>>Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's coverage of S reinve rein Mars. I said reinvent all my VES months away. Re Mars machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. I'm John feer, host of the cube, an exciting guest here, bringing on special guest more robot robots are welcome on the cube. We're gonna have that segment here. Mike Dooley co-founder and CEO of Labrador systems. Mike, welcome to the cube. Thanks. >>Coming on. Thank, thank you so much. Yeah. Labrador systems. We're a company is developing a new type of assistive robot for people in the home. And you know, our mission is really to help people live independently. And so we're about to show a robot that's it looks like my, what used to be in a warehouse or other places, but it's being designed to be both robust enough to operate in real world settings, help people that may be aging and using a Walker wheelchair. A cane could have early onset health conditions like Parkinson's and things like that. So >>Let me, let me set this up first, before you get into the, the demo, because I think here at re Mars, one of the things that's coming outta the show besides the cool vibe, right? Is that materials handling? Isn't the only thing you've seen with robotics. Yeah. You're seeing a lot more life industrial impact. And this is an example of one of that, isn't >>It? Yeah. We just actually got an award. It's a Joseph EGL Bergo was the first person to actually put robots in factories and automation. And in doing that, um, he set up grant for robots going beyond that, to help people live in it. So we're the first recipient of that. But yeah, I think that robots, they're not the, what you think about with Rosie yet. We're the wrong way from that, but they're, they can do really meaningful things. >>And before we get the demo, your mission hearing, what you're gonna show here is a lot of hard work and we know how hard it is. What's the mission. What's the vision. >>The mission is to help people live more independently on their own terms. Uh, we're, there's, it's an innate part of the human condition that at some point in our lives, it becomes more difficult to move ourselves or move things around it. And that is a huge impact on our independence. So when we're putting this robot in pilots, we're helping people try to regain degrees of independence, be more active deal with whatever situation they want, but under their terms and have, have control over their life. >>Okay, well, let's get into it. May I offer you a glass of water? Well, you >>Know, I have a robot that just happens to be really good at delivering things, including water. Um, we just actually pulled these out of our refrigerator on our last demo. So why don't we bring over the retriever? And so we're gonna command it to come on in. So this is a Labrador retriever. These robots have been in homes. This robot itself has been in homes, helping people do activities like this. It's able to sort of go from place to place it automatically navigates itself. Uh, just like we've been called a self-driving shelf, um, as an example, but it's meant to be very friendly, can come to a position like this could be by my armchair and it would automatically park. And then I could do something like I can pick up, okay, I want some water and maybe I want to drink it out of a cup and I can do this. And if I have a cough or something else, cough drops. My phone, all sorts of things can be in there. Um, so the purpose of the retriever is really to be this extra pair of hands, to keep things close by and move things. And it can automatically adjust to any hide or position. And if I, even if I block it like a safety, it, it >>Stops. And someone who say disabled or can't move is recovering or has some as aging or whatever the case is. This comes to them. It's autonomous in it sense. Is that that what works or yeah. Is it guided? How does >>It, it works on a series of bus stops. So the in robotics, we call those way points. But when we're talking to people, the bus stops are the places you want it to go. You have a bus stop by the front door, your kitchen sink, the refrigerator, your armchair, the laundry machine, you won't closet it. <laugh>. And with that simple metaphor, we, we train the robot in a couple hours. We create all these routes, just like a subway map. And then the robot is autonomous. So I can hit a button. I can hit my cell phone, or I can say Alexa ass lab, one to come to the kitchen. The robot will autonomously navigate through everything, go around the pets park itself. And it raises and lowers to bring things with and reach. So I'm sitting and it might lower itself down. So I can just comfortably get something at the kitchen. I, it could just go right to the level of the countertop. So it's very easy for someone that has an issue to move things with with limited, uh, challenges. >>And this really illustrates to this show again. Yeah. Talk about the impact here. Cause we're at a historic moment in robotics. >>We are. Yeah. >>What's your reaction to that? Tell your, share your vision >>On that. I've been in robotics for 25 years. Um, and I started, I actually started working actually at Lego and launching Lego Mindstorms, the end of the nineties. So I have like CEO just last night again, they gush over like you did that. Yeah. <laugh> and again, I'm pretty old school. And so we've my career. If I've been working through from toys onto like robotic floor cleaners, the algorithms that are on Roomba today came from the startup that we were all part of. We're, we're moving things to be bigger and bigger and have a bigger >>Impact. What's it feel like? I mean, cuz I mean I can see the experience and by the way, it's hardcore robotics communities out there, but now it's still mainstream. It's opening up the aperture of robotics. Yeah. It's the prime time is right now and it's an inflection point. >>Well, and it's also a point where we desperately need it. So we have incredible work for shortages <laugh> and it's not that we're, these robots are not to take people jobs away it's to do the work that people don't want to do and try to make, you know, free them up for things that are more important. Yeah. In senior care, that's the high touch we want caregivers to be helping people get outta their bed, help them safely move from place to place things that robots aren't at yet. Yeah. But for getting the garbage, for getting a drink or giving the person the freedom to say, do I wanna ask my caregiver or my spouse to do that? Or do I wanna do it myself? And so robots can be incredibly liberating experience if they're, if they're done in the right way and they're done well, >>It's a choice. It actually comes down to choice. I remember this argument way back when, oh, ATM's gonna kill the bank teller. In fact more bank tellers emerged. Right. And so there's choices come out there and, but there's still more advances to do. What is you, what do you see as milestones for the industry as you start to seeing better handling better voice activation cameras on board. I noticed some cameras in there. Yeah. So we're starting to see the, some of the smaller, faster, cheaper >>It's it's especially yeah. Faster. Cheaper is what we're after. So can we redo? So like the gyros that are on this type of robot used to be like in the tens of thousands of dollars 20 or 30 years ago. And, and then when you started seeing Roomba and the floor cleaners come out, those started what happened was basically the gyro on here that what's happening in consumer electronics, the ability for the iPhone to play, you know, the game in turn and, and do portrait and landscape. That actually is what enables all these robots that clean your floors to do very tight angles. What we're doing is this migration of consumer electronics then gets robbed and, and adopted over in that. So it's really about it's I, it's not that you're gonna see things radically change. It's just that you're gonna see more and more applications get more sophisticated and become more affordable. Our target is to bring this for a few hundred dollars a month into people's homes. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and make that economy work for as many people as >>Possible. Yeah. Mike, what a great, great illustration of great point there now on your history looking forward. Okay. Smaller Fest are cheaper. Yeah. You're gonna see a human aspect. So technology's kind of getting out of the way now you got a lot in the cloud, you got machine learning, big thing here. There's a human creative side now gonna be a big part of this. Yeah. Can you talk about like how you see that unfolding? Because again, younger people gonna come in, you got a lot more things pre-built I just saw a swaping on stage saying, oh, we, we write subroutines automatically the machine learning like, oh my God, that's so cool. Like, so more is coming for, to, for builders, right. To build what's the playbook gonna look like? How do you see the human aspect, creative crafting building? >>I, I it's, you know, it's a hard Fu future to predict. I think the issue is that humans are always gonna have to be more clever than the AI <laugh>, you know, I, I can't say that enough is that AI can solve some things and it can get smarter and smarter. You task that over and then let's work on the things that can't do. And I think that's intellectually challenging. Like, and I, and I think we have a long way to go, uh, to sort of keep on pushing that forward. So the whole mission is people get to do more interesting things with their life, more dynamic. Think about what the machines should be working on. Yeah. And then move on to the next things. >>Well, a lot of good healthcare implications. Yeah. Uh, senior living people who are themselves, >>All those are place. Yeah. >>Now that you have, um, this kind of almost a perfect storm of innovation coming, and I just think it's gonna be the beginning. You're gonna see a lot of young people come in. Yeah. And a lot of people in school now going down to the elementary school level yeah. Are really immersed in robotics. They're born with it. And certainly as they get older, what kind of disciplines do you see coming into robot? I used to be pretty clear. Yeah. Right. Nerdy, builder, builder. Now it's like what? I got Mac and rice. My code. >>Yeah. My, my co-founder and CEO has a good example. Anybody we interview, we say we really like it. If you think of yourself as an astronaut, going on to a space mission. And, and it's really appropriate being here at R Mars is that normally the astronaut has one specialty, but they have to know enough of the other skills to be able to help out. In case of an emergency robotics is so complex. There's so there's mechanical, there's electrical, there's software, they're perceptual, there's user interface, all of those Fs together. So when we're trying to do a demo and something goes wrong, I can't say why. I only do mechanical. Yeah. You got it. You really have to have a system. So I think if any system architects, people that if you're gonna, if, if you're gonna be, if mechanical is your thing, you better learn a little bit electrical and software. Yeah. If software is your thing, you better not just write code because you need to understand where you're >>Your back. Well, the old days you have to know for trend to run any instrumentation in the old days. So same kind of vibe. So what does that impact on the teamwork side? Because now I can imagine, okay, you got some general purpose knowledge, so math, science, all the disciplines, but the specialties there, I love that right now. Teamwork. Yeah. Because you, you know, I could be a generalism at some point. There's another component I'm gonna need to call my teammate for. >>Yeah. Yeah. And you have to have, yeah. So it, yeah, we're a small team, so it's a little bit easier right now, but even the technology. So like there's a, what, this is, this runs on Linux and that runs on Ross, which is a robotics operating system. The modules are, are the, are sorry, the modules, I mean redundant there, but the, the part that makes the robot go, okay, I'm gonna command it to go here. It's gonna go around it, see an obstacle. This module kicks in, even the elements become module. So that's part of how teams work is that, and, and Amazon has a rule around that is that everything has to have an API. Yeah. I have to be able to express my work and the way that somebody else can come in and talk to it in a very easy way. So you're also going away from like, sort of like the hidden code that only I touch you can't have ownership of that. You have to let your team understand how it works and let them control it and edit it. Well, >>Super exciting. Dan, first of all, great to bring robots on the cube set. Thanks to your team here. Doing that. Yeah. Um, talk about the company. Um, put a plug in, what are you guys doing? Sure. Raising money, getting more staff, more sales. We're give, give a commercial. >>Yeah. So we, we closed the seed round. So we've been around it's actually five years next month. Um, did pre-seed and then we closed the seed round that we announced back at CS. So we debuted the retriever for the first time we had it under wraps. We had it in people's homes for a year before we did that. Um, I, Amazon was one of our early investors and they actually co-led on this last round, along with our friends at iRobot. So yeah. Uh, so we've raised that we're right in the next phase of deploying this, especially going more into senior living now that that's opening up with COVID coming down and looking at helping these workforce issues where there's that crisis. So we'll be raising later this year. So we're starting to sort of do the preview for series a. We're starting to take those pre-orders for robots and for Lois. And then our goal is we're and we're actually already at the factory. So we've been converting this, these there's a version of this robot underway right now at the factory that will probably have engineering units at the end of this year. Yeah. Goal is for, uh, full production with all the supply chain issues for second half of, of next >>Year. Yeah. Well, congratulations. It's a great product. And I gotta ask you what's on the roadmap, how you see this product unfolding. What's the wishlist look like if you had all the dough in the world, what would you do next? What would you be putting on there? Sure. If you had the magic wand what's happening, >>It's a couple variables. I think it's scale. So it's driving the, this whole thing is designed to go down in cost, which improves basically accessibility. More people can afford it. The health system, Medicare, those sorts of folks. See it one. So basically get us into reduction and get us into volume is one part, I think the other ones is adding layers. I, what we, when we see our presentation and the speech we're doing tomorrow, we see this as a force multiplier for a lot of other things in healthcare. So if I bring the blood pressure cuff, like we have on the retrieval, I can be a physical reminder to take your medication, to take the, my, my readings, or we are just con having a conversation with some of our friends of Amazon is bringing an echo show to you when you want to have a conversation and take it away. >>When you don't think about that metaphor of how do I wanna live my life and what do I have control over? And then on top of it, the sensors on the robot, they're pretty sophisticated. So in my case, my mom is still around she's 91, but now in a hospital beded wheelchair could, we've seen her walking differently early, early on, and using things like Intel, real sense and, and computer vision and AI to detect things and just say to her, don't even tell anybody else, we're noticing this. Do you wanna share this with your doctor? Yeah. That's the world. I think that what we're trying to do is lay this out as version 1.0, so that when folks like us are around, it'll something like decades from now, life is so much more better for the options and choices we have. It's >>Really interesting. You know, I liked, um, kind of the theme here. There's a lot of day to day problems that people like to solve. And then there's like the new industrial problems that are emerging that are opportunities. And then there's the save the world kind of vibe. <laugh>, there's help people make things positive, right. You know, solve the climate problems, help people. And so we're kind of at this new era and it's beyond just like sustainability and, you know, bias. That's all gotta get done a new tipping point around the human aspect of >>Things. And you do it economically. I think sometimes you think that, okay, well, you're just doing this cuz you're, you're socially motivated and doesn't, you don't care how many you sell it to just so you can accomplish it. It's their link. The, the cheaper that we can make this, the more people you can impact. I think you're talking about the kids today is the work we did at Lego. In the end of the nineties, you made a, a robotics kit for 200 bucks and millions of kids. Yeah. Did that. And >>Grape pie. I mean, you had accessories to it. Make a developer friendly. >>Yeah, no, exactly. And we're getting all those requests. So I think that's the thing is like, get a new platform, learn what it's like to have this sort of capability and then let the market drive. It, let the people sort of the folks who are gonna be using it that are in a wheelchair, are dealing with Parkinson's or Ms, or other issues. What can we add to that ecosystem? So you it's, it's all about being very human centric in that. Yeah. And making the other parts of the economy make it work for them, make it so that the health system, they get an ROI on this so that, Hey, this is a good thing to put into people's homes. >>And well, I think you have the nice, attractive value proposition to investors. Obviously robotics is super cool and really relevant. Cool, cool. And relevant to me always is nice to have that. So check that, then you got the economics on price, pressure, prove the price down lower. Yeah. Open up the Tams of the market. Right. Make it more viable economically. >>Yeah, definitely. And then, and what we're having, what's driving us that wasn't around seven when we started this about four and a half years ago. Uh, my joke and I don't mean to offend them, but after doing pitching the vision of this in six months, don't be, >>Don't be afraid. We're do we, >>My, my joke. And I'm sort to see more bold about is that VCs don't think they're gonna get old. They're just gonna get rich. And so the idea is that they didn't see themselves in this position and we not Gloo and doom, you can work out, you can be active, but we're living older, longer. We are it's. My mom is born in the depression. She's been in a wheelchair for five years. She might be around for a good, another 10 or 15. And that's wonderful for her, but her need for care is really high. >>Yeah. And the pressure on the family too, there's always, there's always collateral damage on all these impacts. >>There's 53 million unpaid family caregivers in the us. Yeah. Just in the time that we've grown, been doing this, it's grown 4% a year and it's a complicated thing. And it's, it's not just the pressure on you to help your mom or dad or whoever. It's the frustration on their face when they have to always ask for that help. So it's, it's twofold. It's give them some freedom back so they can make a choice. Like my classic example is my mom wants tea. My dad's trying to watch the game. He, she asks for it. It's not hot enough. Sends it back. And that's a currency. Yeah, yeah. That she's losing and, and it's frustration as opposed to give her a choice to say, I'm gonna do this on my own. And I that's just, >>You wanna bring the computer out, do a FaceTime with the family, send it back. Or you mentioned the Alexa there's so many use cases. Oh >>No. We talked about, uh, we talked about putting like a, a device with a CA with a screen on it so she could chat and see pictures. And it says, I don't want to have this in my bedroom. That's my private space. Yeah. But if we could have the robot, bring it in when it's appropriate and take it on go the retriever that's that's >>The whole go fetch what I need right now. That's and then go lie down. Yeah. >>That's what I, I called >>Labrador. Doesn't lie down >>Actually. But well, it lowers down, it lowers down about 25 inches. That's about lying. >>Down's super exciting. And congratulations. I know, um, how passionate you are. It's obvious. Yeah. And being in the business so long, so many accomplishment you had. Yeah. But now is a whole new Dawn. A new era here. >>Yeah. Oh yeah. No, I, we just, it was real. It was on impromptu. It wasn't scheduled. There's a, a post circle on LinkedIn where all the robots got together. <laugh> you know, and they were seeing to hang out. No, and you're seeing stuff that wasn't possible. You look at this and you go, well, what's the big thing. It's a box on wheels. It's like, it wasn't possible to navigate something around the complexity of a home 10 years ago for the price we're doing. Yeah. It wasn't possible to wa have things that walk or spot that can go through construction sites. I, I think people don't realize it's it. It really is changing. And then we're, I think every five years you're gonna be seeing this more bold deployment of these things hitting our lives. It's >>It's super cool. And that's why this show's so popular. It's not obvious to mainstream, but you look at the confluence of all those forces coming together. Yeah. It's just a wonderful thing. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate >>It really, really appreciate you for this >>Time. Great success. Great demo. Mike, do cofounder, the CEO of Labrador systems. Check him out. They have the retriever, uh, future of robotics here. It's all impact all life on the planet. And more space. Two is to keep coverage here at re Mars, stay tuned for more live coverage. After this short break.