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COURTESY VEO ROBOTICS
SOLUTIONS
Bloomberg Businessweek
October 8, 2018
LidarWillBringMore
Robots toFactories
manufacturers, including Fanuc Corp. and Yaskawa Electric
Corp., to run experiments for aircraft manufacturers, oil and
gas drillers, and appliance makers. Veo’s potential annual
revenue, Sobalvarro says, could top $1 billion in five years.
That’s a bold claim for a company that so far has only
$13 million in funding from Google Ventures, Lux Capital
Management, and Next47, a venture firm started by
Siemens AG. Veo might raise more this fall just as it starts
shipping to customers.
In a video demonstration, Sobalvarro places lidar sen-
sors around a 6-foot-tall Kuka robot that lifts a 15-pound
suspension component onto a table so workers can attach
other parts. Such human-machine interaction cuts the time
to install rubber bushings, used to reduce noise and vibra-
tion, to 24 seconds from 43.
The safety constraints required for today’s factory
robots can make even routine maintenance tricky. The
copper tips on robots that weld metal car bodies wear
out constantly because of high temperature and volt-
age. Changing one takes less than two minutes but often
requires more time because a supervisor has to autho-
rize the padlocking of surrounding robots before anyone
can climb inside the metal safety cage.
Veo’s technology provides electronic assurance that
the robots will stop when necessary. “Our dream is to
walk into a factory and have any machine you approach
go into a ‘safe mode’ until you leave,” Sobalvarro says. “It’s
the end of fear.” —
John Lippert
THE BOTTOM LINE Veo, which has raised about $13 million from Google
Ventures and Siemens’s VC firm among others, says annual sales could top
$1 billion in five years.
Veo Robotics is using the laser
technology to end safety fears
in car manufacturing
Most automakers use robots to weld and paint the metal
bodies of their cars. But the final assembly line, consisting
of about 500 ever-changing tasks such as the installation
of engines, dashboards, and seats, has defied most e
forts
to replace workers with robots. There’s a good reason:
Increasing automation requires robots to cooperate with
humans on the factory floor, and that can be dangerous.
“Being with a robot in a tight space is like standing next
to a horse,” says Patrick Sobalvarro, co-founder of Veo
Robotics Inc. of Waltham, Mass. “If the horse is calm and
likes you, and knows where you are, you’re perfectly safe.
But you have to know it’s not going to surprise you or step
on you or crush you against the wall.”
Veo has pioneered the use of three-dimensional flash
lidar—which bounces lasers of objects to help determine
what’s nearby—to create real-time maps of robots, humans,
and everything else inside a factory. Its proprietary soft-
ware slows a robot down and stops it when a human gets
too close. The system also shuts all nearby robots when it
can’t positively identify what’s happening in a workstation.
Lidar, and its blend of sensing and computer analysis
in real time, is making self-driving cars a reality. As costs
drop, the technology is spreading. A Velodyne Lidar Inc.
sensor that sold for $75,000 a decade ago can be had
today for $99. Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and General Motors
Co.’s Cruise unit, front-runners in the autonomous vehi-
cle race, rely on lidar sensors. Almost $1 billion has been
invested in automotive lidar companies over the past four
years, according to a report by Bloomberg NEF.
“Veo is the first to use lidar on the assembly line,” says
Joe Gemma, chief executive o
icer in the U.S. for Kuka
Robotics Corp. Kuka, whose customers include Tesla Inc.
and GM, is helping the startup test its system. “We think
of final assembly as the holy grail of automation,” he says.
“We’ve really been lacking in our ability to use automation in
this area because of the additional cost of protecting peo-
ple working in close proximity. These new lidar technolo-
gies could change this.”
Guided by Veo sensors, robots could install windshields
and seats, Gemma says. Humans would still be around,
using their dexterity and judgment to solve problems. That’s
not what happened in the 1980s, when a GM automation
campaign led to robots that painted each other instead of
cars, or earlier this year, when Tesla had to scrap a robotic
conveyance system used to bring parts to the line.
Veo is also working with other big industrial robot
Veo’s system uses
lidar to track robots
and everything
around them