对话ROCOS丨好好管理你的「机器人」吧！
编者按：
全球疫情的爆发，不仅仅我们在认真的「抗疫」，机器人们其实也没闲着。当然不仅仅是医疗行业，越来越多的智能机器人走出实验室进入了制造、运输、农业、清洁等多个领域。都说员工管理不容易，好好管理机器人，也比你想象中复杂的多了。
机器人制造企业很多，但是统一管理机器人的平台却不太多。究其原因，还是因为“太麻烦了”。
制作机器人就已经很“累”了，需要投入大量的精力、财力，何况还要开发一个平台来管理不同类别、不同技术接口的机器人，实现大规模机器人的协同工作呢？
于是，像Rocos这样的初创企业便有了机会“迎难而上”。
Rocos是一家在全球范围内实现机器人劳动力自动化的公司，是G5 Portfolio之一。通过融入Rocos的技术，机器人生产厂商可以做到术业有专攻——在他们的流程中创造更高的效率，能够更快地将其产品商业化从而进入全球市场，从而使这些厂商能够更专注于他们擅长的事情，也就是制造机器人。
左一、左二分别为Rocos创始人David Inggs，Richard Stinear
01
「大放异彩」的机会
不久前我们采访了他的创始人之一，David Inggs，一起聊了聊怎么「管好自己的机器人」。
Q：How did Rocos get started? What made you think of developing a robot platform? What is your ultimate goal?
Rocos是如何起步的？为什么会想到开发机器人平台？我们的最终发展目标是什么？
David：My co-founder, Richard Stinear, and I have worked together on and off for over 25 years. The idea for Rocos was started when we were building robots in our garage – out of interest as engineers as well as how we could potentially provide value to the robotics industry. It seemed clear that the robotics industry was reaching a critical point in maturity where robots were increasingly emerging from the lab phase and entering field trials - proving they could reliably solve a wide range of physical automation tasks.
我和合伙人 Richard Stinear断断续续合作了25年。Rocos的想法是我们在车库里制造机器人时开始的，因为工程师的兴趣所在，也因为希望能够发挥潜能为机器人行业做出贡献。显然，机器人工业正经历走向成熟的关键时期，机器人正逐步走出实验室阶段，进入现场试验——证明它们能够可靠地解决各式各样的物理自动化任务。
It was clear to us that there would be a need for massive scaling of robot fleets over the coming years in all areas from agriculture, security, inspection, delivery and many other areas. It was also clear that these robots would need a centralized system to connect, monitor and coordinate their activities. We evaluated what was available off-the-shelf for robotics companies and found that there was a complete lack of any mature tooling for developers to connect and manage robots from the cloud. This simply wasn’t historically needed, robotics engineers were trying to solve hardware and AI challenges in the lab on one or two robots, rather than solving the problem of scale. With the imminent scaling of robotics globally it seemed like an excellent place for us to use our skills to help increase the pace of robotic adoption by providing this off-the-shelf cloud platform layer.
我们清楚地看到，在未来几年里，从农业、安全、检查、运输和许多其他领域，都需要大规模的机器人车队。很明显，这些机器人需要一个集中的系统来连接、监控和协调。我们评估了一下，是否有现成产品可以为机器人公司服务，结果发现市面上完全缺乏成熟的工具来连接和管理云端机器人。历史观点上来看这不是必须的，机器人工程师们尝试在实验室里用一两个机器人来应对硬件和人工智能上可能遇到的问题，而不是规模性的解决他们。随着机器人技术在全球范围内的迅速扩展，它似乎是一个很好的领域，我们可以利用我们的技能，通过提供这种现成的云平台层来帮助加快机器人的应用速度。
Our ultimate goal is to accelerate the adoption of robots to solve global challenges.
我们的最终目标是加速机器人应用来应对全球挑战。
Q：After the pandemic, do you think the need for robots to replace humans will increase? Any unexpected changes will it bring to the industry / employment and so on?
疫情过后，机器人代替人工的需求会不会越来越多，又会带给行业/就业等等方面哪些颠覆性的改变？
David：I think there have been some areas like in hospitals where it has accelerated the thinking around why robots are useful. Not just the fact they can provide efficiencies but solve problems humans can’t – for example limiting the risk of exposure. Covid-19 also presented this immediate shortage of human labor in many industries, which has made organizations reconsider the risk of this type of event and increased their priority on investigating physical automation using robotics. This however has coincided with maturity of robotics being capable of solving these challenges, so a significant portion of demand is in fact related to solutions now being mature and available and not necessarily Covid-19, but that however has absolutely increased the priority of this for many organizations.
我认为在一些领域，比如医院，机器人的应用加速了人们关于为什么机器人是有用的这一思考。它们不仅可以提高效率，还可以解决人类无法解决的问题，例如控制暴露风险。Covid-19还暴露出许多行业劳动力短缺的问题，这促使各企业组织重新考虑此类事件的可能会带来的风险，并开始优先考虑研究机器人自动化。这与机器人技术的成熟度息息相关，很大一部分需求实际上与现在已经成熟和可用的解决方案有关，并不限于是Covid-19，但这绝对让许多企业对此事的考虑彻底提前了。
02
学会「见缝插针」
对于机器人市场来说，技术可能不是最难的，怎么有效管理才是。前面我们有说，机器人管理平台的开发建设，可能比开发机器人本身更耗费精力。而这，也是目前的市场最大痛点。
因为对大部分机器人企业来说，开发机器人可比开发个平台容易的多！
David：Rocos’ team is unique in that we understand robotics as well as cloud technology at a world leading level. On top of this, we have a design team focused on new unique usability challenges managing robot fleets present. These are very rare skillsets globally, which allows us to design completely new unique technical solutions. A second component of this is the pace and efficiency you can scale your business. Our head office in New Zealand sometimes presents disadvantage in terms of physical access to our global customer base but it also provides certain market advantages, one being the fact that companies like us are forced to be ‘born global’. This means our systems and processes such as engineering, sales or marketing are built immediately for scaling globally rather than organizations that often would focus on their local market before expanding and then run into scale challenges that slow them down. The disadvantage is that it takes more energy up front to prepare the business, but the significant reward is the friction in scaling your start-up is significantly reduced due to the discipline of the business being architected for this from day one.
Rocos团队的独特优势在于，我们机器人技术和云技术处于世界领先水平。除此之外，我们还有一个专门的设计团队，去研究和管理机器人车队在某些独特场景里的适用性。这也是全球市场里非常少见的技术能力，这使我们能够设计出全新独特的技术解决方案。第二个方面是扩展业务的速度和效率。我们在新西兰的总部有时在实际接触全球客户群方面处于劣势，但它也提供了某些市场优势，其中之一是像我们这样的公司被“全球化”。这意味着，我们的系统和流程（如工程、销售或营销）是为了在全球范围内进行扩展而立即构建的，而不同于那些在扩张之前先专注本地市场，然后遇到规模挑战而减缓扩张速度的企业。缺点是，准备业务需要更多的前期精力，但其中的回报是从一开始就为这项业务制定了规则，因此在扩大初创企业规模方面的障碍大大被减少。
There is a very high technical barrier of entry for any new entrants. Timing also a key factor in getting global market advantage. We were early into the market and already are years ahead in terms of ‘leveling-up’ the solutions we are building. This type of technology is typical of needing some fundamental building blocks (which we have built over the last 2 years) and now able to build higher order solutions on top of that. New entrants don’t have that advantage. We also get to work with the best robotics companies in the world like Boston Dynamics, which means our product maturity, and fit with these organizations is ahead and creates defendable position.
任何新进入者都有很高的技术壁垒。时机也是获得全球市场优势的关键因素。我们很早就进入了这个市场，在“升级”我们正在构建的解决方案方面已经领先了很多年。这类技术通常需要一些基本的模块（我们在过去两年中构建了这些模块），现在能够在此基础上构建更高阶的解决方案。新进入者没有这个优势。我们还可以与世界上最好的机器人公司合作，如波士顿动力公司，这意味着我们的产品成熟，与这些组织的配合度是更高的，并创造了可防御的地位。
Q：What is the current development direction of the robot market? Since Rocos has cooperation worldwide, in your opinion, are there any differences between the New Zealand market, the Chinese market and the global market?
目前机器人市场的发展方向是什么？Rocos与全球都有合作，在您看来新西兰市场、中国市场与全球市场有什么区别吗？
David：The New Zealand robotics market is not necessarily unique compared to the US. NZ similarly world-class engineers and is evident by some of our largest success stories such as Rocket Lab providing delivery of small payloads into space. The US seems to have some advantage in unique robotic form factors; an example is the lead Boston Dynamics have in bipedal and quadruped robots. China seems to have a significant lead on high quality, low cost production, rapid evolution and adoption of robotics. A great example is DJI’s global leadership in drones, and we see similar robotics companies in China leading hardware platforms like delivery robots (Keenon), cleaning robots (Gaussian) and many other rover type formats from companies like UBTech. There is a heavy use of embedding Android based interfaces and architecture in China which we don’t see in other regions. This may be related to the rapid adoption in using robotics to as assistance in areas like restaurants and public services that require human input on the robot.
与美国相比，新西兰的机器人市场并不一定是独一无二的。新西兰同样是世界级的工程师，我们一些最大的成功案例证明了这一点，例如火箭实验室向太空提供了小型有效载荷。美国在独特的机器人外形方面似乎有一些优势；例如波士顿动力公司（Boston Dynamics）在两足和四足机器人方面具有领先地位。而中国在高质量、低成本生产、快速发展和采用机器人技术方面具有显著的领先地位。例如大疆在无人机领域的全球领先地位，我们看到类似的机器人公司在中国也有领先的硬件平台，如送货机器人（Keenon）、清洁机器人（Gaussian）和来自优必选等公司的许多其他应用。在中国，大量使用基于Android的界面和架构，这是我们在其他地区看不到的。这可能与在餐厅和公共服务等需要人进行机器人输入的领域中，机器人被迅速普及并用作辅助工具有关。
At Rocos we are very focused on supporting the global market and feel companies from both the US and China have a huge amount of value to offer in terms of a leap in the world’s productivity and solving some significant global challenges like food shortages, access to water and cleaning the planet.
在Rocos，我们非常专注于支持全球市场，我们认为美国和中国的公司都有巨大的价值，可以带来世界生产力的飞跃，解决一些重大的全球性挑战，如粮食短缺、用水和地球环保等。
03
一次漂亮的「弯道超车」
Rocos专注于解决公司如何从中心位置管理机器人车队的问题。本意就是帮助客户解决一些非常困难的挑战。例如如何快速将任何类型的机器人连接到他们的平台，如何处理来自机器人的不完美的网络连接以及这种新型解决方案所需的安全性和软件用户界面等等。
在这个市场里，Rocos当然还有很大的提升空间，但我们相信，能敏锐觉察到市场机会，并逐渐完成「弯道超车」的Rocos，未来可期。
Q：技术研发的困难都有哪些？应用方面的难题如何解决？比如客户的教育成本是否很高？
What are the difficulties of technology R&D? Has the product encountered any problems or difficulties in actual application, such as customer acceptance of the product? Would the cost of educating customers about the products high? And how are you going to solve such kind of problems?
David：We have been lucky to attract some amazing talent and work with world class partners in the R&D space. We also work with some of the world’s leading research institutes like the Australian CSIRO. Customer acceptance has been excellent due to our focus on making sure the system was quick and easy to get up and running with almost any type of robot and the effort on having a good user interface. We currently put a lot of energy into onboarding customers to ensure they are using the platform correctly, but this energy is rewarded with us getting a deep understanding how organizations are using our system and picking up and solving any challenges they have. Over time, onboarding is becoming easier and lower effort on our side as the documentation and onboarding processes are refined.
我们很幸运地吸引了一些优秀的人才，并在研发领域与世界一流的合作伙伴合作。我们还与一些世界领先的研究机构合作，如澳大利亚CSIRO。由于我们的重心始终在确保系统能够快速、方便地启动，并且可以适配几乎任何类型的机器人，加上已操作的用户界面，客户的接受度其实非常高。我们将大量精力投入到新客户的培训中，以确保他们正确使用平台，这种行为的回报是，我们能更深入了解企业如何使用我们的系统，并着手解决他们所面临的任何挑战。随着时间的推移，随着文档和培训流程的完善，应用普及变得越来越容易，我们这边的工作量也越来越少。
Q:What is the biggest achievement and fun of entrepreneurship?
创业最大的成就和乐趣是什么?
David：The biggest fun is working with customers on solving their problems. We are constantly amazed by the wide range of use cases robots are being used for. Robotics engineers are both incredible creative as well as deeply technical which means the projects are very impactful as well as interesting to work on.
最大的乐趣是与客户一起解决他们的问题。我们经常对机器人的广泛用途感到惊讶。机器人工程师有着惊人的创造力和身后的技术，这使得这些项目非常有影响力，也很有趣。
Q：What do you want to say to entrepreneurs of G5?
对G5的创业者，想说点什么?
David：Entrepreneurship can be challenging and stressful but the rewards are enormous in terms of being able to be a leader and shape a new industry. We’ve also really enjoyed working with organizations from all over the world and find it very rewarding to have a global view of the industry rather than a local view. We highly encourage startups to continue to build world class partnerships in all regions of the world.
创业可能充满挑战和压力，但回报是巨大的，你能够成为领导者、塑造一个新行业。我们也非常喜欢与来自世界各地的组织合作，此外，我们发现拥有行业的全球视角而不是本地视角是非常有益的。我们非常鼓励初创企业继续在世界各地建立世界级的合作伙伴关系。
往期推荐
丨会员通道丨