Perryn Olson with REX.one

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

robots, industrial, built, robotics, industry, job, construction, people, solution, palo alto networks, droid, call, listeners, world, crawlspace, conversation, task, company, operated, ot

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Welcome to the Industrial Talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots. And let's go Hi there

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and welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining us the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates industry professionals all around the world. You're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly you innovate to collaborate, you solve problems. That's why we celebrate you on this platform Industrial Talk. Now in this conversation, we're talking robotics, we're talking how to apply them in industry with a gentleman by the name of Perrin Olson, he's with rex.com or ex.com. And I gotta tell you, man, it's exciting times. It's exciting times to be able to discuss robots as Kikko. I, I enjoy innovation. And I enjoy companies leading the way. And I enjoy the fact that they're solving problems that need to be solved. And it's exciting. It's exciting time. All right, Industrial Talk is here for you. It is a platform that is dedicated to industrial professionals. That's why I say it every time. We have education, we have collaboration, it is an ecosystem that is dynamic, and you need to be a part of it, you need to amplify your voice. That's why I'm inviting you to go out to Industrial Talk.com and clicking on get in contact with me and ask me questions and be a part of the ecosystem. It's all there. Again, podcasts, webcasts, learning management system, it's all elevating the conversation around industry. That's why Industrial Talk is here. So we're going to be at an event. And it's going to be PowerGen. And then in February, we're going to be at Distributech. If you're going to be at those events, you just got to look me up, we have booth and we will be broadcasting on site, which is always an exciting time and enjoy those conversations. So we're going to be focused in on energy for the next couple of months. But we always we’re always into energy because I'm a former transmission journeyman lineman, that's, I'm always passionate about that. Now, don't ask me to climb towers today. No, no, I, I'll, I'll cry. That's what I would do. All right, let's get on with the conversation. Parent, that's p e r r y n Olsen. rx.com. Robotics is the conversation. So enjoy. Parent, welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for finding time in your busy schedule. How are you doing today?

04:04

Great.

04:06

Excellent, man. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Now listeners, we're going to be talking a little bit about robots. And you're saying to yourself, Scott, that interests me because it shouldn't trust you because it's robots. It is the way that it's happening, whether you like it or not, and and parent brings a wealth of knowledge to this particular conversation. And we're going to be defining some of the use cases that are associated with using robots have solutions addressing pain, all of that stuff. And ironically, as I look at his form, be human in the robot conversation there. Yep. Before we get into that chat apparent give us a little background on who you are.

04:47

So I'm based in New Orleans not too far from you. Too far from me. Extra started my career as a graphic designer moved in marketing strategy and build a niche and construction marketing been doing that for was 20 years. And then the company worked with REX is REX construction REX engineering and we had REX technology. Three small, very diverse companies. We went out actually acquired super great robots last year. So, I've always been very much a fanboy of construction tech, and all things technology and robots and now, Chief Marketing Officer for Stupid Robot.

05:23

So why did Rex decide that I need to purchase Super Droid.

05:30

So the vision of Steven USP, our CEO, is the make the AEC that architecture engineering construction industry safer and more efficient, structural engineer by trade pretty much a technologist by passion. And one of things that really excited me about coming to work with him is just building up this vision of making a safer industry. And part of that is software in a lot of people play the software game, but we really see its construction, you know, industrial, things like that. There's a lot of manual labor, we see there's a hardware component to this. And so we weren't required to do it. Actually, I did it for a while. Some of that time, the founders had to come to the 21 years, which is kind of unheard of in a robot world. That's where like the ancient grandpas and robots, they're ready to retire. And it was good opportunity for us and got a great team, they built it up to about a 20 person company with some kind of random like very much a mom and pop shop. So our goal is really to come in and define the robots little more bullets and processes and things like that and, and grow and scale.

06:34

So for the listeners, let's let's define what the robot is. Because when I say Super Droid, I think of flying. And I think as droids help the listener understand what we're talking about.

06:47

Well, I'll give you a quick origin story of Super Droid so superior that he actually gets started by using the royalties and licensing fees from becoming a runner up on season two of BattleBots. If you remember the atomic wedgie, that was our family, his robot. So they use all that to start the company or the garage and then grew from there. So you know, ground robots, that's when you start thinking BattleBots and I hope grandiose a little bit, but you have a variety of robots, actually a few 100. We've developed over the years anywheres from a small crawl space robots like home inspectors, plumbers pest control to go under a house and safely inspect the crawlspace up to police robots that SWAT teams bomb units use and a lot of different things in between. So most of our robots have three to six wheels or trucks. We don't we actually don't do the flying robots, but we are actually in development for a two legged or nose by that humanoid, and then a quadruped Ed, that'll be out next year.

07:43

No way. Really you guys are developing that as we speak.

07:46

Yes, we are. So that's been exciting. Changing who we compete with to that's the NRS thing is we go off to some of the bigger opportunities. And as we look at standardizing our robots and kind of building out our core platforms, to the platforms that we found that were missing for more applications was the humanoid and the quadrate pad that the dog people call it. So yeah.

08:07

And on your form, you talk a little bit about from an industrial perspective and being able to use the Droids in a way that allows inspection of equipment, without having me, human guy, go in there and do it. It's sorted that just by virtue of that makes it safer. Well,

08:26

if you think about our work environment built for humans, so robots therefore have to be human like to be able to work in so something as simple as looking at a gauge, it's five, six foot off the ground. Most robots can't do that. You can't fly a drone around oil finery generally, it's not safe. So it's if we could have a robot go into those dangerous areas, or even just do the mundane tasks, you got to go check 30 different gauges every day on the our robot could do that. So they have a human or we have some robots that are in like nuclear facilities and they're essentially permanently hot. They don't come out that it's they go into the wall, they drive around their cars remotely operated, they never come out because they're now nucular radioactive. So

09:09

does the droid I heard you say manual or remotely operated? So you got the the individual with the joystick or whatever the tool is, and working it Do you Do you have programmable solutions. Yeah.

09:25

So the kind of three words we have remote control or sometimes even call it telepresence or color robotic where you can like work virtually essentially. You have your programmable that you can teach it how to do things that you have autonomous that has an autonomous has very different levels from they can do a simple task up to working as more of a co robot where people work collaboratively with them up to like an autonomous car that has to do everything independently. So there's lots of different levels most are we do are anywhere from the remote controller teller robotic. We do have some autonomous ones in the past a lot of autonomous robots were what we call autonomous ready, where they were going to hand it to like a university or a large company that had a robotics team that they didn't want to build a hardware and they would do all the software side. And what we're doing now is more installations. So one of their newest robots is called the groundhog it's made for construction, they could do 360 reality capture, or process a job site, because they're now being tasked not just to do that once a while, but not only do it weekly, but progress monitoring. Their owners are now requiring vacations. It's a task, it's really fun for the first week after the second week, it's really boring. So essentially walking a jobsite with tripod. It takes a few hours of just every four feet, you take a 360 photo. So it's something we can either replace with a robot.

10:43

So what's the pushback? What are we talking about what I mean? This is, from my perspective, it's still relatively new, still untapped? I'm, you know, I mean, if I'm a, if I'm a company, or a manufacturer, or some sort of industry, I have a way of doing my thing. And I've sort of created that. Explain to the listeners, what are the challenges out there?

11:07

I think the biggest challenge are bots, you kind of have this wide breadth of potential customers, every customers are very sophisticated and know they have robots, they just want better robots. And it's not like buying a car, they want a better car with more features, more diversity. And then you have the other end of things that people never seen a car. And you know, they've never seen a robot in their workplace. And it's amazing, we can have a sales call with somebody, and they're just in it. And they're talking nuts and bolts and features and what's on the horizon. And the very next holiday like, my industry doesn't use robots. And like you should talk to the guy who just talked me five minutes ago, like it just there's such a gap when we got a Super Droid, because the assumption was a lot of police departments that we were selling to we were selling him their first robot. And what we found out very quickly was no we weren't, we just did a good job doing sales before. And we were actually sometimes people's 10th robot, so a SWAT team. And so it's just the level of sophistication has arisen with some industries and some, but it's very isolated. Then the other fun part is who is the robot person at every company, you know, construction companies are now starting to have this thing called construction technologist. That's kind of this bridge between it and operations and finance and their job generally make the place more efficient, safer, things like that. But that's really on the big companies, little companies don't have that. So it's robots isn't ideal doesn't fit in necessarily just the pure it generally is somebody in operations or somebody just as tech savvy, like we saw back in the 90s, where the person who was good at Excel or to fix computers now the IT guy, it's kind of the same thing in robots. Oh, you're tech savvy. And you're on a police department. You're now the robot guy. Like it just? Yeah.

12:45

You're the closest person there. That's got it. Yeah, it's a bit geeky on this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So if I was, if I was a customer, or a client, or a prospect, or a target, whatever you want to call me, what am I? I don't even know if I have pain. But do you have that conversation?

13:08

Oh, yeah, we totally do. And construction is a little different. Because there's such a shortage of labor, they're generally looking for something like just anything that will save them time help them with any of the labor. But one of the issues I've seen in construction in particular is most of the construction technology out there is made in price for the large general contractors, but it needs to be used by the trades, and trades can't afford it. So that's one of the things we're really focused on is supercharges. How do we make robots accessible? So the one thing that's been holding back like this reality capture robot was the only one on the market was $150,000? Well, it's a $20,000 use case. So before we even started building our robot, we knew we've got to hit a $20,000 price point, just or lower. So yeah, our first model out was 17,000. Because we knew that was the price point, it came down to, you know, talking people in the industry and know coming from a engineering construction background, we knew the industry well enough to talk to people about that. And we're continuing to do that, how

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to drive down that cost.

14:05

When we build the all the robots ourselves, you know, it's, it's, there's kind of two sides to robots, there's some that are very task specific. So this robot is built for this task. And there's those are more platforms that are built for everything. So like, the famous dog that we see on the news and things like that, that's a platform, and it's gonna be used for everything. And it's overkill. And that is the only application right now for reality capture on a job site. The one thing it can do that my robot can do is climb stairs. But most of my customers that we're talking to is, you know, instead of if you're comparing a $17,000, we're about $250,000. Or like, I'll bring it upstairs. So it's, and we are working on that solution to it, it won't be 70,000 but still trying to find a more affordable solution like ours. The whole thing is how do we find accepting you know, this budget friendly thing that we can make some money and survive, but still getting more robots out there? Because, to me the robots that are on the market now or have bout to be on the market are just overpriced for what people need.

15:04

Yeah. And, and I'll be, I'll be clear. So putting money back in my pocket I have a cost is a putting money back in my pocket is it and me being in a an Industrial Maintenance Loan or at one point in time, safety was everything. Everything you know, yeah, but didn't have to have headaches or scare you know somebody's hurting themselves that that that has its value.

15:37

And a lot of times safety is our entry point like manufacturing and construction, we a lot of times will get brought in by safety like we've got one manufacturer that we worked with, they had a pallet chipper essentially would just shred the giant wooden pallets. Well, somebody had to go underneath the machinery every once a while. And so we just devised like essentially a broom on a robot to go, somebody can remote control, we're not replacing a job. We're just now if somebody's not go under this giant Shredder, that they got to duck under the whole time. And they're basically on their hands and knees with a dustpan and a small broom. We now have the robot get all the stuff out, and then they can vacuum it up. I mean, it wasn't that big of a deal. I think the robot was less than 20 grand. But that probably easily dropped their insurance rates 20 grand a year as well.

16:21

Yeah. See, that's that's a great connection. The insurance side? Yeah. Because insurance companies are looking to drive down that risk, too. Yeah, absolutely.

16:29

And we did a great case study with Nucor Steel. Yeah, they've got a huge furnace underneath there in a flue that runs underneath their, their steel mill. And they shut down for six weeks, every five to five or six years. And they, they need to inspect that flue to see, okay, do we need to tear up the entire plan to replace it. So they stick one of our extra crawlspace robots in there and they can drive around and stuff. And before that, they'd have to be human do it. And this flu is about 200 linear feet with multiple terms, and it's 20 inches by 30 inches

17:02

and add your weight for that thing to cool down. So that at least you know, that's time. Now you can sort of create use a bot in a way and that use case? Yeah, okay. It's down to whatever it gets should yeah. Oh, and it's

17:17

so much safer. But also it gives them the video documentation, who's the other things, you know, if he can't winds down there, they might be able to note, okay, at 20 feet, there's an issue here and they'll take a picture. But now they're getting every inch of that flew, documented in HD. So it's now that the next time they go do a shutdown, they can compare, okay, what did it look like, five years ago, today? And now they're building that baseline? So it's those little things like that. Take

17:43

us through sort of the process of you going on site? And what do you what, what are some of the drivers? What are you looking at?

17:52

It's actually generally customers come to us, either, they've found a need, and they find us we've been around for so long, we've been great in the Google rankings, we do have a team that will call people in general will call safety or operations to kind of ask some of the pains that they're having and see if there's some solutions. And we just kind of collaborate. We try to get out to as many shows as we can. But that's actually one of the changes we've added since acquisition a year ago was building out a salesperson team, which we have our first salesperson 20 years, and trying to do trade shows just because it is such a demonstratable product that people want to see it. And one of the things we've also seen is some of our competitors have kind of left a bad taste in people's mouths. We literally had some police, sheriffs and police chiefs, like I'm never buying a robot off the internet again, because the last one we got was flimsy or didn't work broken a few weeks. They like they said, particularly in police, when we go do a show with them or we do demos, like they would literally kick it to me throw it off with three storey building, like kick it dirt off the building once you know it, just Yeah. I mean, come on. You're an industrial guy. I think the SWAT team members that we talked to are kind of the the epitome of that macho attitude on things. And it's this. It's It's intense when you're around them, and they just think they want to break stuff like that, guys is demo. We need it for the next thing too. So it's

19:18

yeah. So if you want if you want something indestructible Well, it's just FYI, there's a cost associated with that.

19:25

And we're about to build top. But you know, you guys want to push it to its limits and every demo, it makes it does take a ticket after a while we've got one so I'll bring the role of the demo robot back to the shop and just do you know, tighten some screws and do other things, but it's still, you know, a sound machine. But it's it's interesting is it's such a demo, but we just can't be everywhere. It's like we've actually priced the other day. Okay, if we did a roadshow year round roadshow, who could we hit? How many things would get what would have caught and it's hard. So we were trying to get more cotton we get strategic with conferences and now but still we we need Need a field team to really cover the bases and

20:03

it? It's got that dazzle and splash if you're at a conference and people are eyeballing it, it has an impact.

20:12

Yeah. But we also have been trying to how do you pass a splash and get to people that are actually serious about making it work because that's the right now we're kind of a real big push, you got our website, it's robots at work, we kind of jokingly say is our robots them dance, they work. We don't get the we're on the news for dancing robots, because our robots are behind the scenes actually doing all the work. And that's kind of this this edge to us. We don't have the prettiest robots. We've had very industrial looking sound robots, you know, it's, they're not made of plastic, they're made of steel and aluminum. And you know, that they're built to last. And so it's, it's interesting to see kind of how the industry has evolved. What customers looking for. I said, you know, we have very tech savvy customers that have a few robots, and they kind of do what they want, but they don't want and you have others that just anything awesome. And almost 100 overwhelmed. We got a few calls people we just overwhelmed them.

21:04

Yeah, and, but but again, her your, your statement, you worked with them, you're saying, Hey, I'm totally I'm on the horn, I somebody says I need to think about or consider getting a robot for my process, whatever it might be. Yeah. And then you're not just going to say, here's one off the shelf, go for it, you're gonna have to. So there's a customization that goes on, right?

21:28

Yeah, we're running your robotics companies that will even do custom robots. That's really where we built our name over the years. And how we built so many models was they were all essentially custom models that we then either standardized, or just the client had a single use, they weren't going to become like a robotics company. We've we've built robots for people's proof of concepts, they've gone on to be robotics companies as well, where we do some OEM work for companies. But you know, a lot of our stuff is it's a single use for a company and they pick up the robot, they're good. And we can then resell it to something someone else for a different use. And that's really interesting to me is, is the diversity of the same robot like that robot, we put a Nucor Steel was our crawlspace robot, but in their world, they call it a confined space robot. It's the same robot, you know, it's a compact robot that fits in that hole. So it's, it's interesting and see that and, you know, we're trying to constantly use the same robots we use a police departments we have in nuclear facilities, because it has an arm on it that can open doors and pull gauges and things like that. So it's very interesting, it's very challenging in the market and sell out sometimes. You definitely have to start with what is the pain where the process and we have prospects that are certain get overwhelmed with okay, what are the early wins? What can we do to just show people that this is a, this is doable? And then from there, we can get bigger and more sophisticated things like that, you know, it's, it's sometimes it is just as simple as that third one, there's crawlspace robots, especially in manufacturing, they generally have to go under places and under machinery and things. Yeah. So cheaper about they could try and just see oh, we can do this. We What do

22:58

you see it going? I mean, what puts your future hat on? Yeah. What do you see the trends happening within? Within the world of robotics?

23:07

I think, much like we see, do you look back to the computer, and then the internet, and then the smartphones, there's a lot of similarities to this, even go back to the industrial age, you know, there's this fear of robots are taking jobs and my sales guy, Patrick, and I really kind of like, Yeah, we did. We want all your nasty, dirty jobs that are unsafe, like let's stop having human to do unsafe jobs, because we think they're the only ones that can do this. Let the robots handle that kind of stuff, you know, that just the poop scooping jobs, you know, they're just essentially taking microbes dirty jobs. That's where a lot of stuff that humans shouldn't be doing. But they're the only way to do it in the past. So let's let robots handle that, or some capacity of that. But much like we now have more. So you know, there's more cell phones and people in the world whether investing can be more robots than cellphones in the world service. And like, in the next five years, we'll probably cross that. And, you know, we're not going to live in the Jetson the world. And I think that's sometimes the challenges and people want Rosie from the Jetsons that does everything, you know, order Inspector Gadget that does everything. And when we kind of jokingly call that the footlights, swiss army knife. It has everything, but it doesn't fit in your pocket. And that's the core criteria is it fits in your pocket. Yeah, and that's where we're trying to find that blend of the task specific robot and then the platforms. The platforms are very general, but they have more software based task is where they're assigned. You know, if you have a humanoid robot, it's taught how to swing a hammer. You don't have a hammer swinging robot. It's

24:39

Yes, it's happening. Oh, I went to Sam's Club over here in Mandeville, and they got some robot sweeping. Just around there. And of course, me being who I am. I decided that I've got to jump in front of it. And it got out of my way. Yep.

24:58

No, it's those are There's are tasks that can do a middle the night when no one's working or Walmart was one it was kind of find the abandoned they had one that robot that was going into it would scan the shells and tell the people what they needed to stock the next day. Yeah, just run at night. Right you know the midnight shift the graveyard shift and it just long toll robot that had this like laser beam that would tell them what products were in the wrong area. Like somebody you know. And then what what was the holes and it was telling you? Because otherwise you need someone to go around and look at every shelf of the store and figure out okay, let me go pull this in the back. And that's it's boring job.

25:36

That's pretty cool. Yeah,

25:38

so it's there's a lot of it's the robots gonna This isn't exclusive, the secret robot robots are going to use for the call it the 3d games, dirty, dangerous and dull. And we're starting out as we're getting more popular with the teller robotic or telepresence is the distance, you know, could you have a robot at like a data center or an oil rig that can help do a job that somebody doesn't need to do full time like, say you're an IT guy, right now if you're an IT guy, you work in oyster, you got to be on the rig because you need to have hands on in case something happens, okay, but if you had a human or a robot that could do what you can do with you operating, you could log on to it, operate the robot, put it back in its closet, log off and go the next rig log on and just you can have one person working on their house. Do that. What's what's interesting is besides that distance thing and because it's a lot of money to get somebody out on an oil rig, but now you could have somebody potentially work from home in a wheelchair that the job they can ever have before. Like, there's a whole accessibility thing. People because if you look at like, because we started exploring that, oh, if you look at like the top 10 jobs where you know, people in wheelchairs, they're almost all require college degrees, if not, masters or PhDs. Well, not everybody with a wheelchair has the brain capacity to get a college degree. So can we put these people to work? Give them a robot, you know, little avatar style, like the blue avatar. You know that your other portal but you're still kind of like operating the computer.

27:04

That's a bomb. That's that's a lot

27:08

of things. Yeah. It's should open up doors for a lot of people. But there's a lot of tasks that you've seen in industrial work. Yeah. Construction and oil and gas. Yeah, nasty jobs. So like, why can't we put even though it's sacred. Wearing biggest requests we get is tank cleaning. Industrial tinkling. Yes. So that's something that like, almost everyone's trying to figure out how to use a budget because every year a few people dive something going on, and you would think blown up on him. So it's, Oh, yeah.

27:42

I saw it at a show. A magnetic robot magnet stuck on the side of a steel plate, which is representative of a love a tank. And it's sandblasting. Yep.

27:55

Yeah, there's all there's all kinds of things like that, that are just really portable jobs are demons, but we've never had a different way to do it. So they built some of these things they weren't thinking of how do we maintain them? How do we clean them?

28:08

Frickin dead sexy? I love that man. That's so cool stuff. Well, parent, we have to wrap it up. How can we get a hold of you? How does somebody say I like what he's talking about. I want to

28:20

do what me personally the best please find me on LinkedIn. And if so my name right it's pretty easy to find me and then find Super Droid it's stupid robots.com And we're pretty much on all the socials, especially YouTube and LinkedIn and Facebook or other biggest ones. Very cool. I

28:37

enjoyed that. And now I'm not going to talk about the social the the reluctance of individuals thinking that the robots are going to take their job so I'm not going down that road right now. Nope. No,

28:47

we believe they will take the job that they don't want.

28:49

Yeah, there it is. There's

28:51

there's a lot of we've got facts to prove it we're actually working on a white paper on kind of pulling all these facts together on that because it is a sales objection that's valid and at first once people do the research Oh, okay. This isn't taking our jobs Yeah, it's no it's it's actually keeping us alive.

29:10

Some Yeah, very cool. All right, listeners. We're going to have all the contact information for parent and the right spelling for first name so you will not add his Lincoln link. Yeah, you'll have a stack card available as well as the the website to super droids robots that's pretty cool. No, no Super Droid not there's no other robots. Disregard the Super Droid robots. They'll

29:35

find us. Yeah, go.

29:36

It's all out there. We're gonna have it out on Industrial Talk. Apparently, were absolutely wonderful. I enjoyed it. All right, listeners. Don't go away. We will be right back.

29:45

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

29:54

It's happening. Whether you like it or not, it's been happening. Robots will be taking handling situations that are mundane, more mundane, improves safety. You don't have to stick people into dangerous situations because robots can handle and do the work that we normally did in the past. And so you're not going to be able to, I can't say that. I'm not gonna put any limits on robots, because I think that industry is full of creative individuals. Sharp, just solutions oriented. That's what I think. So don't be surprised when robots are, are doing a lot more to as well. All right. All his contact information, parents contact information will be out on Industrial Talk. So reach out to him, you will not be disappointed. Get engaged at Industrial Talk. It's the ecosystem that you need to be a part of amplify your voice. You need it we want you to succeed. We just do. Be bold, be brave, they're greatly we're going to have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.