EP 228: Vecna Mark 3

In this episode, I was joined by Matt Cherewka of Vecna Robotics. Matt is the Director of Business Development and Strategy at Vecna and you may remember I spoke with him previously during ProMatDX earlier this year. We discussed the market for AMR’s over the last year and a half, the Mark 3 software update, and interoperability standards.

Key Takeaways

• Vecna Robotics is in the AMR game and over the last year and a half with the pandemic creating all kinds of unexpected changes in the way we operate, I was curious what they have seen in terms of demand. In discussing with Matt, it is clear that AMR adoption is on the rise and as he said a lot of companies have made their 2030 technology plans into their 2020 technology plans to keep up. One of the biggest drivers of this adoption is the labor shortages that many of Vecna’s customers are experiencing. With the ability to take over a lot of the repetitive material movement tasks, AMR’s like Vecna’s are in a great position to help alleviate some of these struggles.
• The latest from Vecna is their software upgrade called Mark 3. With this upgrade, they are improving a lot of the efficiencies with their hardware but most notably is the increase in speed. From my perspective, AMR and robots are making great strides but they have still been a bit limited in the speed at which they can do things. This upgrade pushes Vecna’s offerings to a max speed of 6.7 mph which is a jump from their previous 4.5 mph. At 6.7 mph they are getting very close to what a standard human-operated machine would perform at. It is certainly a big advancement as it gets closer to the replacement of the typical manually operated machine, however, there are certainly notable efficiencies that an AMR presents versus a manually operated machine which Matt and I discuss.
• At the end of the episode, Matt and I talk about the Mass Robotics Interoperability Standards which Vecna is a huge champion of. Since they are one of the founders of Mass Robotics, it only makes sense that they are also leading the way when it comes to interoperability standards. Matt discusses the first test and demo of how these standards work and the potential they hold. They did the first demo with Waypoint Robotics and were able to have great results. This is certainly something that will move the industry forward in an amazingly collaborative way.

Listen to the episode below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.