In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks with Melonee Wise, former CEO of Fetch Robotics and current VP of Robotics Automation at Zebra Technologies. Melonee speaks about the origin of Fetch Robotics, her experience at Willow Garage, her experience being acquired by Zebra Technologies, challenges in the warehouse setting, on autonomous cars, and on the future of robotics.

OAKLAND, California, Dec. 14, 2020 /Press Release/ -- Silicon Valley Robotics, the world's largest cluster of innovation in robotics, announces the inaugural'Good Robot' Industry Awards, celebrating the robotics, automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that will help us solve global challenges. These 52 companies and individuals have all contributed to innovation that will improve the quality of our lives, whether it's weed-free pesticide-free farming, like FarmWise or Iron Ox; supporting health workers and the elderly manage health care treatment regimes, like Catalia Health or Multiply Labs; or reimagining the logistics industry so that the transfer of physical goods becomes as efficient as the transfer of information, like Cruise, Embark, Matternet and Zipline. The categories Innovation, Vision and Commercialization represent the stages robotics companies go through, firstly with an innovative technology or product, then with a vision to change the world (and occasionally the investment to match), and finally with real evidence of customer traction. The criteria for our Commercialization Award is achieving $1 million in revenue, which is a huge milestone for a startup building a new invention. Tessa Lau, Founder and CEO of Dusty Robotics, an Innovation Awardee said "We're almost there. Dusty Robotics' FieldPrinter automates the painstaking, time-consuming process of marking building plans in the field, replacing a traditional process using measuring tape and chalk lines that hasn't changed in 5000 years. The company's vision of creating robot-powered tools for the modern construction workforce resonates strongly with commercial construction companies. Dusty's robot fleet is now in production, producing highly accurate layouts in record time on every floor of two multi-family residential towers going up in San Francisco. The SVR'Good Robot' Industry Awards also highlight diverse robotics companies. In our Visionary Category, Zoox is the first billion dollar company led by an African-American woman, Aicha Evans, and Robust AI shows diversity at every level of the organization. Diversity of thought will be critical as Robust AI tackles the challenge of building a cognitive engine for robotics that incorporates common sense reasoning. "Robotics and AI will shape the next century in the same way the Industrial revolution shaped the 20th century.

Time will tell whether supply chain shortages from the COVID-19 pandemic will hasten the deployment of robots in warehouses. Last week, we reported that autonomous mobile robot suppliers are seeing a surge in demand. Among those beneficiaries is Fetch Robotics, regarded as a leading supplier of autonomous mobile robots, or AMRs. Founded in 2014, CEO Melonee Wise was the second employee at Willow Garage, an R&D lab influential in advancing robotics. DHL, Ryder and Universal Logistics are among those that have deployed AMRs from Fetch Robotics.

The COVID-19 pandemic is poised to accelerate adoption of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) to ease supply chain backlogs. Even before the coronavirus pandemic shut down the global economy, leading companies that distribute large amounts of goods were deploying, or evaluating, AMRs such as DHL and Ryder. UPS yesterday announced that it has begun deploying AMRs in some of its facilities to consolidate orders. UPS wants to "create more custom and turnkey outsourced fulfillment services to meet our customers' unique supply chain needs," according to a statement from Philippe Gilbert, UPS's president of supply chain solutions. The weak link in warehouse automation efforts is the shortage of people to fulfill the steady rise in e-commerce transactions.

For more than a century, factories and warehouses have depended on forklifts to move heavy objects from one place to another. Roboticist Melonee Wise, founder and chief executive of Fetch Robotics, thinks fully autonomous robots could do a better job. In a conversation with Forbes, she shared a sneak peek of a new version of her giant Freight bots that has the ability to pick up items from one place and drop them off at another with no humans involved. Fetch intends to debut the new Freight 500, called CartConnect500, which can lug up to 500 kilograms (or 1,100 pounds) at the Modex 2020 trade show in Atlanta on March 9. A fully autonomous version of the Freight 1,500, which can haul up to 1,500 kilograms (or 3,300 pounds), is in development and likely will launch later this year.

The real robotics revolution is not having robots take care of tasks but having them available to businesses as a service. And so another acronyms to represent the expanding world of as a service is added to today's business vocabulary. The business world has introduced a number of different functions as a service, including software-as a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) among others. But another as a service category has come on the scene in the past couple of years: robotics-as-a-service (RaaS). RELATED: WHY ARE WE SO SCARED OF ROBOTS? 15 EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON WHAT THE REAL DANGERS ARE The video above explains RaaS "is a cloud computing unit that facilitates the seamless integration of robot and embedded devices into Web and cloud computing environment."

In a Silicon Valley startup, Fetch Robotics, about 50 employees, and 125 robots work cohesively. According to CEO Melonee Wise, the human employees see the robots as pets, even calling them "pups". This is becoming the new normal, with many companies employing robots to supplement their workforce as opposed to completely replacing it. Despite the fear that robots are predicted to take over most jobs, the future might, in fact, be more about working alongside robots rather than robots running the workforce completely. At Fetch Robotics, Wise states that "no one has ever lost a job because of our robots."

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. We could watch these water drones swim and dive all day. They were developed by APIUM Swarm Robotics, which took them for a swim off of Catalina Island in California.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. We've written about extra robot arms for humans in the past, but these are more complicated and perhaps capable than most: I'm not completely sold on the control system here, since it essentially means you're trading the use of your legs for the use of some extra arms. If this isn't enough reason to get a RoboThespian, I don't know what is: ROBOTIS was running this demo at ICRA as well; the first TurtleBot is using its laser for person-detection and following, while the other TurtleBots are wirelessly following the first.

ICRA, the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, is an annual academic conference covering advances in robotics. It is one of the premier conferences in its field. This year, I was invited to attend to its 2017 edition in Singapore. With a superb organization and a beautiful location, the event included conferences of leading researchers and companies from all around the world, as well as workshops and an exhibitors area. This latter is where I spent most of my time, as I love direct interaction with the companies and research centres.