Welcome to Texas Talk.

I'm Gilbert Garcia, metro columnist for the San Antonio Express-News.

On this show, we bring you in-depth one on one conversations with some of the most fascinating figures in Texas.

Politics, culture, sports and business.

Tonight's guest is Eric Nieves, a true innovator in the field of industrial automation.

Eric is the CEO and co-founder of Plus one Robotics, a thriving San Antonio tech company that develops software enabling robots to see their way around warehouses.

It's also at the center of so many pivotal questions in our society.

How is technology changing us?

How will we adapt to the growth in automation?

And how does a community create a climate for innovation?

Let's get started Eric, thanks so much for being with us.

I appreciate it.

Are you kidding?

This is such a treat.

I grew up as a PBS kid also.

It's great.

Well, you know, I know you grew up in Long Island.

You moved with your family to Texas, I guess, when you were a teenager.

Yeah.

And you went to Judson High School.

I'm curious, you know, what kind of kid you were?

Were you someone who was fascinated with technology at a young age?

I mean.

Yeah.

I mean, we had our prized possession at home was the World Book Encyclopedia.

I had them that you had.

And the se was always in my room because space.

Right.

I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer.

I wasn't sure what that was, really, but I knew it had to do with planes and spacecraft.

And that's what I was really into.

And, you know, we moved here to Texas in the early eighties.

Was it a culture shock for you?

It was.

Oh, my gosh.

We the landed no lie on the 11th of August 1982.

Right.

Back then, the airport didn't even have a jet bridge.

You stepped out onto the little ladder, you know, step staircase thing.

And I got to the door of that plane.

I was like, oh, my gosh, there's no way I want to turn around and go back home.

But, you know, a couple of years later, your blood turns to Kool-Aid.

There's no going back.

And I'm texting through and through at this point.

During summer break from in college, you worked at a cement mixing factory in Minnesota.

Yeah.

And my understanding is this was maybe an early experience with robotics.

I mean, what what what were you doing there for that for that company?

And how did you how did robotics enter into your job?

Yeah.

So I was going to college here in Texas.

And in the summers I would drive up to Minnesota because there was a factory there that would accept all comers.

And you could work as many hours a day as you could stand.

And you're right, it made cement mixers.

And my job this would have been 1988 was to grind the welds on a cement mixer drone.

It was hot.

It was loud.

It was heavy.

And it was at night.

And the foreman drove up in his own cart one day, one evening, and he says, Hey, Eric, I hear you know something?

About computers.

The truth is, I don't know much about computers, but whatever he's thinking about, it's got to be better than what I'm doing.

And so he pointed me to this machine and said, We've got this thing over here.

Nobody knows how to make it run.

It was an industrial welding robot, and I didn't know anything about robots.

I didn't know anything about welding, but I knew how to read a manual and work my way through it and ended up running that robot for three consecutive summers.

I got a raise out of this thing, and I didn't have to hold this up anymore.

I thought, OK, robots is a pretty good deal.

And that's how it really how it started was as a summer job in college.

Then you were a high school physics teacher for for a while.

I was in college my last year of college.

The local high school needed a physics instructor.

And so I taught, you know, physics just for the one year there.

And if I weren't an industrial roboticist, which is what I call myself, I would be a teacher of some stripe.

You know, I really enjoyed that experience.

But you know, once robots gets in your blood, you know that virus, you can't shake it.

Now in 1981, you started working for this robotics firm based in Ohio.

Motorman.

Yeah.

And what I'm wondering what, what the state of the industry was like at that time.

What were the major applications for robotics was it primarily, I guess in the automotive industry was the big thing or.

Yeah, it was.

So in 1991 I moved from Minnesota to Dayton and it went, it's because the robot company that had supplied the robots I was working on, I went to work for them.

That's how that happened.

I went from being a customer to, to working with them and at that time robots were few and far between.

They were nearly exclusively in the automotive industry, spot welding painting, that type of work and art welding.

So in the folks that would use robots for art welding, we're going to be Caterpillar and John Deere and, you know, heavy fabricators like that.

So I went to work for them in 1991 teaching people how to program, maintain robots, et cetera.

I ended up staying there for 25 years and you know, basically made a career there of in the end I ran sort of the research and development group not teaching robots new tricks, new applications, new things to do, which is ultimately what you know, led me to start my own robot company.

I was going to ask, I mean 25 years there, you had a great career going.

Obviously it's always a little daunting for somebody to go out on their own.

And what made you decide in 2016 to start plus one robotics and what made you decide to to base it here in San Antonio.

You're you're based at the Port San Antonio.

Yeah.

So back to back up to about 2005 OK because even while I was still working for your scour the robot company, I was eager to get home.

You know my mom was here, my family was here and wouldn't you know it, we came for Thanksgiving and in the newspaper that weekend Toyota chooses San Antonio.

That was a big day.

That was a big day.

And that was my ticket home because Toyota was a huge user of the technology that we were providing at YOSHIKAWA.

So I raised my hand and said, I'll go take care of that one.

And I moved home in 05 and basically managed all those robots at the Toyota complex for four or five years.

And in the end, I started plus one and it wasn't my own volition.

I have two co-founders, Sean and Paul, and plus one was really their idea.

They needed somebody to help them, you know, kind of pull it together.

And I was happy to do that.

And, you know, the whole premise was robots have been really successful in manufacturing for a long time.

But there is a huge need for robots in material handling, warehousing, distribution, fulfillment, et cetera.

And that was going unmet.

And we, you know, knew it would be a big opportunity if we could figure out how to make it work.

And that's what plus one, you know, was sort of predicated on.

Before we started taping, we were talking about the history of the word robot, which I had no idea about.

And I hadn't I certainly didn't have any idea that there was any Texas connection to it.

Would you mind sharing that story?

Sure.

The word robot is actually out of the Czech language.

And it means in forced labor.

Right.

And it was coined in a play written by a playwright named Carol Chapek.

Mm hmm.

And this was a hundred years ago that the term robot came into the lexicon.

And he wrote a play called Ransoms Universal Robots.

And it was pretty dystopian, the first of its kind robot sci fi, where the robots in this case, they were, you know, androids and biology and that type of thing.

They were more humanoid.

Rise up, take over.

You know, kill off all the people.

And then, you know, it's it's kind of a sad story, but that's how robot came into the language.

And the term is fascinating because it's pretty much across all languages, no matter what language you speak.

Robot is robot.

And I thought about that.

Yeah.

The Texas connection is that in raw sums, universal robots, it's our you are.

And there is one sculpture in the entire world sort of talking about this concept of raw, universal robots and reinterpreting it as a, hey, let's not ever let the robots take over.

Right.

And of all places, it's in Bernie, the there's a longtime resident of Bernie, and she's Czech, and she wanted that story told.

And so she, you know, funded this art piece that you can just go on River Road and you will see the big are you are for Broadcom's Universal Robots which is what gave us the term 100 years ago.

I think I'm driving there this weekend.

Now that you tell me that one of the things that that I picked up on and just in reading about your industry is I I've seen a lot of people make reference to something called Ross, which is I guess this stands for a robot operating system.

And it comes up a lot because people refer to this as something that was kind of groundbreaking or it was a game changer in some way.

I mean, could you explain what what that is yeah.

Ross was seminal.

So it was born of an effort really at sort of the graduate level, you know, programs for robotics across the country.

Every graduate student that wanted to do something with robots ended up having to build everything associated with the robot being able to do anything of its own before they actually got to the part that was interesting to them.

Right.

Everybody started from zero and you know, a visionary in California said, let's not do that anymore.

And he created a foundation called Willow Garage, and it brought in the best minds in robotics from across the world.

And he funded it for a number of years.

And the output was the robot operating system ROSS And that basically became the fundamental building blocks.

You no longer had to do all of that work.

You could really get to the area of interest, which was what's the robot going to do the application layer.

So it was hugely important.

And there are a number of robot technologies today and applications for robots and industries that are serve that are all built on the sort of Ross framework the Texas connection here locally to San Antonio is Ross, when it was conceived, was all thinking about sort of personal and home robots, elder care that type of thing.

And it was here at Southwest Research Institute, that query said, you know, we struggle with this same thing too.

But for industrial applications, not consumer, but B-to-B.

And so what was born from that was an effort that's called Ross Industrial or Ross AI, which is a hugely important development in the robot space.

It's very well supported.

Boeing, John Deere, Ford, all of these huge entities supporting the Ross Industrial Initiative right here in San Antonio at Southwest Research Institute.

And our technology is built on Ross AI.

Now, as I understand it, plus one robotics.

One of big things you do is or have done is developing a 3D camera, which I guess is able to provide the robots with something kind of simulates vision and makes them much more adaptable in a warehouse environment.

Is that is that right?

Yeah.

I mean, the you know, you've had all these robots here in Texas and San Antonio since Toyota arrived, but all those robots, as capable as they are, only really have a couple of things working in their favor, their repeatability.

Right.

They basically have a physical memory.

They'll do the same thing the same way every time.

And their endurance the last four, four or eight years of time, bored out of their skull.

But warehouse operations and order fulfillment and parcels that you don't know what's going to come down the line next.

You have to discover every time.

So where robots in manufacturing can be blind robots in the warehouse need to see.

And so what plus one brought to bear was adapting 3D cameras to the problems inside the warehouse so from a technology stack, that's kind of where it's at.

But I would argue that the real sort of thinking was about the problem we were solving.

You know, I tell people we're in the year 17 AP 2022 you know auto domine but 17 after prime because Amazon Prime changed everything you know it used to be before prime.

If I wanted to order something from Amazon, which had been around for a while, we were all using it.

I would check with Brenda to see if she needed something and she'd check with the kids and we would all consolidate the order because we were on the hook for shipping.

But once we paid our subscription for Amazon Prime, we all lost restraint, all order something.

Brenda will order something from her office at some other time.

The kids will order something at 11:00 at night.

Even if we didn't order anything new, we end up with four different packages, right?

And we were burying the shippers and the order fulfillment piece, et cetera.

There was not going to be enough labor to go around in the years.

AP So you were really responding to a need that had had arisen because of that?

Yeah, I mean and covered well, we certainly wouldn't have asked for that at all.

Had the effect of accelerating three years of growth in the, you know, order fulfillment and distribution space.

Right.

I mean, we all we're now subscribing to a lot more goods.

You know, people were ordering dog food, online, razors, detergent, things that we would have easily gone to the store for now.

We were ordering online and with the lockdowns and everything else, it just surged.

And it's a new normal and so, you know, yet again, not enough labor to do all the work that needs doing.

You mentioned the service robots and the idea of robots, you know, assisting people at home, which for some of us of a certain age, I mean, it conjures up memories of The Jetsons and Rosie, the the robot housekeeper.

And I know that some of this is happening, but how far along are we in?

You know, in our culture with that as a reality?

Well, I'll take that two ways.

One, from a technology side, we're a long way from Rosie.

Yeah, right.

Rosie was mobile.

She had two arms.

She could see, she could hear.

She was easily programed.

You could tell her Rosie cleaned the living room.

That was kind of sassy.

As well.

Right?

Yeah.

So from that perspective, we're a long way from there.

The robots truly are right now sort of assistance on a task level.

Discussion, right.

But from a cultural level, that perspective, I do think we're starting to see much more change in that this younger generation is much more comfortable with robotics in their day to day experience than they know.

Those of us of a certain age would have been.

You go to pretty much there are many college campuses today that have autonomous mobile robot delivery vehicles running around campus delivering somebody's Starbucks order.

Right, right.

And nobody pays them any attention.

The more robots recede into the background I think is indicative of the more successful they're being.

And you mentioned the impact that that that COVID had and just the the increased need because of the labor shortages.

How challenging was it before that just to convince businesses to to trust robotics.

It is certainly the case that, you know, there was a help wanted sign in front of all these warehouses before COVID it's not as if there was enough labor to begin with.

These are not desirable jobs.

So if your job is, you know, depoliticizing office stack, your day is going to be measured in tons, not hours.

It's awful work and people don't want to do it.

So people may start, but they don't last very long.

It's the churn that's the issue, right?

We all know somebody that worked at FedEx or UPS.

They're just not there anymore.

They did it in college and then they were done.

So, you know, the problem predates COVID.

What is certainly true is that COVID accelerated acted as an accelerant because now everybody's labor dried up at once.

You know, as we went into lockdown and such just at the time, we all needed the orders to flow the most.

We had the least capacity of people to go to work.

So what's the way forward?

It really is bringing automation tools to bear where you can you know, the people that are working in those facilities, they're not going home.

We already agreed there wasn't enough of them to begin with.

Instead, what's happening is they're not becoming robot technicians and robot managers and responsible for a team of robots and doing the work that way.

And that's a higher skill job, that's more impactful, better wages and cetera.

Yeah, well, that gets to the next question with those guys here, which is, you know, you chose to base your business in San Antonio, San Antonio, like a lot of cities.

And Texas has seen population growth.

We've seen job growth.

But there's been some frustration about the fact that we haven't had more high skill, high wage jobs.

What do you see?

Is that do you see a potential for change there and how do we get there?

For sure.

San Antonio is an up and comer in the tech scene.

And if there's anything gratifying about plus one, it's being part of a broader story here.

And the ecosystem is, you know, starting to coalesce.

Plus one is not the only robotics company in San Antonio.

There's renewed robotics doing lawnmowers on an industrial scale, Xanax, robotics, doing the disinfection and hospital bills.

You know, there's a number of different sort of companies that recognize that there is a talent base here in San Antonio.

Yes, having UTSA be accredited as a research institution is going to really help and drive the pipeline of talent.

But the engine of innovation for tech in San Antonio, I would argue, continues to be Southwest research.

You know, they they handle they tackle so many different industries there.

And it's just a wonderful institution that acts as sort of the nucleus.

Every robotics cluster has to have that nucleus.

It could be MIT in Boston.

It's Stanford, in Berkeley, in the Bay Area.

But here in San Antonio, it's Southwest Research Institute.

What are some of the challenges about?

Being in Santiago is difficult, finding the sort of pool of investors that you need here, or are there other challenges.

Certainly other places have more capital available and are ready to invest it in tech, where may be in San Antonio.

That hasn't always been true.

It is definitely the case that one plus one first started.

Our investors were asking us to.

Move and.

Go to the coast.

Right?

You want our money?

Come here to San Francisco.

We weren't going to do that.

We're from San Antonio.

We're staying here.

What that meant is we had to go it alone and we bootstrapped the company initially for the first year plus.

And then the investment that we brought in was from outside of Texas.

It wasn't until last year that we had our first investor from San Antonio join the plus one, and we couldn't have been happier.

What do you see?

It's a broad question, but what do you see as the future of robotics?

If you if we if you could project ten years into the future some of the applications that maybe we wouldn't foresee or that are maybe still in the early stages right now?

Yeah, so if in the end, what we do as roboticists is try to replicate human capability, but in, you know, electromechanical for in ten years, you still don't get to this.

So you going to divide and conquer.

Yeah.

What does that mean?

I mean, you can have mobile robots.

So those would be the wheeled robots that are running around town.

It could be air, you know, drones and such that are doing deliveries, medical supplies, what have you.

But you are going to see a lot more arms in different places than in manufacturing or even warehousing.

I'm starting to see it.

Now is the first time you can go into a fast food restaurant and there's a robot arm in there, you know, making your fries or flipping the burgers or, you know, coming up with your salad fixings and such.

So we're going to become more comfortable with robotics as just another tool.

And I think that's all for the better.

Robots aren't any different than that.

They're yet another tool in our just at our disposal that we can use to solve particular problems, in particular in the circumstances.

You talked a little bit about automation and the role that has in our economy and the fact that in some cases, probably many cases, you have to find people to be able to create new jobs in a way.

But obviously there's there's been fear of automation and what the effect that's going to have and how people are going to be sort of sort of forced out of or out of work because they're going to become unnecessary, expendable.

I mean, what's what's your answer to that?

I agree with George W Bush on this point, which is there are jobs Americans won't do.

And we've proven that to ourselves in this country numerous times.

And you know, so the jobs still need doing.

What's the path forward?

There's a couple, right?

Robotics is one comprehensive immigration reform with a true guest worker program is another.

And yet we seem to have next to no appetite for that.

And so, you know, what do you do in the meanwhile until we figure that out?

Well, you bring automation to bear as you can.

I would say, if you're looking at a task.

Yes, robots replace tasks.

Robots are lousy employees.

Right.

But they're good at tasks.

So at that level, yes, somebody was doing that task.

And now a robot is there's displacement.

But we've already agreed that sort of at the facility or enterprise level, it was a wash. Nobody went home.

Nobody got a pink slip because the robot showed up.

There weren't enough people to begin with.

The folks got repurposed to higher value work.

Call that a wash.

But if you look at the level of the economy, I would argue that automation and robotics, just like any other tool and machinery is a net gain because we get better products and better services at better prices kind of writ large.

That's productivity and in our system, productivity is a positive thing.

So robotics has a role to play in that.

Again, at the level of the task it might be cold comfort to someone whose job was that task that now a robot has come in, but robotics is now an accessible technology this person can learn how to manage those robots.

And that's really the upskilling that I'm excited about.

And that's really the reason the company that we found is called plus one, because we believe, you know, however many robots you've got, they become much more effective through the addition of one person than being right.

Robots work people rule is our mantra because of that very you know, that's our ethos.

Eric, thank you so much for being with us.

It was great.

Thank you.

Enjoyed it.

That's all for this edition of Texas Talk.

Thanks for tuning in.

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So please email us your thoughts at Texas Talk at KLRN.org We'll be back next month with a new guest.

Till then, take care.