EP 203: MassRobotics

Kevin Lawton

On this episode, I was joined by the Executive Director of MassRobotics, Tom Ryden. MassRobotics is a non-profit that helps to accelerate the robotics industry and give a space for an upcoming robotics company to get to the next step. We discuss MassRobotic’s mission, Tom’s tips for deployment, and the new industry-changing interoperability standard.

Key Takeaways

• MassRobotics was founded by Daniel Theobald who I spoke to previously when he was representing his company Vecna Robotics. Tom runs MassRobotics now as the Executive Director and comes from a history of working with technology companies including iRobot. MassRobotics is on a mission to help robotics companies get their start and get on the road to success. They also are focused on helping all robotics companies come together and make the industry more standardized for the greater good of users and solution providers. In Massachusetts, they have an incubator space where start-up robotics companies can come in as residence and utilize the resources to help grow their technology.
• Tom provides some great tips on robotics deployments for your operation which should be considered. For many, deploying robotics at this point in their first exploration into this world and it is important to understand how to be properly prepared. One big tip that Tom gives is to have a strong wireless network implemented. As he points out, robots need a strong wireless network to operate on and be able to communicate properly with each other and your systems. In many warehouses, the wireless network is not as strong as it should be and can be quite spotty which robots can not always tolerate.
• The big news from MassRobotics is their recent release of the interoperability standards 1.0. This is a huge help for the robotics industry and for operations that are looking to utilize multiple robotics solutions. The standards help to ensure that different robotic solutions from multiple companies can communicate with each other. This is important because many robotics companies are focusing on just one part of the process to automate and operations will be looking for solutions for all of their processes. In order to do this effectively, each solution needs to communicate with each other and the interoperability standards will help to do this. It will be exciting to see how the standards develop over the next few years.

Listen to the episode below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.