BLOG
BLOG
Oct 5, 2018 | Time to read: 5 min
Dr. Prasad Akella, founder and chairman of the Drishti board, is creating his third massive market category that uses technology to extend human capabilities. In the 1990s, Prasad led the General Motors team that built the world’s first collaborative robots (“cobots,” projected to be a $12B market by 2025). In the early 2000s, as cofounder of the social networking pioneer Spoke, he envisioned and helped build the first massive social graph — a category now worth trillions. Today, at Drishti, he is working to combine the cognition of AI with the flexibility of humans in factories in the form of AI-powered production. Prasad is based in Mountain View, California.
In the mid-1990s, I led the industry/academia team at General Motors that built the world’s first collaborative robots. It was hard work; most people even in robotics had not heard of a “cobot” (or, “intelligent assist devices” (IADs) as we referred to the broader category), knew what it was, much less how it could be useful. Our academic partners-in-crime, Northwestern Professors Michael Peshkin and Ed Colgate, founded Cobotics, Inc. (renamed CoMoCo, for Collaborative Motion Control, Inc.), the first startup in the cobot market, in 1996 while UC Berkeley Professor Hami Kazerooni went on to found Berkeley Bionics, renamed Ekso Bionics, later on). By the time I left to head back to the Valley and co-found the social networking pioneer Spoke Software, the word was out. Vendors like Fanuc, ABB, Gorbel and Stanley were producing early versions of product, and companies, including GM and Ford, were beginning to explore the use of cobots of different forms because they could see how useful and valuable this form of collaborative automation was on the factory floor.
Fast forward a decade, and Esben Østergaard, Kasper Støy and Kristian Kassow founded Universal Robotics in 2007, while Rodney Brooks and Ann Whittaker launched Rethink Robotics (then Heartland Robotics) in 2008 – and all previous cobot development efforts paled in comparison. Brooks’ track record and dynamism leant a celebrity power to his company. It’s indisputable how much Baxter and its little brother, Sawyer, changed the landscape and public dialogue around collaborative robots over the next ten years.
That’s what makes this week’s news about Rethink Robotics closing its doors such a shame, but it doesn’t come as a surprise. As I learned first-hand at Spoke, and as anyone who has worked in the startup world knows, it’s a hard road. And even after many successful years, companies can fail. Especially when you’re trying to define a category – to prove the value of a technology that has yet to be seen by the vast majority of your audience – the roadblocks are many, and the folks who emerge as victors are few.
Still, there are several takeaways we in the world of manufacturing automation can glean from Rethink’s journey, and use to help drive our own successes to the benefit of everyone in the factory:
It’s never a happy occasion to see a promising company with pioneering technology fail, especially one where a very dedicated and smart set of people have worked so hard. Luckily, Rethink’s end doesn’t mean the end of innovation in manufacturing, and I look forward to an exciting future for all of stripes of Industry 4.0 startups (including Drishti) that are attempting to help companies harness and evaluate data from tasks their machines and employees execute on the floor. The potential to impact GDP and human lives is incredible.
Our thanks and best wishes go to the pioneering team at Rethink, whom I personally applaud for moving the world of cobots forward.
Read how Drishti can help your factory workers be more competitive in a global landscape.
