Urban Machine Podcast Transcript

Allyson Klein: Welcome to the TechArena. My name is Allyson Klein, and today we are delving into a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Sustainability and in particular sustainability of trees. I'm very glad to be joined by Andrew Gillies, co-founder and CTO of Urban Machine.

Andrew, welcome to the program.

Andrew Gillies: Thanks so much for having me. Excited to do this.

Allyson Klein: Andrew, why don't we just get started with an introduction of you and your role at Urban Machine and how you came to become the CTO and co-founder of Urban Machine?

Andrew Gillies: Yeah, sure. So my background sort of bounced around through startup land in Silicon Valley here PhD at a robotics lab at Berkeley.

And before starting Urban Machine, I was doing sort of freelance contracting work. And through some of that work I met my co-founder and the CEO of Urban Machine Eric Law. Eric is really the construction industry veteran and, and wood products guru. He, he had been sort of tinkering on this problem at his last role.

He was working on innovation and sustainability at, at Winterton Builders. And he recognized through that initiative that there's this huge waste stream of lumber in the US we're effectively landfilling every single year. So the, the EPA studies, the most recent numbers on that is around 37 million tons of lumber we're shredding, and we don't really have a good use for that shredded material. Right now, it mostly gets spread on landfills to keep birds off of garbage or, or suppress. Some of it gets used as, you know, mulch for agriculture or some amount might get burned for fuel in specific cases.

But there's really not a good answer out there right now of what to do with this huge volume of material. And the construction waste in general is a huge part of our overall waste stream. And some around 25% of our overall waste stream is just construction and demolition. And if you go and speak to the operators of the recycling centers and the landfills like we did when we were starting this, they're just overwhelmed by the pressure of all this material.

There's a lot of changes in the construction industry, a lot of these urban areas now and they actually call it wood again cuz they're getting so much of this material. They don't know what to do with it. Because once you shred that material doesn't have a lot of value.

So when Eric and I were looking at this problem, he identified that, well, when it first comes outta the building, it's not shredded, it's still in his beam form. The main reason in that state that is not valuable is cuz it's full of metal fasteners, it's full of nails, screws, staples, and it's not very sellable when it's covered in bent nails and screws and staples. No one in the lumber mill is gonna want to take the risk on their saw blade of passing that material through their line. If you hit a nail with one of those saw blades, your whole line is down. it's just not worth the risk. So the mission we're on at Urban Machine is to intersect this material while it's still in its full board form and figure out a way at scale to remove the metal fasteners.

That's really the crux of what we're doing is getting the metal fasteners out of the lumber. Once you can get the metal fasteners out of there, as long as you don't shred it, it's still very high value material, and we've been working with early customers and early partners to validate that we can sell it either at or substantially above the commodity price of lumber.

I came at this from an automation perspective saying like, okay, well we're talking about a repetitive task, scaling a repetitive task, it's a perfect candidate for automation, for robotics, especially with where robotics are today. So that, that was really my role is working with Eric.

He had the concept and then trying to connect the dots of like, okay, so we have, let's a system change here. Let's provide a technology stack that can implement that system change.

Allyson Klein: so. It, I don't talk about this on the TechArena, but one of my passions in life when I'm not talking about technology is actually remodeling homes and trying to use architectural salvage as much as possible in that remodeling, and I know how much of a burden it is to remove nails physically, or manually from wood, even if you are a well-intended sustainable person, it is a tremendous amount of work to do that. So when I saw that you've invented a solution that combines artificial intelligence and robotics to bring that same capability to market my antenna raised and was very excited because you've combined my two areas of passion. Tell me about the solution that the team has invented and how you've tapped technology, both from the world of robotics and the world of artificial intelligence to bring to bear to this labor intensive challenge.

Andrew Gillies: So at the heart of this problem really, you can think about it as sort of a reverse Amazon pick and place system. Amazon has this huge challenge of trying to like, move objects from A to B, right? Or like place an object into a box. We're trying to pull nails out of wood. So , the fundamental layer of this is the same two challenges. There's a perception challenge, which is, you know, given a scene where the objects that, that I care.

What's their pose in 3D space or like their position in orientation, and then what's the classification of that object? And then the other challenge is it's a manipulation challenge, which is, okay, now I know where the object is that I care about. How do I go in there? How do I grab it?

How do I manipulate it? How do I move it from A to B? So those are sort of the the two main technical challenges we're working on. On the perception challenge, that's where a lot of the magic has happened for us. That's where the AI lies, which is like looking at these complex scenes, looking at the wide of array of fasteners we see there.

And it's not good enough to just pick them out in a 2D image. We need to know the 3D position and orientation of these objects. So that's where we're applying AI right now, and leveraging the breakthroughs that we've seen in computer vision over the last several years. . We've developed a, a special pipeline and a data set.

 We joke that we've now generated like the largest data set of reclaimed lumber in the world. So the amount of lumber we put through there and the number of wild fasteners that we've seen yeah. And that the AI is the unlock there, instead of going in and doing painstaking feature engineering across this like long tail of fasteners, we have a model that we've developed and then a pipeline after that to post-process the results of that model so that we can output pick points that we then hand off to our manipulation stack. So that's really the heart of the AI.

Allyson Klein: And then when you look at it from a standpoint of the robotics you're passing on the information of here are all the fasteners in this piece of lumber now go at it. What does that look like?

Andrew Gillies: Yeah. So the go at it part, that's more my, so I'm more, much more on the hardware side. So the go get 'em is, is the, the key part that I focus on. And, you know, we looked at a variety of solutions. There's sort of, again, if you break that manipulation problem down even further, there's kind of two aspects of it.

There's the end of arm tooling or the end effector. The, the, the part of the. Is going to actually try to grip the fastener. And then there's how to get that end factor to the pose, right? So that's the, the robot arm part of it. Our solution, we decided to go with the robot arm. That's a gantry format.

Mm-hmm. . So it's, it's a three axis with a rotation on the end. It's sort of a glorified 3D printer in a sense. Very fast, powerful 3D printer. We did some initial experiments, but loads that you need to pull a nail out of wood are, it can be up to several hundred pounds. Mm-hmm. So there's not a lot of off-the-shelf gantry that can work on the cycle times and apply the loads that we need.

A lot of off the shelf robot arms that you might think of, like a universal robot, a, a cobot or even a light or medium duty industrial robot arm, like a c. Those might have a payload of around a few kilograms, up to like maybe 50, 60 kilograms for like a reasonable light to medium duty robot arm.

But we need several hundred kilograms. Mm-hmm. . So that kind of ruled out those off the shelf solutions. So we've actually developed our gantry in house so that they can be not only super fast, but also have these like tremendous load capabilities. So that's what the gantry, that's what the robot arm looks like.

And then for the end effect we took a lot of inspiration for other hand tools that you might use to remove nails. There's also some fun tools that you can find in the hardware store to help solve this problem for people. They're all frustrating in their own ways and they're all awkward in their own ways.

So we kind of did a design study across what was out there and arrived, you know, through iteration at a solution that we think is like a really healthy compromise across all those tools. We call it big bird cause it more or less looks like a sharp little. And, and we can pull out with that same beak, we can pull out all manner of nails staples.

We, we can actually pull out a big, like 16 penny, like a framing nail. Mm-hmm. that nail could be hammered all the way through. Two by four folded on the far side. And we can actually get under the nail, head into the wood, penetrate the wood a little bit, get under the nail hill, grab the shaft and just pull that nail up and bend the nail straight to pull it out of a hole.

It's, it's amazing. It's quite the scene.

Allyson Klein: Amazing. So this is fantastic. When you look at actually entering wood into the machine, what is the timeframe that it takes to scan that piece of wood? Remove all of the nails and exit the lumber out of the machine?

Andrew Gillies: Yeah. So there's a lot of moving pieces of this. We have targets on the business model side. So we know like if we want to hit a certain revenue certain rate with the robot, we need to hit a certain throughput. And we actually created a full 3D model of our system. Mm-hmm. that we get input certain characteristics and parameters of the wood so that we could estimate, we could break down into how quick each of these actions needs to happen.

So we could say like, you know, if we have a pick time of X and if we have a movement time of Y and we have this number of fasteners and a piece of wood, and the, what is this dimension? Throw that all at our 3D simulation and we get a result. This is how much volume of lumber we get a day. We know how much we can sell the volume of lumber.

And so all that backs into these sort of, each of these modules. We, we get a cycle time for. Our initial target was 15 seconds per nail removal. Wow. Mm-hmm. , that was sort of like the initial and to date, currently with a third generation prototype, we've got that down to about 4.8 seconds.

That's amazing. So, of like, well under initial targets. Yeah. That's really incredible. Yeah. So we're, we're getting better. Each, each generation has got better and better and better. Yeah. and we can move lumber through the system. it, works out to be about 10 meters a minute. , we don't do it continuously.

It's sort of a semi continuous process. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. But we can, we can effectively like cycle the wood with our conveyance system. We have a cycle time for, I think it's like every 0.25 meters. We can move we can move that in about three seconds. A little under three seconds.

Allyson Klein: So I know that Urban Machine has been getting a lot of attention since you've been public with your product. what customers are you going after with us? Is it builders? Is it places where lumber is disposed of today in landfills? Who are you working with and what has their response been when you've presented the machine?

Andrew Gillies: Yeah, the response has been really strong. A lot of folks, you know, the story you told at the beginning of working on the home, having leftover lumber and the pain of what to do with that.

We hear that all the time from on an individual level to a company level. So they immediately recognize the problem. They immediately want to be involved. It's been really strong strong response partnerships with the. You can almost think about it like a two-sided marketplace.

What we're doing, we have the input side, and that's the demolition partner. So they're feeding us the material. Mm-hmm. . And we have a few key partnerships that we started starting in the Bay Area. We have a few key partners and they've been really excited to work with us because they're also feeling the pressure of what to do with this lumber.

Right now they're paying to dispose of this lumber. there's tipping fees at landfills, and then there's the trucking fees of hauling it off. And then there's regulation coming in that saying that they have to find a better use than it getting shredded and ending up at a landfill. So they see the change coming and they wanna find other avenues of what to do with this waste stream.

So that's on the supply side, on the demand. we've seen a huge a spectrum of folks interested in it. As we're getting going, as we're small before we scale, we have just like little sort of sips of material that we've put putting through the first couple of prototypes, and we've been working with partners that don't need huge volumes of material.

So we see folks in either they're like boutique architectural applications, or they're creating furniture out of the lumber. Or floorboard, sidings, things like that. But then on the other side of the scale, we've also had interest from developers. Mm-hmm. Sort of at the top of the pyramid where they're coming into a site and they might have a client that has their own sustainability initiative and they're going to redevelop some site they're gonna turn it into a large, let's say something like a large tech campus. There's a bunch of old buildings. That have a surprising amount of lumber in them. So they're actually specifying , from the developer level, hey, we want, this site to be almost fully circular. We're gonna involve Urban Machine from the earliest stages.

They're gonna clean the lumber coming out of the old buildings that we're tearing down, and we're gonna directly use that material on the same site in the new structures. Oh, that's wonderful. So that, which is, which is pretty wild. so we come in, we clean the lumber as the demolition crew is taking it.

and then that lumber just sort of hangs out on site or nearby storage until it's ready to be built into the new structure. It never leaves the initial site, which is pretty wild. It is really the most sustainable way you could go and you get this great story in your new structure.

They can say like, Hey, this is actually built. There's a story here. A lot of the cities involved. they want to maintain some sort of connection to the, to the history of the place. And we can provide that as well.

Allyson Klein: That's fantastic. So if a company is going after LEED certification or whatever for their building, this gives them a direct path for reuse of materials for the exact same building that they're remodeling or retrofitting.

That's fantastic. When you look at broader sustainability in construction, wood is obviously a huge component of that. But you know, I think about the fasteners that you're taking out of the wood, other applications. Does Urban Machine have broader ambitions to be part of a broader response to sustainability and if so, what do you see are the opportunities to apply technology in this field?

Andrew Gillies: Yeah, there's tremendous opportunity. there's a huge sea change coming. one. One of the exciting things about working o on this problem and starting urban machine is that we just feel like we have a lot of wind in our sails.

Mm-hmm. , there's a lot of changes. So if you think about it, we're really starting in this very narrow wedge, which is dimensional lumber, get the metal out. Right. We see a lot of opportunities in adding technology sort of upstream and downstream from where we are. Demolition is going to change to more of a deconstruction style, right? Right now, the status quo is mostly going in and flattening the building as quickly as possible. That's not gonna be the way it is in the future. Regulations are coming through. Waste pressure, like I mentioned earlier is a huge problem.

And deconstruction is just a different. Currently it requires a lot of human labor, but we see a lot of opportunities to jump into that process, work with their demolition partners as well, and, and provide technology like upstream as part of the demolition process directly to help deconstruction move faster, move safer and, and require less human labor.

Because the industry as a whole is just severely under-resourced on the labor side. So that's a bit on the upstream. We see opportunities there. And then on the downstream, we are capturing so much data on this wood where we have it in our registered, in our machines. So doing value add processes to the wood while it's still under our control is, is sort of a no-brainer.

we can start looking at post fabrication, even forming structural elements which taps into the other huge movement that's happening in the US right now, which is this movement to mass timber where you're seeing. Steel and concrete skyscrapers. Mm-hmm. transitioning to full timber buildings.

I think the record in the US now is 18 stories of a full wood structure. These are incredible, beautiful buildings. Far lower carbon impact than steel and concrete, and there's been a trend in Europe for much longer. I think it's about 25 years. Europe is way ahead on this trend. Finally the US is starting to catch up.

We're starting to see more. They're called cross laminated timber production fill facilities where they make these huge timber structural elements. We're seeing more and more in these, in the US right now. So we also see opportunities there where automation is gonna be a huge lever that's gonna unlock that even further.

Allyson Klein: That's so exciting. I can't wait to hear more. I am going to be following your story to see how Urban scales and introduces new capabilities in a very exciting place. One final question for you, Andrew. If folks want to connect with Urban Machine and learn more about the technology, talk about a partnership, where would you send them to connect with the team and, and learn about the machine?

Andrew Gillies: Yeah, so the most direct place to reach out would be on our website, which is urbanmachine.com so you can go there. And then we also have links to various social media outlets. We're very active on LinkedIn as well. And we'd love to talk about partnerships and we're also hiring, so we're hiring across the development side operations and on on the technical side as. So if you're interested in working on cool robots with a sustainability mission please reach out.

Allyson Klein: Thank you so much for being on the program today.

It was really interesting to learn more.

Andrew Gillies: Yeah. Thanks Allyson.