Hendrik Susemihl - CTO at Han's Robot

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Hendrik, the CTO at Han's Robot, and we discuss their mind-blowing innovation in the world of robotics, what cobots are and how they're working with humans, and why it was so important for Han's Robot to build open technology. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) Hey, are you there, buddy?

(Hendrik at 00:00:35) I'm there. Hi, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Hendrik, is that how I pronounce your first name?

(Hendrik at 00:00:40) Yes, that's correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41) I like your background. Look at that. What does your neon sign say?

(Hendrik at 00:00:45) Think about things differently.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:47) Oh, I like that.

(Hendrik at 00:00:48) It's pretty cool. I hope it's capturing the camera here. I did a lot of setting things up that you got it not overlighted, and I hope it looks cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) It looks great. You've got a light going. What type of camera do you have?

(Hendrik at 00:01:00) Right now, it's just my webcam here that I'm recording. But I got a little light that you can see me good enough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:05) That's like the future now. We have to have lights. We have to have microphones. We have to have cool backdrops. This whole working from home thing has really stepped up everyone's game.

(Hendrik at 00:01:16) Absolutely. And all those things are completely sold out because everybody is buying it and all the accessories you need for home streaming and all the web meetings and so on. I tried to get a headset, I think, the second week after lockdown here in Germany and COVID happened. It was nearly impossible because the complete Amazon stock was empty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:35) Oh, yeah. Even today, some of the webcams are out of stock. We tried to buy some for our sales team, you know, to upgrade the experience that people have when meeting with our sales team, and they were just all on back order, and it's been like two or three months.

(Hendrik at 00:01:48) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:49) Yeah. Hey, I was really interested. So I was reading through your bio, and it said you have a degree in something I didn't know existed. It's called mechatronics. Am I saying that right?

(Hendrik at 00:02:00) That's correct. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:00) What is that?

(Hendrik at 00:02:02) It's not well known in the United States. Mechatronics is an intermediate way of having electronic mechanics, control software, and it's just right in the middle. So you get to look in all these different fields. And yeah, it's perfect for robotics. So the study course I did, you can choose if you want to go more focused onto electronics and do electrical development or if you want to go more to the mechanical part. And I was very focused on mechanics and combination with controllers and so on. So making motions, making things optimized for dynamic behavior and dynamic motions, and it's a really cool thing. So I can recommend it. If anybody finds this course, I can recommend it to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:48) Now, was that your first introduction to building robots, or had you been doing it prior to school?

(Hendrik at 00:02:55) The very first time I was introduced to robotics was actually as a child when I started playing around with those LEGO toys. I think LEGO Mindstorms was the first name when they launched it. This was the first time. But then over, when I started my engineering course, at the beginning, I didn't have anything to do with robotics. But just, yeah, by accident, as it always happens, then in the middle of my bachelor's degree, I found a job or I found a thesis at an institute that was about to set up a new robotic cell. And it was super fascinating to work together with the team there. And then from that point on, I stayed in the field of robotics until now. And I think it's the greatest decision I made because you can do so many different things, and it's like all the engineering disciplines coming together in one product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:45) And what type of problem were you solving in college or your first job? Like, what was the business value that you solved with the robots?

(Hendrik at 00:03:54) We were working actually with very big, heavy-duty robots. And I'm located here in Hamburg in north of Germany. And here, the aerospace business is pretty big. So the challenge in aerospace is always to make manufacturing cheaper and make it easier and more productive. I think things have changed maybe now, how the need for productive manufacturing in the aerospace business is right now. But at that time, it was pretty much ramping up, and everybody was looking for new ways of building planes. And the parts you're doing at aircraft, especially large parts like the wings, like the vertical tail plane and so on, they cost a lot. So it's like a house. One part is the value of a house you have there. And so the process you need to do on that, like trimming the edges or coating the whole part, it's super sensitive and it needs to be super precise and very good controlled. But on the other hand, you have those very, very big special machines you normally use that nobody wants to invest in the future anymore. And yeah, then robotics were very interesting at that point, leveling the quality and the accuracy and the capabilities—what robots can do—to a level where you can do the precision and the quality you need for aircraft parts. And yeah, this was where I started. So we set up a robot cell where we wanted to machine robots, machine aircraft parts, and make this whole process much simpler and much more versatile.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:16) Are you excited about this path that you chose? I mean, you get to work with robots all day.

(Hendrik at 00:05:21) Yes, I do. And it's so cool. So every time you see a robot moving with all its axles at the same time, it's always fascinating. So the childish eyes you have at the first time, you never lose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:31) I was at a conference last year at this conference called Synapse, and they take all the different technology from our state and they bring it to Amalie Arena, which is like a professional hockey team, and they display it. Right? So you get a wide variety, whereas normally conferences are pretty narrow. So you'd be like security, you get all types of stuff. And they had this robotic arm, and they were showing it off to me and it was really cool because I don't get to interact with industrial robotics often. Right? And the feature that I found interesting was that it had this concept that it works with humans. So when the arm would move, if you apply a certain amount of pressure against it, it kind of just collapses and returns to some normal state because they're made to be working around humans. And then when I saw your website, I saw that you had some of the robots that almost looked exactly like one of the ones I had seen. So are these robots like working side by side with people?

(Hendrik at 00:06:29) Yeah, that's the whole idea about it. So robotics, I think they started very simple in the industry. It was a pretty easy tool to just get things done in a higher productivity, in a higher precision, and do it day and night all day over. But the thing is, you build normally a tool to interact with it, to use it in certain situations. And robotics at the beginning were pretty complex, so only experts can use them. And they were pretty successful in car manufacturing industry and everything that's dirty and not a very nice environment for working with humans. And they did a great job there. So if you look today at the car manufacturing industry, it's like 90% is automated, and only the complex part, the last 10%, are so far not automated. And more and more, there was kind of a saturation how you can use robots in the industry or in other fields because they were not flexible enough. It was a very static setup where you have to invest a lot of money at the first time, but then you can do many, many, many parts. But today, you have such a high variety on products you want to do. Or if you're not a big company that is building millions of cars, you need a higher flexibility. You have different product variants. Maybe you have a big job one time for a couple of weeks, but then you need to change everything. So there was a need of more flexibility. And there comes this problem in that this setup of classical industrial robots takes a lot of time to change. And the idea then was—and this field that you just saw and mentioned is called cobots. It means collaborative robots. So robots are able to work close to a human and do this in a safe way so that you don't have to build up these fences and make sure with optical scanners or other safety devices that the robot hurts you. You can just put it next to the person, and then they can work with the robot side by side and reach to the robot some parts or, yeah, just collaborate. But yeah, that's actually what we're doing, but we're doing the next step of this era. So the idea of having a flexible robot next to your side is pretty great, but there's a lot of work to do to really get the benefit of having a robotic assistant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:34) Yeah, I saw in one of the screenshots or graphics I was looking at because you had this Future Days event recently. So we were looking at it, and I think it was just like a week or two ago. So how did it go?

(Hendrik at 00:08:48) It went absolutely great. So it was the first time that we launched the products or that we showed the products to an exclusive amount of people what we have done over the past time, and it was a tremendous success. So we had so many views. We did like three sessions. One session for Asia, one session for Europe, and one session for America, and everything was live-streamed there. And we were all like frightened and pretty excited because we were waiting for the feedback and didn't want to make any mistakes, but it was a perfect day. So it went perfect. And yeah, the feedback that we get gives us a feeling we are on the right track right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:24) What was the big highlight? Like, what's the thing that you were most excited about at the event?

(Hendrik at 00:09:29) What you've seen so far on our website is not the things that we have put our most focus on. So there's not much to find right now what we're really doing, but we launched three different products. The one you've probably seen, we launched there a very new generation of a cobot. So of a robot that is very light, that is very precise, but on the same page is super low cost so that even small companies or yeah, even family businesses can buy such a robot and start with simple automation. This was the first one. The second one that we launched was, it's called AMRs, so autonomous mobile robots, that enable, yeah, for example, in logistics or assembly lines, parts to be moving around completely autonomously. And on top of that, you can put also manipulators. So you have this robot with a mobile platform that can completely do autonomous tasks. And then the third thing, and this is the most exciting part, we presented our newest product that we called a cognitive robot. So we define this as the next generation of the robotic era will look like. And what is special about this robot—that we really start doing a personal assistant. So the robots that can work side by side to a human have the problem that they are still robots. So if you want to bring the robot to a new task, you still have to do this, yeah, procedural programming. You need to know a little bit about robotics. You need to know a little bit about programming to really bring the robot to an application. But what we want to do is to make a robot so smart that you can work with it as you would work with a coworker. So if you want to teach me, for example, a new application, how would you do that? So you wouldn't write me a code. You wouldn't write me an if-else instruction or something like this. You would explain it to me. You would show it to me. Maybe you would even speak to me or show me something. And this is exactly what we have worked on—to build a system that is able to do that. So imagine you have an assistant on your side that is not only safely working next to you and is able to detect the environment, but that also can listen to you, that you can show the system something. And it directly understands what to do and then makes the program out of it by itself. The whole thing is covered under the name cognitive robots. So you got the cognition. So measuring the whole environment, seeing what is around me, hearing what is around me, and then combining it with intelligent software and bring this together to a smart assistant. And this was definitely the most exciting part, presenting this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:58) That's cool.

(Hendrik at 00:11:59) Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:02) I thought a lot about that too because when I was thinking about different AI systems—because my background is primarily software, whereas my dad has mechanical engineering. And so I've got a little mix of both worlds—but I always thought, like, they would need to evolve. They would need to co-evolve, like the sensors and the movement with the artificial intelligence, because it would be really hard to develop everything in just like a simulator, just completely alone, and have it go all the way to market ready. So they would be kind of like codependent on each other, the progression of the physical abilities with the progression of the cognitive abilities.

(Hendrik at 00:12:40) That's completely right. And this is where we put a very great focus on—that we combine this world on one platform. And I also saw one of your talks with the CTO of Vicarious AI, and it's a really cool company. What they're doing is amazing, talking about general intelligence. But bringing these things really into applications and bringing this soon into applications, there's one thing that you can't forget about, and this is how this interacts really with the hardware. So if you really want to use sensors in real time, you want to interact on situations that happen very quickly and you need to be fast, you need real-time communication. And this is very hard if you say, I have a very intelligent software, but I want to apply this to every hardware that is out there in the world. You run very, very quickly into problems like which interface you're using. Is it smart enough? How do we put a camera on top of it? And then the problem becomes, again, very complex again because you got many different parties that need to be put together to one system. But if you really control the hardware, this makes, from our perspective, the whole game changer where you can really get one step further. When we started the company, we made this one week of workshops where all of our departments started to introduce what they wanted to bring into the company. And I also did a start presentation, and one of my very first credos I wrote down was, people who are serious about software should do their own hardware. I think it's a quote from Alan Kay, a pioneer in object-oriented programming. And he was relating, of course, to electronics, but it is also true for all the mechanical hardware. So if you have control over everything, if you exactly know how your robot arm behaves from motor to the encoders you have inside of it and you build everything so that it is made to assist humans. And then you build on top of this, this software basis. Then you can really make crazy things with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:33) Yeah. I like that when you're talking about this cognitive robot that you can show it things, maybe like in a warehouse setting. It's really interesting because I like having—I notice that people have the conversation of, okay, the robot's not smart enough, and it's very subjective to say that it's smart. And they're like, well, it's not as smart as a human. And then you have to go farther than that. You have to say, it's not as smart as a human who knows that specialized task. Because we've gotten far enough in life to know that if we dedicate enough time and energy with the right motivation, we can learn something, but we can only hold so much information at once. Right? So we're limited in our capacity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:11) So when I start thinking of how these robots will mature and come about, the default conversation is that they're good at everything if they're as smart as a human. Like, that's how we think about it. But really, we have to narrow that down to how smart a human can be at one specific task. And can we get a robot programmed in an easy way to do that one specific task? And then you multiply that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:35) And the benefit that the robots have is once the skill is roboticized, if that's a word, it can be...

(Hendrik at 00:15:43) I think so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:44) It could be translated. So the robot could have perfect skills at virtually every available task because it's learned from the humans, and it can all be inside of one robot in the future.

(Hendrik at 00:15:56) Yeah. I think what is so fascinating about putting AI and robotics together, if you compare it to humans, one human can get very, very good in one task. And then maybe afterwards, he learns another task and then another task. But if you have a robot system that somehow talks with each other, exchanges information, then what one robot is learning in one situation, you can directly apply to all the other things. And this is when things really get crazy and applications get very, very rapidly going everywhere, and the opportunities of what you can do with such a system can be rolled out everywhere.

(Hendrik at 00:16:30) This is the exciting part. But of course, you have to have certain requirements. So if you work in an industrial environment, you will always have specialized tools where you can grab something, some special parts, and this exact robot then, of course, cannot do another task as good as some robot that has been tuned for this application. But what you've learned on a software base, you can directly apply to another one. This is fascinating, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:54) So yeah, let's fast forward this a hundred years. I have kids. They're under the age of four. But what it looks like now, robotics is in its infancy. It can pick something up. It can move something. It can do some, what you were describing, some basic monkey see, monkey do stuff now with the AI where you could show it something and it can replicate it. Fast forward that a hundred years, what does it look like?

(Hendrik at 00:17:18) That's a tough question. I mean, what everybody would have said a hundred years before, how our future would look like. So if you look at movies of the eighties or something like Back to the Future, they were all thinking flying cars and everybody thought that was crazy, that would never gonna happen. But I think no one would have seen come what did happen right now with all the technology we have, with smartphones, what computers we're carrying day by day, and how we are connected together. So it's very hard to say. I love to see the videos of Boston Dynamics, the dog and Atlas. It looks like a human. And it's crazy how fast they start to move like humans. And if you fast forward that speed, how the technology has developed over the last ten years, what they have did, and we combine it with all the technologies that are coming up there with super fast real-time communications that can happen over the whole world, with more and more growing computing power that gets in very, very small devices.

(Hendrik at 00:18:14) They become very, very powerful tools. But I think what is very important is that a robot is always a tool for a human and that those systems should always be developed to assist us, to help us to get better, to do some things easier, and to improve our lives. So I don't think that there is a scary future where people think of Terminator scenarios where robots are so smart that we can never compete with them anymore. But we will be able to do things that we right now can't imagine. I'm sure of that. So it's very hard for me to imagine what a hundred years will look like with such a development speed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:46) Yeah. But it's exciting, though. I think I tend to be an optimist because everybody that I know, they're building things to help others. Right? And those are the things that really improve and grow in the market. So I think we'll continue with that path. And things like Neuralink. I like Elon Musk's concept. If you can't beat them, join them. Right?

(Hendrik at 00:19:10) Let's just upload. There we go. Yeah. That's super exciting. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:14) But it should always be...

(Hendrik at 00:19:15) To help people. So this is also what our main creator of the company is. We say we serve humanity because we wanna give people the ability to focus on the things that they are normally good at. And people are not good at doing tasks day in, day out over and over and ruin their body and getting, yeah, doing unhealthy tasks. They are good at doing creative things, of being social, talking to people, evolving new ideas. And I think this is what it is about. So to give them a tool where they can do also simple tasks with and teach them the robot, but then focus on the next one and the next one. And the assistant on their side just helps them to maybe do the dirty work or to do the work, yeah, where humans are just not meant to be for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:55) Yeah. They'll probably be... I like to think of what's an ideal or perfect future, just for fun, like a thought experiment. And one of the things I run into is, so I think about what would it be like if we could have robots that manufactured other robots, like autonomous systems that could replicate. And then those robots essentially did all of our work for us. Right? And then you mix in the conversation of emotion into the robots. And I think there'll be a split. I think there'll be economy-based robots. And then I also think people end up having personal robots that they'll actually have relationships with. I think there'll be service robots that they'll interact with, sort of like a cobot, maybe do the laundry or the dishes, but there's no emotional software package installed on it. So I don't think it's a one size fits all, and I know that's where the conversation goes by default. We imagine that they're always infinitely connected. Right? But it's not gonna be like that. There's gonna be different manufacturers. There's gonna be different operating systems. There's gonna be different purposes and all sorts of things. Yeah. It would actually be kind of chaotic to try to network them all together to have one singular personality. Right? Just from our background in engineering, that would be an incredible feat.

(Hendrik at 00:21:07) Yeah. But the exciting thing is everything you just described, I think the technology is there for having emotional bondings to robots. I mean, there is software that can easily detect how you're feeling right now, in what mood you are, and it's so crazy what you can do already with this technology. So yeah. But it's exactly as you said. So there will be not, unless it's iRobot or something, the one big company that builds all the assistants that can do everything from manufacturing to personal home assistants. It will be always specialized products that can help you and evolve your life in certain situations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:39) I have a question for you. It might be kind of silly given all your experience. Okay. So I was doing the laundry the other day, and then I saw one of your robots, and it seemed like it had an upper torso that the arms could move in and a head, but then it could also, had a base so it could move. Correct?

(Hendrik at 00:21:57) This is...

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:57) Like, one of the newer robots? So when I saw these arms, I was like, okay, it could pull the laundry out and fold it. And maybe if I taught it, right, if I taught it, that could happen. And then I thought, okay, well, what if you wanted to build a bunch of these and then give them to people, have people rent them. Right? And they would be able to go clean their houses and do dishes and do laundry. But at first, you wouldn't, because all the situations would be unique, you would almost need a person in a call center with robotic mesh on or some sort of mesh controller on. And that person would do it the first couple times and then it would autoplay for that household because it would know all the uniqueness of it. And I was just curious as far as training goes. Right? Not actually pursuing this as a business model. I just like to have these thought experiments. But as far as that goes for training, will we see robots like that in the market where there's essentially robot drone type pilots in a central place controlling fleets of them and teaching them? And is that gonna happen? Or is it happening?

(Hendrik at 00:23:05) Well, that could be a way of training the robot. So I think you can use a lot of information on how you train a robot. So what we are focusing right now is that we really show the robot live directly what you wanna do by taking the robot, guiding him to what he should do, and just record everything, or by just using our fingers and using the sensors we have inside and show him, for example, you have to go around this corner right now, then he just records it and saves it. But of course, you also could use those tracking devices and monitor your body and then use it as doing motions and make the robot do it. I think there is also, I don't know which company it was, actually, that did this use case on a show where Jeff Bezos went into these arms that were tracked, and then they have two of those small robots, and they were exactly imitating this behavior of what he is doing. So the technology is absolutely there. It's only a question, I think, of what makes sense from a perspective of how easy it is, how expensive it is to have this device that tracks you, or is it more suitable, like we do it right now, to use the sensors that the system already has inside and you just do it on-site. But another interesting thing, you were just talking about business models. And there is a lot of thinking about doing completely new business models with robots. So I think the classical way we have today that a company just buys a piece and then uses it until it's broken and scales it out as much as they need it, it also will apply to smart robotics because this is the field where everybody is coming from, and they will implement those robots there first.

(Hendrik at 00:24:39) But the idea of having a person who is like a farmer, a robot farmer, who has this fleet of systems, and he can do jobs at certain locations or has a small manufacturing hall, for example, that can do various jobs and he's only training the systems and then they are doing it for themselves, allows a lot of freedom to have more ideas of how the business could work. So it doesn't need to be the OEM manufacturing who is doing it by itself. It could also be freelancers who have just a farm of assistants who do the work for them. And they just, yeah, train the robots and learn new tasks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:12) Yeah. It's a whole new market. Everyone's saying the robots are gonna take our jobs. I mean, that would create an entire... That's like every kid who got their start, you know, knocking on the neighbor's door mowing lawns. Like, what if you had the smart lawnmower, you could mow that person's lawn one or two times, and then the mower would learn to do it. And then it would have some basic detection of anomalies or whatnot, but then you could have operators monitoring it.

(Hendrik at 00:25:36) Yeah. Absolutely. So it's always the discussion about new industry revolutions, what happens to the jobs that are affected by this. But it is like it has been before, all the revolutions we have seen so far. There is a big wide field of new opportunities of new jobs that are created by those. And I think the important thing, and where people are very scared about, is I need to become an expert to work with robots, and this has been true for the last decades. It was very hard to work with a robot. You need to know, as I just mentioned, programming languages and so on. But these new types of robots, they are just programmed and used as you do it with your smartphone. So everybody who's able to go on the Internet using a simple app, they also can use a robot, and it's not a hard thing to learn it. So there will be not expert trainings and so on. You just can look at it on the web and have a training there and just learn, okay, how it works, very simple, and then you can start trying it and just do it by yourself. And I think if people realize this and if they have the contact the first time with such a system or one of our robots and they see there is no barrier anymore. I can do it very, very easy. I can learn it very quickly. I think then many people will lose the fear that there will be no space for them anymore in the future. Of course, they need to have the understanding that they need to learn something new or that they need to change something, but it is possible for everybody to work with such a system.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:59) It's amazing some of the fear, though, that I've seen out there. I was actually surprised. So I was talking about it with my father-in-law who happens to be a UPS semi-truck driver, like, shipping semi-truck driver. And he was like, oh, that'll never happen. And it was like last Thanksgiving. And I was like, what do you mean? I mean, they just built a semi that delivered its first autonomous load already. He's like, no, it would never happen. And so I looked it up online and I found this documentary on Amazon Prime where they interviewed all of these semi-truck drivers and the amount of anger and fear of them saying how impossible it is and how you have to, you know, understand the road and all these things that sensors could definitely do a lot better. It was just surprising to me. I was like, I guess I am in my tech bubble. Like, with all the tech people, when I can see this stuff and understand it, it's very, very exciting to me.

(Hendrik at 00:27:56) Yeah. And I also can understand that it is, for many people, also very scary. So if you see the Boston Dynamics robots for the first time, it looks kind of scary, of course. But on the other hand, it's so fascinating what you can do with it. And if you use the tools right, I think there is nothing to be scared of. But people are not in the tech industry. We do it every day, and we are reading so much about it. I can absolutely understand that this looks frightening, that this looks like something that is not good and that people don't want. But it will happen. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:25) It's like people are scared of... It's a human thing. People are scared of what they don't know. I mean, even myself...

(Hendrik at 00:28:31) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:31) It's my first reaction when I don't understand something to be scared of it, and then I, you know, have some realization. But I was curious about your company. So is, and we can edit the podcast as much as we want, but is Neuro Robotics, is that a new thing, or can you explain Neuro Robotics to me?

(Hendrik at 00:28:49) We are about to change the brand a little bit. So as you've seen before, before the launch event of last Friday, everything was under the title Han's Robot. This is how we started. This is our initial name. But right now, we're changing the brand a little bit to the new era of what we're doing. So Neuro, the name from neurons, bringing in intelligence to systems, is definitely more suiting for the new era that we are working on now. So it's still the same company, but we are just making a little bit of rebranding. So if you right now go on websites and so on, there will still be a lot of the old name because we just announced it last week that we will do it. But over the next weeks and months, we will then completely just transfer everything to the new brand.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:31) Nice. Nice. I like the name. It sounds very modern. It's really... I'm a huge fan.

(Hendrik at 00:29:38) Thanks. I love it also. I love it very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:40) What did Han mean for Han's Robot?

(Hendrik at 00:29:44) It's Chinese, actually. We have a Chinese relationship, and Han comes from "for the people, for everybody." So it's also suitable, actually, the name. But for many people who not directly understand it, it's maybe not so obvious what the main name means.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:59) Yeah. Well, you know, you're in Germany, and I have one of my friends who's German. His name is Hans. And we realized, we're like, "No, no, it's Hans." Like, it's Han apostrophe S. It's not Hans as the name.

(Hendrik at 00:30:12) Exactly. Yeah. It's happened actually very often. If you talk to German companies, especially companies maybe that are not so modern, a little bit older, and then you explain what the name is, then they're always thinking about the German first name Hans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:25) So this other robot—so you guys have the new cobot or the cobots is the category, and then you—

(Hendrik at 00:30:31) Cobot is a category, exactly. And so we have three different products. We have cobot. That is also something very special and new to the industry because right now, cobots are mainly focused about being very light and very flexible and to be safe. And what we brought together here is what the industry absolutely needed, to bring in industry standards like robustness, protection classes, and accuracy to such a concept. So the new cobot that we just launched, the name is actually Lara. It means Lightweight Autonomous Robotic Assistant, combines both worlds—so being lightweight, being flexible, and being very precise, and also having such a system at a very low price so that small companies can start implementing robots very, very easily. Then we have this mobile robot I just talked about, and our newest version that we call actually MIRA that you won't find much about yet. It stands for Multi-Sensing Intelligent Robotic Assistant. This is what we like to define a cognitive robot because this is the next step over the cobots.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:37) Okay. So if I wanted to build a robot that could put away my dishes from my dishwasher, right, and I wanted to do it from a remote location—like, I'm here at my office, I'm not at home, and I want to put on my robot suit and I want to be inside of this robot and put my dishes away back at home—which robot would I start with as a base to start hacking on top of?

(Hendrik at 00:32:06) As soon as you move in an environment where not everything is controlled, you need this next evolution of robots because that's what it's about. Cognition means that you can detect and interact with the environment when things happen that you can't foresee. So in a household where things can lay around, where the dishes can be a little bit different than before or something gets stuck or whatever, this is exactly the environment that is so far for robots so complicated. And there you absolutely need all the sensors and the algorithms behind us who can deal with this. And so the answer would be clear. For me, you absolutely need one of those cognitive robots. And with a cobot, you also could do pretty cool tasks, and you can very easily learn how to bring the dishes out of your dishwasher. But as soon as something happens that you haven't programmed before, then it gets stuck. And I think you wouldn't be happy with such a system at home where you come home and it stopped after 10% because there were something unexpected happened.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:05) Now can people build on top of your robots? Are they open?

(Hendrik at 00:33:10) Yes, they are. This was super important for us. So the whole software architecture that we built is designed that, first step, you got many, many known interfaces that are industry standards that have real-time capabilities. And we also offer all the sensors we have inside of there, all the AI features that everybody can directly work with it and also run programs on our system. And this even goes to user interfaces. So you're also able to just very, very quickly design your own user interfaces. So if you are a company, a small company, you do, I don't know, welding applications, and you just need some things to add for your customers, you can directly build it on top of it. And the field of robotics where we are going into will be so huge, and there can be so many things be done that it would be crazy if we say we do it all by our own. We want that people work on our system. We want that research institutes, universities, that they use the system, and they love it because it is so open source and it has all the standards that you already know from robotics. And yeah, this is also where a big barrier right now in the robotics market is because normally, a robot manufacturer wants their system as closed as possible because there is their know-how inside, and they offer just the interfaces you need that are from industrial standards required. But as soon as you want to do new things, and those things mostly happen at first in research facilities—and I worked also there for a long, long time—it was super frustrating if you have this great idea, you have this great organization where multiple companies want to do crazy things. You have new sensors and great software developers, but you can't do it because you have no access to that black box. And this bothered us so much that we said, "All right, we directly from the beginning, we want to do it open, and we want everybody to be able to build on top of it."

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:56) Yes. I'm a fan. That is so exciting. That's what you want. I mean, I've been a software developer for like seventeen years, and nothing's more frustrating than when you want to just go over and make an edit to something, and it's all locked up, and you can't even do—you know, flip a single bit. You can't just make one small change. Yeah.

(Hendrik at 00:35:14) Yeah. And I think the industry has to understand that if they really want to do big innovation steps and they want to move forward and improve systems, that they cannot do everything in their house because it takes so much knowledge to build such a thing. So, I mean, we have here a team where you have engineers from all different disciplines, and they've been working on it since many, many, many years and build up their knowledge in there. And what we are putting here together and having such a crazy environment and crazy team here, this is very rare, especially for the companies who are in manufacturing here or in production. They have to specialize stuff in doing what they are best at. And this is what companies should always do, doing—having their focus. And if they are trying then to use a robot and say, "All right, we're building everything by our own on top, but we're securing the knowledge that only we can do it," this won't do very big innovative steps. So you need systems that are open, where people share, where you have communities, where you have, like, we have systems planned like app stores where people can do great applications and then just supply to the community. Or if they're very, very good, build a business on top of it and say, "I'm expert at this application here. You can buy my applications, and then you don't have to do anything new with your robot. You just start it, and you are also an expert in this." And this is also a thing that will get the industry to completely change because you not have this classical chain where you have the manufacturer, the robotics or automation expert, and the customer. You then have, like you did at a smartphone, you have a complete community of intelligent people all over the world who can work on it and supplying them with simulators. So for people that don't have the money to build such a robot because—or buy a robot because for a private person, of course, these are machines in the first place that are made for industry, so they are not coming as a DJI drone. But for industry, they are very cheap. Giving them then simulators, online tools where they can work on how they can learn programming, or giving this to schools and universities. I think this is where the real fun happens when many people say, "All right, this is so cool. I want to work on this."

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:14) So cool. You remind me a lot of like Stripe, the payments processor. When they came out, they just focused on building the infrastructure and making it really easy for developers to engage with it, and they completely took the payments industry by storm. All the other payment processors saw it as an expense and pointless and, you know, focused all their resources elsewhere. And they said, "We're just going to make it really, really easy for all these engineers out there to build on top of," and then they're like dominating now. And it sounds like you're making it really easy for people to build on top of these robots.

(Hendrik at 00:37:48) Yes. That's exactly the plan. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:50) Yeah. So there you go. Stripe, next Stripe billionaire, Hendrik.

(Hendrik at 00:37:55) Oh, it's a long, long road to go there. So we're just getting started. And that's the exciting thing. So we already have done so many cool things, and we are so proud of the robots that we have right now here running at our partners, at our first customers. And, but still, it's just the beginning. So the road of those robots bringing to wide application in the world, that's just such a long road, and that's the exciting thing. So that we just done those first steps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:20) So at what point do you call it a robot? So like, I have an Alexa, right, that sits on my kitchen countertop, and I can talk to her, interact with her. She can affect change in the real world by me placing an order or a volume change or lights on and off. But then I typically associate robots with things that can move. Right? But what's the actual line? Like, where do you say this is a robot?

(Hendrik at 00:38:45) Well, I'm not an expert in the definition of the real definition of robot. So if I has learned that it's a programmable machine that can do repeatable tasks that you have once trained them on. If this also applies to something that only happens virtually by talking to you or controlling lights or whatever. I actually don't know. So I would also call this a kind of a robot. So but I think mainly people see robots as things that can interact with something and that can move. So what definitely our robots are, like drones, like automatic lawnmowers, like all the things we've seen from industry and those type of things that somehow can move, can walk, can have kind of mechanics that interacts—a program or no—that transfers a program into emotion. So I think this might be the correct definition of what a robot is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:35) I might be a robot.

(Hendrik at 00:39:38) I don't know. I don't know. I think in, I don't know, five to ten years, it will be hard to tell.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:43) It will be. I've got my little cyborg add-on right here. Soon, it will be embedded inside of me.

(Hendrik at 00:39:51) Yeah. It's starting with Neuralink, and then we see what comes next.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:55) What is some of the like—you mentioned like the lawnmowers too. I'm just assuming that they exist. I've never actually pulled them up and I've seen them. But I have seen some of the—I had a talk with the, like, construction foreman, and they were explaining to me about how some of these, like, paving machines for highways, right, building, like, the asphalt machines, how they're partially autonomous now. Even though there's a person in the control seat, they're very targeted with the GPS, and the movements are all planned out in advance. And so I'm just curious. What is some of the coolest things that you've seen, aside from what you're doing, like, just out there in the world that we've been using robotics for recently?

(Hendrik at 00:40:39) Well, there are so many crazy things out there. I think a couple we definitely talk about. So I am a huge fan of what Boston Dynamics is doing. And a couple of his videos really, first time, scared me. And I am always, when people are not knowing what are robots right now, and I try to describe what is actually a robot and how robots can look in the future, I just pull out my smartphone and show, like, the videos where he's doing parkour movements, and they're like, "This is not CGI. This is real." So I think these are definitely one of the craziest things. What I also I'm really impressed of: I worked for a long time, as I mentioned at the beginning, in the aircraft manufacturing industry, and there are such amazing machines where mobile robots that weighed, like, ten, fifteen tons or something like this, where multiple of those move together to a fuselage of the of an aircraft and—well, test or not well, test; at months, no, also not bonding. What's the—riveting. Yeah. Riveting is the right word. Riveting those huge processes together, and those are such amazing looking machines. I mean, it's not such high-end robotic as Boston Dynamics is doing it, but it's just a combination of so many big machines doing this completely autonomously. And it's like a huge, huge, huge factory where it looks like airplanes can be built completely autonomously.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:58) That is so cool. That's amazing. My producer, Jake, he just sent me a link to this company. I can't pronounce them because it's just hard for me to say. It starts with an H, but you can buy an autonomous, like, personal lawnmower for your own yard. That's crazy.

(Hendrik at 00:42:15) You never have seen these?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:17) No. I've never seen these.

(Hendrik at 00:42:20) I think they are pretty similar to the ones that make the vacuum cleaning in your household. I think it's mainly the same principle, but they're just a little bit more robust for outdoors. So yeah, that's also a category of robots. And they are super successful because there's such a wide market for it. What we are doing up to now is still focused on industrial use cases like manufacturing or in the future like medical, food production, life science, and so on. But going with robots into the private sector and consumer markets like drones and all those private robots you use, that is an insanely big market, and they are super successful with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:59) I love it.

(Hendrik at 00:43:00) And, you know, the German company Bosch—yeah—was the main car supplier. They have this cool commercial where they have a song like "Like a Bosch." So they're using like "Like a Bosch," and they are showing what IoT in the future in the private sector can mean. So you have the car that drives in your yard completely autonomously. Then you have those lawnmowers. You have your automatized refrigerator that says what to do. You have all this lighting that it's controlling, and it's so cool. It's just one person walking around, and everything is completely done by robots. And he's just like a boss because he don't have to do anything. That's pretty cool. I love this commercial.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:40) I love it. I'm going to watch that after our conversation here. That sounds really cool. Wow. Man, I just—I'm excited. The weird thing is, my friend, we are going to see this in our lifetime. Like, twenty, thirty years, this is—I was thinking about my kids growing up, and I was like, "Wait. In ten years or twelve years when they start to get their licenses, how many—what percentage of the cars are going to be autopilot?" Probably a lot.

(Hendrik at 00:44:07) Yeah. Yeah. That's absolutely true. So I think I'm very lucky that I have been born at the time that I've been born because I also think that the time where computers are starting really to roll out and to have been one of the kids that have a Nokia phone and that really appreciated what piece of technology we have today in our hands, not only saying, "All right..."

(Hendrik at 00:44:29) I use it for Instagram and so on, but really understanding how much engineers have worked for it over decades and how crazy the technology has become. I think this will even more value the next ten, twenty, thirty years, what will happen, to see where we have started. And sometimes, yeah, when I see my parents right now, they are also adopting all this technology at their homes, and they are still pretty open to it. And I force them that they do new things because I never want that they say, "Okay, I'm too old for this," because I don't believe that you're ever too old for this.

(Hendrik at 00:44:57) Today, it's so easy. You can learn it all the time. You can be 90 and you can learn how to use a smartphone. But if I imagine what they must be thinking of the world of today, if they started their life in the fifties and they are seeing what right now is happening in the world, I think for us it will be even crazier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:13) I hope so. That's what I was sold. I was sold craziness. Right? That's what I'm excited for it to happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:21) I mean, you just look back at the movies and what they're predicting, and then whenever I see a business case line up with a futuristic technology, you just know it's going because all the money can flow there. Like, once you start building the robots for the industrial sector, money just happens because they're looking for efficiency and growth. And also, there's just constantly more humans. I think a lot of the times when we talk about economics, we leave out this fact that there's not a static amount of humans. Like, we are growing rapidly. And so there's more people, there's more needs of the basic items, and, you know, it almost seems like we will get the technology the moment we start to need it. You know, I don't think we were meant to just completely fill up Earth and that be it. I mean, I think we're explorers. I think the technology will enable us to venture out far beyond where we currently are.

(Hendrik at 00:46:18) Absolutely. What I find super interesting is that some of the technologies that we are using today or the ideas of having that, they were started in science fiction movies. And I think it's fascinating that many of these ideas are not coming from the people who are building this, but they are coming from people who are just creating stories, just thinking about visions and creating the future. And then, yeah, people like us then just pick it up and say, "Alright, that's possible, and we can use it for this one or that one, and we can improve the world to a better one." It's so fascinating that innovation can happen in such various ways. Yeah, this is why I also love to watch science fiction movies because it's always interesting to see people who are saying, "Oh, that's nonsense, and that's not gonna happen." And they say, "Oh, you're partly right. Okay, that's maybe a little bit over the top to make it more exciting." But actually, there are kind of pieces of technology where you could do this in the future. And if we need it as humans, there might be someone who will come up with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:18) I think that's one of the greatest parts about humanity as a whole because we're such a diverse—like, if we look at all of humanity as a specific organism, like as a single organism, right? There's parts of us that do this imagination thing and that becomes movies and arts, and there are people that are more into that. They spend their time there, so they're specialists there. There are people that are specialists in the building. But we're all connected in the fact that when we're not building, right, when we're not doing our day-to-day thing, the here and now thing, in our extracurricular time, in our media consumption time, a lot of that is either replaying social scenarios that we're just familiar with or envisioning a future. Right?

(Hendrik at 00:48:00) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:01) And so it's almost like an incredibly important part of humanity to be constantly being over the top, like creative with the science fiction in the future, because that inspires us, you know, to get to that next step. It's like, it's very—I think humanity is a very beautiful, interesting organism.

(Hendrik at 00:48:20) Yeah. Yeah. And I think also the diversity you just mentioned, it's super important for doing innovation. So we here in the company, we have, like, I think like 20 nations or something working from all over the world, even though we're not right now the biggest company in the world. We're already in a small team. I have, like, yeah, 20 nations, and it's such a great impact on the work. You have so many different backgrounds, cultural, also political, and it's such a cool thing how very different people can talk about the same thing, have the same passion, and want to do the same thing in the future, how it, you know, incredibly makes development and innovation faster. So if everybody would just come from maybe my private environment that I think they are similar like me, I don't think that we would do such a rapid innovation as we're doing it right now. It's because of the diversity we have here in the teams and in the environment. And, yeah, I think this you can scale up to the whole humanity. So even if, or only if, we use this diversity, we will do the big next great steps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:25) Yeah. We have to embrace something that's very useful to the progression of us. Right?

(Hendrik at 00:49:31) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:31) What are you learning from a leadership perspective? So you're a leader at the company. You're building these robots. Seems like there's a lot of energy, a lot of drive, a lot of passion for what you're doing in the market you're in. You've got people, diverse backgrounds, 20 plus nations. But you as a leader and your personal growth in your career, like, what are you learning right now?

(Hendrik at 00:49:54) If I summarize what I have learned over the last time, it's firstly, I was super—not scared, but I had a very big respect to start this position with such talented people because everybody here is an expert in their field. They have such a great track record, and it really brought me out of my comfort zone when I started here. But I really learned quickly that there's really no need to do it. So everybody has this role here. I have a role to communicate mainly, to bring ideas together, to see where are the focuses we need to set. And I have grown over the last one and a half years, for me personally, enormous. So on the one side, technologically, I have a study background and also my professional background where I learned a lot of different fields. But how deep I could dive into technology in certain fields like electronic manufacturing and embedded software development and so on, where I knew a couple of things before, but how intense we are doing it right now, this is one part where I have grown a lot. And the other thing is that, of course, it's also very challenging to have such a complex product as we are doing it and to bring many, many people from different backgrounds together and make their work as effective as possible. And it helps a lot that people here are working that I completely can trust. And I have team leaders that I have worked together before for ten years, and I brought them in the company and showed them the vision that we are gonna do it. And they were fascinated from it. And I knew the moment that I saw the blink in the eye when I asked, "Do you want to join us? Do you want to become part of the team?" And they said, "Yes, I want to do it." I know I can trust you, and I can concentrate on learning and adopting with you on my side because I know you will do the best of your job, and I know what you are doing. And I think this was very, very important. And the thing of getting further and further for me is always, my personal rule is to try to bring me every time in unexpected situations and come out of the comfort zone because it is quickly—when you do quick development, you quickly reach a new level of comfort. And you're used to speak for many people. You're used to lead bigger teams and go to companies and present your product and your company to the CEOs of the world. This is becoming day by day more of the comfort zone. So it's hard that you every time find something new that you don't know and then concentrate on that because this will help you as a person to grow and then, yeah, bring this into your new field of where you like to work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:15) Nice. So, yeah, you're learning a lot. You're really excited. This is an awesome company.

(Hendrik at 00:52:20) Absolutely. It is so great. And, yeah, one of the best parts, as I just mentioned, is that I work with so many people for so long a time, and that every people that I asked, I know in this field, you are the best person that I know, and I have the complete trust that you can fill your position there. And each person that we were asking, same for my network as for David's network that I think you will also talk to in a couple of weeks, our CEO—he also asked the best people from his network. Every one of those people, they were directly in, and they thought this vision is the right thing to do. And from the beginning on when we started, we had this feeling of we are a team that is working together for ten years, even if many of the people I've seen on the first day where we started for the first time. And, yeah, this environment here and this team with working on such a great vision that really drives us and kicks us in the ass day to day to do more and be better and create the greatest out of our products.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:17) Oh, I love it. That's like a mic drop moment. You're great. This has been fantastic, Hendrik. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Hendrik at 00:53:26) I feel great. It was so much fun. So it was the first podcast that I was doing, but the ones that I've done so far were more like really focusing on what you did at the last part. So motivating people on how they can build up their career, how they can do it better, or very, very technical and diving into very certain things. So I love the mixture that we just discussed here from political, cultural aspects over new technology, how it will go there. It was super exciting. So thank you very much for being a part of it. I'm very honored to be in such a great format here that you've created with many, many people that are in the highest level of the tech companies in the world, and I feel pretty honored to be a part of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:07) Oh, I'm so grateful that you took time and came on and hung out. I like this to be like if you and I were to go to lunch, you know, what would we talk about? This is what we would talk about. This is what would be interesting. And for me, with being a software engineer for so long and I got to work on, you know, so many different types of products, like, it's fascinating to me what you're doing with robotics. Like, I could have a whole lifetime over there, but instead, I just kind of get to dive in and talk to experts from all the different industries. And for me, that's just kind of the thing that I really enjoy doing. So, you know, this hour that we get to spend together, I mean, this is like the highlight of my week, man.

(Hendrik at 00:54:46) Absolutely. I think when COVID allows us, we also will definitely present our products in the States. Yeah, we plan to do it in January also in the CES, but unfortunately, not a chance. But maybe the year after, we will be definitely there and rolling this out to the whole world. And we want everybody just to touch the robot, and then we absolutely know that they will fall in love. And we don't have to do anything more than just bring the systems to the people and just say to them, "Try it once," and we know they will be excited about it. So thank you very much. I really love the format that you're doing. And, yeah, I can imagine that it must be so exciting to talk to such great people on a weekly basis and to learn so many different things. And you did great by building up this podcast here. Thank you. Okay then. Have a good week. Thank you so much for taking the time. It was absolutely amazing, and hope to see you soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:38) Talk soon, buddy. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.