San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
ROBOCITY, USA?
Accelerator: A special strain of robots are on the rise in San Antonio.
Robots are rising in San Antonio. That may sound like a refrain from a list of economic development talking points, but when it comes to robots, San Antonio keeps winning.
With the news in late April of Plus One Robotics’ $33 million funding round and expansion, germ-zapping robot maker Xenex’s explosive growth, and several other companies such as Reckon Point, Xyrec and Renu Robotics gaining momentum, the South Texas robot business is booming.
And don’t forget Southwest Research Institute and Toyota, San Antonio’s heavyweights in the robot game.
Then there’s the SATX Robotix Meetup, a group of more than 430 people who’re either in the business or interested in the industry.
Erik Nieves, chief executive and co-founder of Plus One Robotics at Port San Antonio, said the group is better attended than Austin’s version.
San Antonio’s special strain of robots are for business or industrial use. These are business-tobusiness robots, not humanoids like C-3PO or the Terminator. Nor are these machines with household applications such as a Roomba or automatic pool cleaner.
Think robots at work disinfecting on a large scale, building trucks, unpacking pallets, sorting packages, lasering paint off aircraft or mapping building interiors, or as industrial-sized lawn mowers for solar panel farms.
“Consumer robots might come from Asia, or at least Boston, but the application of robot tech to industrial problems is what S.A. does best,” Nieves said.
Before we can riff on the area’s robobiz, it’s worth thinking about what, exactly, is a robot. The best definition my brain concocted was “a machine that performs a task autonomously.”
I’m no expert, so I turned to some San Antonio robot gurus for their perspective.
As it turns out, the answer is, well, complicated.
“The definition of ‘robot’ is not a settled question,” said Nieves, whose company specializes in helping robots’ hand-eye coordination. “Many different morphologies, many different applications, but one thing they all have in common is that they have a semblance of programming and move through physical space.”
The latter distinction, moving through space, is why appliances like dishwashers and refrigerators aren’t considered robots, he said.
“Perhaps defining ‘robots’ is akin to (Supreme Court) Justice Potter dealing with obscenity,” he said. “I can’t give you all the rules, but I know it when I see it, and I know what it isn’t.”
Kris Kozak, principal at Hatchbed, a robotics consulting firm at Port San Antonio, said it’s “a tough question” and “the lines quickly get blurry.”
Besides humanoid and industrial robots, he cited other categories that could be included. Kozak has worked in robot research and development for more than 20 years, so he’s selfadmittedly “pretty inclusive” in his definition.
His list includes self-driving or autonomous vehicles, aircraft and boats, as well as robotic mechanisms such as the cabledriven receiver that hangs over a 500-meter telescope in China.
“The one bright line that I’d draw is that a fundamental attribute of a robot is that it must be able to physically interact with its environment,” he said. “I guess you could say that a robot has to have a body of some sort, so Alexa and Siri are not robots … yet.”
Peter Boeijink, Xyrec’s chief executive, checked in from the Netherlands. His company has a division at Port San Antonio that’s pioneering automated painting and paint removal for aircraft and other large equipment. “I like to define a robot as a programmable machine to automate the use or application of a physical process with a high degree of flexibility in movements,” he said. “By this, a robot can be used in many situations.
“All efforts in robot development are to use robots for more applications and make it easier to program the robot for its movements.”
Near the airport, Xenex manufactures robots that blast germs — including the coronavirus — with ultraviolet light. It’s seen exponential growth during the pandemic.
Morris Miller, Xenex’s chief executive, said his firm defines “a robot as a machine programmed by a computer that is capable of carrying out actions automatically.”
And he introduced a new term to our conversation: “cobot.”
“Our LightStrike robot is moved from one location to the next — for example, from a patient room to an operating room — by a trained technician, so we also like the term ‘cobot’ to describe the relationship between the robot and its human operator,” he explained.
So, like so many questions that seem simple at first, the answer to the robot question is nuanced and, apparently, still in debate.
But what’s not in debate is that robots are a growth industry on the rise in San Antonio.
Is there a Robocity, USA, yet? We’re working on it.