When work is a grind, get a robot
Erik was introduced to the field of robotics while working at a cement mixer factory in the summers during college. His initial job was blending weld beads on mixer drums, a job that required holding an 11-pound grinder chin high for ten hours a day. One afternoon the foreman came by and said that he’d heard Erik knew something about computers. Erik figured that whatever the foreman had in mind would beat holding up that grinder. The foreman pointed Erik to an industrial welding robot standing idle in the shop. “We bought this thing, but no one can make it work,” he said. “See what you can do.” Erik grabbed the manual, and by deciphering the technical instructions written in poorly translated Japanese, he soon had the robot making sparks. After loading steel parts in a fixture, he’d hit a green button and sit down to read for 15 minutes at a time while the robot welded. After graduation, Erik installed a second welding system for the cement mixer factory, then took a job with the maker of that system. A career was born.
Erik finds ROS and his co-founders
Erik worked at Yaskawa Motoman Robotics for 25 years, initially as a trainer, then establishing a subsidiary in Mexico, and eventually as the company’s Technology Director for the North American region. In this role, Erik was tasked with finding a new market for industrial robots and discovering the technology gaps which prevented robots from entering that sector. Recognizing the explosion of e-commerce, Erik zeroed in on supply chain and logistics. Industrial robots traditionally excel at high repeatability tasks; by contrast, e-commerce tasks have a high degree of variability.
Cracking open the logistics market would require robots that could sense and respond to variations in the flow of work. In his hometown of San Antonio, Texas, Erik discovered that a non-profit, contract R&D lab was using ROS, the open source Robot Operating System, to bridge the gap between repeatability and variability. When two of the researchers, Shaun Edwards and Paul Hvass, approached Erik about leveraging ROS tools for industrial robots, ROS-Industrial was born. Through his speaking engagements at trade shows and conferences, Erik spread the news about ROS-Industrial, promoting this new open source project which had the potential to unite the industrial robotics world. The cooperative effort of Erik, Shaun, and Paul to unite the industrial robotics industry through ROS turned out to be only the beginning of their collaboration.
Robots work. People rule.
Most ROS developers — and industrial automation companies for that matter — are focused on the holy grail challenge of making robots fully autonomous. But in the quest to make robots autonomous in the unstructured environment of e-commerce, a nearly insurmountable challenge lies in wait: the corner cases. Corner cases are the engineering term for the diverse, unpredictable events that happen during the normal course of operations.
They are like the tossed coin that unexpectedly lands on its edge. Corner cases are rare events, difficult to reproduce and time-consuming to solve. However, Erik and his co-founders saw a solution to the corner cases so common to the logistics market.
This insight opened a giant opportunity. The co-founders recognized that people are great at dealing with unusual events and can often solve problems without any prior experience. If autonomous robots could be programmed to deal with the common events — the coin that lands on heads or tails, then digitally connected people could deal with the rare occurrences — coins that land on edge. Working together, both would be better. This is the essence of what Plus One Robotics was formed to do. This is why we say, “Robots work. People rule.”