Nilli Mtz

MIT Sloan MBA, building in robotics, Ex-Google Hardware Engineer

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

Spent the last few months talking to warehouse and logistics companies and the robot OEMs that serve them.

Everyone's excited for Physical AI.

But the gap between what we show and what's acceptable for a daily task on a customer's site? Still wide.

[Mission Robotics @MissionRobotBay]

Congrats to the winners of the Embodied Metal Hackathon 🏆

We're astounded by the response. 70 hackers, 21 robots, 12 teams – and 10 of them shipped working robots by Sunday's live judging. Data collected Saturday, models trained overnight, demos on real hardware.

Read on for the winners 👇

[Mission Robotics @MissionRobotBay]

🔨 @rerundotio bounty, Best use of the Rerun Viewer: Team Lama (@daksha_ladia and @nillimtz)

A fine-tuned MolmoAct2 policy that plays a real xylophone with an SO-101. And the hard part is physics, striking a bar so it rings instead of damping. Every strike visualized live in Rerun.

$2K from the Rerun bounty pool.

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

An insight I got from working with SO-101 robot arms.

The first time, you have an idealized view of how good you are going to teleoperate and capture everything.

The reality is that it is not straightforward, something breaks... always, and that's how you get more realistic.

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

They were not only building robots, they were building new ways to increase utilization for their customers.

That's what Skild bought: deployment and orchestration experience, compounded.

This experience can't be bought with just the robots, you need the team that created it.

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

Yesterday I said that utilization is an ops problem in a robotics costume.

Here's the proof...

Zebra paid $291 for Fetch in 2021 but wound the division down in December, that's when Skild came in.

But the main asset they bought was not the tech, it was the team

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

Because Fetch had more than AMRs.

They were in the business for so long that they made the experience become magical.

While newcomers were just figuring out how to make the robot work, they already streamlined the entire user experience to work for their clients' employees

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

The more I get to know about logistics/warehouse needs, the more I understand it is complex.

Not only you need technology.

You also need to understand operations and systems to improve them.

Utilization isn't a robotics problem.

It's an ops problem in a robotics costume.

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

Walden Robotics went out of stealth today.

The videos are impressive.

The question is whether they survive the real world.

What they're doing differently: focus on unit economics.

Tedrake said: "success is not assured."

That humbleness is what makes robots provide value.

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

@lukas_m_ziegler you are so right, and there are so many more areas that usually go unrecognized but they are so key to the process: supply chain, field support, deployment engineers, they also have to understand how the systems interact to do their job

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

@RussTedrake congratulations to the team! the blog and the video bring so much optimism to the space, especially seeing the robots being deployed in factory settings first. I'll keep an eye on future posts to see how different they are from Agility.

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

@CyberRobooo the videos are impressive, I wonder if they are also working on an orchestration algorithm to sync multiple robots and achieve more complex tasks

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

@cchevyyc love this!

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

@antoinemarcel really cool! I would love to hear about how you are thinking the onboarding process will look like for the first users!

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

Legacy robot vendors deploy through System Integrators.

Startups want to do it all themselves.

Early on that's the right move. You learn the business, you learn the customer.

Long run, they are shooting themselves in the foot.

Every new site is another hire.

Agree? DM me.

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

If you know any robot company seeing this level of growth in Europe or US, send me a DM. I'd love to talk.

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

One thing that surprised me talking to a warehouse robotics vendor:

They have more deployments in Europe than in the US.

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

The sales manager corrected me.

There's a better reason that drives all of it:
hourly wages are even higher in Europe.

So the ROI on automation is greater in that context.

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

@benjaminhgordon @SymboticTweet @ArmsInnovations This move is closer to how Amazon does things, they are realizing that they can get more done the minute that they own the orchestration layer and beyond so that they have more control over its optimization

[Nilli Mtz @nillimtz]

@RoboDaily They are on the right track, however deployment involves multiple steps not only the training part, Standard Bots needs to also think about how to scale their deployment without scaling the amount of operators doing this demonstrations and troubleshooting