Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 13, 1994 TAG: 9402150301
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
They got into a conversation with some local business people at the Radisson Patrick Henry Hotel, where they were staying, and the locals seemed stunned that they were in the valley looking at robots.
Although Cybermotion, a robot-maker in Salem, has been in the Roanoke Valley for 10 years, some local residents still are not aware of its existence. In Cybermotion's early days, the company saw the main market for its robots as handling and transporting materials in factories. Over the past three years, though, the company has developed a niche in the security business.
Tough, tireless and able to sniff out trouble as soon as it develops might be some of the attributes in a description of the perfect security guard.
Cybermotion says it makes a robot, called the SR2, that is all those things, as well as being immune to boredom on tedious security patrols.
The security market was one that came to the company without Cybermotion setting out to develop it, Holland said.
Glaxo Pharmaceuticals, the U.S. affiliate of the British drug company, had been considering another company's robot for a security patrol and asked to look at Cybermotion's robot for comparison.
Although Glaxo liked Cybermotion's robot better because of its ability to navigate the company's buildings in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, the robot had not been equipped for security duty.
In collaboration with Glaxo, Cybermotion developed a security package for its basic robot. One of the business lessons that Holland says he has learned is that "the customers get to design the product in the end."
Neither his company nor his competitor at the time had a good idea of what a security robot should do, Holland said. "We focused on catching the bad guy," but what a security guard does, he said, is monitor a building for anything out of the ordinary. That can be a fire, plumbing that has sprung a leak, or a thief.
Cybermotion has granted the European distributorship for its robots to CompuGuard, a subsidiary of a Dutch holding company, Hodon International. Cybermotion switched to the metric system in its manufacturing processes a couple of years ago, a decision Holland said punctuated the company's commitment to going global.
Glaxo now has nine Cybermotion security robots. Other robots are patrolling the halls of the J.C. Penney Co.'s world headquarters in Dallas and the Los Angeles County Museum's galleries of 19th-century European art.
Ross Volk, corporate manager of information security for Glaxo, said the robots have more than met the company's expectations. The company's security officers are working well with the robots and are proud they're using a new technology, he said.
The U.S. Army has purchased some SR2 units and has been investigating their use to patrol some of its 112 military storage warehouses around the country.
No contract is signed, but the Army may begin purchasing the robots in quantity soon and could possibly buy between 20 and 30 next year, said Ken Kennedy, Cybermotion vice president. Those robots may be equipped with a device to read inventory tags that could help reduce theft at the warehouses, each of which loses about $2.5 million a year in goods.
Cybermotion is also working on a $500,000 contract with the Army to develop a robot that could patrol outdoors. The trick is to develop a navigation system that will work where there are no walls or halls by which the robot can navigte.
If the company lands the Army production contract as expected, it will have to expand manufacturing space at its Sheraton Road location, near the intersection of Interstate 81 and Virginia 419, or look for outside subcontractors, Holland said. The company's current production capability is one robot a week.
The company employs 15 people, including engineers, computer programmers and technicians. Five employees are Virginia Tech graduates.
Most of the parts used to assemble the robots are acquired from companies in and around Roanoke, Holland said. The Hub Pattern Corp. of Salem provides metal castings, and Keltech of Roanoke supplies printed circuit boards.
The private company does not release information about profits, but its sales last year hit $1 million. The company has already identified sales for calendar year 1994 that would double that figure, Kennedy said.
Holland, 47, is an electrical engineering graduate of Virginia Tech and a Vietnam War veteran. He was an engineer at the ITT fiber optics plant - now Alcatel - in Roanoke County and a consulting engineer before he and a partner, Michael Frank, incorporated Cybermotion in January 1984. The original offices and shop were on Aerospace Drive at the base of Windy Gap Mountain.
The company has about 30 shareholders, half of them from the Roanoke area. Frank is no longer active in day-to-day operations but serves on the company's board.
John Roach, an associate professor of computer science at Virginia Tech and director of his department's robotics lab, serves on Cybermotion's board of directors.
Roach explained that stationary robots, essentially automated arms used in factories, have been around since the 1960s, but mobile robots such as Cybermotion's made their first appearance in the 1980s.
"I really think Cybermotion is the leader in the world," Roach said. "They've survived the hardest years; I'm just hoping the market really develops."
Don Vincent of the Robotic Industries Association in Ann Arbor, Mich., agrees that Cybermotion is a world leader with its robotic navigation system and its security robot. Vincent is familiar with Cybermotion, because of its membership in his association.
Most of the U.S. industrial robot business has moved overseas, but U.S. companies hold the lead in the development of mobile robots for service applications, Vincent said.
Some big companies, which Holland declines to name, have made offers for Cybermotion. Some have been quite aggressive, he said, but the company's sales are not big enough yet to demand what the company's technology is worth.
Since its founding, the company has had two major infusions of capital, but total capitalization, including some subordinate debt, totals less than $1 million, Holland said.
It is difficult to sustain investment interest in a company like Cybermotion, because investors and lenders want a quick turnaround on their money, he said.
Some competing robotics companies invested large amounts of money in single robot applications, only to fail, he said. But Cybermotion intentionally decided to keep its capitalization low and grow the company on sales.
Cybermotion also decided early not to focus on one particular application but to build a modular robot system that could be adapted to a variety of uses.
Finding a market for the company's robots was "sort of like flying a kite in a lightning storm to see what strikes," Holland said.
From the beginning, the company expected the robot would be big in the nuclear power industry, but that market is only now starting to grow.
"Nuclear was nothing last year; this year, nuclear is going to be very big for us," Holland said.
The company's robots, equipped with gamma ray detectors, operate in nuclear facilities at Savannah River in South Carolina and Los Alamos in New Mexico. At the latter, the robot is used to monitor radioactive contamination of a floor, moving along at one-inch per second - a painfully slow pace that would exhaust a human being.
Cybermotion's major competitor is Transitions Research of Danbury, Conn., but that company's market is for robots to perform routine handling tasks, such as delivering meals in hospitals and nursing homes.
Both Cybermotion and TRC are "poor enough" that they cannot afford to go after new markets, Holland said. He estimated that it costs his company at least $150,000 a year to maintain a presence in a potential robot market.
One day recently, one of the company's SR2 units was moving back and forth along a path in the Salem assembly shop.
As Tim Orwig, Cybermotion's spokesman, and a visitor approached the robot, it stopped and set off an alarm. Stick figures representing the location of two people, Orwig and the visitor, appeared on a nearby computer terminal.
Two years ago, robots lacked this ability to track people in a building. Holland likens the process to a cat seeing movement in the grass. When something catches the robot's attention, it focuses on the object to determine if it is a person.
But the technology that can be installed in robots is developing rapidly. "We're going to be able to make the robot far more powerful than I ever dreamed in the very near future," Holland said. For instance, Cybermotion recently looked at technology that would enable a robot to recognize people's faces when they pass in a hall and determine if any are strangers. Such a robot could actually greet a familiar person by name.
But such technological advances will not mean that a robot is a thinking being. "They are no more intelligent than a magician's trick is reality," Holland said.
When he was younger, Holland said he read his share of science fiction. That is something you might expect from someone who has launched a business on the leading edge of technology.
His reading matter nowadays has a different focus, but he finds it just as exciting.
"Usually, when I have time to read, I read more on business," he said. "That's far scarier."
\ THE ROBOTICS INDUSTRY\ \ U.S.-based robot industries received $648.5 million in new orders in 1993, up 31 percent over 1992, and shipped $558.5 million worth of product, a 21.5 percent growth. It was the industry's best year on record.
\ There are 500,000 robots are in use, worldwide. About 50,000 of them are in the North America.\ \ NAFTA, the new trade treaty among the U.S., Mexico and Canada, is expected to benefit the U.S. robotics industry, creating demand for the machines in Mexico. Major emerging markets for robots are Singapore, Taiwan, China and Eastern Europe.
\ Industrial demand for robots is chiefly for machines used in welding, materials handling, assembly, and painting and coating.
\ The industry is recovering from a downturn in the mid-1980s, when auto manufacturers cut their orders for robots.
\ Major users of robots, besides the auto industry, are electronics, pharmaceuticals, food packaging and appliance industries.
\ Major non-industrial uses for robots include security, commercial cleaning and health care, especially in dealing with hazardous materials such as cleaning of contaminated sites, chemicals and nuclear weapons disposal.
Source: Robotics Industries Association
by CNB