Robotics company teaches machines to do the drudge work
Some people fear losing their jobs to robots, while others cannot wait for the rise of the machines.
Consider the warehouse or fulfillment center worker who sorts objects into boxes by type, size or color. Any 4-year-old can do the job, but managers expect employees to work at lightning speed. Everyone involved wishes a robot could do it.
Employee turnover exceeds 45 percent a year. Once every potential worker within a 40mile radius burns out, recruitment becomes tougher and tougher. People do not move across the country for a $10-anhour job.
The search for a smarter robot is on.
At a former Air Force base in San Antonio, experts in machine vision are developing an artificial intelligence that can reason. Their solution is elegant and iterative: employ a human coach.
“We work from the premise that people are better than robots at everything,” said Erik Nieves, co-founder and CEO of
Plus One Robotics. “That’s why we’re called Plus One; we believe that a team of robots becomes much more capable, much more adaptable through the addition of real people.”
Robot arms can lift more weight and swing around faster than a human. Five companies make most of the world’s robotic arms, making them a commodity.
The real innovation is around the robot’s brain. Plus One Robotics is developing an artificial intelligence that can learn from experience and operate with low-cost cameras and 3-D sensors.
Advanced software gets the robot started working the conveyor belt, but a human looks over its proverbial shoulder, tutoring it. When the robot sees something it cannot identify, it puts up a virtual hand like a child in a classroom.
“We deal with what, in the terminology, is called the clutter pile problem,” Nieves said. “The big pile of junk. How do I get it out, one at a time, and feed the rest of the system?”
The human sorter becomes a robot crew chief, supervising dozens or hundreds of robots in a warehouse, or multiple warehouses around the world via cloud computing. Artificial intelligence allows all the robots to learn when the crew chief provides a lesson to one of them.
“Maybe the first time it asked me what a Frisbee is and then the next time it may ask me what a Frisbee is again. It may ask me three or four times, but at some point, it now knows, and I don’t get a call from a robot asking about a Frisbee,” Nieves said. “You may not hear from that robot in Tallahassee for two or three hours. But maybe there’s a robot in Peoria that asks for help.”
Nieves offers customers a choice: buy the equipment and operate it, or buy a subscription, which the company calls Yonder. Plus One can operate and supervise a client’s robotic workforce, guaranteeing throughput while elevating the warehouse worker.
“You are now responsible for robots in the diaspora,” he added. “And you’re a chief.”
Plus One was founded in 2016 and has clients across the country. The company secured $8.3 million late last year in a second round of funding led by Pritzker Group Venture Capital and Zebra Technologies. Nieves would not discuss specifics but said Plus One plans to triple revenues by 2020.
The company is expanding from a 4,000square-foot office to a 10,000-square-foot building at the Port of San Antonio this year. The company is hiring and will soon have 40 employees, ranging from robot crew chiefs to artificial intelligence scientists.
Nieves, who has a long career in robotics, is committed to San Antonio to take advantage of what he sees as a booming robotics, cloud computing and cybersecurity ecosystem.
“That’s the future of not just robotics, but pretty much any piece of equipment on the floor,” he added.
Plus One is sponsoring students, university courses and tech meet-ups across Central Texas to develop the workforce it will need in the future. Nieves insists he is creating more jobs than he’s eliminating.
“Robots are taking tasks that people do,” he said. “But if you look at the enterprise level, it’s generally a wash. Certainly, in this space, no robot ever deployed in a warehouse has ever resulted in a pink slip. There are not near enough people doing this work today.”
The best technology creates better jobs for a better future. Plus One Robotics is an example of using technology to solve problems, not create them.