Cobot - Collaborative Robotics, Inc

Excited to share we closed our 7th customer today. All our commercial engagements are paid. We’re already live doing production operations at two customers (Maersk and Mayo Clinic). In 2024 alone we moved 21,000 production carts over 1,500kms traversed. We see a clear path to well over 1,000,000 Proxie deployments in our target markets of logistics, manufacturing and hospital operations, and an already well blazed path to safety certification. Perhaps what I’m most excited about is our progress we’re making in developing an end to end framework for training a bimanual manipulation foundation models that works around the scaling bottlenecks we see inherent in other approaches. Robotics is hot right now!

Latest in my weekly Sunday video drop. This week I'm going to share my thoughts in written form here as well, so feel free to watch the video or read the content. [EDIT: drop me a note on whether the humor worked or not, trying to decide if I try this in future videos or not] If you find either the written or video compelling, please repost/share/comment/like. I do this to build an audience and your comments, reshares can help! The Tyranny of the 50/50 Decision I think a lot about decision velocity, particularly how do we make high quality decisions quickly? One of the traps I see I call "the 50/50 decision". The 50/50 decision is a decision between two nearly identical options. The challenge when two options are nearly identical is that deciding which is better becomes very hard! You can spend a lot of time trying to find a reason why A or B is a better choice. A good example of this was my first car. I was deciding between a Honda CRV and a Toyota Rav4. The vehicles were extremely similar in price, space, power, everything. I spent weeks agonizing over the decision. The reality is both options would have been great. Also, cognitively, you're going to justify the decision you made no matter what. I loved my Honda CRV. I'm sure I made the best choice! Recently we faced a similar 50/50 decision at Cobot trying to decide which AI notetaking tool to pick. There are lots of good options and the team was ready to set up a set of test and trials to try to determine which would work out best. I intervened and said "stop, this is a 50/50 call, all the options are going to be great and it's going to be hard to decide... so far we've been using this one and we like it, just keep it." AI notetaking also happens to be a two-way door decision where it's reversible if somehow we start hating our choice. That's my decision-making tip this week! Don't spend too much time on 50/50 decision. Make a choice and fall in love with your choice. Have any 50/50 decisions you're wrestling with or recently decided? Share in the comments and enjoy the video!

Video number 4 this week. I don't tell this story often, but my passion for radio controlled planes, helicopters, and drones is what ultimately led me to robotics. As someone who has been passionate about everything that flies since I was a young kid, when the opportunity to partner with Gur K. to help him build the Prime Air drone delivery program for Amazon arose in 2014, I jumped on it. This early work introduced me to the sheer scale of the opportunity to apply autonomous systems to logistics networks and spurred me to make the jump fulltime into robotics in 2017. Nowadays, building and flying RC planes is a means of getting back to the basics of building a simple actuated system... the importance of quality building instructions, the right materials, the right tools, structural stiffness, actuation forces, wireless links, battery management, safety protocols... and simply a way for me to relax and recharge a bit. This week's much shorter video also has a slightly different message about the value of compounding actions and experience. Plus a shout out to Blue Origin for an amazing demonstration this past week of what compounding experience, mastered over time, can deliver! Oh, and it's very much day 1 on my video editing skills, but thankfully those skills will compound too. #robotics #rcairplanes #compoundingaction

Sharing my third weekly video update. This one is about 5 minutes. I touch upon Jensen's CES presentation where he showed Physical AI as the ultimate step in our AI progression. I talk a bit about our company offsite this week and how we approach bringing everyone along on the journey. And I share my heartfelt thoughts on the devastating wildfires. Please leave a comment on what you like, what you don't like. I want these to be casual and informative, but I'm trying to get the balance right between the two. Any feedback you have is appreciated! Enjoy! #cobot #weeklyvideo #ces

Is China ahead in AI and robotics? I cover this in week 2 of my new foray into LinkedIn video content. Let me know your thoughts… do you think a head-to-head battle for technological pre-eminence, the likes of which we haven’t seen since US/USSR in the 1960’s, might be the catalyst for even faster societal progress? Or will it just encourage and accelerate risk taking? UPDATE: Relevant links in the comments. Also, let me know in the comments if you appreciate this format and want me to keep posting videos like this. So far engagement seems similar to text posts, so hard to know if video is adding much for the audience here. Strong opinions are welcome. #ai #robotics #china

These days your website is your business card, your company brochure, and your gateway to a deeper connection with your customers and supporters. Similarly, your logo represents you in every digital and physical medium. As part of raising our Series A in 2023, we engaged Tom Vining and More Air to design a unique logo and brand styling. We also did a very rapid turn on our website, recognizing we didn't have a lot of visual content to share as our product was still in stealth. When Series B rolled around earlier this year, we decided to do only minor updates and just get back to building. But as part of our Proxie reveal, we knew we wanted to add a lot of video and motion to really highlight Proxie and our customers. Tom and his team were able to assess that the website topology we had built would continue to serve our needs even with a significant content refresh, saving us significant time and cost. We couldn't be happier with the quality of the result!

We decided in mid-September to reveal Proxie to the world before the holidays, giving us less than 10 weeks to pull it off. We knew we wanted to work with the most talented creative team we could find anywhere in the world, as well as a director who understood the story we wanted to tell about a future more alive with the help of robots, and a venue that paid homage to our industrial history. Finding a team that could do the quality of production we were hoping to achieve, as well as a venue that put Proxie in the best light, quite literally, was a tall order in such a short time frame. We had been inspired by the work Blonde Inc. out of Denmark had done with other brands to tell human stories connected with new technology. We were excited when they agreed to take on the project. We were confident Carl Feigenberg was the director who could bring the emotion to that story. We then searched all over for the best location for the shoot and found it right in our own backyard at The Bridge Yard in Oakland. I've talked about the community you build as a startup with an emphasis on building community with our customers, investors and employees. But you also create a community with the vendors you choose to work with. Over the next couple of days, I will highlight more of the amazing vendors we feel fortunate to have in our Cobot community. Thank you to Carl and Blonde Inc. for bringing Proxie's story to life at Bridge Yard. If you haven't seen the video, please check the comments for a link.

Excited to share that Proxie made its first conference appearance today - at the Mayo Clinic VIBE Automation Summit! Christina Zorn’s fireside chat this morning set an inspiring tone for the future of automation at Mayo and in healthcare in general. Mayo has been a visionary partner and investor in Cobot and we’re thrilled to be able to show Proxie for the first time here in sunny Rochester, Minnesota!

AWS re:Invent is amazing this year! The energy and excitement is contagious. We’re honored that Cobot - Collaborative Robotics, Inc was spotlighted in AWS CEO Matt Garman’s keynote at Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2024. The keynote, packed with new innovations, featured Proxie, our cobot designed to handle material movement tasks in dynamic environments while working seamlessly alongside people. The video let me share more of our vision for robots that work alongside us in every sector, starting out with “Our preconceived notion of robots is they lack some empathy, they lack some interactivity; I don’t think it has to be that way.” We're excited to be working with AWS as well as industry leading customers like Maersk, Mayo Clinic, Moderna, Owens & Minor, and Tampa General Hospital to solve real-world automation challenges. Thank you to AWS for sharing more of our story. #reinvent #innovation #robotics