been on our any of our webinars before. Looking forward to it. Stay tuned for the, end of June for the next episode of robots versus wild. Have a great weekend, everybody. Have a safe weekend. Bye. Bye.