In this episode, I was joined by CEO and Founder of Vecna Robotics, Daniel Theobald, as we reconnected post MODEX 2020 show (Episode 94) to discuss what has happened in the industry since the pandemic has hit and how Vecna Robotics is helping companies get through.

Key Takeaways

• Vecna Robotics has embraced its philosophy of helping the community by reaching out even more to the community as it needs help during the pandemic. They have an amazing policy that employees should be dedicating 10% of their workweek to community and volunteer work. This can create a great culture and also an amazing corporate reputation. For Daniel’s time, he works as the President of MassRobotics which is an innovation and startup hub for new robotics companies in the Massachusetts area.
• With social distancing being a requirement in most facilities, the idea of deployment becomes a point of concern for some. Vecna Robotics has been working on addressing making deployments less labor-intensive which has been able to help them during this time because there is no more on-site person needed. Once the robot is delivered, it is turned on and then you can work remotely with a Vecna Robotics representative to do all of the mappings that are needed. The beauty of getting your first robot taught its surroundings is that it can share that information with each robot that you add to your fleet so the setup needs to be done just once.
• In the previous episode, we talked about Vecna Robotic’s orchestration engine Pivotal which is doing great work in helping facilities to maintain social distancing as well. By putting in more constraints about how close a robot can get to another robot or to the human workers, which are tracked in the system as well, the robots can help to control the distance of everyone working within the facility.
• One of the differences in our industry as opposed to most others during this time is that we have been experiencing increases in volume, with some companies even experiencing peak related type volume. That brings some different challenges including being able to hire enough workers but also to be able to keep that workforce distanced. Vecna Robotics’ robots are able to help with this challenge by having the robots do optimization to not only keep the distance as mentioned above but also to take the best path to get the most work done. Daniel discusses the difference between how a human mind would optimize versus how the robot would optimize.

Listen to the episode below and let us know how are you dealing with the COVID times in the comments.