so we can just start by uh having you
tell us
your name where you were born and where
you grew up okay i'm
bruce shimano i was
born in los angeles california i grew up
there
and i attended stanford university for
both my undergraduate and graduate
degrees
okay what did you study as an
undergraduate
i was in the mechanical engineering
department as an undergraduate
i was lucky enough that very
shortly after getting to stanford
probably in my sophomore year
i switched engineering and was in
mechanical engineering was randomly
assigned to
bernard roth as my professor
and he in fact was then my advisor
through you know three years of
undergraduate work and
my master's work and my phd
what did you work on initially for your
master's degree
uh i did uh work in computer graphics
and so i was at stanford for five years
getting my bachelor's
and my master's you know concurrently
and then
i went away for two years and after that
i called up uh
bernie roth my advisor again and you
know asked him what the options were and
he said
well you come back here and work on your
phd in mechanical engineering
and that's what i did and he said that
he would get me a summer job at the
stanford artificial
intelligence center and he knew people
there and he
he then got me assigned got me a job as
a research assistant at uh at sale and
and i was uh lucky enough to
to have as my boss there
richard lew paul and so i went into the
robotics group
so i started in robotics then when i
started my phd
okay so what your undergraduate master's
in mechanical engineering both
my my bachelor's master's ph.d were all
in the mechanical engineering department
at that time there was no such thing as
a robotics degree
people were either in computers
a lot of them were in computer science
uh
you know some people were in mechanical
engineering because of bernie roth
a few people you know perhaps
in aero and astro because of the
controls aspect
but uh primarily uh it was
since there was no official
uh curriculum at that point in fact
there were no robotics textbooks at that
point
so you so all the work was really
done just as a research assistant at the
stanford arts visual intelligence lab
and they had a group which was called
the stanford hand
eye group and at that time it was
working on the development of
the initial electric robots and
and programming languages and controls
and such
so what year did you join sale it was
i was at sale from 74
to 70 eight or nine so about four or
five years
and um prior to that did you have an
interest in robotics
or was it really the opportunity to work
in the robotics lab
i was i was always interested in
programming and computer science but i
was also interested in mechanical
engineering
and actually at that time stanford
didn't have a undergraduate degree in
computer
science either so as an undergraduate
really the choice is
you know i i went to stanford in 67 and
was there from
67 to 72 to get my master's bachelor's
so at that time your choices were to
as an undergraduate uh were to be in
engineering
uh either mechanical electrical or one
of the
you know natural sciences physics or you
could be in math
but if you wanted to be and a lot of the
people
in computer science i think had some
relationship to the math department as
well
but there was no undergraduate computer
science degree there was no
undergraduate computer science
department
and there was no robotics whatsoever
so as an undergraduate then
i was a mechanical engineering which
which i enjoyed
although i've never really been a a
hardcore mechanical engineer
and so as a mechanical and so as an
undergraduate i enjoy the engineering
and i was just lucky enough that i was
assigned to bernard roth who
happened to be the the person in
mechanical engineering who did the most
work in
computer science and and programming and
analytical
types of things although his primary
background is
is a kinematician he was also the the
person
in the mechanical engineering partner
who had an emotional relationship with
computers
and so i did a computer graphics masters
with him as my advisor
because there was a computer graphics
group also
who else was in the robotics group when
you that you worked with
when you first came here uh in 74 when i
went back to stanford then to to go to
uh the artificial intelligence lab
uh the uh there were a number of group
number of people in the hand-eye group
uh richard lepaul was was my advisor
and my boss and i worked with blue for
for many years and you know
lou was was a great guy and he really
did a lot of the foundational
programming i wrote by programming
language work
bernie roth who was uh my advisor
he advised you know generations of
robotics people uh
don piper did was one of his uh
students and don piper uh wrote a
you know sort of a breakthrough phd and
which uh applied kinematics and
kinematics theories to robots and so
don piper working for bernie roth israel
the guy who
uh established uh homogeneous
transformations and
uh denver and hartman and all that sort
of stuff that was all out of
uh bernie roth and don piper's work
uh don piper left before i got there but
he sort of set
the you know a lot of the mathematical
foundations for for robotics
loophole did a lot of the controls and
language work and i did work with lou
victor shimon who is my office mate
victor shimon
is a fellow who designed all the
mechanical systems and some of the
control systems for stanford
and for mit and so victor is really the
guy
who who you know laid all the
the groundwork for electric small
electric robots there there were
at that time industrial companies like
cincinnati
milicron who were doing these you know
very large
electric robots for spot welding but
victor is really the guy who who
developed the small electric robots that
would then become the the assembly
robots in in the future
so victor shineman was my office mate
tom binford was more of a vision guy
and he led a portion of the hand-eye
group
and ray finkel was another office mate
of mine
uh but uh rayden you know he worked in
his is he was mainly interested in kind
of languages
and not robotics per se so he went on to
other things
let's see
i'm trying to think about who else bob
bowles
was did a lot of groundbreaking uh
vision work for robotics
and bob uh you know went on to sri and
uh
i think he's i assume he's still at sri
i've talked to bob for a while
but bob did a lot of the the great
initial
uh work and uh computer vision
as it applies to robotics he he
developed a lot of the
uh the initial uh connectivity
uh algorithms and so so bob was at
stanford when i started there
and there were a number of people who
went on to uh to work at the uh
at the ibm group in watson and then
later on
were spun off as part of ibm's uh
effort to to enter into industrial
robots
when was that ibm
got started in a robotics
probably in the
around 1980 or so and
in 1980 there was this sort of boom rush
of
companies getting into robotics
the at the time that brian carlisle and
i started
adept technology you know after i got my
phd and after i worked for unimation
we started depth technology when adept
technology was founded in
in 83 i believe that there were
some
40 to 60 us robot companies
a number of them were were in the heavy
part of the industry uh
looking at sort of spot welding
applications which was the application
of the day
and uh you know still the largest
automotive application
so at that time you had companies like
unimation
which was the first robotics company
cincinnati millikron
uh
uh so there were companies that of that
sort that really specialized in
the larger uh robots that were doing
spot welding applications
uh there in the early 80s there were a
number of companies then that entered
into the
smaller robotics the assembly markets
and such ibm was was one of them
uh westinghouse kind of dabbled in
everything ge
uh so were there they were the large
companies and then there were a lot of
startup companies
automatics which
victor simon founded with a number of
other people like
phil fillers there's uh
there were small companies like american
robotics
and teledex so there was just a
wrath of you know everybody and his
uncle
in the united states in the early 80s
decided to get into robotics ibm being
one of them
do you think there was a reason uh for
the interest at that time
something specific yeah i think that uh
unimation who was the first industrial
robot company
they struggled for years and years to
find a good application and to make
money
in the in the 70s
finally there was good acceptance of the
large robots for spot welding
and uh and today you know all spot
welding is done robotically
but prior to that people you know went
out there with these big spot welding
guns and they welded cars together
but uh after working for probably 10 or
15 years
uh animation finally had a beach head
in in automotive and spot welding and it
it's one of those things that you go
from
you know having no one believe you until
you know years later on
it's just the accepted way to do it so
in the 70s it became
the robotics became the acceptable way
to spot weld cars
and you know automotive was a huge
business still
is and uh and suddenly there were all
these robots being used for spot wadding
so
people you know then accepted that g
these so-called industrial robots they
they could really do something
at that time the things that they did
were very simple they were all
uh teach and repeat you uh just taught
them a
fixed pattern and they did it in fact
the the early industrial robots like the
unimate
they didn't even have computers in them
they had
what was called plated wire memory and
it was just this uh
you know literally hardcore memory that
just played back this repetition of
points and had this
uh all this logic uh no no computers to
speak of
that then just took these these
positions in memory and just
regurgitated them in a fixed pattern so
you could uh for a spot welding
application you might teach
you know 50 50 positions and the robot
would just go
position one position two you know never
change anything it would just go boom
boom boom
and there would be signals coming in
that would tell it that if
your next next car was there and it just
start and it would just go boom boom
boom and it would
fire off the you know fire off the spot
welding gun and spot one
and gun what what it did is it
had fingers that that clamped metal
together and it could squeeze the metal
and once the metal was compressed
then it put an electric current through
that and then that welded the two pieces
of metal so the car bodies were all done
that way
so so there was in the 70s uh finally an
acceptance that
these things which at that time were
called industrial robots but which were
you know really dumb
actually could could do something and
and in fact they could do something
better than a person could because
uh they were very repeatable uh the cars
uh
in a car you would you'd have uh
hundreds of
spot walls i don't i don't think it was
thousands but you'd have hundreds of
spot welds
uh you know around uh every door you'd
have sheet metal with sheet metal and
you'd have to
spot weld that thing maybe 20 or 30
times and so all the various car pieces
you were spot welding together and uh
robots were very good at that so after
that time then
in the late 70s we started to look at
assembly and uh and suddenly people
thought oh
you know these robots are pretty good
and
and uh there were some other
applications there was spray painting
which
uh was popular then too but spray
painting was kind of extension of spot
welding it was
again dumb robots that were just kind of
doing this very fixed pattern
so there were spray painting companies
and there are quality companies
and in the late 70s then there was a lot
of interest in assembly
uh and small parts assembly and so
that's when a lot of companies got
involved to uh to do a spot
welding robot uh they were huge you know
they were very expensive robots
for the time they were very big and you
needed a fairly big manufacturing
operation to go do that
once you started talking about electric
robots and small robots then
you know it was it was a lot easier to
break into the market
and and there were at that time then the
japanese started coming on board
and the japanese were prepared to
license things so for instance
ibm ibm did have their
i think they might have had one
mechanical robot of their own
but primarily ibm was in the business to
sell computers
and so they bought japanese mechanical
systems
and they married him with ibm robots and
so ibm just thought of this as a good
application to you know sell
sell computers and they thought they had
all this computer technology
but there were lots of other companies
too and and everyone just felt that
robotics was going to be a big deal and
and these companies like westinghouse
and ge
that had always been you know dabbling
in in automation
they thought that this this was the next
next big beach head and so
there was this huge boom of companies
that got into the market
it was probably helped somewhat by by
automatics
the company that victor simon started
victor
was victor actually started uh vikram
that i worked at so
victor ryan carla and myself were a part
of a
company for a few years and then victor
left that and
went off and started automatics and i
think automatics
probably helped the business because
they were
they were never a huge financial success
in terms of profitability but they were
a real wall street darling and so they
were able
to go out and get a lot of money very
quickly
and they had a ridiculously high
valuation
and they had a lot of uh
you know business savvy and and you know
people saw that they would
whoa you know there's wall street's
interested in this you know we can go
get a lot of wall street money too
uh and so there was there was just a lot
of different things that happened at
that time
and they were looking at the same these
companies that you were working with
were looking at the same
applications of assembly and painting
and welding
yeah at that time uh uh
you know during the uh the 60 late six
well the
60s the 60s there were a few
universities
that that were involved in robotics
there was in the u.s there was a lot of
international place places as well
but when you talked about robotics in
the 60s it was really
a couple of companies there was
unimation who had been there since the
the late 50s cincinnati milicron
who was getting involved and stuff i
i believe that abb might have abb might
have been there
although i'm not sure so there were
maybe a couple
in europe perhaps um
and then in japan really japanese robot
got started when when unimation licensed
some of their technology
to some of the companies in japan
so there were only a handful of
companies in the 60s
and you know really struggling but there
was a lot of robotics
uh research going on in universities and
so there were
uh you know robotics conferences and in
the 70s there were lots of conferences
so in the early 70s there weren't very
many more companies
but there was a lot of university
research and uh
there was a fair amount of government
grants at that time
you know arpa was was giving grants for
robotics research and various other
places we're giving robotics research
grants
uh looking into you know both vision and
the mechanical side and the programming
side
so there was uh there was a lot of
research interests at that time
in the u.s it was primarily mit
uh carnegie mellon and stanford uh that
was you know
that was i think in the early 70s you
know
the primary hubs of where you have quite
a few people there were
there were other places as well a little
bit later on that caltech and jpl
had some people come out and such
but in the early 70s it was primarily
that and but there were universities
overseas as well there were people who
dabbled in
robotics uh in europe much earlier than
that
and some in japan as well and it was in
the late 70s that
that there was this blossoming of
industrial interest
so what was the first project you worked
on when you got to settle
yeah i worked on
a language stanford was developing a
language
called originally called hell
but then you know of course there was a
problem with 2001
and so there was so we had to drop that
and there was this big fight about what
the language should be called
and so finally we just dropped the
h and became l just because we couldn't
figure out any any
better name and you know stanford has a
the artificial intelligence lab has a
long history of
acronyms with no meaning because
at stamped at the artificial
intelligence lab the programming
language
which was used there was sail act and it
was
you know people thought it was a
standard artificial intelligence
language but it never really was
and other documents called you know
referred to sale and said that sale was
really an acronym for a suitable uh
acronym invented later
so stanford didn't put much
credence into you know what the acronym
meant
so i was assigned to work on al
and and now was going to be
uh the first uh high-powered industrial
programming language
and and i worked there for for loophole
who had done the predecessor
language which was called wave w-a-v-e
and wave was a very simple system but it
you know
really was a groundbreaking system in
that it
had uh it was all digi it was digital it
had trajectory generation it had
kinematics that you know had a lot of
good stuff in it
so uh loophole did did wave
uh pretty much by himself and that was
his uh his phd thesis
so you know in the early 60s uh there
was such a mathematical basis
that was laid down by uh piper and and
other people
there was some control work that was
done at stanford and then loophole came
came along did wave and pulled it all
together into
uh into a programming system and then
when i got there in 74 my job was to
work on
l which was to be to have all the
uh the features of wave in terms of
robot control
but which was supposed to have a a
full-featured language on top
that you could program in and such and
you know
l was a you know a very ambitious
program
project for the time and it integrated
vision
that had robotic control it had could
handle multiple
robots it it had
a very structured language in it and it
was very formal language
and we had a group of probably
i think six to eight of us working on
various aspects it
and at that time the the computers that
drove all the stuff were all from
digital
equipment and they were all pdp tens
and such and so uh you know we would
have a
little we had a little table about the
size of a regular office table
that had a robot on it and then behind
that you had
just this gigantic air-conditioned room
full of computers
uh and at that time you know the
computers were sort of racks and racks
and racks of
of stuff that that you used
during the time that i was at stanford
uh digital equipment came out with their
pdp 11 series
which was a you know computer that could
actually fit in one rack
and so we uh we we developed our
language for that
and then it was after you know after
that that uh
the pcs and everything else came along
so computers at that time were actually
much bigger than the robots were
and so my job was to work on the
language victor shineman developed the
uh
the mechanism and some of the controls
uh
and so i was very following the
footsteps of richard fall
so what were the first robot
applications that your software was used
for
uh it was all uh it was all simple
assembly
applications but but also at stanford we
tended to
emphasize vision based applications the
group was actually called the hand-eye
group within
the stanford artificial intelligence lab
and so we had a heavy emphasis
on on vision right from the beginning
and so we were working on you know
vision on camera to rope
to robot calibrations and things of that
sort
so we uh we did uh applications like uh
stacking
little little blocks little children's
uh wooden blocks you know we would try
to stack those up using vision you'd
throw the blocks down in front of the
camera
or cameras and you would identify the
blocks and you'd pick up the box and try
to stack them
uh you know those that's that's kind of
the
the degree of sophistication that we had
at that time
uh you know nowadays uh you could do
that you know no trouble you could go
out
and you could get a system and you'd be
able to do that in
a short period of time at that time that
was a big deal
we were also working on control
algorithms trying to uh
trying to get the robots to actually
perform better
because it was you know nowadays robots
their controls are pretty well known and
it's uh you're able to get very good
smooth control of things at that time
you know everything was it was much more
crude
and so so really our prod our projects
were very simple projects that we were
trying to do
uh block stacking uh doing uh pegging
the whole
kinds of insertions uh and uh
and really just trying to pull together
a complete system because at that time
there were no computer-based robots out
in industry
later on you know cincinnati milicon
would introduce one but as i mentioned
in the
60s all the industrial robots they were
a lot of them were hydraulic not
electric
and all of them were very very simple
controls
and so our job was really to to
have robots that you could program
in conventional in a conventional
computer programming sense
and figuring out how to integrate that
with the vision and getting them all to
talk and such
and so the so the applications weren't
so
as it weren't so important as trying to
figure out how to get everything to talk
together
so after you finished at stanford where
did you go after that
uh victor simon who did the
the mit robot the stanford robot
he uh the mechanical design the
electrical design
he was my office mate
and he had a deal with stanford where he
could
he would support the mechanical systems
but also he was off
uh develop manufacturing and instead of
a garage
mechanical systems that he would then
sell to research labs
because in the early 70s there were a
number of
research people who started getting
interested in getting into robotics
but going out you couldn't take an
industrial robot because they were these
gigantic things they were hydraulic
they didn't have computers in them they
didn't have interfaces of computers
so you know victor did a a great job of
developing an electric robot tabletop
electric robot
a lightweight and a couple of different
configurations
and he then sold it uh he he went
on sabbatical to mit to go do the mit
simon mit arm so he
he developed a number of these
mechanisms and
and there were both universities and
also
research facilities at companies that
that wanted to start to do some robotics
research but they didn't
want to spend the time to go develop
their mechanical systems which was
which was a big task and so victor
started a company called bike arm
and so victor was simultaneously working
at stanford at the ai lab and
part-time and also part-time you know
still
working on his degree although not very
much and then
working on his company bicarb and
initially vicarm
was just selling mechanical robots and
other people had to figure out how to
interface them and then he decided well
he'd sell kind of an interfacing package
for them
and to some companies to some research
people he even sold kits apart
and they would put it together
themselves and and he sold it to uh he
sold such things to like
gm uh they had a robotics research group
and so victor sold a couple of his uh
uh robots to uh to gm
to the to gm's research center
and this was probably in
76 i would guess 76 yeah probably 76.77
so vikarm sold a couple of them to gm
and the gm guys uh
uh and they were uh the elite people
there were mitch ward and lothar russell
um mitchum you know came
and he told victory well he's going to
buy a couple of robots but
a couple of these mechanical robots and
he'd like to get the controls also
but the problem he had was that if there
was no software with this thing
then he would take this back to his
management and his management would look
at this thing sitting on the desk
and for months they'd be saying well
when's it going to move so mitch said
told victor you know it'd really be
helpful if you at least provided us with
some test software
so that when we got it we could just
plug it in and if we could just move it
around a little bit it would really take
the heat off of us
and you know the management people would
be much happier and would then leave
them alone and then he can go do what he
wanted to
so victor came to me and he said
gee he really needed some test software
to just move this thing around doesn't
have to be very elegant
but you know he'd pay me some money and
since victor had this deal with the lab
then we talked to the lab and they
didn't mind me doing this on their on
their computers
and so then i worked part time while i
was getting my phd for victor
and so i did this little uh
test program to evolve to supply the
gyro motors
and uh and it got you know bigger and
bigger and bigger and then so
finally you know general motors said
well what is this software
and uh you know victor
said well uh we got to give it a name
and so
victor called that bell because uh there
was hal at stanford which became
al which was al and so victor just put a
v in front of it just like his company
was vikarm which was
you know people didn't know whether that
was vick's arm or what but uh
so victor put a v in front of it in
front of al and he says well this is a
bell
and so we wrote a little manual and it
was a like a
four or five page manual and so we gave
it to to uh
to gm and then eventually more people
wanted that and
you know i kept on working for victor
and so so i was doing more and more
part-time programming for victor
and then eventually building the robots
got to be too much for victor and so
victor asked
bernie roth my advisor and victor's
advisor
was there anyone that he knew that he
could get to help him out
and so bernie introduced victor
to uh uh to brian carlisle
and uh he hired brian carlyle then as
his first full-time employee
and so brian then started working uh on
the the robots
and you know doing mechanical design and
electrical design
and brian was actually better at that
electrical design you know had a better
background
than victor victor is always a primo
mechanical guy
and a dabbler in electronics brian was
uh good at the mechanics but
even stronger than victoria electronics
and i i did the software so it was the
three of us
and uh so that's what i that's what i
did and so when i graduate when i got my
phd
then victor said well you should
keep on working for us i said well i
wanted to move to los angeles because
that's where my family was
and then victor and brian said well
that's fine with us
we don't see you anyway you're always at
stanford you just modem over the
software
so if you want to live in los angeles
that's fine
and and just before i graduated probably
the year before i graduated victor show
sold vicarium to unimation and
unimation became the west coast research
division of
animation so victor and brian
worked for unimation and when i quit
when i finished my phd then i worked for
unimation as well
in about 79 or so
the the group at general motors who had
purchased one of the a couple of the
bike arm robots
general motors decided that they really
wanted to look at
robotics for assembly which no one
had really done on a big scale there
were people like us at stanford who were
doing these little
tinker toy kinds of assembly but there
was no one who had an electric robot who
was actually
in a factory doing assembly so general
motors
put out a request for bid for
an electric robot they wanted to use in
assembly
and that robot was called the puma
for programmable universal something or
other
and but it was uh
they had done a study uh and uh
uh gm had done a study and they had had
arrived at the conclusion that the
majority of parts that go into a car
after you get it all welded together and
everything
they were all small parts and they were
less than you know five pounds or less
and because they're all assembled by
people now
they were all you know lightweight and
were things that people could
could get to within an arm reach
and so they specced out this puma robot
as
something that could assemble parts five
pounds or less and
were within sort of an arm's reach
and since general motors research lab
had purchased
one of our robots one of our bicom
robots
then they obviously had a lot of input
into this and so a lot of the spec for
kind of the things they wanted were you
know pretty much what we had
had developed at stanford uh and at
vicar
so there was this rfq and lots of people
competed for this rfq you know this was
a big deal
and part of the reason that you know
purchased us was
was to go after this rfq and we won the
rfq i mean there was
you know bendex and unimation and
[Music]
cincinnati milicron you know lots of
people bid on this thing all the
the industrial companies at that time
good on it and we want
and we won you know in part because they
had been using our things for
for years so we got the uh
the project to build the puma robot the
first industrial
uh all-electric computer driven assembly
robot
and over the next couple of years that's
what we did we developed the
the puma robot and we delivered the puma
robot to general motors
uh and uh the puma robot and its
successors
you know eventually got to be a big
portion of
unimation's business it grew to be about
30 or 40 million dollar business for
them you know a few years
uh so it was a very successful project
and
uh uh and general motors was very happy
with it
and it really ushered in the the
computer
you know true computer driven assembly
robot
there were industrial robots a long time
uh there were they were primarily
hydraulic
there were electric robots that were
introduced for spot welding
that eventually took over all the spot
wine nowadays there are no hydraulic
robots they're all done by
electric ones because the hydraulics
were you know they always seek a certain
amount of fluid everywhere so they're
kind of messy
so there are other people who develop
the electric robots
so we weren't really the first
industrial electric robot
but we were the first industrial
electric assembly robot
and then after that you know everyone
tried to get into the game
was it mostly just uh the development
done by the three of you or who else was
on there
oh there were uh so it started out with
the three of us
and then they uh then victor hired a
machinist
uh by uh by the time that we started on
on the puma project i think our group
was uh
maybe 10 people or such uh chuck
spaulding who's
who's still at dev technology
don allen who's who's with us at precise
automation he did some of the mechanical
design
then we had a couple of other people who
were more electronics people so i so
uh i think that victor
brian uh chuck spaulding and i um
you know we were really the robotics
people uh dave paparazzi who's still at
uh adept uh he was there too
and then there were just a you know
handful of other people who
really specialized in amplifiers or
digital
boards and things of that sort so from
the time you won the bid from gm
until you delivered the prototype how
long have you been developing
i think it was about 18 months until we
delivered the first prototype and then
it was
probably another
year before we went to production and
probably a couple years after that
before things got smoothed out
in fact when you interview brian
carlisle he can probably tell you about
about that because we developed the
this you know puma robot with and that
the control was about
you know that big uh
so we developed this uh computer-based
uh
controller uh and it had a programming
language and had a
crt that you had the type ad and it had
a little
manual control pendant and uh we did
that all on the west coast and unimation
was in
was in connecticut and danbury
that was their the headquarters so
uh after we had the prototypes then uh
you know we we were really a small group
we weren't going to be a production
group
so after the prototypes uh we had to
take this back to danbury
and have danbury start to manufacture it
uh and brian did that brian carlisle did
and when brian went back to danbury and
this was in
79 80 or so uh when he went to danbury
uh they didn't even have an oscilloscope
uh and uh they put him in one of the
they had no space for him so they put
him in one of the test bays for the
hydraulic robots because these hydraulic
robots they were pretty big and so
the test bay for i dropped robot was
about the single car
garage kind of size so they put
brian in this test bay and set him up
and
and he said well you know
i need a scope they said well we don't
have a scope so you had to go out and
buy a scope
and and at that time they didn't have a
computer
in the you know the company and they
were about to get their first computer
so you know everything was still uh
ledgers and uh paper and pencil
and so they didn't even have a computer
in the building
uh and so uh so you know that's what
brian dropped into and then we had to
transfer our technology to them you know
people who had never seen a scope and
who knew
never touched a computer so that was uh
and unimation was you know one of the
better companies
and so that was a real rude awakening
and it took uh it took a lot of time
for unimation to come up to speed and
and understand that they they went out
and they hired some good people
to uh to take all the stuff over from us
and they you know they did a good job
but it was
it was a real cultural you know shift
for them
and there was a lot of uh
naysayers and people who didn't support
us back in the corporate headquarters
because yeah
there were people there who who frankly
didn't even think that electric robots
were a good idea
they they said hydraulic robots are
really
the way to go and and there are you know
there there is some uh
some reason for them to think that
because hydraulic robots are very
efficient
in terms of energy energy
so they're very efficient but uh no
matter what you did to them you just
couldn't get them to stop leaking oil
hydraulic fluid and their servos were
very hard to control and such
and they were expensive too because they
had these very expensive valves
servo hydraulics at that time were
mostly things that
people had these sort of bang bang
controls that just opened up a hydraulic
valve and the hydraulic fluid rushed in
and you know some big
plow or something would do something to
to really do robotics with
hydraulics you had to have these very
expensive aerospace
valves to control them so so it was
expensive
to do it but there were still people at
unimation who thought that hydraulics
were the way to go
and they resisted the electrics for the
longest time and if it hadn't been for
gm
insisting on the electric robot you know
the animation would have gone down
with hydraulics you know forever
so uh so was a big shift
in the next question too many questions
um well i i could tell you about the
eighties how about these 80s and what
would have been the first year that gm
was actually using the puma to
manufacture
cars uh you know i don't know for sure
but
i would guess they probably
started using them around a you know
prototype
probably about 8 1980
81 at latest and so that's when they
they started
you know put them into the factories and
and uh
and then of course aft you know we did a
a small five kilogram one and then there
was sort of a larger one and a larger
one that came along and unimation did
those
we were after we got the uh
well actually sort of concurrent with
with doing the uh the puma
uh we were still all you know very much
fanatics about
uh machine vision uh with our background
at stanford and so uh
so we even though uh
gm was not interested in to begin with
uh you know we did the the first uh
vision uh vision integration with
industrial robots showing industrial
robot
uh working with vision and so and i
think that was that uh
we did our first demo of that at robots
nine
or something like that in washington i
i believe that was uh
around 78 or 79 we did the the first
annual robotics conference
yeah yeah who sponsored that
was that organized it was uh uh ra
and and also there was the international
robotics
group but so that that was a big
industrial robot show
and so you know we we were always uh you
know
very enthusiastic about computer vision
and so
we we did you know the first integration
of
of the computer vision systems that were
coming along at that time there were
there were people
uh out of sri did the first sort of
practical
vision that you could use with the robot
they did
blob analysis and connectivity before
that you know people were just sort of
flailing around trying to figure out how
to identify objects and
an sri came up with bob analysis and
connectivity and they said look
if you just do a binary image if you
find the the edges the bounding edges
and if you then characterize that blob
by the center of area and then it's
moments of inertia then that tells you a
lot
and so long as the parts aren't touching
and so long as they're well lit
you could actually go out and pick pick
up these parts so sr
sri developed connectivity which which
was you know a great thing not not the
end-all be-all
but you know huge step forward and out
of sri
came a company called the machine
intelligence
they're started by charlie rosen and
some other people
and so machine intelligence was going to
take the
uh they got a license from sri to
to productize productize this
and so uh so we took one of the machine
intelligence systems and we interfaced
that to one of our robots
and we showed that at robots nine uh
there were
there were vision systems before that
but the vision systems were all simple
inspection systems they would
look for a dark patch or a light patch
or they would count pixels or
they would look for an edge and things
of that sort which is
which is fine for inspection so there
were vision inspection systems
you know during the 70s and maybe before
but what what sri did is they came out
with the first
object recognition system that could
tell you
here's where this object is you know
that you would
do simple teaching and you would say
i've got this round
you know cap i want to pick up and then
we go and tell you here's the cap here's
a cap here's a cat
and we go boom boom boom you can go pick
them up
what was the program called the
i don't know what their program was
called but their tech technology was
called
blob analysis and now people call it
connectivity
and the company was machine intelligence
and machine intelligence after they got
started
then uh automation uh
then phil villers and victor you know so
victor was with us
until i think uh 1980 or so maybe 81
and then he went back to stanford for a
short time and then he had a
a long time friend named phil villars
and
so phil villars
had quite a bit of money out of he had a
a cad cam company um
but he left that and so phil billers was
looking around for something so phil
talked to victor
and they pulled together the the company
that they
eventually found which was called
automatics
and automatics as i said you know did a
great service to the robotics industry
by making uh you know really
attracting financial people into the
business
and automatics took the same sri
technology and
and that was one of their first products
as well
so so how did the robots unfold robotics
unfold in
the 80s after so uh so what happened was
that
for brian so brian victor and i did the
puma
we delivered the puma uh but after that
uh victor went back to stanford
and so brian took over management of the
group
uh and uh you know we slowly grew and so
they were probably about
20 of us or 25 of us at unimation's
west coast group and we were still doing
development
unimation was was owned by another
company
and uh that company the animation was
starting to do better
uh and i think they might have hit
uh 70 million in revenue i don't know if
they ever hit 100 million dollars in
revenue but
animation was growing was doing better
robotics are very popular
conduct who owned unimation got into
financial trouble
and conduct in addition to selling off
their corporate headquarters
they sold off animation and so unimation
was sold to westie house
and so it's part of this uh you know big
spree of
robotics in the uh the early 80s with
everyone getting into the business uh
westinghouse already had a robotics
group uh but
uh they uh they looked at unimation and
they said well if we bought unimation
we'd really get a lead up about
everybody and so uh so animation was
was sold to westinghouse in 80
i think it closed in december of 1882
and uh
and westinghouse the western house
people were very good people
and they were nice guys to work with but
this whole robotics thing was a total
disaster
and the group that originally justified
buying unimation where they were purged
before the sale closed
and a new team was put in place right
after the sale
and then that team was purged because
westinghouse was really struggling with
some other businesses and so they were
reorganizing like crazy
so between the time that they
decided to buy unimation and
yes the deal closed and a few months
after that there was like the
third group management group that was
put in charge of animation
and they were good guys but they had no
idea why
westinghouse purchased unimation and
what you know what the business was all
about and they had no background
robotics
and uh they uh
they then toured uh this the new
management
uh then toured uh the various things
that they bought
and they came out to the west coast and
they then the fellow there
uh was a very nice guy he was the
vice president of research and
development at westinghouse he was in
charge of the 3000 person
uh westinghouse lab in pittsburgh
and uh and he knew nothing about
robotics and he came out and he said
i don't know what we're going to do with
these guys i don't know what we're going
to do with unimation
so i have no idea what to do with the 25
of you guys
and he says you know maybe you guys
ought to all move out to pittsburgh
and uh you know joined this three
thousand person
research lab and he invited us out and
we went out there
and uh yeah they had smart guys but uh
and we started as a three-man company uh
and then we got to be 10 people and then
we were sucked up by
uh unimation which was uh a few hundred
people and we thought that was pretty
big
and then suddenly we're in westinghouse
it's got 30 000 employees or something
of that sort
and they're inviting us to you know join
their 3000 person lab
and the stanford artificial intelligence
lab was probably
50 people or something like that and so
we went there and they were really nice
guys and they said well
you know we know who we westinghouse
knows who we are and
uh and if if you'd like to be with us
fine if you don't
you know you don't and so we went to uh
joe engelberger who was uh you know the
father robotics and the head of
animation and in our boss
during the time we were unimation and we
said joe you know this
just isn't for us and uh you know we're
gonna leave
brian and i we're gonna leave and joe
said well
don't leave uh you know what are these
other 23 people going to do out there
without the two of you guys since you
you know run run the place he said let
me talk to people at westinghouse
so uh he talked to westinghouse and
one time when brian and i were out there
because now what happened is the
westinghouse
since they really had no clue what to do
with the animation then they did what a
lot of big companies did would say
they hired mackenzie to come in and do a
market study for them and tell them what
to do with the thing they just bought
so mckenzie was running these market
studying as part of the market study
they put together these little focus
groups
and so brian and i had to attend
meetings in pittsburgh in this focus
group to help
westinghouse decide what they were going
to do
and uh after one focus group the vice
president of research
invited us to his office on the you know
23rd floor of the westinghouse building
and and he said well i hear you guys
want to leave and we said yeah
you know it's not for us and he says i
understand that entirely
and he says that uh coincidentally
westinghouse has just
done a study and we've decided that
because big companies
in that day didn't have the option of
going belly up that they owed it to
people
you know it's kind of different
mentality than the last couple of years
in art you know that happened in the u.s
but he said you know westinghouse
doesn't have the luxury of going valley
up we got
a lot of people here and that we have a
lot of shareholders
and that means that we can't take risk
but we want to innovate
and so we've decided the only way we can
innovate is that we've got to invest in
small things
and so he said that this ruling just
came out at westinghouse that they're
going to go invest in startups
and he said that they were thinking
about buying into things they never
thought of
spinning stuff off but he said why don't
you two guys rather than just going why
don't you
take the you know take the west coast
with you and take these
25 people with you and
he said you can uh you can take the
technology you've developed
you can take the people you've developed
and all we want is we want just to
minority minority
ownership in it so that we can keep
track of you guys at some point you know
we may decide that uh
if you guys are interested you know we
might buy you back but it would be our
way to
invest in innovation and uh and he said
uh you know
you have to go get money yourself which
was no problem because there were lots
of people that we knew
and he said but you can take the people
you take the facilities
and the only restriction is you can't go
do a
knockoff puma because you did the puma
for us and that's ours
but so long as you don't do a puma you
can do whatever you want you can do
whatever you want with the technology we
don't care
and we were stunned because here it was
we thought it was being a contentious
battle and we thought they were going to
argue with us
and they just tell us to take the thing
and so in fact
brian and i left the office we drove to
the airport to catch a plane
and halfway to the airport we just
couldn't believe it so we stopped the
phone booth and we called his second in
command who was at the meeting we said
did he just tell us that we could take
that and we have the technology and we
can do what we want and we got the
people and the guy says
yeah he doesn't believe it either but
that's what he said
[Laughter]
and uh and that's how we started that
technology
so uh so we got venture capital money
and and westinghouse stayed on our board
for you know
probably uh 15 years until we went
public
westinghouse participated in the various
rounds of financing
you know keeping their pro rata share to
keep their ownership the same
they had a board member and they would
send people out and and so
we had a good relationship with them but
that's how we started depth and so we
started depth
in 1983 when there were 50 other
u.s companies in robotics and uh
clearly we were going to be in assembly
robots
and we looked at the and we although we
were six axis kinds of people
we couldn't go do another puma and so uh
we
looked around we said well uh we've been
doing work in direct drive technology
and then we
really thought that that uh there was
good work and
you know research being done in direct
drive so we thought direct drive was the
way to go
and there was a lot of interest in that
time and scare robots because scares
were just becoming popular though
the puma was a five axis or six axis
robot
in fact that a couple years you know
after that the japanese had invented
skera
and the scara seemed to be a really good
assembly architecture
and we said gee we've got this direct
drive motor technology that we've been
working on
and the japanese have introduced a scare
configuration which seems a very good
configuration because it's cheaper
because it's
only four axes and the thing that that
the japanese discovered
uh was that a lot of assembly is
vertical assembly
so it's parts that go vertically in
other parts
and so at the puma was
was modeled after a person and so
general motors wanted this articulated
robot with six degrees of freedom it
could reach around and do all these
things
which the puma could do but it turns out
that for assembly most assemblies
vertical assembly
and you only need four degrees of
freedom and that was uh
and furthermore you know having the uh
the compliance of the scare going
horizontally
you know people thought that would be a
good idea although that never really
turned out to be very much it was really
the
the key idea was that it's assembly is
really a vertical operation
and so we said you know these the
japanese researchers they've
they've hit on something here and so we
went out and we did the adept one which
is a direct drive
scare robot and uh and that's where we
introduced and then
scare robots were adept technologies
claim the fame and so we competed with
uh with all these other 40 us robot
companies
and some of them were using articulated
configurations that were a lot more
expensive
some of them were using japanese robots
some of them did so these cheap
knockoffs
and and we were lucky we just had a
great team
with us in terms of the sales and
marketing people and and
the manufacturing team and the
engineering team you know there was
really no one who had a better
engineering team than we did
and uh so we put together the adept one
and that
that was really the uh you know the key
product for adapt
for probably 15 years
but you definitely need to speak to
victor simon
because victor is the guy who invented
all the mechanical systems that you know
everything else sprang from and i think
you should talk to bernie roth too
because you know bernie is the guy who's
uh he's really the person who put
everyone yeah got everyone interested in
robotics at stanford
and was everyone's advisor he was don
piper's advisor
mike kahn's advisor he was you know
richard uh
lou paul's advisor he was victor's
advisor brian's advisor my advisor i
mean he was everybody's advisor at
stanford
and um he's still in the standpoint he's
still at stanford mechanical engineering
schedule there's like doing like 20 days
in the next two weeks so
you know if you want to it's all a
question of whether if
you if you want the early years or the
the sort of later years
and if if you want the early years you
should speak to
uh to victor and and and bernie and you
know possibly lou
yeah okay
okay um so the adept one
okay um so what year did you finish that
and then what
it was so we we we founded a depth in 83
and we demonstrated the adept one
i believe it was june of 85
and we went to production shortly
thereafter
and the the interesting thing about the
uh
the adept one is that uh when we started
adept
people still question whether vision was
at all useful
with with robots uh so it had taken
people
you know 1960s to really
think that there was that that these
things which were called industrial
robots were
useful at all and then in the 70s there
was a
there was an acceptance that you know
you could use industrial robots for
spot for blind spot welding for spray
painting and things of that sort
but then in the 80s people began to
accept that you could use
electric robots for assembly
but when we started that still
people didn't think that computer vision
was very useful
and uh and they weren't very there
weren't any good vision applications
um what kind of cameras were they using
what kind of
video signal were they uh cameras at
that time
uh in the uh
well you know way back in the in the 70s
there were these
cameras that were kohu cameras that were
these boxes about like this
uh in the uh in the late 70s and the
cameras were
kind of these cylinders about this big
uh
and so they and their prices were better
but uh you know they were
the resolutions were like
probably a 100 by 100 pixels or
something of that sort
you know nothing um
and then you know then actually they
gradually they got to be you know 200 by
200 pixels and things of that sort
so uh so there was a lot of a lot of
advancements in cameras during that time
so the cameras really came along digital
cameras really came a long way in the
late 70s early 80s but there still were
not any good
robot vision applications and
almost all robots were we're blind we
just you know
pick and play blind pick and place and
as i mentioned we demonstrated a
vision you know application in the late
70s but
still it was you know simple
so as i mentioned uh there were a couple
of companies that came along
out of the sri technology machine
intelligence who tried to sell it but
really they were still signing more
inspection things they never really got
a good foothold in the robotics
and then automatics you know they they
were going to push
vision big time and they sold some
vision but really
not very much you know they they they
initially came out with a vision system
uh but uh most of their their stuff was
just
blind work too and we had sold a few
vision systems here there but uh we were
convinced that vision was was a good
thing
and it's interesting that uh the very
first adept one that we sold the
very you know adept one number one that
had a vision system on it
uh and we didn't know why
and uh and probably six months or a year
you know six months or a year after we
were still asking
why are these people buying these things
but uh
and through the you know through a good
part of the 80s
uh robot companies everywhere didn't
sell vision
you know we we sold vision from the
beginning
of the debt but there were a lot of
companies that never offered vision
you know through the 80s robot companies
uh
so the uh
so you know we were still looking around
for an application people were still
buying
vision we didn't know why they were
buying vision adept
from the very first year we sold 25 of
our robots with vision didn't know why
the uh we had a
very smart marketing lady by the name of
elaine wood
at a depth and so
we asked elaine go figure out why people
are buying vision
and try to figure out how we could use
vision because we think is a great thing
but but we've got to figure out how to
say you know what we can do with this
and of course there were
companies like cognex uh who were
selling vision
for inspection uh there were
there were specialized companies in the
semiconductor industry
that were starting to to look at vision
but so elaine went around and she said
you know the great thing uh we're
starting to
at that time probably in 86 87
we started to look at assembling of
printed circuit boards
because there were a lot of these really
expensive chip shooters
and these ship shooters uh they were
these hard automation things where you
put on reels of components
and they would just go boom boom boom
and they would stuff these things down
uh through hole components at that time
very little surface mount
and uh so they there are these very
expensive hard automation machines that
people made for through-hole insertion
that
did lead prep and stuff these things
down and such
but elaine said you know there's a lot
of components that that are fit into the
odd component category and by that it's
it's uh
it's not resistors and capacitors that
you can stuff down there are these
and they might be a an oscillator or
power supply or something you've got to
put down there might be one or two of
these things on the board
and they're really big and they're done
by hand now
and elaine said wouldn't it be great if
we could use robot to put down these odd
components
and vision would be tremendous because
you
you have to look at these fiducial marks
on these boards and they these fiducial
marks are these landmarks to tell you
where to put the chips down and these
boards kind of move around a little bit
and
they're all through-hole components and
so you got to get these leads through
these holes
and if you try to do it blindly that's
just never going to work
and so she said we ought to develop an
application to go find these fiducials
and then adjust the robot position put
these things down
odd components down and we did that
and that that was the first application
that we did where we really knew what we
were doing and we really knew what the
benefit of vision was
and nowadays you know all these chip
shooters they all use vision too
but at that time you know they didn't
and you know people use vision
for mask alignment and things of that
sort but they didn't really use it for
for putting down chips
so what year would did you finish that
that was probably
i think 86 or 87 that that sort of time
frame
and so uh so you know that was really
when we knew why we were selling vision
i mean we
we were promoting vision since the late
70s
the very first robot went out with
vision but finally you know
two or three years later on we finally
knew why we were selling vision and what
it was good for and
and applications that we can go out and
tell people hey if you're going to go do
this you really want to use vision
because here's what it's going to go do
for you
so uh uh uh so the 80s were
sort of a consolidation time that's when
a lot of companies
when u.s companies went by by the boards
uh and so we went from you know 50
industrial companies down to
a handful and by the 90s
adept was the only us robot company left
wow what was the last handful
well uh jen you know there's
uh general motors uh started uh
uh started at about the same time
they general motors decided that uh in
83 in 83 about the same time we were
starting about 83 84
that uh it was they weren't getting what
they needed from the robot vendors and
they were going to start
their own robot company which was
general motorspanic
and so it was a partnership between
general motors and fanuc
and fanuc would be doing the
manufacturing
uh general motors would do the controls
and and be the marketing arm
general motors fanuc was uh
i'm forgetting but i think in the late
80s fanuc bought out general motors so
that's
today they're just fanuc uh
let's see who else was uh
yeah i can't even tell you who the the
last ones were i mean they
you know there was just a bloodbath of
of them going out of business
and and that's when the japanese were
coming on strong and the the japanese as
i mentioned
they originally got their technology by
licensing from from unimation
so what were the big japanese companies
uh
well fanuc was was big
seiko instruments in terms of assembly
the
sony uh was was in there and still is in
there
um
i'm forgetting some of the other big
ones it's just escaping my attention at
this point
but uh and of course at that time then
then you had abb was was really doing
well
uh kuka
both you know both really focused on
automotive
and so there were a number of european
companies
i can tell you yeah um
okay so then uh so adopt was the last
u.s companies standing in the early 90s
right
and what happened since then uh
brian and i ran adept uh and we found we
were the two founders of adapt he was
the ceo
and i was the uh on the board of
directors as the vice president of
research and development
and you know ran engineering from time
to time
but he and i ran the adept
and we we finally were able to take it
public in
in 1996. so 13 years after we started it
i think we started making modest profits
probably in the late late 80s
and so during the early 90s we were
making modest profits our profitability
got a little bit better the mid 90s
and so we took the company public in 96.
the uh in
the late 90s uh once we were a public
company then there was more pressure
than ever
to make make profits
and and the board really wanted to see
us
expand the company quite a bit and to
take some risks
and so uh so we we made a number of uh
investments strategic investments in the
semiconductor
and then also and then we started to
make some headwinds in semiconductor
uh in packing the packaging market which
uh which we did pretty well
at uh but they wanted something a little
uh
you know that was really gonna explode
and so uh in the uh
the early 2000s uh we invested in
photonics in a big
big way and uh after the uh
uh after the internet bust uh
then uh in the early uh
2000s uh people said well you know the
internet's
uh all these startups have sort of
robust but clearly the internet's going
to work
but in order for the internet to do
better you know people need more
bandwidth
and so it was it was thought that the
next big push
was really to get bandwidth in
everybody's house
and the way to do that was through fiber
optics
so photonics was the fiber op
the development fiber optic so that you
could lay this cable everywhere
and get bandwidth and so
so in the early 2000s there was this
huge rush to photonics
and everyone was uh going into photonics
in fact uh
corning who uh was
you know had been in optics for a long
time uh corning had corning wear
cornine had cornine missiles and things
with that sort of you know corning in
the early 2000s
they sold off corning ware and they sold
off the missile division
and they were gonna they were gonna
specialize just in photonics and fiber
optics to locate
a cable and then there are lots of other
companies like uh
jds uniphase and and such and so you
know photonics just
took off and we said this is this is
some place that we could play because we
had actually been working with corning
on doing optical assembly for a long
time
so we made a big play in photonics and
photonics
uh was his rush you know just like
the internet and everything else was i
mean it just exploded
there were conferences and you know
money everywhere
and then it just cratered and uh
and unfortunately that's where we made
our our bet
uh and uh and then of course uh toward
just about the time uh photonics was
cratering then 9 11 happened
uh and so uh
so what happened then was that uh you
know the combination of 9 11
and and just the cratering of photonics
we had to really shrink adept we grew
adept
i think we we had over we peaked out
over 100 million dollars in revenue but
suddenly you know with 9 11 and
photonics
cratering we had to shrink the company
by
to you know get rid of two thirds of the
company and that was very painful
so we shrunk the company down from 100
million dollar revenue down to about 30
or 40 million
revenue and unfortunately you know with
it uh all the people
some of them uh you know who've been
with us a long time
all of them friends and so
so we made it through there
just by the skin of our teeth and so you
know we were still alive
we made it through the through another
crunch
but we needed more cash and uh
and so we went out and we got more cash
and uh
and the board said well they want to
change management
that uh we had been running the company
for 20 years from
from 83 to tonight to 2003
and they said that uh that was long
enough
that you know most companies change
management all the time
and for of us for us to be in charge for
20 years they thought was
way overdue that they got new management
in a public company
and so as part of getting the money in
we got shoved out
which was okay because it
was a very unpleasant time for us it was
really sad to to
to part with a lot of friends that we
had
but it was a very contentious situation
at that time with with the board of
directors and
and enron it happened and uh
basically it's uh it's uh not very fun
to run a public company in any vein and
adept
even though we had a good industry and
even though it was a fun industry
being a public company is just no fun
so that's when we left in 2003 and we
started
precise automation brian and i
okay so and what's the the focus
of sublimation uh our focus is is
different that
when we started adept uh we were gonna
we knew we were gonna be a big company
and so
right off the bat we got tons of venture
capital funding
uh and and we put in a whole
manufacturing operation
and we grew like crazy in the early
years
and so our goal was to be you know a big
company
with precise automation
our goal is to be a small company that
has that really focuses on technology
and instead of investing in the big
sales channel and a big
manufacturing organization uh our view
is that you know those days are kind of
done
uh and so uh so we we have a very small
sales force just a couple people
and we have no operations to speak of
and and we
we have partners who do all their
operations for us and so in fact
uh we're at chad today and chad does all
the
robot manufacturing for precise
automatic
automation so uh brian and i are still
you know robotics industrial robots is
our business
uh and controls and and robots is our
business
but uh but we now feel that it's better
to have the flexibility to have other
organizations
within the united states you know do the
manufacturing
so we still have you know all our
products manufactured in the us but we
just don't do it ourselves
and we focus really on the technology
and
also we've uh at adept
we shied away from from automotive but
but we did a lot of electronics
and at precise we're really focused on
other marketplaces lab automation
we do a great deal in live automation
and our robots are now designed for that
we do some some work in semiconductors
still
uh we uh do a little bit of packaging
and such
so you know we believe that there are
just different marketplaces now and
different ways to do business
uh and so uh you know we
obviously automotive is uh still a big
portion of the robotics industrial robot
business
but it's a commodity business it's
pretty brutal and it's just
you know these uh the large automotive
companies just sort of beating the
robotics people to a pulp in terms of
making ends meet
but you know there are a lot of robots
that are still sold there
uh semiconductor is an interesting
opportunity uh there's
there are actually more robots sold in
the semiconductor i think than there are
in
auto mode nowadays but it's a very it's
a very small market
uh in terms of the number of players and
the number of users
so so we we supply controls
in the semiconductor we think lab
automation
pharmaceuticals is a really interesting
area though because
they uh people are in that business are
getting to the point now that
they're handling more and more product
we have one
company that we deal with and
their business is to handle the blood
samples
that you know you go and nowadays
everyone when they get a physical or you
go to
you go to your doctor you get blood work
up
and so there are thousands of tubes of
blood
that have to be sampled everything
tested every single day
well more and more you know
day was when you go to your your your
local doctor and they would do their own
blood work but people don't do their
blood work anymore
they send them out and so now there are
these companies
and their whole job is to do blood work
and they will get in
seventy thousand vials in at night
and by the next morning they have had to
split those out into all these tests
and return the results to the doctors
and so there's these huge blood
processing places and uh
it's all done by hand you know seventy
thousand tubes come in
and people you know pour it out and you
know split it out into various tests and
load that stuff in and i've not
toured one of those plants but you know
these customer bars have toured it and
they say if you'd see these plants you
would never believe test results again
in your life
because the number of mistakes that are
made and that all that handling as they
say is just
frightening and so so now those
companies want to automate that
they have these little plastic tubes and
they want to you know
have robots pour out that those tubes
into these samples then they want to
load these samples into these these
testers
but they they need to handle 70 000 in a
night
and so there are these huge automation
systems that are putting in
for that there are other people who are
doing you know all sorts of
pharmaceutical tests and and such and
you know there's uh
pharmacy is just a huge business now and
uh
all this pharmacy uh it's all a matter
of testing you know these people and
they're developing new drugs
it's all testing they split them up they
you know try various things and it's a
tremendous amount of testing
and all that testing that used to be
done by hand but now
more and more they're automating that so
we believe that
lab automation is is really a very good
industry
uh is are you involved in a genetic
sequencing
machine yeah they do that you know they
do
that as well so yes uh that's that's
part of that industry
so uh you know that's that's uh so that
there are a lot of these these areas
that uh
um you know there are the areas that
people think of like
uh electronics which which robots are
used in quite a bit
there's uh automotive that robots are
used in
uh spot welding there's even arc welding
that people use robots in but
there are all these industries that are
kind of under the radar
that's that use thousands of robots that
you don't think about
semiconductors a good good case you know
people never even paid attention to
semiconductor
and yet there are thousands of robots
sold every year into semiconductor
by just a few companies
so what are the big uh companies now for
industrial automation
uh well in in semiconductor uh
uh it's it's mostly the the japanese uh
you've got uh you know you've got uh
i think that uh
i believe that that yashkawa made a big
push
and so yashkawa's got a lot of
semiconductor business
they might be the biggest semiconductor
robot of the conventional robot people
the company that specializes just in
semiconductor though is brooks
and so brooks is not thought of as a
robotics company but in fact
that's what they are they're a robotics
company but they specialize just in
semiconductor and i think
uh probably brooks and yashkow i would
guess would be the two biggest supplier
of semiconductor
robots and then there are lots of other
smaller players and
what about a laboratory automation
uh yeah that's just an emerging area now
and so uh
there are there are some small ones
actually there is one company
that does cartesian robots all they do
is cartesian robots
and all they do it all they do is for a
very small
segment of lab automation they do this
cartesian robot which is just to uh
and i'm forgetting what the what the
particular application is but they they
saw about a thousand robots
a year uh which
uh you know it's probably more robots
than a lot of robot companies sell
and no one knows about it you know and
then they make this they make this one
cartesian system they saw a thousand
robots a year
and that's all they do and they're a
swiss company
and they uh
and they just make you know this little
robot and accessories and they do
probably you know some tens of millions
of dollars in revenue
and but they're not you know they're not
part of any robotics
organization they don't show up at
robotics shows
they just attend these these the lab
automation shows
uh packaging you know i think that
abb does a lot of packaging
adept does a fair amount of packaging
i don't think that fanuc or yash kyle
has ever brought broken very much in the
packaging they've tried
uh and then of course they're you know
there are specialized robots
for instance there's the delta robot
which sig makes
and uh you know there the the delta
robots there's been a
a real upsurge in delta robots because
all the patents uh ran out a year and a
half ago
and so demerol developed had the
held the original patents for the delta
robots
and the and they sold a license for the
larger delta
to uh to abb and they sold a patent to
the
medium-sized robots to sig
and so that's why the delta robot has
only been used by
only been sold by denmark abb and sig
for the last
15 years but the patents have all run
out
and so that's why in the last year and a
half
you've seen delta robots spring up
everywhere
what's a delta robot delta robot is a uh
it's a parallel robot it looks like uh
your uh if you take your camera tripod
flip it upside down
that's a delta robot and so instead of a
serial robot where you have one link
after another link
and then the end is is moved by this
serial chain
the delta robot's a parallel robot that
has these three legs
and by driving these legs up and down
you can move this platform around
and then that platform it's it's a very
clever design because by the arrangement
of these links
the platform always stays horizontal
so so it's a very clever design
it uh it has the attribute that
all the motors are stationary because in
any
any robot a lot of the weight is is the
mo you know where you put the motors and
so
you have a choice you can either put
their motors close in which case you've
got all this weight
out there that you're trying to move or
you can remote the motors in which case
you've got some sort of drivetrain which
is costing you a lot of money
well the delta robot is this parallel
system
um okay um
let me think if there's um
um
[Music]
so uh any any other uh
anything else you want to say about the
80s or 90s
no you know i think if you talk to the
japanese
and some of the other people you will
get uh
more of a sense for people who are
trying to break into the
service industries and such
and we just haven't you know that's just
not been our forte
but that's service robots have have been
you know important things since the mid
80s but they just haven't gone anywhere
so what about consumer robots
uh no the you know they're mostly mostly
toys they're they're
the uh the thing that there have been
is that there have been various
educational robots
uh that the people have made from time
to time but there really hasn't been a
very
popular educational robot that
that's lasted you know more than a few
years
so there have been a number of people
who've tried educational robots
but none you know none of them have made
it uh
and uh
yeah i think that's about it you know
it's uh
also when you talk to uh
you know there's a big distinction
between robotics
and uh and what we do
uh i think that people have correctly
characterized that
we're really in uh intelligent
automation
and they would differentiate that from
robotics which you know is going towards
more autonomy
kinds of things i mean our goal is not
not to have
thinking machines our our goal is to
have things that are cost effective and
and you and that are easy to to teach
what
what to do so i think that there's still
just a huge gap between
autonomy and thinking machines and what
we
what we sell
but a lot of the technologies you've
developed can be used
for all sorts of applications right
right so what do you think the the
biggest innovations
that you personally came up with in your
career
or the people you work with
well i think we were a big promoter of
vision for robotics for a long time
you know we uh
i suppose things would have been
different if if we would have been a
flop at general motors you know if uh
if someone else had gotten the bid there
and had really screwed that up that
probably
wouldn't have changed things forever but
it probably would have
slowed things down considerably because
uh
the the puma really was a landmark
machine and it was a very successful
machine
both from a product point of view and a
you know commercial success and in fact
the last time that i saw
joe engelberger and and victor was when
you know one of the first pumas was
inducted into the
smithsonian
so i think the uh the pumas was really a
big deal
you know that that was a bunch of us
who worked on that and