Interviewee
Michael Blanton, CTO at Renu Robotics, the company automating operations and maintenance for the solar industry. He is a Research Electrical Engineering professional with extensive experience implementing technical solutions for commercial and government clients.
Transcript
Michael Blanton: I'm the CTO of Renew Robotics, lead, all the technical development for the autonomous mowing system and all the, the supplemental components of it, the recharge pod, the, the solar charger, everything that, that helps the op robot operate out in the real world completely autonomously. And so my background is in electrical engineering, did a lot of development at a nonprofit national organization for advanced robotics and Automation, doing a lot of vision guidance of robotics and advanced autonomy. And then ran into Tim Matus, our CEO, you know, a number of years ago. And he had the desire to start up a company that was a manufacturing based company that would serve an industry need that he had identified at the time, which was vegetation management on industrial scale solar farms, right? So after the solar farms were installed, the largest cost, or one of the largest costs is the o and m cost for managing the vegetation, just keeping the grass mode, keeping the plants out of the, outta the panels, keeping it a safe environment for producing electricity.
And so he wanted to look at automating a ground robotic system that could manage that vegetation. So we got a small team of people together. It was about four of us that started tinkering around in a garage and building prototypes. And after about a year or so, we built a sufficient enough prototype to do a PI test pilot program. So we built four of those units, one here to stay at home base and do development on, and three of 'em to go out into the field with a, a partner, an energy partner out on the east coast. And so during the Covid lockdowns I was traveling out to the East coast a lot and we were field testing the units, getting a lot of feedback on their performance in the field enhancements that we could, that we needed to make to the system for this, this pilot program. And so during all of covid, the, you know, the small team was working vigorously to make updates and upgrades to the mechanical, electrical and software components of the system.
And then towards the end of the, of Covid we were ready to roll out our, what we call our generation three model, which is our current production unit. And we have, you know, got a little over 60 of those out in the field right now and, you know, we are continually monitoring them and continuing to make upgrades and enhancements on a continual basis. So one of the things that, you know, we had originally thought that we could do this fully autonomously, completely hands off, nobody touching it at any point in time, just get it set up on the site and let it go and Okay. Quickly realize that it's gonna be, it would be a great benefit to be able to get a human in the loop at some point in time, right? So there's just things in the world that robots come across they really aren't quite trained to handle yet or, or don't, you know, aren't able to interpret and deal with. And so we, we said let's, we stood up what we call mission control, which is a remote monitoring service. So at any point in time, the bot, while it's operating, if it runs across the situation it doesn't know how to handle it, will call home and, you know, a mission control operator will, will remote into the bot, we can look through cameras, we can look at the data feeds from the sensors, we can look at the health reporting from the bot and determine what the issue is, get the bot recover from that situation and get it back on its way.
Elisa Muñoz: Okay. And talking about the company and the recent news, I know that the FORD International Airport recently announced the third round of FLITE and Renu Robotics is one of the five companies selected. So congratulations on that!
Michael Blanton: Yeah, certainly. Absolutely. Yeah, so we designed the bot to work on solar farms, which is one of the more complicated environments to try to get an autonomous vehicle to operate in. There's a lot of critical infrastructure there that you have to be, you know, really careful around. And so rather than starting off, you know, going for like sports fields or golf courses or parks or, you know, the, what, what we consider to be really easy autonomous operational environments, we went for the very complicated one of the, the solar farms and right. So that's our core target market. And what's the success that we've seen out there in the capabilities that we've built into the system to handle, you know, the difficulties and nuances of solar farms, other vertical markets have been, you know, seeking us out from the interest that they've seen from the solar industry. And one of those vertical markets is airports, right? So there's a number of automation initiatives going on for completely automating air airports and airports have grass that needs to be maintained. You know, one of the main things they have to deal with is the wildlife that can, you know, try to live on an airport, right? A lot of birds can try to live there.
So they wanna maintain the grass levels so that it helps promote animals not trying to live at the airport, right. And so, you know, keeping that grass controlled at a precise level and keeping people out of harm's way at an airport, you can imagine, you know, that can be a pretty dangerous area as well. Okay. Yeah, that's one of the areas that we've been pulled into recently. We've got a couple of pilot programs going right now with airports. We've got a system installed on one, we've got a couple installed on, on military airfields as well. So it's an exciting time.
One of the key things about leading a technology development company is being able to delegate and trust. Trust your team to take care of the things that need to be taken care of.
Elisa Muñoz: Okay. So you mentioned how you guys are a software hardware company, right? So talking about the pandemic, a lot of hardware companies struggle with purchasing. What do you think has been probably the biggest challenge there and how did you guys manage to solve the problems?
Michael Blanton: Yeah, I mean one of the biggest challenges was the drop in microchip availability and electrical components, right? But like I said, you know, we have a small team so we're able to be very agile and move quickly. But also the ability of the engineers directly involved with the designs are, are highly capable and experienced engineers. They've got, you know, among us all, we've got decades and decades of experience of doing, you know, detailed hardened designs for, for, for industry. So we were able to, to move through and quickly modify the necessary, you know, portions of the system to accommodate the, the lack of, you know, that component being available. So, and at, at one point it was almost a daily activity cuz you would, you would, you would see that a component was not available anymore. You would turn, you would identify one that's available and then start to redesign it.
And then that component you were redesigning wasn't available anymore. So we changed the process that we used for design during this, this pandemic issue. And what we did is we identified components that were appropriate for the design and before putting them in the design and completing that, we would just purchase the components. We would say we are gonna, these will work before we design, before we put them in the design, we're just gonna buy them. So we have them available and we bought, you know, enough to cover our production needs and then some. So we generated a surplus of components that allow us to draw those components into new designs and the existing designs as well
So that was one of the methods that we used to get ahead of some of these procurement issues during the pandemic. We kind of turned the typical engineering design structure on its head instead of saying, instead of, you know, designing with components we think will be available, we just bought the components and said these are the ones we're going to design in.
Elisa Muñoz: Wow. I mean, you guys have to adapt to the situation at the end of the day. And talking about the next steps for the company, what will you say comes next for Renu Robotics?
Michael Blanton: Next is growth. We've got a, you know, we've got a roadmap of additional products to be putting out and capabilities enhancements to the systems. You know, just taking a lot of feedback from customers on, you know, now that we're meeting their vegetation management needs, what else would be useful for them in, in their industry, right? For, for automating, you know, having a ground robotic vehicle out there monitoring their, their sites, things like that. Right? So we are actively working on additional designs. Okay. And, you know, just growing our sales pipeline overall, right? Eventually we're looking to go international. So that's a long term play. We've had a lot of, we've had a lot of pull this year to go international. You know, a lot of the solar companies, energy producing companies around the world, Australia, you know, South America, Europe, all have the same needs, right? Right now our core customer base is domestic here in the US and that's our primary target for now. But we are working towards, you know, getting certifications to go international as well. So that's a longer term play for us.
Elisa Muñoz: Thank you so much for sharing! Last but not least, Do you have any advice for future CTOs or engineers starting on this path?
Michael Blanton: Sure. You know, be willing to, to let yourself be challenged. Don't, don't be comfortable in anything that you're engaging in. You know, push yourself to learn new things and to explore areas that you're not comfortable with. You know, continue to push yourself to excel at what you do know, but then reach out and explore other things. One of the key things about leading a technology development company is being able to delegate and trust. Trust your team to take care of the things that need to be taken care of. That is absolutely key. You know, building a team of people that are capable, knowledgeable, and driven and are trustworthy. You know, to be able to hand off, you know, things that need to be developed. And cuz every single component of this system is critical down from the bolts that we use to the, to the autonomy algorithms that we develop. Everything is critical and everybody has, no one person can pull this all off, right? So you have to be willing to trust people, to develop things.
Elisa Muñoz: That's great! Michael, thank you so much for being here, for taking the time. We were lucky to have you at Builder Nation today.
Michael Blanton: It was a great pleasure, Elisa. I really appreciate the time. You have a blessed day.
