IAM Robotics introduces a new solution and a new direction

Last month, Pittsburgh-based IAM Robotics introduced a new autonomous mobile robot that takes a different approach to order fulfillment from other solutions on the market, and expands the weight capacity of most AMRs. You can watch a video of the solution here.

I have been following IAM since 2015, when the company was little more than a PowerPoint on the founders’ laptops. Back then, they were bringing an autonomous mobile piece-picking robot to the market. Two years later, I had the opportunity to watch the first implementation in action at a wholesale drug distribution facility in Rochester, New York. It worked without interruption during the three hours I watched it on the evening shift and was completely different than anything else on the market. I thought I’d seen the future of near-fully autonomous order fulfillment.

The market may not have agreed, and a few years later, IAM made the first of its pivots, focusing on the AMR market, along with adaptations so that it’s AMR could work in applications beyond robot-to-goods picking applications like rivals such as Locus and 6 River.

The new solution represents another pivot, something that Jay Link and Lance VandenBrook, IAM’s chief commercial officer and CEO respectively, refer to as a mobile, put-to-light wall utilizing a “meet me” approach to people and robots working together. Think of a light-directed putwall with configurable shelves mounted on an AMR base. The base is capable of carrying a 500 or so pound load. “I have five shelves that can carry full cases of auto parts or you could have up to 100 4-inch containers for the health and beauty industry,” says Link.

The plan is to stand out in a field that consists of a lot of me too providers taking a similar approach to the AMR leaders. “What’s confusing for the market is that we’re all clumped together under the AMR label,” Link says. “But we have picked a very different challenge, and one that we don’t think is being addressed.”

The different approach is not just an AMR with configurable shelving and the capability of carrying larger loads. It’s also how the robots collaborate with associates on the floor.

Two approaches predominate in the AMR market. One is robot-to-goods: The robot gets a task from the WMS and travels to a pick location, indicates that it is ready for a pick and waits for an associate to go to the robot and complete the pick. Then it’s off to the next task. 

The other is “follow me,” where an associate follows the robot as it travels through the facility.

IAM’s meet me approach “is the best of both models, where robots and humans are equal,” explains Link. “We don’t follow a robot, but we have parallel motion.” In IAM’s meet me model, an order selector working in a zone receives pick instructions from the WMS and walks to a designated location. Independent of the picker, the robot is also directed to that location, synchronized to arrive at the same time as the order selector – the selector is meeting up with the robot. “As soon as the associate confirms the pick, the robot and the human get their next assignments,” Link says. “The associate is independent of that robot and may interact with many different robots.” The solution supports batch and discrete picking strategies. It can also support both strategies on one robot: One tote might represent a single order, and another all the batch picks for a single SKU.

Once the robot is full, it goes to whatever locations are required for packing. Single orders may get delivered to a pack out station while batch orders might go to a putwall where they’re sorted. The robot travels to as many stops as required until all of the totes on the shelves have been unloaded. Then, it checks the battery charge. If there’s plenty of power left, it travels to induction to get its next assignment. If not, it goes to a battery station where the battery can be swapped out for a fully charged battery. IAM says its batteries can do two shifts on a single charge.

As someone who has followed IAM Robotics since its inception, I was as interested in learning about the company’s pivot as the new product. In reporting on startups, one of the things I learned is that often, the best startups, the ones that survive, are those that were launched with one idea for a product and along the way pivoted because of a new opportunity. They even teach the concept in business school at Stanford.

Making a pivot was essentially Lance VandenBrook’s charge when he became the new CEO in early 2021. He came to the job with robotics experience as a former senior executive at Kiva before it was acquired by Amazon. “I took the approach coming into the business to do due diligence as if I was going to buy it and spent the first 60 days analyzing the business,” he recalls.

At the end of that period, he posed two questions: The first was that the company had strong underlying technology, so how could they repuprose what they’d already developed? The second related question was to look at the white space between the existing solutions on the market: What was missing? “We realized there was an opportunity in the robot-to-goods space where we could create our own area,” VandenBrook says.

The concept for the new solution came out of that analysis period. “When we thought about the design, we wanted to create flexibility,” VandenBrook says. “The idea was to create a mobile putwall, or a putwall on a mobile cart, but more importantly, it was to optimize the human assets and the physical assets on the floor, with the flexibility to configure robots and how humans interact with the robots.”

They hired a team of engineers to build the enterprise software layer to operate the system and to design the putwall, utilizing the original AMR base. In late 2022, recognizing that there was – and still is – a shift away from growth at any cost within the venture capital markets, VandenBrook had to take difficult steps to right size the organization to control IAM’s burn rate. “We recognized that the market has changed,” he says. “Valuations had been crazy and all of the venture firms thought they had to be in robotics. That started to change, and we shifted to make sure we’re on the right path for that changing market.”

They are now taking the new solution to the market, which will be available in both a Robotics-as-a-Service model and as a capital purchase. They have pivoted, right-sized the firm and are working on pilots of the new solution. They are optimistic that the pivot is the right move. “I was talking to companies that thought of us as a robotic arm on a mobile base,” says Link. “Now, I can talk about this new product. We have a bit of a tailwind.”