Rick Faulk on Locus Robotics, Warehouse Automation, and Physical AI

**Rick Faulk** (0:00)
Having a dedicated physical AI solution that works in a warehouse is much more compelling for operators and a much more scalable business model than what a lot of these other businesses are doing. The form factor that a lot of them are looking at, which is the bipedal feet, is probably a recipe that's not going to work in warehouses. Most companies in the robotics space that I talk to, a lot of them fail, and they fail because they don't understand the client's problem. Big difference between a robot looking for a problem and a problem looking for a robot.

**Brian Heater** (0:27)
One of the conversations I keep having over and over again in a physical AI space is this lack of real-world data.
You have incredible number of robots out in the field. What can be done with the actual data that you're actually out there processing and collecting right now?

**Rick Faulk** (0:43)
We've done over 7 billion picks. As we speak right now, we're probably doing 150 picks a second right now, a second. Each pick we do, we learn something that we can make it more productive for the client.

**Brian Heater** (0:56)
A lot of these companies decided, hey, we're going to leapfrog from AMRs to humanoids and skip anything that might be in between. To a certain extent, the array strikes me as that in between space.

**Rick Faulk** (1:08)
There's two ways to automate a building you could argue today. One is with humanoids that are designed to do 100 different things, none of them particularly well, or something like array that's dedicated to do one thing and do it unbelievably well. But having said that, we don't have our head in the sand. Eventually, I think eventually humanoids may get there. I think over the next five years, it's going to be a big challenge.

**Brian Heater** (1:40)
Welcome to Automated, I'm Brian Heater, the managing editor at the Association for Advancing Automation. Here's a great talk with somebody that we've been looking to get on the show for a minute. Rick Faulk is the longtime CEO of Locus Robotics, and he knows more about scaling and deploying industrial robots than just about anyone else in the world. It's a unique bit of insight, and I certainly learned a lot from the conversation. If you're enjoying the show and also learning a lot from these conversations, don't forget to like and subscribe. Check out the newsletter over at automated.fm. And with that, here is Rick Faulk of Locus Robotics.
One of the things Jasmine told me in the lead up to this conversation was that this is actually the third headquarters for Locus.
Not only is this the third headquarters, but everything was generally in this vicinity. Is that right?

**Rick Faulk** (2:34)
Yeah, it is the third, Brian. We started out in, well, I actually, it's really the fourth. We started out in a building in Devens, Massachusetts, which was quite logistics. Locus spun out of that, and then we moved to a smaller facility about two miles from here. It was basically an office.

**Brian Heater** (2:49)
Smaller than this, not smaller than the first facility?

**Rick Faulk** (2:52)
Actually, much smaller than the first facility because the first facility was Quiet Logistics, which was a big warehousing operation, and Locus was in the back of that. And then we moved to a smaller building right down the street. There was only probably 3,000 or 4,000 feet, no manufacturing, no operations. It was a really small building. And now we are in three buildings in the area.
We're in one in National New Hampshire, which is our R&D facility, one in Tewksbury, which is primarily a storage and shipping facility, and then here at Locus Park, which is where we're at now. And we do everything here from manufacturing to refurb. We have most of our team here. We have folks that work around the world, but a lot of our mechanical engineers here, a lot of our software folks and the like. So yeah, we're in three buildings.

**Brian Heater** (3:40)
Initially, what was the relationship between Quiet Logistics and Locus? It started as something like a side project, would you say, a spinoff?

**Rick Faulk** (3:49)
Well, I wouldn't say it was a side project or a spinoff. It was a major problem.
And I believe great businesses are built out of major problems, and Locus was. So what happened, we were running a 3PL, Quiet Logistics, and we decided the best way to run that business was to automate it. And we did. We automated it with a company called Kiva, which ironically is located about three miles that way, which is now Amazon Robotics. And we were one of the largest Kiva customers in the world. We had 250 robots solving all the problems in logistics of getting volume out the door and doing it at the lowest cost. And then Amazon came along in 2012 and decided they wanted to buy Kiva, and they did. Amazon actually toured our building before they actually bought them. Of course they did, and then they decided that Robotics was so strategic to them, that they took the product off the market.