Episode Transcript (computer-generated)

Paul Spain:
Well, welcome along to the podcast. Great to have you here, Lachlan.

Lachlan Murray:
Thank you for having me. It’s my first podcast, so should be cool.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Oh, well, a real privilege to have you on the show. So tell us how Robomate came about.

Lachlan Murray:
So my dad actually had robot lawnmowers in 2008, which is way back before it was really a thing. So at that point in time, he had to import them from Italy directly. There was a company called Ambrosio in Italy at that point in time. They had perimeter wires that you needed to bury around the edge of the lawn. They were pretty basic, really. So I had been introduced to them in 2008, and then it would have been 2018, when a family friend that also lived near us said, hey, what do you think of those robot lawnmowers? We’re sick of mowing the lawns. Do you reckon they could do our property by now? Their property was really big, really steep, pretty brutal sort of conditions, but kind of thought, it’s been another 10 years of development from where they were then. Like, surely now it’s worth a nudge.

Paul Spain:
Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Lachlan Murray:
So actually secured the agency for the brand that dad had imported all those years before, and we got a few units in and we tried to install it at the friend’s house. We only sold a very few of them, and we really quickly learned at that point in time that they hadn’t really changed much since 2008.

Paul Spain:
Right. So they’d come up with the initial ideas and they hadn’t really invested back in. In terms of research and development to kind of keep up, because there would have been a whole lot of new things coming into the market over a decade period, wouldn’t there?

Lachlan Murray:
Yeah. So it had things like an app now, which the original ones didn’t have, but actually the fundamentals hadn’t changed. They still needed perimeter wires, so they would randomly bounce around. And that comes with so many issues, like, it’s hard to explain in a single conversation what that actually means. It’s more than just having to set it up. It’s. That’s actually how it operates. It means that if it gets stuck somewhere, chances are it would get stuck near an edge, because that’s where it’s doing most of its turning.

Lachlan Murray:
And chances are it would also be on a slope, which means that if it’s doing all of its turning on a slope, then it gets stuck. It’s like when you get stuck in your car, it will start to dig. So sometimes it would dig up the perimeter wire and cut the cable.

Paul Spain:
Oh, boy.

Lachlan Murray:
And then other times, though, it just means that it started to dig a hole. And then if you imagine big, thick mud tires on a truck or something like that, once you’ve done a few rotations in mud, they become like slicks. And so then it’s going around just roughing everything up and making it worse. So then next time it goes out, it gets even worse. So there’s so many little cyclic issues that can’t be solved. Cause it just didn’t have actual awareness of what it was doing at that point.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Lachlan Murray:
Wow.

Paul Spain:
Okay, so quite a challenge there. And did that mean you were a little bit in the. In the whole. If you had invested into having the agency to distribute this product in New Zealand, you brought some in, and I guess your confidence. It’s hard to sell. It’d be very hard to sell something if you didn’t believe in it. Right. You probably wouldn’t have felt super excited about selling something if you were disappointed with the product.

Lachlan Murray:
The interesting thing was that it was actually really good for the customer because it did a really good job of cutting the grass. But because it had all of these other issues and we were trying to provide a high service level, it kind of felt like we were mowing their lawn for them. But using a robot.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Lachlan Murray:
Okay. So from the customer’s perspective, we weren’t really. We were almost doing them. You know, we were providing a good end result.

Paul Spain:
They got the result. But you were heavily involved.

Lachlan Murray:
Yes. And so I also really quickly figured out, though, that there were going to be a lot of big changes in the pretty near future, and that it wasn’t worth trying to scale a business behind that sort of technology. Because obviously the biggest thing being the perimeter wire, a lot of the other intelligence of the robot hangs off as navigation. So realizing that that was going to go wireless in the near future, we didn’t want to be going around and setting up networks of installers all over the country, which would then become redundant. And at that point in time, I thought it would have been like two years away.

Paul Spain:
Yes.

Lachlan Murray:
So after that, we pivoted to doing robot vacuum cleaners. And this is still probably 2019. So there was still a very strong stigma around robot vacuum cleaners at that point in time, that they would, you know, get stuck under the couch. You’d have to pick them up and put them into each room at a time. They were kind of just gimmicks for geeky people to have because it was cool to have and a bit of fun. But they didn’t really work. But at that point in time, things were really just starting to change. There was a company called Neto, which was out of the US and they had just put lidar on top of the robot.

Lachlan Murray:
And so the robot was starting to map the house, which meant that it was actually going backwards and forwards, and it was smart. And that actually put proper suction on the vacuum. So the prior ones, because they weren’t really a proper serious thing, didn’t have much suction. So as soon as they put the navigation on the robot vacuum, then it was worth making it actually clean properly. And then as soon as it starts to get to that stage, then the industry starts to grow really rapidly and the investment and stuff starts to hit some sort of exponential growth. So we got into that in 2019, and then very shortly after that, Covid hit. The original plan was actually to be more of a standard distribution company. So we would buy the product, act like an importer, and then go through other channels.

Lachlan Murray:
What the realization was in these early phases went to a whole lot of, like, home shows and stuff like that. And we discovered that all of the questions that people had about the product were about whether it would actually work, dispelling some of the old myths. But actually, people understood that if it did work, they would want it. So it was more just about, particularly with the robot vacuums, was, is it going to fall down the stairs? How does it actually work? Can it pick up pet hair? All of those sorts of things. And then at that point in time, all of the retailers were starting to consider doing robot vacuums and stuff like that. But the way that they were selling them was boxes on a shelf with a tiny little placard which would have five bullet points, which was the same five bullet points on the box. And you’d go in there and be like, hey, I want to buy a robot vacuum. And they’d try and sell you a Samsung stick vacuum, because that’s what they understood.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, okay.

Lachlan Murray:
A friend of mine let us set up camp in the corner of his office, and this time around, we decided to be like a retail channel for robot vacuums. And so at this point, there are a few brands that were starting to go into Noel Leemings, Harvey Normans, JB Hifi, all of the big guys. So we went to these people and said, hey, look, we want to be one of your channel partners. And so the first sale pitch for this process was actually just getting them to take a risk on us. Our strategy, though, was to be completely different Our strategy was to come into the market and we decided that we were going to make videos explaining all of the answers to the questions that we had at the home shows. So rather than trying to sell stuff to people, we were taking the more geeky approach of explaining how it works. And rather than saying like, it can suck up pet hair, trust me, we would make a video showing it doing that in a real life scenario. And so we went and we got all of the big brands at that point in time onto one website.

Lachlan Murray:
So it was almost more like a review website for robot vacuums with videos filmed on an iPhone that I’d financed.

Paul Spain:
So were you getting these, the importers, the distributors to, to basically finance the product? How did that work? Or did you still have to sort of pay for things upfront?

Lachlan Murray:
Yeah, we had to pay for things upfront and we definitely weren’t credit worthy at that point.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. So they were taking a risk on just dealing with you as it were, because whether it was gonna be worth their time and so on.

Lachlan Murray:
Yeah. And potentially causing issues with the other channel partners.

Paul Spain:
Gotcha.

Lachlan Murray:
We could have, if we weren’t who we were, like gone and discounted and tried to beat them on price or something. But that was never part of the strategy. We were determined to be a place where you could a, get advice properly to figure out which one was going to be best for you. And then we were going to be end to end partners with the customer right through the journey. Unlike when you go and buy a TV or something like that, you go and buy a tv, you get excited about it and then the next day it’s just like a piece of furniture that’s there that you use a robot kind of lives in your house and it changes over time. And so getting the sale is only like the beginning of the journey normally. And so if you were to buy from a normal retail channel, particularly back then, you’d go, and then if you needed help, you, you could go back into the store. No one would know what to do.

Lachlan Murray:
And then they’d give you a call center number and the call center number would be some offshore call center that’s also doing tech support for toasters and stuff. And they’re just following a script that you could have done through Google. And so we decided that we were going to try and give people proper tech support. So rather than following fully through a script, we would actually just know the product well enough, get to the heart of the issue and get it solved relatively quickly. So that was probably the biggest value proposition that we offered to the customers and I guess it worked.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you talked about the product sort of changing over time. Describe that.

Lachlan Murray:
What were the scenarios, particularly for the robot vacuums? Initially, there were still quite a few of the, what I call dumb robots, ones without proper sensors, so they didn’t map the house, but they very quickly all moved to LiDAR, which meant that they were scanning and mapping the houses.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So laser scan of a room and of each room and effectively the whole area that needs to be cleaned.

Lachlan Murray:
But that means that once you’ve got that, it gives you, like a situational awareness of what’s around it, which then means you can start to build better logic into it. And then over the last few years, have started to recognize specifically what different objects are. So, like, that’s a shoe, therefore there’s going to be a shoe lace there, therefore we should go slightly further away from it.

Paul Spain:
Right. Or a cat’s made a mess somewhere. Or there must be a range of scenarios that you want whatever’s running around your house to know about, Right?

Lachlan Murray:
Yeah, exactly. So it went from being something that needed a lot of help and then just slowly over time, they’ve decreased the amount of human help that’s required and then improved the actual performance of the cleaning. And then the other big shift has been into mopping. So the mopping now is actually really good and they can wash their own mops, whereas the earlier ones were fundamentally pretty bad. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Spain:
So a really, really big evolution over quite a short period of time.

Lachlan Murray:
Really. Yeah, very fast. And so that’s what we saw with the robot vacuum space was as soon as the product gets a certain market fit, then the budgets, the companies, the teams, all of that stuff just snowballs so unbelievably fast. So it goes from like a super small niche industry to a mature within about five years. And so the whole story for us was actually waiting for the robot mower industry to catch up, because that was actually, you know, where we were wanting to do business in the first place.

Paul Spain:
Gotcha. So when you started effectively retailing the robotic vacuums, when were we talking that that happened? What time?

Lachlan Murray:
This would have been probably 2021 at this point.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Lachlan Murray:
Okay. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
So not that long ago.

Lachlan Murray:
It feels a long time ago.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Maybe it’s sort of four to five years ago, Right? Yeah. Okay, so you did that. The product’s coming through and you ended up with what, quite a broad range of products that you were able to sell?

Lachlan Murray:
Yes, we did. At that point in time, they were very Different. And more recently, the product itself has got a lot more similar. So for example, like a car, if you go and buy a car now, it’s kind of like Honda or Mazda or something like that. Sorry, auto people listening, but they’re pretty similar. And so as the market’s matured, the brands have become and the products have become so much more similar that it’s less about that and much more about the support that comes with it now.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Okay, and so then how did you evolve from a retail standpoint during that period?

Lachlan Murray:
So right back when we gave up on the robot Mars, we sat down and we was literally on a piece of paper, drew what we thought someone should make. And it had a few requirements that it needed to tick before we’d want to do it in New Zealand. And the requirements were it needed to be wireless, it needed to be four wheel drive, it needed to have a low center of gravity, and it needed to be powerful enough to cut through Kikuya. So pretty basic, pretty simple. The drawing that we drew didn’t look like the thing that we found in the end, but it ticked the boxes.

Paul Spain:
It did the job. Yeah. So the New Zealand aspect that was important there is being able to kind of cut our tougher grass and so on, I suppose.

Lachlan Murray:
Yep. Well, our entire country runs around the fact that we can grow grass really fast. So we have the worst possible conditions for a robot lawnmower, I think, in the world. We’ve got a lot of rainfall off and on during the day as well. And it’s warm enough that we keep the robot mowers working all year round as well. And it’s warm enough that we have tropical grasses. So it’s like almost like a rainforest environment, particularly in the Upper North. So most of the solutions out there were built for like a lot nicer European conditions where they put them away in winter in a nice warm shed.

Paul Spain:
How did you go about deciding on whether to stick to one brand? Was that just down to, hey, you’ve found one product that’s a really good fit versus multiple brands and how’s that evolved?

Lachlan Murray:
So the brand that we’re working with is called Mimotion and these guys launch.

Paul Spain:
On Kickstarter or something?

Lachlan Murray:
They did launch on Kickstarter.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, they did.

Lachlan Murray:
So robot lawnmowers are a lot older than what people think they are. I think they’re about the same age as me, so about 30 something years old. And they started with promoter wires and then they’ve kind of done these iterative changes of like a few percent every year. But actually if you looked at most of the brands, it still is actually pretty similar to where it started. And so mimotion is a split off company from dji, the drone company.

Paul Spain:
Okay.

Lachlan Murray:
And they came in rather than making iterative changes on a previous generation. When they launched into the market, it was completely and utterly different to what anyone else had done. And so the decision to go with them was just because they were the only ones that ticked all of those boxes at that point in time. And so things will start to change and stuff over time, but it’s a pretty hard industry to actually make something work in.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, okay. Okay. So there’s this new product, it’s being launched via crowdfunding platform. You were no doubt kind of watching what was going on with this. What were the things that sort of stood out to you around how they were going about it and what did that trigger for you?

Lachlan Murray:
So the funny thing was we had actually been trying to contact them for a while and they were growing real fast, probably in that crazy startup phase. And we never heard back. But through the robot vacuum journey, our YouTube channel had got a little bit of traction and one of their social media people reached out to us and asked like, hey, would you be interested in doing a review video on this product? Not paid, by the way. But I said, yes, we’ll do this. And so we got the sample. I had to pay for it and I had said to them, I’ll do this, but if it is good, we would want to talk about the business side as well because, you know. And so we got the sample and as soon as I got it out of the box, once you’ve been doing this sort of business for a while, you get a bit of a feel for it. So I could recognize that it wasn’t like it was the right kind of specification of plastic.

Lachlan Murray:
It wasn’t rattly. It was pretty solid. It was much heavier than I expected it to be. So, okay, this isn’t some dodgy startup. It’s not your typical Kickstarter project. It felt proper. And then I took it out to the property where we first. That first got me into this whole journey and set it up and it just worked.

Lachlan Murray:
And so the app was pretty ugly at that point in time. There were a few little things that were like, not great, but the fact that it could do it when nothing else could, within about 10 minutes, I just knew that this thing is pretty insane.

Paul Spain:
Wow. When you’re experiencing, you know, that difference, did that give you a sort of an immediate Clarity around, hey, this is where we can go with the business with a product like this. How long did it take you to work around? What did you need to do in terms of getting distribution and the other bits and pieces and maybe refreshing your business strategy?

Lachlan Murray:
I already had the plan of what we were going to do. I was waiting for the product.

Paul Spain:
Gotcha. So.

Lachlan Murray:
So as soon as we saw it, I was like, okay, we’re on here. If we can get this across the.

Paul Spain:
Line, that’s exciting now. So we’ve been talking around the lawn mowing side. What happened in the meantime in other areas? I saw on your website at one stage you were doing the robot sort of accent for swimming pools. I’m not sure if you’re doing those any longer. And of course, the in home vacuums as well.

Lachlan Murray:
So the in home vacuums, we’re still doing all of it, by the way. So we’re still doing the pool cleaners, we’re still doing the vacuums. These industries are a little bit more mature, if you like. And so it’s more of a steady growth story there because they haven’t had the same complete fundamental transformation in a year or two. They’ve been more steadily growing. And so we as a company are not wanting to be like the robot mowing people. It’s just that robot mowing is probably the biggest problem in New Zealand. And it’s the thing that’s seen the biggest change at the moment.

Lachlan Murray:
Our focus as a company is on being the robotics people. And then I almost see us more as being like a tour guide into the technology for people that don’t understand the technology. So we break it down, make it easy to understand, and then we take them along the journey. And so we find the best products and then bring it for them. So we’re not trying to find like every robotic product that’s out there. There’s so many things. But we’re trying to make sure that it is actually, like, fit for purpose and does the job right.

Paul Spain:
So no humanoid robots just yet, but that might be coming up in the future.

Lachlan Murray:
Nah. And I like to test these things and play with them, but I’m not out there to try and sell stuff to people that’s not actually gonna help them. So it kind of has to tick the box. There’s things like window cleaners and stuff like that as well, which are all right. But yeah, not really doing what they need to do yet.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, sure, sure. So let’s delve into the technology side. A little bit more curious to kind of Understand, on the lawn mowing side, you know, what are the key technologies that have really come along and transformed things?

Lachlan Murray:
The biggest one by far is the RTK or gps with a localizer triangulation system.

Paul Spain:
Yep. So this is where you’ve got basically some. Is it a pole? What is it set up that it can triangulate off and work out its location from? How does that tend to happen?

Lachlan Murray:
It’s a tiny little GPS receiver about 15cm across for people that can’t see it, which you install locally, which means that the robot is talking to a satellite, and then the gps, the RTK is also talking to the same satellite, and then the robot and the RTK are talking to each other directly as well. So it’s completing the triangle.

Paul Spain:
Gotcha.

Lachlan Murray:
And so because the RTK doesn’t move, it means that the GPS location is super accurate because it’s comparing the position of something that stopped.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah.

Lachlan Murray:
Okay.

Paul Spain:
Okay. So you can be down to what sort of level of accuracy is that able to get down to.

Lachlan Murray:
Do you think it’s around about a centimetre?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so, yeah, that’s quite, quite key then. And so this idea of, you know, having a wire in the ground to sort of, you know, mark a perimeter that then gets really left behind. I guess there’s probably still some products that use that technology.

Lachlan Murray:
There is still some out there, but there’s probably not much more future in them.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so you’ve got that. And then I guess there’s sort of, you know, the motors, the batteries, you know, these pieces are quite key. Right. Especially, you know, for, for New Zealand conditions, for those with a larger property and so on, and I guess an automatic kind of recharging type capability and back to a dock sort of thing.

Lachlan Murray:
Yep, definitely all of the above. The thing that’s quite cool about robots is that they’re actually simpler than combustion. So each on our ones at least, with four wheel drive, each of them, those four wheels would have an electric hub motor, so there’s no axles or anything. That motor’s in the wheel. So there’s four wheels in that, and then they have two cutting motors directly above each blade system, motherboard, drive, board, battery. It’s actually pretty simple if you understand it. Which means that if things break and stuff, it’s pretty easy to fix as well.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Okay. You can figure out what it is that needs swapping out. What are the sorts of things, things that tend to go wrong?

Lachlan Murray:
It really depends. One thing that we have noticed is if you had the same robot, the same property and a different user, you’d often get quite a different outcome. So one of the challenges that we kind of joke about internally is it feels like we’re training an entire generation on how to use robots. So that bit is hard. Some of the other things that go wrong, obviously the whole industry has been growing up pretty fast as well. And so like the original ones, particularly in New Zealand, we had a few like water ingress issues and stuff like that. But now we’re up to like generation four within three years. And so they’ve had a chance to, you know, get most of those things all ironed out.

Paul Spain:
So how, you know, what do they tend to be rated for in terms of water and dust and, and the like? I mean, we’re used to our phones over a quick period of time have gone from an electronic gadget that you don’t get anywhere near water to. And then sort of an in between point where they were supposedly kind of IP rated. But you’d get some real sort of shocker situations. If any of my experiences are anything to go by to now where they’re really, well, you know, built from what I can tell, water wise. I mean, you’re dealing with a product that’s outside all the time, dealing with the elements, little bits of grass clippings and mud and dirt and water. So, you know, how good are they from that perspective?

Lachlan Murray:
They’re generally pretty good. So obviously we have had a few things over time, but I have seen them go into ponds and be fine. Likewise, I’ve seen issues where, you know, some seal has been torn or something like that. Yeah, we’re talking in pretty big volumes now. So I’ve seen most things happen. Yeah, but now they are getting pretty good. The first generation was definitely a little bit more prone to that sort of stuff. And then over time they’ve improved.

Lachlan Murray:
But the robot mowing industry in particular is just so complicated because it’s working in an uncontrolled environment. And then one of the other issues as an example in New Zealand is like temperature changes and stuff like that, change pressures within systems which make waterproofing harder and all sorts of little things like that. But they’ve got to a point now where they’re really good.

Paul Spain:
So okay, we’ve got the location. I mean battery wise, how much battery do they tend to need? Noting that they can kind of go back and recharge I guess on their own.

Lachlan Murray:
So we have different models, different models have different batteries. The bigger ones would generally be about 15amp hour. So generally in terms of power consumption and easy to understand terms like a medium sized lifestyle property might use around $10 a week or something in power.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Okay, and what are the other sort of things that sort of stand out in terms of the technology, like their ability to see and sense and so on, how’s that come along?

Lachlan Murray:
So the other part of robots is how they deal with challenges when they arise. So by putting the GPS in there, it gives them a situational awareness so they can understand where they are in relation to other things and they can actually start to put a logic in with how to approach certain problems and stuff like that. So in the robot vacuums and robot mowers, we’re starting to see early level AI stuff. AI is on everything now, so it’s not like genuine AI yet, but they’re starting to recognize certain things and approach it just a little bit smarter. So I think that’s probably where we’re going to see the next growth in the industry will be like if you think about how you would use a ride on lawnmower and all of those little micro decisions you’re making all the time around, like speed revs, the grass is longer here, approach this from this angle, doing all of these sorts of things, I think that the AI will actually start to come at that level. But now they’re just starting to build self mapping capabilities so it can recognize the difference between flowers and lawn and recognizing ponds and stuff like that. But it’s not really there yet. It’s still better to map it yourself.

Paul Spain:
Okay, what are the apps look like in terms of how mature and capable they are today?

Lachlan Murray:
They’ve come a long way, so I’m always looking at all sorts of things. So whenever a new company comes on the market, it’s pretty awful. In the beginning it’ll be functional but ugly. And then over time it’s pretty easy to make the interface look better. So in a robot lawnmower you’d have essentially a plan view of your different lawn areas and you can set the cutting heights and the angles and stuff that you want to do and then connect different lawn areas using channels so it knows how to safely navigate between the different ones. So it’s pretty simple, fortunately.

Paul Spain:
And one of the things when we look at technologies is think around how long is this going to last. Right. And some technologies like a smartphone, there can be quite a big variance between one brand, which gets a year or two’s worth of updates, and you actually need your device, ideally to be kept secure because it’s got your data in it, handles your communications and so on. And then another brand that might maybe do five to to seven years. So you get a little bit of a feel for the life of a product that way. And then we’ve got cars are becoming more and more tech enabled. So if you had a Tesla and the software stopped working, then you’ve really just got a kind of a lump of battery and bits and pieces that aren’t going to be much use to you. How does that look in this world?

Lachlan Murray:
It would be pretty similar, to be honest with you. So you’ve got to make sure that you pick one of the brands that’s going to be a winning brand. There are a lot of brands that are going to come and go over the next few years. It’s just the way this tech evolves. So the biggest thing is making sure that you get a brand that is going to be there for a while. So looking at the infrastructure and stuff behind the scale of it all, then from a software update perspective, there’s two elements to it. So long as it’s doing its core function well, that’s what most people are looking for. So there’s one argument to be made that leaving it alone when it’s working is really good and then the other one is over time you can obviously do over the air updates so you can get improvements and stuff like that.

Lachlan Murray:
Personally, I think that when you’re buying a robot, you’re not buying it for its gadget factor, you’re buying it to perform a fundamental task. So if it’s doing that task, I would actually personally rather that they left it alone, but they will continue to do updates if you want.

Paul Spain:
Right?

Lachlan Murray:
Right.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So do you sometimes see some downsides with a software update and someone runs an update and there’s a side effect that’s not always positive.

Lachlan Murray:
It has happened. Yeah, it has happened. It’s happened to everyone at some stage, I think. But even just little things like logic changes and stuff like that, where it isn’t necessarily a problem or a benefit. It’s just like I always like to think that people aren’t buying a robot off us, they’re buying cut grass or clean floors. Most people aren’t buying it for the gadget value.

Paul Spain:
As I said, when I look about online on really any technology, there are always stories of different things being hacked and compromised and so on. Is that something that sort of comes on your radar of thinking around, oh, what are the downsides of someone’s robot lawnmower gets compromised and neighbour decides to take control of it or. I mean, I don’t think there’s been a whole lot in the news about that, but there certainly have been bits and pieces around. Probably the biggest is sort of robot vacuum cleaners and, you know, the fact that they can see around inside your private home lawnmowers are probably not quite the same risk, but still some risks, right?

Lachlan Murray:
Yeah, there’s definitely a risk, like anything that’s connected needs to have good security. There have been some pretty famous cases from robot vacuum manufacturers, at least one that comes to mind. But generally speaking, I like to hope that when a lot of media gets around something like this, that the companies now are getting big enough that they fill those holes pretty quickly. So when they’re at that sort of startup phase and they’re moving real fast on this or that, then I think the risk profile is a lot bigger than once they start to stabilise. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Spain:
It’s interesting, isn’t it, because when they’re in the startup phase or they’re smaller, then to a degree they might attract less attention because they don’t have as much market share and so on. But yeah, on the flip side, where they get bigger, they might get to be more of a target, but they’ve got the. Hopefully got the resources and the commitment to staying on top of their security.

Lachlan Murray:
Exactly.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Lachlan Murray:
It’s much more important for the robots inside, like you said, than outside, in my opinion. I think if someone’s looking at my lawn, it’s not as bad as if they’re inside the house, but like I said, they are starting to reach that next level. So as an example, when I started working with Mimotion, they had like less than 200 people and now they’re over a thousand. And so they definitely wouldn’t have had. Yeah, they definitely wouldn’t have had like a cyber security team in the beginning, but they would have a cyber security team now. So it’s just those sorts of changes.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And talk us through the technology. You know, when it comes to the vacuums now, obviously, you know, you’re buying it for an outcome, but also the technologists will be wanting to know, well, you know, how do you get that outcome and how much snooping can go on and the like.

Lachlan Murray:
I would say that the top four robot vacuum companies should have their security pretty locked down by now because they’re getting into that giant company phase, you know, four or five thousand employees, many, many billion dollar revenues, so they should have that lockdown. The technology itself is getting much more similar across all of the brands. And so they pretty much all using lidar now they’re starting to get to integrated lidar, so it’s not spinning on the top anymore, it’s sitting on the front. They’re starting to build the AI functionality. So it’s recognizing if the floor is particularly dirty in specific spots so that it can come back and get that bit again.

Paul Spain:
This is different to the lawnmower world, then, in terms of the tech that’s there.

Lachlan Murray:
Yeah. And it’s easier to build the tech into the robot vacuum than it is outside. So, like, the robot mowers have cameras and stuff on them as well. The same sort of technology, but you can’t build the same level of sensitivity into the camera outside, because if it starts to dodge this thing, then potentially like a paspalum header or like a flower or daisy or something like that, it will start to dodge that as well. So inside the house is really easy to build more intelligence into it, whereas outside, they’re always balancing, like, the sensitivity of it all. Yep, yep. The biggest other change for the robot vacuums is the fact that the mopping has now got really good. So it used to be like you’d clip on a mopping pad and then it would just drag it around the floor.

Lachlan Murray:
But if it came to carpet, it couldn’t get over it. So you’d end up with all these different, like, islands. So you’d have to carry it to this hard floor section or do that and then carry it to the next bit. So the bit where the robot mopping started to become mainstream was when they got it so that it could lift the mop up and then down as it needed to in the right appropriate times. But the other issue that they also had was if you set your robot off, you’re probably gonna do it remotely, like, not standing in front of it. If one of the kids drops jam on the floor right in front of the robot, it could spread the jam around the entire house.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah.

Lachlan Murray:
So now they’ve also made it so that the charging stations don’t just charge the robot, but they wash the mopping pads and stuff like that as well. And so once the product starts to become fit for purpose, then the investment into that feature just goes through the roof. And so we’ve seen them go from, like, static mopping pads that just drag around the floor to, like, almost like a roll them up system. You know, like those street sweepers you might see around from time to time. Yeah. And they’ll slide out the side of the body and rub off against the skirting boards and do all that sort of stuff.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, okay.

Lachlan Murray:
But the.

Paul Spain:
So they would actually clean the skirting boards now or just right up to.

Lachlan Murray:
The vacuuming itself hasn’t really changed that much. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in the industry where like suction figures and stuff just go up every single year. And the suction motors aren’t really changing much. The reality is that if you’re measuring pressure, if you put, you know, make the suction hole slightly smaller, the pressure will go up. And so they’ve all been playing these games over the last few years where the pressure ratings for the vacuums just keep going up through the roof. And then the internal hardware is just not really changing. So we’re starting to see the vacuuming performance stagnate in the last couple of years. And then I think that the mopping and stuff will start to get to that level too, where there won’t be that much more improvement without making the robot much heavier.

Lachlan Murray:
They’ve also started to build, like robotic arms that come out of the robot and pick stuff up and put them. You know, you can put a designated dumping spot. I think it’s a little bit gimmicky, to be honest. I can’t see it taking off. And then they’ve also started to build carrier systems so that the robots can get up and down the stairs. And again, I think it’s going to be a little bit of a gimmick because it’ll be cheaper in the end to buy two robots, one for the top and one for the bottom, right?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those sort of challenges are interesting, right, because you’re doing your own vacuuming. You go up, you vacuum all the stairs and away you go. Those systems don’t have a, sort of a solution to actually vacuum the individual stairs. Cause of the size and shape and so on.

Lachlan Murray:
Would become a challenge. No, not really. And I don’t think it will get there very quickly to a level where I just don’t see it being worth investing the time in solving that problem immediately. It’s kind of like having a dishwasher. You still need a scrubbing brush. It should do like 95, 98% of the work, maybe. But there’s always going to be a little bit of stuff for us today.

Paul Spain:
Which is fine, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, Dyson’s a company. It’s been interesting to follow because they’ve been really interesting from an innovation perspective. And yeah, they have their innovation awards and so on that they get involved in around the world, as well as the things they’ve created. They’ve done really well from a marketing perspective to sort of build this brand that it has managed to, I think, achieved some pretty impressive results. Now, not everything that they’ve tried, they’ve been able to pull off. They tried to go into electric vehicles and spent horrendous amounts of money and then pulled the plug and decided that that wasn’t the world for them. Are there any sort of things that you take from their journey that you see sort of feeding in? Like, they seem to have been building their own motors and varying other sort of sometimes quite small things, but over time it’s like, oh, that’s quite a good little innovation that hadn’t come through from another firm.

Paul Spain:
Ultimately, everyone seems to copy everybody else over time. Do you see that? How do you look at it? Because this is more your world than mine.

Lachlan Murray:
I think that this particular industry is much faster moving than almost anything else in this sort of, like, physical product space. So, like, the pace that they will move and the amount of information that seems to be passed between them, we’ll call them leaks that they’ll always end up working on the same thing at the same time. And when they bring something to market, everyone gets all excited and you go, like, I go to CES every year and see the exact same products on different stands. And it’s like you’ve clearly known for the last two years what you’ve been working on. So I think there isn’t really these sorts of big tricks and stuff anymore. Dyson have had a number of goes at entering the robot vacuum market, and it never goes well.

Paul Spain:
No, no. That just doesn’t seem to be a world they’ve been able to get their head around.

Lachlan Murray:
It seems to me like they want to enter by doing something completely novel. And so they’re disregarding what everyone else has done and trying to come in with something that’s unique. They don’t want to copy everyone else.

Paul Spain:
Which does seem to be their modus operando.

Lachlan Murray:
Right.

Paul Spain:
Is to be different. And sometimes that doesn’t work. Just like cybertruck versus a normal ute or something.

Lachlan Murray:
Yeah, well, there’s a reason why it ends up being like that. There’s a reason why they’ve all ended up being circle and why they all use lidar and not camera. And Dyson seems pretty determined to make theirs completely different. And unsurprisingly to me, it hasn’t really stuck.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, interesting. Oh, that’ll be fascinating to see if they can nail it. Because I would imagine as the robot sort of vacuums become more and more useful, then the need to have your Dyson sort of stick vac kind of changes. Maybe that’s why they’ve launched their pencil vac recently. Right. So it’s just for those few odd cases where, say, a robot vac can’t do the job. The little pencil vac isn’t really designed to vacuum a whole house, but it’d be good for doing a few stairs or a few little spots. I mean, that’s quite an interesting looking gadget in terms of just how tiny and small it is, Right?

Lachlan Murray:
Definitely. And if they continue down the current path that they’re on, that would probably end up being their best seller. So I don’t think that they can afford to ignore the robotic segment for too much longer. It’s reached that point in time where anyone that actually understands what it is would have one. It wasn’t the case even like three or four years ago, but it’s got to the point now where everyone could in theory use one. And once they’ve used it, they’re definitely not going to go back. And so if they continue to ignore it, it will probably end up being a bit like a Kodak sort of scenario. I can’t see them doing that because they’re quite different.

Lachlan Murray:
But I am very surprised that they’ve, you know, not had a successful attempt yet.

Paul Spain:
So what other thoughts have you got on the, you know, on the way that the world is going sort of technologically and what you’ve learned? You know, there does seem to be, you know, a world at the moment where there’s a huge amount of innovation coming out of China. And every time I hear from someone that’s been to China, they’re, you know, just sort of shouting from the rooftops around. This is amazing. You know, I was in a city and all the vehicles were electric and the pace things are moving there and then we’ve obviously been very reliant on Silicon Valley for a lot of innovation over the years. But when I look at the world you’re in, a lot of this tech is much more from China rather than from us, Silicon Valley and the rest of the world.

Lachlan Murray:
I think that China is getting so far ahead now that it’s actually going to be hard for any of the Western countries to catch up. So in our world, Irobot were the incumbent. They are the brand name, the Roomba that everyone knows. And it’s got to the point now where it’s looking uncertain Whether they’re even going to survive. In their case it was because they decided to go down the camera route instead of LiDAR. And part of the reason why they did that was the cost of the LIDAR unit. So the difference in China there’s quite a few differences. Number one, the government will obviously try and incentivize certain industries.

Lachlan Murray:
You have an enormous high skilled workforce with a lot of discipline and drive and they will quite easily follow a unified vision. This is what we’re trying to do and everyone will work in towards that then probably the single biggest thing though is that they also have this integrated supply chain. So like iRobot stuck with cameras and then couldn’t easily switch in China. What most manufacturers will do is that, well I call them manufacturers and they’re not even really manufacturers. What they do is they’ll have massive R and D arms and then there are giant contract factories which manage a lot of the supply chain. So individual components and stuff like that. There’s this massive ecosystem for like you want a wheel motor or you want a lighter or something like that and it’s all just really well understood and integrated and the cost of every single component is so much lower. And so it starts this cycle of change.

Lachlan Murray:
And so we’re seeing the same thing as well in EVs right now. If you’ve been to China you would be seriously concerned for your Tesla shares because the innovation and features and the levels that they’re getting to and I go back every few months and every few months is actually a pretty notable difference. And so just the pace and the speed and I think that we in the west kind of get caught up in like once a company gets to a critical mass we get bureaucracy and then we’re reluctant to continue to evolve. Whereas over there they have this inbuilt competitiveness that comes from like when they’re going through school, like right from a real young age they’re competing with each other for grades. They’re not just trying to get this grade, they’re trying to compete. And then as they get through uni, trying to get into the right university, like this inbuilt competitiveness then gets into the companies and it’s just hyper, hyper competitive. Whereas I think in our society we get to a certain level and then we start to protect, we start slow down the innovation, we start to protect. And yeah, I just struggle to see a world in which we can catch up again.

Paul Spain:
Wow, wow. That’s a fascinating insight and observation. Now there’s a whole sort of commercial Side of the picture that we haven’t delved into. And it often comes up, hey, AI is going to take all our jobs away, and so on. Now, when I think about robotics and commercial scenarios, actually, it seems like that is a market with a lot of potential in the next few years ahead. How do you look at that?

Lachlan Murray:
It definitely is. The thing with robots is they don’t really care whether your use case is domestic or commercial. Grass is grass and cleaning is cleaning. So the technology being developed for the consumer stuff will eventually take over commercial as well. It’s the logical next step. I think it’s a great thing for a country like New Zealand with a small population base, because we’re wasting talent doing repetitive menial tasks. I think completely replacing humans and stuff like that in the movies is a lot further away than what people think. But initially robots are going to be really good, almost by definition at repetitive tasks.

Lachlan Murray:
So things that don’t require much creativity but need to be done really frequently, that’s what robots are made for. And so New Zealand doesn’t have many people. We don’t want to be wasting people on doing that sort of stuff. We can always find better ways to deploy people.

Paul Spain:
And I guess the lawnmower side, you know, those have been used, the robotic lawnmowers in a commercial sense, haven’t they? Over quite a period. So, you know, how has that side been evolving?

Lachlan Murray:
That space is really just starting to engage now. I think there’s been a lot of small test case scenarios and stuff going on, but generally speaking, they’ve probably been capable of doing it for a while, but you also need to have the infrastructure to support the product. And so there are some pretty successful use cases, but not many in New Zealand yet in Europe and stuff like golf courses and stuff like that, a lot of them would be fully automated or almost fully automated, yeah.

Paul Spain:
Okay. And if you were to kind of look out 10 years from now, how would you picture the robots that are going to be relevant to most of us? And how many of those areas do you think you’d be involved in?

Lachlan Murray:
Well, our goal is to be ready for whatever comes, but I see we’re almost approaching a crossroads and I think the technology could either go down the track it’s currently going down, which is we have a whole lot of different specialized robotic things for different tasks, or it could go down the road where we end up with humanoid robots that use human tools. So it’ll be interesting to see and I can’t really predict it. I think that the biggest factor, like in pretty much every industry will be AI in the end to get it so that it’s not just doing a pre programmed function, but is actually like responding to its environment with real logic. So there’s that element and then also the AI speeding up the product development cycles, so making it easier for new people to go and start to develop robots or at least prototype them. And once the AI gets to the next level, I think we may see more disruption, more disruptors entering the market. So there’s two kind of sides to the AI puzzle that I see.

Paul Spain:
If we were to be chatting again and it was 10, 15 years down the track, what do you imagine business might look like? Can you imagine that far out?

Lachlan Murray:
I always joke that Robo years are like dog years. So 10 or 15 years may as well be like a century. At that point. I can’t even predict what the product would look like exactly, but I can predict that building relationships with customers, looking after people, caring about people, all of that sort of stuff is always gonna be relevant. And the further the tech gets developed, the more important that that becomes. So our company philosophy is just serve the best tech that gets there to help people and then try and hold onto that sort of stuff as we grow.

Paul Spain:
Well, all the best for what’s next with Robo.

Lachlan Murray:
Mate, thank you so much for having me first podcast done.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, we’ll look forward to following the journey as you progress forward.

Lachlan Murray:
Thank you so much.

Paul Spain:
Yep, all the best.