 Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-inv, re-in Mars. I said re-invent, oh my, re-invent, it's months away. Re-Mars, machine learning, automation, robotics, and space, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. An exciting guest here, bringing on a special guest, more robots. Robots are welcome on theCUBE. We're going to have that segment here, Mike Dooley, co-founder and CEO of Labrador Systems. Mike, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. Labrador Systems, we're a company that's 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 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 walk-the-wheel chair or a cane, could have early onset health conditions like Parkinson's and things like that. So, let me set this up first before you get into the demo, because I think here at Re-Mars, one of the things that's coming out of the show, besides the cool vibe, is that materials handling isn't the only thing you're seeing with robotics. 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 Eggingburgo was the first person to actually put robots in factories and automation. And in doing that, he set up a 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 what you think about with Rosie yet. We're a long way from that, but they can do really meaningful things. And before we get to the demo, your mission here and what you're going to 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. 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 has 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 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. We just actually pulled these out of our refrigerator on our last demo. So, when we bring over the retriever, and so we're going to 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 that automatically navigates itself, just like we've been called a self-diving shelf as an example, but it's meant to be very friendly. Can come to a position like this could be by my arm chair 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. 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 height or position. And even if I block it like a safety, it stops. And someone who say disabled or can't move or is recovering or has some aging or whatever the case is, this comes to them. It's autonomous in its sense. Is that how it works? Or is it guided? How does- It works on a series of bus stops. So, in robotics, we call those waypoints, 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 arm chair, the laundry machine, you won't cause it. And with that simple metaphor, 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, ask 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 a reach. So, I'm sitting and it might lower itself down so I can just comfortably get something. I'm at the kitchen. 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 limited challenges. And this really illustrates this show, again. Talk about the impact here. We're at a historic moment in robotics. We are, yeah. What's your reaction to that? Tell your, share your vision. I've been in robotics for 25 years, and I started, I actually started working actually at Lego and launching Lego Mindstorms in the end of the 90s. So, I have like CEO, just last night again, they gush over like, you did that? Yeah. And I, yeah, I'm pretty old school. And so, 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 moving things to be bigger and bigger and have a bigger impact. What's it feel like? I mean, cause I mean, I can see the experience. And by the way, it's hardcore robotics communities out there, but now it's so mainstream. It's opening up the aperture of robotics. 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. 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 them, you know, free them up for things that are more important. In senior care, that's the high touch. We want caregivers to be helping people get out of their bed, help them safely move from place to place. Things that robots aren't at yet, but for getting the garbage, for getting a drink or giving the person the freedom to say, do I want to ask my caregiver or my spouse to do that? Or do I want to do it myself? And so, robots can be an incredibly liberating experience if they're done in the right way and they're done in the human body. Well, it's a choice, it actually comes down to choice. I remember this argument way back when, oh, ATMs are going to kill the bank teller. In fact, more bank tellers emerged. And so, this choice has come out there, but there's still more advances to do. What do you see as milestones for the industry as you start to see better handling, better voice activation, cameras on board. I noticed some cameras in there. So, we're starting to see some of the smaller, faster, cheaper, hack. Especially, yeah, faster, cheaper is what we're after. So, can we, 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 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 on consumer electronics, the ability for the iPhone to play the game and turn and do portrait and landscape, that actually is what enables all these robots to clean your floors to do very tight angles. What we're doing is this migration of consumer electronics then gets robbed and adopted over in that. So, it's really about, it's not that you're going to see things radically change. It's just that you're going to 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. 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, faster, cheaper, you're going to see a human aspect. So, technology's kind of getting out of the way now. You got a lot in the cloud, you have machine learning, there's a human creative side now, going to be a big part of this. Can you talk about how you see that unfolding? Because, again, younger people going to come in, you got a lot more things pre-built. I just saw a swammy on stage saying, oh, we write sub-routines automatically with machine learning. Like, oh my God, that's so cool. So, more is coming for builders to build. What's the playbook going to look like? How do you see the human aspect creative, crafting, building? It's a hard future to predict. I think the issue is that humans are always going to have to be more clever than the AI. I can't say that enough, is that AI can solve some things and it can get smarter and smarter. You test that over and then let's work on the things that can't do. And I think that's intellectually challenging. And I think we have a long way to go 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 machine should be working on. And then move on to the next things. Well, a lot of good healthcare implications, senior living, people who are rebuilding themselves. All those are put, yeah. Now that you have this kind of, almost a perfect storm of innovation coming. And I just think it's going to be the beginning. You're going to see a lot of young people come in. And a lot of people in school now, going down through the elementary school level, 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 a robot? It used to be pretty clear, right? NERD, builder, now it's like, what, I'm not going to write code. Yeah, 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 it's really appropriate being here at Ari 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 mechanical, there's electrical, there's software, they're perceptual. There's user interface. All of those fuse together. So when we're trying to do a demo and something goes wrong, I can't say, well, I only do mechanical. You really have to have a system. So I think if any system architects, people that, if you're going to be, if mechanical is your thing, you better learn a little bit of electrical and software. If software is your thing, you better not just write code because you need to understand where your- Well, back in the old days, you had to know FORTRAN to run any instrumentation in the old days. So same kind of vibe. So what is 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 specialty's there, I love that. Now teamwork. Because I could be a generalist at some point, there's another component I'm going to need to call my teammate for. Yeah. Yeah, and you have to, yeah. So we're a small team, so it's a little bit easier right now, but even the technology. So like there's a, this runs on Linux and that runs on ROS, which is the robotic operating system. The modules are, sorry, the modules, I mean we're done in there, but the part that makes the robot go, okay, I'm going to command it to go here, it's going to go around, it sees an obstacle, this module kicks in. Even the elements become module. So that's part of how teams work is that, and Amazon has a rule around that, is that everything has to have an API. I have to be able to express my work in 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. Talk about the company. Put a plug in, what are you guys doing? Sure. Raising money, getting more staff, more sales, give us a quick commercial. Yeah, so we close a seed round. So we've been around, it's actually five years next month, did pre-seed and then we closed a seed round that we announced back at CES. 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. Amazon was one of our early investors and they actually co-led on this last round along with our friends at iRobot. 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, and we're actually already at the factory. So we've been converting this, 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. Goal is for full production with all the supply chain issues for a second half of next year. Well, congratulations, this is a great product and I got to ask you what's on the roadmap, how you see this product unfolding, what's the wish list look like? If you had all the dough in the world, what would you do next? What would you be putting on there? If you had the magic wand, what's happening? It's a couple of 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. So basically get us into production and get us into volume as one part. I think the other ones is adding layers. When you 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 my readings, or we're just having a conversation with some of our friends of Amazon is bring 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 want to 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 bed and wheelchair, we've seen her walking differently, early, early on, and using things like Intel RealSense 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 want to share this with your doctor? 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 in something like decades from now, life is so much more better for the options and choices we have. It's really interesting. I like kind of the theme here. There's a lot of day-to-day problems that people like to solve and there's like the new industrial problems that are emerging, that are opportunities, and then there's the save the world kind of vibe. There's help people, make things positive, solve employment problems, help people. And so we're kind of at this new era and it's beyond just like sustainability and bias, it's all got to 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 because you're socially motivated and you don't care how many you sell it to just so you can accomplish it. It's their link. The cheaper that we can make this, the more people you can impact. I think you were talking about the kids today is the work we did at Lego in the end of the 90s, you made a robotics kit for 200 bucks and millions of kids did that. Right, very pie. You had accessories to it, make it 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 going to be using it that are in a wheelchair or dealing with Parkinson's or MS or other issues, what can we add to that ecosystem? So it's all about being very human centric in that 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. Well, I think you have to nice attractive value proposition to investors. Obviously robotics is super cool and really relevant, cool and relevant to me, always is nice to have that. So check that. Then you got the economics on price pressure, put the price down lower, open up the TAM to the market, 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, Mike Joke, and I don't mean to offend them, but after doing pitching the vision of this in six months, Don't be afraid, don't be afraid. We don't need it all the time. My joke, and I'm sort of seeing more bold about it, is that VCs don't think they're going to get old, they're just going to get rich. And so the idea is that they didn't see them themselves in this position. And we're not gloom and doom. You can work out, you can be active, but we're living older, longer. We are, it's, my mom is born into depression. She's been in a wheelchair for five years. She might be around for a good another 10 to 15. And that's wonderful for her, but her need for care is really high. And the pressure on the family too. There's always collateral damage on all of these impacts. There's 53 million unpaid family caregivers in the US. Just in the time that we've been doing this, it's grown 4% a year. And it's a complicated thing. And 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 twofold. 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. She asks for it. It's not hot enough, sends it back. And that's a currency that she's losing. And then it's frustration as opposed to give her a choice to say, I'm going to do this on my own. And that's just- Bring the computer over to FaceTime with the family. Send it back. You mentioned the Alexa. There's so many use cases. Oh no, we talked about putting like a device with a screen on it so she could chat and see pictures. And she says, I don't want to hand this in my bedroom. That's my private space. But if we could have the robot bring it in when it's appropriate and take it out. Call the retriever. That's the whole- Go fetch what I need right now. And then go lie down. Yeah, that's what we call the Labrador. Doesn't lie down, actually. Well, it lowers down. It lowers down about 25 inches. That's about lying down. Super exciting. And congratulations. I know how passionate you are. It's obvious. And being in the business so long, so many accomplishments you had, but now as a whole new dawn, a new era. Here. Oh yeah. No, and we just said it was impromptu. It wasn't scheduled. There's a post-circle on LinkedIn where all the robots got together, 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. It wasn't possible to have things that walk or spot that can go through construction sites. I think people don't realize, it really is changing. And then we're, I think every five years you're going to be seeing this more bold deployment of these things hitting our lives. 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. It's just a wonderful thing. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Really appreciate it. Great success, great demo. Mike Duly, co-founder and CEO of Labrador Systems. Check them out. They have the Retriever, Future of Robotics here. It's all impact, all life on the planet and more space too. It's theCUBE coverage here at ReMars. Stay tuned for more live coverage after this short break.