Meeting Recordings

For this meeting, we had a great guest speaker, Aaron Turrner. He is an expert in cybersecurity, with decades of experience and accolades including:

• Named one of the 5 most-influential cybersecurity leaders of the last 30 years by SC Magazine in 2019
• Co-founded US Government critical infrastructure protection program at INL
• Jump-started Microsoft’s security program in the late 1990’s, 2-time Bill Gates “Gold Star” award winner
• Serial cybersecurity entrepreneur helping solve big industry problems
• IANS Research Faculty
• RSA Conference Program Committee

Robots will break. As your fleet grows, your robots will experience failures. These can be very small or very large, but regardless of impact, you need to learn from these. How do you do it, and how can you improve your fleet in a timely way?

In this meeting, we discussed how to leverage failure in your fleet to make it stronger over time.

For this month’s ROG Meetup, we went in depth into the topic of teleoperation and telemanipulation. We discussed:

• what is possible?
• what are the use cases?
• when are they appropriate?
• how do we deal with safety?

Leading the discussion was James Davidson. James is working on Talos, a remotely operated platform to train and supervise industrial robots. He was previously co-founder and CTO at Third Wave Automation and worked at Google on Brain Robotics.

In this ROG meeting, we heard about how OhmniLabs deployed and supported 100 robots for virtual attendees at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress, enabling remote presence for media and VIP attendees who were not able to attend in person due to COVID restrictions.

Special Guest Aaron Prather, a thought leader in the AMR space, led the conversation on where the industry is headed and how FedEx is embracing robots. With nearly 25 years at FedEx, Aaron Prather has developed and deployed numerous technology applications across the FedEx enterprise. In his current role as Senior Advisor, Technology Planning & Research, Prather leads efforts to find and deploy new technologies into FedEx operations, including robotics and automation. He sits on the company’s Operations Technology Council which coordinates efforts across all of the FedEx companies.

Robots don’t work in a vacuum (well, ok, maybe the space robots do.) There are usually internal or customer systems and other robots that have to not just co-exist but work collaboratively. In this session, we will discuss various approaches, including some emerging industry standards, that aim to facilitate system-wide operations.

Discussion around how to effectively detect and respond to incidents in the field.

In this session we were joined by Leo Chen and Lawrence Ibarria of Verdant Robotics.

We focused on Configuration Management and the associated challenges.