Automation Unwrapped: Nicholas Zylberglajt, CEO of Unmanned Life

Olivier Proust, Partner in our Brussels office, speaks to Nicholas Zylberglajt,  the CEO of Unmanned Life, an award winning software platform for seamless orchestration of autonomous robotics. Nicholas speaks about how the power of automation is reshaping industries far beyond a few isolated examples, his challenges and predictions for the coming years.

Transcript

Welcome to the Fieldfisher Automation Unwrapped podcast. 

In this series, the Fieldfisher tech sector team speak to their clients about the world of automation and what the future holds. 

In this first episode, Olivier Proust partner in our Bruss office speaks to Nicholas Zylberglajt, the CEO of Unmanned Life an award winning software platform for seamless orchestration of autonomous robotics. Nicholas speaks about what it's like wearing the many hats of a CEO of a young, dynamic company in this space. 

Olivier Proust: So Nicholas, thanks very much for joining this podcast, by Fieldfisher on, Automation unwrapped. I'd like to start off with a general question. You are the CEO of Unmanned Life, a company that is directly involved in automation.
So can you tell us a little bit about your company and what it is that you do and your role within the company? 

Nicholas Zylberglajt: Thank you, Olivier. And, Unmanned Life, our vision is the autonomous everything. In 5 years from now, you will have  millions of robots in the air and the ground in the sea.
And our vision of life is that we will be orchestrating all of these robots. We will be the software platform that will be bringing all of these robots together. We are the software platform, that layer, that brings all that together. 

Olivier Proust: Excellent. 
That's that really sounds very exciting, but I suppose must be really busy.
What is it that you enjoy about your role at managing a company that is driving so much new technology? 

Nicholas Zylberglajt: Yeah, we are, a software platform that brings different type of robots to our world, a fleet of drones, fleet of robots together, and we deploy in use cases in security, surveillance, reforestation, asset inspection, so imagine that, the type of customers and the type of parts that we are in touch with, like AWS, Telefonica, Telus, it's huge.
And so my role is to be with our partners, to be with our customers, but also to be with the team and, also with our investors. So in the typical day that we have it's very diversified, right? And so it's very enjoyable. 

Olivier Proust: Yeah, I guess these are very exciting and at the same time, challenging times, so going a little bit deeper on the topic of automation, because we're talking a lot, and we hear a lot, about artificial intelligence and automation and how it's going to change our lives but can you tell us in a little bit more detail, is automation going to change our lives in the near future? 

Nicholas Zylberglajt: Yes, so let's take 1 use case 1 precise use case. Autonomous perimeter surveillance. So take a factory. Yeah, where you have today a control center where you have the typical CCTV cameras that we are all familiar with and you have, security guards with all the different TV cameras in the command center. That is limited, you have blind spot areas. 
With orchestration of robotics, you can deploy drones that will be doing perimeter surveillance for example. So there, for example, you are adding additional capabilities to that security account. So what before was a blind spot, now you are adding additional capabilities. 
Another example is that you are adding safety. Imagine offshore, for example, in the oil and gas industry where you want to protect the safety of workers. You want to do inspection. That can be done by robotics so that you are protecting,  the safety of the workers. 
A third example can be in sustainability. You want to track, for example, how forest are being protected. You are doing tree planting and you can use drones and robot to do harvesting and tracking how trees are growing.
So these are three examples of how automation can help the future of the world. 

Olivier Proust: That's really interesting. And I think, through these three examples, what you've shown is also, the multitude of use cases in which automation is going to be used, right? And the combination with robotics makes it possible to use automation in so many different types of use cases.
 
Nicholas Zylberglajt: Yes, the automation is there and that's why if you look at the market in robotics, so you have projections that are talking about a 200 billion market for service robotics by 2030. So the market is huge. 
And, there are of course, Continents that are more advanced because, They are catching up. And so when you are catching up and you are building from scratch, and it's a greenfield, you can say you let's say you are jumping a generation and you can invest directly into robotics.  So you have, Continents, Asia for example, that are investing heavily in robotics. 
So yes, use cases are tremendous and now you have areas like sustainability or logistics where you see that this has been adopted. And of course what I was referring to surveillance inspection. This has been adopted heavily. 

Olivier Proust: Yes. really interesting. So as the CEO of, Unmanned Life your company has existed now for already several years and is doing really well and has been growing but I expect that, you are also facing certain challenges at times.
Can you tell us what are some of the challenges for a company like yours developing all these automated services. 

Nicholas Zylberglajt: Look, it's never done until it's done, right? So we always have challenges as a company. So I would say that the challenges that we have, it's, we are Constantly fundraising, 
So that is until you don't exit your company or, you don't, find, let's say the ultimate product market feeds for your product offering. 
And this is a constantly evolving market, so regulation is also as a 2nd element and is still evolving. 
We were talking before about AI safety, we're talking about GDPR. We are talking about drone regulations. 
So you still need to be very knowledgeable about the regulatory landscape.
Access to talent is also still something that you need to be aware. 
And so you need to be very, Let's say resourceful, to adapt to the different challenges and then you need to be an entrepreneur, right? 
You cannot say, okay, this is, this is not functioning and you need to stop in robotics in automation. This is something where things maybe don't work at the 1st time. But you need to continue. You need to try again and then you need to keep calm and keep going because it will, always, end up working. 

Olivier Proust: I think that's a key thing to remember. 
So looking more closely at the industry or the sector for autonomous things, how do you see the sector as a whole evolving in the future?
And, if I broaden the question a little bit, we read a lot, we hear a lot about the fourth industrial revolution. 
Would you say that indeed we are there, that we are living this fourth industrial revolution? Or, do you think that, there, there are maybe some other factors, that we need to be thinking about?
How do you see the sector evolving in, in, in the coming years? 

Nicholas Zylberglajt: I think that, we now are seeing the sector maturing. I was giving a talk, A few weeks ago to a sector that is digitising rapidly like the Ports, and I was talking about four elements, that you need to transform and digitise, in robotics specifically.
One is the data, second part is the connectivity, then of course the robots, and then to have a platform approach. 
And if you take all this in conjunction, you can really deploy autonomous things rapidly. and that now, for example, 5G and edge computing is arriving to be deployed at such rapid scale.
And this is what you need to deploy. For example, robotics and autonomous things at a much wider scale, because you need to be able to control your robots in a, let's say, controllable manner, right? And for that, you need connectivity. You need the data that you send to your robot need to be constant.
You don't have to be to have what is what you call the latency. And for that, you need 5G for that. You need that compute and that is starting to be widely available and you have the infrastructure that is becoming available. 
Also, with the AI revolution that we are seeing, you are starting to have capabilities widely available to many more companies. And the prices of the hardware is also starting to come down. So you have a conjunction of elements that brings everything much more available to the market. 
Because before, let's say, a ground robot that you could see in a car factory could cost 100,000. Now it can cost you less than 10,000. So suddenly it becomes much more, affordable to deploy. 
So if you take this example, and you multiply by all the robots that you can have then you start understanding the dimension of what we're talking about. 

Olivier Proust: Okay. And so just picking up on what you were saying about Artificial intelligence, can you give us one or two examples of what you think are Use cases of artificial intelligence that we will see arriving on the market in a year or so?

 Nicholas Zylberglajt: Yes, in terms of in our field, yeah.  
The artificial intelligence. It's a very wide term, and this is more as a conclusion. Now,  I would say that in terms of intelligence that dynamic path planning that the drones can decide based on what they see for example, and then another example is that, you can give, as an operator command, based on natural language processing, You can create a mission to the robot orally say, hey, please go to this point and the robot will just go directly there and you don't need to create a mission on an interface. The robot will just turn on and go directly where you tell the robot to her to go.
And for that you need a lot of artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and you need a lot to happen in the back end, right? So these are two examples of the dynamic path planning, and then the other example is the ability to talk to a robot, and the robot follows your instruction.
And I would take this as a conclusion, that yes, it's, it seems very far away, but this is going to happen, and we shouldn't be afraid of robots. They are going to be there to help us in our day to day tasks in the future. 

Olivier Proust:Thanks so much, Nicholas, for sharing your thoughts on this and how you see the market evolve. This has been incredibly insightful and thank you so much for joining this podcast.