From Deployment to Insights

Thank you all for joining us for our webinar; From Deployment to Insights; Automating Inspection with Spot. I'm Vatche Arabian, application expert here at Boston Dynamics. Just some quick housekeeping. We will be sending out a recording of this webinar following the presentation. If you've got questions, please use the Q&A button below. Let's get started with some quick introductions. So you know me. I'm excited to be joined by my colleague John Weiler for today's webinar. John, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah. I'm excited to be here as well. My name is John Weiler. I am a sales manager here at Boston Dynamics and I get to take spot around the world visiting our industrial customers and manufacturers and deploying Spot. So really excited to share that experience with everyone this morning. Awesome. Thank you. All right. We'll get things started. So you're here because you've heard about the advantages of industrial inspection with a mobile robot. In the past few years, more and more customers have joined us on their mobile robot journey because they see Spot as the first step in the revolution. Just a few months ago, we caught up with a lot of reliability and maintenance engineers at the reliable plant conference and we chatted with a lot of folks who felt that their reliability programs were still too early for something like Spot. But what we really want you to take away from this presentation is that it's never too early to start saving money. Customers who've started with Spot are seeing faster than anticipated returns, and we've made it easier than ever to get started with mobile robots. So why are organizations starting with Spot in the first place? With labor shortages, companies are looking for ways to automate the mundane tasks to free up their skilled staff to focus on tasks that have higher value. By increasing the data you have about your facility, you can increase your reliability and uptime, meet the energy and sustainability goals of your organization, and finally, once you've built that massive tranche of data, start using advanced AI analytics for predictability. For all those reasons, industry leaders have built out an industry forum roadmap and have invested heavily in their digital transformations. But let's take a second to assess the hill you're climbing. Downtime is costing more than ever. In a report from Siemens, manufacturers are seeing a 50% increase in hourly downtime costs since 2020. In a recent census.gov report, they estimated almost 2.1 million unfulfilled jobs in manufacturing by 2030. You're being asked to do more with less. So how can we make sure that people do have are focused on higher value tasks? Artificial intelligence is advancing at breakneck speeds, but 66% of you are stuck not leveraging AI for more intelligent automation. And that's because at the root of your challenge is collecting the data you need to power those insights. 80% of you are stuck at that gap with not enough time or people to capture the data or the robust infrastructure to make it useful. Spot, combined with our software, Orbit is the tool that can help overcome these challenges and accelerate where you're at in your transformation journey. Thanks, Vatche. So customers around the world always ask us, how do these robots that we've seen on YouTube and around the world, how do they fit into our workflow? And typically, when manufacturers ask me that question, I come back and ask them, well, what are the things that you're trying to solve for? Because the robot can do quite a lot, but what do we need to do for your workflow? And the majority of these customers come back with the things that you see on the screen here where they have legacy equipment, they have assets all throughout their plant and their mill that require condition-based monitoring. They've got the labor constraints that Vatche touched on. So they've got new challenges in the labor market that continues to trend that direction. And then safety, right? So how do we increase operational efficiency and how do we increase safety with a shrinking workforce? And so Spot, what you see on the screen here is Spot's able to achieve a lot of these things for our customers. That visual on the right hand side is really giving a good understanding of how does the robot fit into your workflow to accomplish these things. So that yellow line that you see, Spot's on its docking station. We teach and repeat a path throughout your plant, and Spot will stop and inspect that equipment and provide you with that real time data so you have repeatable, consistent data capture on the assets that you care about. You're also able to allow your workforce that you have to be able to do higher value tasks, which we'll touch on in a little bit. And you can also remove them from unsafe conditions. So confined spaces, high ambient temperatures, basements that are dark, dirty and dangerous. These are all things that customers talk to us about, and these are great opportunities for the robot to fit in seamlessly. So Spot is a fully autonomous quadruped, right? It can go anywhere that a human can go. Like I talked about in some of those unsafe areas, probably in areas where humans shouldn't be spending too much time. It can go up and down stairs. So multistory manufacturing environments are a breeze for Spot. It understands obstacles both moving and fixed. So it's able to dynamically move throughout your facility. And the battery runs about 90 minutes, and it's water and dust resistant. So what did you see throughout that video? What's the hardware that this robot has and what's the main kind of inspection kit look like that we're deploying to our customers? What you see on the screen here is starting from the bottom and moving up is that docking station. So that's where Spot sits down, charges its batteries and deploys for missions in your facility. Then you actually have Spot the robot with the audio and visual system that we've now released last year. On top of the robot, you have a FLIR IR camera connected to our Spot Cam, which is a 4K 360 degrees pan tilt and 30x optical zoom camera. For people out there in the audience that have iPhones, I think it's about 5x. So think about a camera that's six times more powerful. Right behind that camera system, you have a Fluke SV600. That's your acoustic imaging device. And then right behind that, you have a Velodyne LiDAR Puck. This is shooting meters of LiDAR all throughout your facility. So this is how Spot's able to dynamically in real time understand moving objects and plan its behaviors accordingly. On top of that, Velodyne LiDAR Puck is an antenna. So if you wanted to have connectivity through private LTE outside of your Wi-Fi, you have the ability to do that. And you also have some additional GPUs in there to help you run some additional compute options which we'll touch on here. All of that hardware comes with software called Orbit, which we'll touch on in a couple of slides. So with that hardware on board, what are you able to do? What are our customers doing today in their manufacturing sites? These are the inspections that are available today. And so with that thermal camera and that 4K camera, you're able to accomplish your visual inspections. You're able to look for changes in your environment on your manufacturing floor. You're able to have Spot read your digital gauges, your analog gauges. And then also you're able to do thermal analysis. So anything that has a heat signature; vacuum pumps, motors, gearboxes. Anything that you want to grab thermal analysis on, you can do that with that FLIR IR camera. And then with the acoustic leak device, anything that's compressed, that SV600 is going to find and it can hear. And it doesn't care how loud your environment is. This is something customers talk to us about often. It's listening for changes in frequency, and the frequency bandwidth is far outside of what the human ear can hear. So again, anything that's compressed; compressed air, compressed gases, this device will actually find that. And this is a really big deal to our customers, and we'll tell you why here on this next slide. Energy and sustainability. This is something that whether you're a publicly traded organization and you have shareholder pressure or you're a private organization that's trying to grow and you've got leadership asking, this is something that a lot of our customers bring up to us, is every manufacturer knows they have air leaks, right? So they have literally money leaving out the infrastructure of their facility. But because they're doing-- maybe turning wrenches or working on higher priority more critical assets, there's not often the labor available to be able to go around and listen for all these air leaks and find them. So this is something where Spot is able to come right in. And it's been something that our customers have been able to readily quantify and measure, and it provides a direct impact on these ESG and sustainability metrics that many of our customers are facing. And so this is really exciting. When you buy the robot, you don't just buy what the robot is capable of doing today. You're also buying what the robot can do in the future, right? So with that same hardware that's on the robot, we're able to do acoustic vibration detection. So that Fluke SV600, once we update the software, we're able to now listen for things like bearing anomalies. Why is something like this so impactful to our customers? We'll talk a little bit here about building business cases and how our customers view the value. But one thing that's anecdotal feedback that's shared with me often is there's a lot of thermal and visual inspections as well as acoustic, but oftentimes there can be anywhere from three to five times the amount of vibration inspections available at a manufacturing site. And so this is something our customers are really keen to use with Spot. The other thing is that you continue to hear people talk about digital twins. That word means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But one of the things is that Spot can help you on your factory automation and simulation journey. So with of Leika BLK ARC that's coming soon, Spot will be able to do autonomous reality capture, which a lot of our customers are excited about. And so you have all these inspections and you have this route that the robots running throughout your facility. Where does all the data go? How do we manage the robot? How do we teleoperate it? How do we schedule missions and build out inspections? All of that's accomplished through our software called Orbit. Orbit is your gateway into Spot's world. So this is how you control and manage and expand your fleet. This is how you can build out your missions, expand your missions, add new maps, and this is also how you can teleoperate the robot. And so with the teleoperation, this is something that people share with me often is things sometimes tend to go wrong on the weekends when there's not a lot of people around or in the middle of the night. Oftentimes I've had people talk to me about having to drive 45 minutes to an hour to come and check a sensor that went off. Our customers don't have to do that anymore. They can check that stuff through the eyes of the robot and understand if they need to actually drive to the plan or not. And then last but certainly not least, throughout this software, you're able to view and analyze all the data that the robot captures. So what exactly can you do and what types of data and insights and analysis can you take with Orbit? I said data capture and data review, right? So you have the ability to all of the anomalies that Spot finds throughout your facility. So those could be thermal, visual, acoustic, vibration. They all can show up on the Orbit software, and you can start to do things like correlate the trends that are happening with your assets to predict how long they're going to last, to figure out end of life. All of this gives time to-- operators time back to be able to problem solve. We can also do stuff connect to our API so when spot finds an anomaly outside of getting an email alert, or a text alert, or a display alert right on Orbit, you can also have it do things generate a work order, so your team can get right to fixing things. And this is something that I really get to enjoy here across Boston Dynamics, is there's a lot of very purpose-driven automation. Spot is something where regardless of the industry that you're in, everyone's got rotating equipment, everyone's facing some of these labor challenges. They're facing things like how do we increase operational efficiency. So if you're in any of these industries that you see on the screen here, just know that Spot's currently doing meaningful work with some of your peers in these industries. And so reach out to us if you see yourself in one of these categories and you're curious. It's really exciting some of the work that we're doing. And so how did we get to 2,000 robots and 40 different countries around the world and automation across all those industry sectors that you just saw? It comes back to having a really tight process. So we have our sales engineering team who works hand in hand with our field engineering team. And we have a process where we come out and evaluate the site, we document everything, we make sure that we're setting the right expectations with the customer. As something that I like to say, it's better to do it right than right now. This is a project, not a switch. And so the process is going to drive our execution towards that and allow us to not only think big, but start small and scale fast. And one of the things that we've learned over the years of doing this is it's not really the technology as much as building out a map, building out a pathway for the robot, making sure all the data is going to the right set of systems. It's really that change management piece, and that's where our team can help educate and sit down and work through all the different steps that it takes to get the site ready for Spot and make sure that we have a smooth takeoff. And so I had mentioned something that I like to communicate with a lot of the customers and they've really found this to be relatable is just to think big. So when you see the robot, you see this walking robot, it does provoke your imagination and it does provoke some emotion. But you want to start small because that'll allow you to scale fast. And that's what you're seeing on the screen here. So this is from one of our customers in the food and beverage space. They started with just thermal inspections. They were able to measure exactly what they were doing there and validate their business case assumptions, which allowed them to start scaling really fast. And so they started with one inspection modality, and now they've grown into several inspection modalities. And you see on the chart there, starting with hundreds of inspection points, now to thousands. And something that I would add here is this particular customer, you can see-- some of this data is from 2022. This customer is now doing 10 plus lines and they're collecting over 4,000 inspections every week. This is one of our good friends, David. And I'm just going to read this off the screen because this is something that's a customer quote and is really impactful when we share this. "When you say a one-year payback to companies, that's the golden light bulb moment. You always want a more efficient organization because that provides stability and further investment opportunities like we're doing with Boston Dynamics." And this is something where when you bring the robot into your facility, you're going to have attention because it garners attention. And that's a good thing. And so we want to make sure that when we set you up for success, that you're able to go and tell that story back to leadership, knowing that they're going to have their eyes on this project. So this customer in particular is speaking to that. And so what does the ROI-- when we say a one-year payback, what do we mean and how does that take shape? I want to start by saying when I leave a customer site and we're doing a demonstration, one of the things that's echoed back to me is, OK, so now we're going to go build our business case. One of the things that's really cool is when you work with Boston Dynamics, we're going to help take some of that burden off of you. So we have tools and resources available to help you on your journey when it comes to building out this business case. So if you think you're interested and you're trying to figure out how do I drive value in my environment with my inspections, reach out to us. We're certainly here to help you build what you see here on the screen. But what's typical is that these buckets in this circle here, those buckets tend to be the same regardless of the industry that you're automating inspections in. The numbers is-- this is pulled from a customer. So the numbers are going to look different. But when you think about the value and breakdown reduction, the avoided downtime-- so avoiding unplanned downtime events. How do we augment labor? How do we quantify energy savings? Those are the things-- when I refer to buckets, those are the things that our customers tend to continue to come back to us and say, hey, we've deployed Spot, we've built this business case, we're really coming to find out that the unplanned downtime and the energy savings are beating our expectations. And so we're able to scale faster. So this is an exercise that I love doing with our customers. Awesome. Thanks, John. There's been a flurry of great questions in the Q&A. So just a reminder, if you have questions about any part of our presentation, please drop them in there and we'll be getting to them shortly. Just a few more points that we want to make before we get to the Q&A. So you saw a little bit about deployment timelines, but what is our formula for success? And it really comes down to what we're able to offer as an organization. We've deployed more robots than any other manufacturer in the world. Our more than 1,500 robots have gone through the most stringent qualifications and testing to improve our reliability. Our test fleet of more than 100 robots walk more than 9,000 kilometers a month. And combined with our customer fleet, our robots have circled the equator more than 12 times. And if you like analogies, another one is Spot has walked to the moon and back and then sun. We offer premium-- there's a video there. I missed it. This is just a little bit of a look of our reliability testing area. We offer premium service and support to all our customers through Spot Care. This premium service plan provides an additional year of extended support coverage, including protection against damage during routine operation, free replacement parts, and a quick turnaround with your Spot repaired or replaced within 10 days. Additionally, we have a full support center housing a self-service knowledge base and case creation for support tickets. And finally, we touched upon it earlier with a typical deployment timeline, but we also have a robust offering of instructor-led solution based training. We can train at your headquarters or on site, and are constantly expanding our course catalog focused on and your needs. So in closing, with Spot, you're able to capture the high quality repeatable data that you need to avoid unplanned downtime and best of all, give your people more time to act on those results rather than looking for a needle in a haystack. Thank you. So with that, let's dig into some of these questions. Oh my goodness. There's so many. Let's start with a quick, easy one. There were a couple questions on the thermal limitations and temperature parameters that Spot can work in. John, you want to take that one? Yeah. Absolutely. And I'll preface by saying I had mentioned it earlier about buying the robot that you buy today and what it can do in the future. That lives true for the hardware as well. So we're always updating our hardware and our software. And with the newest version of the hardware, the thermal range is actually increased. So the range that Spot can operate in reliably well, today is -20 C to 55c. Perfect. There were a couple questions about APIs and connectivity to Orbit, Orbit tying into existing predictive maintenance software. And this is a very common question that we get. Does Orbit connect-- Orbit does have a full suite of APIs. We can't go into detail on that in this format, but we do have an API webinar. We do have a lot of documentation on our support center that I mentioned regarding that, and we will follow up with the folks that ask that question so we can get a better understanding and make a better recommendation about how to go about that. Another question we got was, how do we activate gauge reading. John, you want to speak to that? Yeah, absolutely. So the computer vision models with gauge reading, we have partners out in the field that help facilitate this. But at the simplest way to think about it is you have different gauge styles throughout your facility, right? And this is something that I talked to manufacturers about. They typically will take me to the ones that aren't hooked up to a PLC or a transistor already. So there's a human walking around taking manual readings, which is just mundane work. They could be fixing things. And so we take a picture of the gauge style. Let's just say an Ashcroft 3 to 300 or 30 to 300. And now we build a config file with our partner. And now when Spot deploys on site, Spot's able to read all of the gauges that same style. So we collect one reference image and then we build out the computer vision model, and then Spot on site is able to understand the min and the max threshold on any analog gauge, and it gives you a numerical readout of exactly where the PSI is. Perfect. And there's a question that came through about-- an individual who is curious about technology adoption, change management stories, and there was an earlier question about some of the common challenges that our customers face. And this is a real common question, especially as we're getting started. And John, you could probably add to this too, but what we often see is just your site-- not everyone at your site really being ready to get Spot in. And that really starts in the minute that-- the decision needs to start earlier. You make the decision you're going to get Spot. Don't wait till spot shows up. Start to engage the affected parties that you need to ensure a successful deployment. We have the blueprint for that and that's a little bit of that timeline that you saw earlier, but getting your IT board early. Getting all the networking people that you need to talk to get things-- make sure the connectors are there for the data. All of this is part of that deployment process. And it's a little bit of that change management. It's a little bit of making sure you have the right infrastructure and team and individuals within that infrastructure to support it. There's a perfect storm of folks. But I don't, John, if you've got more to add to that. Yeah. I'll add a different flavor to it. In a lot of the Industrial sites that I visit, you could take a paper mill, for example, the next generation of talent, it's not always the most appealing opportunities to operate day in and day out in some of these environments. But when you bring Spot onto the site from a change management piece-- it's been recently shared with me that Bring your Kids to Work Day, and this gentleman who's been working at a mill for 20 years shared with me that his kids have never been more excited about the work that he's doing. I thought that was an interesting piece from a change management. But how you bring the robot into-- exactly what Vatche said, how you introduce it, how you speak about it, and how you prepare people, the people that are operating around it, and then people that are just going to be walking by curious about it. It is something we're talking about it and educating people on what exactly the robot does and then also how to operate safely with it. So our team comes on site. We have safety posters. We have a series of meetings that take place to set up with key stakeholders; IT and reliability, cybersecurity. There's a process in terms of getting people prepared and educated. And then we have a tremendous amount of support documentation available online. And all of these things kind of culminate to allow for a really good experience. But at the end of the day, it is something where-- I'll go and visit customers that are just started their journey and then you can go visit customers that are a couple years in, and the thing that we look for is for the operations to be boring. And that might sound counterintuitive, but in the beginning you'll have a lot of people looking at the robot, kind of seeing what it's doing and there's a lot of excitement there. You fast forward a year from now, this is an industrial tool just collecting data and sending data and people look at it as a teammate and they just continue on with their shift. Yeah. Since you touched a little bit on people affected by it or people just working around it, we've had a couple questions about what provisions do we make regarding Spot operating near human bystanders that are not really involved with Spot. So again, part of that is the awareness of the robot. There are definitely safety requirements. We've got a lot of documentation on our recommendations around safety around Spot, but we are designing spot to operate safely within these rapidly changing environments. And in a recent update last year, we introduced new AV light and sound features to the robot to help the awareness of the robot coming and going. In addition to that, our autonomy payload recognizes people and moving objects like forklifts, so the robot will actually move slower and more safely and also use the light and sound system to signal its intent to the folks around it so people understand what the robot is going to do next. So it's a little bit of we're working on the hardware side to make it work and integrate better, but there's also-- you still have to do that piece of making sure people understand what the robot does, what its mission is, where it's going and what those lights and sounds mean. There's someone that had a lot of detailed questions there. We'll definitely take note and follow up with you on in more detail on some of your follow up questions there. There was a question. I'm trying to go back to it. So I work at a foundry-- and he's got a couple questions. So what is a typical deployment timeline? John, do you want to demystify that a little bit? Yeah. So I'll just reference. There is a previous webinar that's all over-- I'm going to actually go back to that timeline just so people see it. OK. That slide is actually pulled from a webinar that Vatche and some of our team did earlier in the year that we can share that goes into a lot more detail than I'll go in my answer here. But what you see on the screen here is a high level overview of the process. And so if we were to assign time frames to this, I would say typically from the point of making a purchasing decision to Spot being deployed on your site can be anywhere from two to six weeks. A lot of that depends on the scheduling. So if we break that down, the two weeks is assuming that the IT is all ready to go, the robot's connected to the network and the hardware is on site and the field team is coming on site to deploy. And when we say deploy, what we're saying is before the field team comes on site, our sales engineering team has created a proposal, the customer signs off on that proposal and that statement of work, and then we kick that project off. Once the robot is connected to the network and the hardware is on site, then we can actually get to building out the missions and building out the maps. So that's that two-week process. At the beginning of the two weeks, you'll have a robot sitting on a dock and at the end of the two weeks, you'll have the robot traversing multiple floors, collecting hundreds of data points and all of those data points piping to you MES or your CMSS. And that's when we hand it off to our customer support team for continued customer support and care there. Another question unrelated deployment but can Spot traverse spiral staircases? So that's a pretty challenging problem to solve and the robot cannot do that today. What is the typical maintenance program needed for a Spot? I can jump in on that one. So a lot of the preventative maintenance stuff-- I shouldn't say a lot. Some of it's going to depend on the environment, right? And it will make more sense when I speak to some of the preventative maintenance stuff. So we have Michelin foot treads. Depending on how corrosive the materials are on the floor or how corrosive the terrain is that Spot has to traverse on a daily basis will impact the longevity of those foot treads. But that's an example of a preventative maintenance thing that you would do to the robot. As the treads wear, just like any type of shoe, over time, you need to change out the sole. So that's something where you change out those foot treads. There's also five stereo vision cameras on the body of the robot. We ask that you wipe those down. So I service a lot of customers that are in the wood space, wood manufacturing and there's dust just everywhere, sawdust everywhere. You just wipe those camera lenses down so Spot can accurately take all of its readings and navigate the environment. So those are some examples of things. Maybe cleaning out the fans would be another thing. There's fans on the body of the robot so the stack inside can breathe. Those are some of the examples that I have. But what I would say to anyone else is if you're curious about it, our team can send you a breakdown based on your environment, weekly, monthly, quarterly maintenance routine for Spot. Logan asks this question, does Orbit have support for collecting data from third party sensors? So I don't really have a great answer. We would need to understand a little bit more about what you're trying to achieve there, but not out of the box. But that could be possible. That's just something we'd need to talk to you in a little bit more detail about. What higher value tasks are getting done with the people who used to run your inspection routes now that Spot's running them? So that's a great question. So we definitely talk about it at a high level. Freeing up your people to do higher value tasks. But the anecdotes we've heard from customers-- I've personally heard from customers are they don't have enough time to get to the inspection tasks to begin with. So they're behind on that. And then the other thing that they're behind on is actually getting ahead of their maintenance schedule and being more proactive. And with Spot coming in and taking over that more mundane task and to John's point, that boring task, it's a cool-- it's the coolest robot doing the most mundane thing. But that's the whole idea. Now you can plan better and you can get ahead of your maintenance schedule. Like I had one-- I think it was a customer that I don't know if I can name, but they essentially said they took their-- I think their mean time between repair was like 60 days just because of all the other things that they had going on. And once they deployed Spot, they got that down to under 30 days and in some cases, 15 days. Things that Spot was finding, they were able to get that repair into a planned downtime and get it repaired. And so again, I think I used the anecdote of looking for a needle in a haystack. That's what people are doing today when they're looking for these problems. But Spot going out, getting that information, providing that tranche of data and now you can track those trends and know that this slow-to-fail pump is failing or on its way down and then you can schedule a closer look. That's the biggest advantage of Spot. Can Spot open doors or how does it manage closed doors? John, you want to take that one? Yeah. So autonomously today, Spot can open doors. But what you sacrifice by adding the arm to the robot is you sacrifice that real estate on top of the body of the robot for a set of sensors. So typically what our customers tell us is they want to be able to collect as much data as possible. But maybe there's a group of assets behind a closed door, maybe by design or maybe for safety reasons. And so they start to think, well, what can I do? Should I add the arm? And what I often say to these customers is that a lot of the things that are going to come to mind as you're deploying this robot can be solved off the robot. So now we have a partner that helps us with automating doors. So you don't have to sacrifice that real estate on top of the robot. You can have the maximum amount of sensors on top of the robot and you can still achieve getting behind that door to collect data on all of those important assets. Do you have partner programs to help users and clients configure and deploy Spot? So again, we kind of talked to our deployment services, and then we do have partners. So that's a situation where we would, again, learn more about what you're trying to do, where you are and then we make we'll make that recommendation to you. So I'm going to use this question. George had a question, is there an option to demo Orbit if you already own spot? So I'm going to use that to plug the QR codes that are on the screen here. We'd be more than happy to demo and walk you through Orbit if you do not have it today. Please use the contact sales form or raise your hand at the end of this webinar. We'd be happy to schedule a time to demo and speak in more detail about some of the features of Orbit. I think that's-- I'm going to try to take a couple more questions. Let's see, what are the most-- this is a great one from Ali. What are some of the most innovative or impactful ways that Spot has been utilized across different industries? So case studies are my personal favorite thing. We've got some amazing ones on our website. I highly recommend checking out the AB InBev video that we referenced the quote in this webinar. That's a great one. We've got some great stories from Nestlé Purina, National Grid, Southern Company. There's just tons of case studies on our website. So definitely head to bostondynamics.com and look for that on there. Cool. I think any questions we didn't get to, we will follow up via email. But we really appreciate your time today and meeting with you and learning more about Spot. So thank you all for joining us and until next time. Thank you.