11.8.22-Tokyo-Showcase-Veo-Robotics

ALBERTO MOEL: Good morning, everybody. I'm Alberto Moel and I'm the VP of strategy and partnerships at Veo Robotics. We're building the future of manufacturing, safeguarding through human-robot collaboration. Veo's co-founder, Patrick Sobalvarro, has a bachelor's, master's, and PhD in electrical engineering from MIT. And so do I. Let's see.

So manufacturing requirements continue to increase, with shorter product cycles and higher product variability. To keep up with the market needs, manufacturing must become much more flexible. And at Veo Robotics, we strongly believe in the future of manufacturing is dynamic, flexible, human-robot collaboration. Over the last five years, Veo Robotics developed and has commercialized the product called FreeMove, a vision system to make manufacturing more flexible by improving human-machine collaboration.

FreeMove is our comprehensive 3D analysis and decision system that makes factory spaces intelligent and aware. FreeMove uses advanced 3D vision hardware and software to enable safety-rated human-robot collaboration. Basically the process is as follows. So FreeMove captures 3D point cloud data, imaging the manufacturing work cell. The data is fused into a semantic representation of the work cell, including a robot or other machinery, work pieces, other elements of the work cell, and the humans.

As the robot and the human move in the work cell, FreeMove determines a safe distance between the robot and the human. And if the distance between the human and the robot is shorter than that allowed by the safety standards, that is the ISO 13849 or the ISO 10218 speed and separation monitoring protocol, the system will slow down or stop the robot safely before the human gets to it while the robot is moving. The sensing intelligence is performed safely and in real time under the ISO 13849 and ISO 10218 standards.

Basically we have both hardware and software, including ISO 13849 safety-rated three time of flight sensors and dual pipeline computation engine. Our system is available for sale now in volume around the world. And it's covered by currently 20 issued patents and another 75 pending. So basically with FreeMove humans and large industrial robots can safely share the same space, performing tasks that they're best suited.

So the humans can do the fine work and the activities requiring judgment, dexterity, and flexibility, while the robot can do the things that it can do well, like carry heavy items and perform very precise processes. Basically we support the four major robot brands, FANUC, Yaskawa, KUKA, and ABB. And we can support other brands if necessary. We are actually currently developing an interface for Kawasaki.

Here's a video of our system in action this is our CTO and co-founder Clara Vu, who is basically modeling a manufacturing line where you have a dryer that is being put together. And the robot picks up the dryer from the assembly line, brings it to Clara. Clara approaches the robot and then she can perform-- you see what the robot is seeing. You can see the robot sees Clara step into the space.

The robot stops and then she can perform activity that is hard for a robot or a machine to perform, like putting the feet on the dryer. She does that. And when she's done, the robot can then start up again and move to an ergonomic position so she can put in the additional feet. And when it's all said and done, the robot can then proceed to the next step, which is to turn the dryer, so that Clara can do another activity that is very hard for a machine to do, which is putting in a lint filter, which is flexible and hard to image, hard to manage for a machine to do this process. So once all that's done, then the robot can take away the dryer and put it back on the line for the next set of steps. So that's one case study.

The next case study is palletizing. This is a customer, a global customer, consumer packaged goods. They had been palletizing by hand, as you can see on the upper left. And they had considered-- the reason they were doing palletizing by hand is that basically they had a lot of variability, and variability in their process and the size of the boxes and the types of boxes.

And so they wanted to automate this process. And so they considered a fully-automated palletizer, which is the one in the middle. That was very expensive and inflexible. It occupied a lot of space, very inconvenient. And then they also considered a cobot, a PFL robot palletizer, which is the one you see below, using a slow collaborative robot which is safe for human interaction.

And they also considered the Veo solution, which is up in the upper right hand. So of the four options, basically the manual operation, the fully automated, the cobot palletizer, or the Veo FreeMove, the Veo FreeMove solution had the best ROI. Cycle time was as fast as that of the fully automated palletizer, but the investment payback was half. Implementation time was much shorter, as you can see in the table there.

And compared to the cobot palletizer, it was three times as fast as the cobot palletizer, even when the cobot palletizer was running, with additional safety components that allowed it to run at its fully-rated speed. It's very clear what our system can do. I'll show you a quick video of the operation. So what you see here is the comparison of the three systems. On the left you have the cobot slowly picking up the pallets.

It doesn't stop, because it's safe for humans to be next to it. But it's very slow. In the middle, you have the same cobot now running at full speed and being safety controlled by a 2D scanner that basically stops the robot when a human approaches it, but otherwise runs at full speed.

And then on the right, you have an ABB robot running at its natural full speed and being slowed down or stopped by the approaching human as the pallets come in and out or our human needs to work on the pallet because it drops something. And you can see already, within 30 seconds of watching this video, the cobot palletizer has got two rows of boxes, while the ABB palletizer with Veo FreeMove has already started stacking up the second row, the second stack of boxes. So all in, the process using the cobot takes about six minutes. The process using the cobot, running at full speed, still takes three minutes.

The process with our system takes a minute and a half. And so the savings are quite dramatic. So in terms of what we want for Japan, Japan is a huge market for us. It's maybe 30% of our market. We have Japanese customers outside of Japan, in the US and Europe. That's already happened. We'd like to have Japanese customers in Japan.

We have some great partnerships here in Japan. Some of our key partners are FANUC, Yaskawa and SMC. We see big, large corporates. And this week is the big JIMTOF trade show, which we'll be attending. We'd like to establish a presence in Japan. We would have done it two years ago, but obviously we couldn't really do much. We have talked to JETRO and other regional governments to do something and would like to continue our discussion.

We're also looking for system integration partners, solution providers, to help us break into the market, and for customers, in automotive supply chain, white goods, aerospace, machinery, and logistics end markets, which are our current end markets. So lastly, please, thank you very much for your time. Please do not hesitate to contact me either at the exhibit or otherwise I'm available at am@veobot.com. Thank you.