Could humanoid robots be used to fire mortars? | Defense Dollars

Foundation Future Industries is working to bring humanoid robots from the lab into real-world military and industrial environments

testing how autonomous systems could transform the future of work and defense

Joining us now is Mike LeBlanc, co-founder of Foundation Future Industries. Thank you so much for being here, Mike

Thanks for having me, Justine. Of course. Yeah, so let's get right into it

For viewers who may be hearing about your company for the first time, tell us a little bit about the mission and what problem you're really trying to solve here

You know, I think everybody has realized just what ChatGPT and all of the generative AI can do for them with words

But the real next frontier is what that's going to do in the physical world

And so we're seeing all kinds of exciting robots that are coming out now that are able to learn tasks and adapt to new environments immediately

And so we are building a human-shaped robot called Phantom, which is our first product

but that is going to be able to do all of the work that a human is going to be able to do

And we cater that toward businesses and toward defense. Yeah. Telling us a little bit more about these humanoid robots that are going to be

pretty much everywhere probably in 10 years or maybe even less than that

Why is that the right form factor for both military and industrial applications

You know, it's funny. If you look at the history of robotics, what you find is a lot of research

robots that they are able to do one part of a task, but they're not able to do all of the

surrounding tasks. So a good example was they tried doing this in McDonald's. They would have

a robot that would dip the fries and they thought, this is great. We can deep fry the fries by having

a robot do it And it could So they developed that robot and they launched it but the robot wasn able to open up the bag of fries to be able to dump them into the net And and it was that you know that still meant

that a person had to be there. So you're not able to replace the full, the full place, unless you're

able to do everything the human is able to do. And it so happens that the, you know, we live in a

human shaped world. So human, human shaped robots can eventually take over all those tasks

Yeah, it's so important to think about that full picture, right? And not just one task here, one task there filled in with people along the way

And thinking about putting these robots into a real world situation, you've been testing your technology in Ukraine, right

So what have those real world deployments really shown when it comes to the capabilities of these systems

Well, you know, we're seeing robots all across the battlefield right now. I was a Marine for 13 years before my first robotics company and now in foundation

but what you see in the military is drones everywhere you're seeing a lot of autonomous

ships that are coming out and you're seeing a lot of autonomous vehicles that are driving around

but a human-shaped robot is going to be the only one that can interact with the billions of dollars

of you know armaments and weapons that we already have that we've collected for humans so that's

that's the real promise is that our robot is going to be able to fire gun guns drop mortars

breach buildings, do all of the things that humans are able to do. And so far, what we've

been finding is that our AI models are very robust to have them walking outside. Walking in mud was

something that we thought was going to be a lot more challenging than it has been. So we're learning

but it's small iterations every day to make it great. Yeah. I mean, just thinking about some of

those small pieces of the puzzle like you saying walking in mud or something what have been the biggest actual challenges or limitations that you found from these real world deployments that you seen here as you doing your research Well it been more realizing new opportunities So I think very early on we thought that the case

was going to be a lot of reconnaissance of the robots just being able to walk around. We didn't realize that in Ukraine, the front lines are really set up in strong points

And they have to get logistics, food, ammunition, all into these. And that's one of the most

vulnerable spots is people just walking up and down stairs, you know, walking out of their choke

point to go to a truck. And those are tasks that we do every day on businesses and in auto

manufacturing. So it's really about learning those new places because the soldiers on the ground are

always going to have better ideas for what technology can do than whatever we come up with

on a whiteboard. Yeah, I mean, those real world experiences and being able to gather all that data

about what really is important there is just vital, I'm sure, to all of your research and

development. When it comes to some of these deployments or other kinds of technologies

partnerships, integrations, what are you really doing right now to accelerate development and

bring these robots to market faster, but also better with this knowledge that you're gaining

Well, so I think a smart thing that we did early, because there are a lot of humanoid

companies out there, we got the robots on manufacturing lines as soon as we could

So within six months, we had done our first proof of concept. It was with only half of

robot. We only had an upper torso, but we, we proved that we were able to replace three workers

right? Cause they would work 24 hours a day, you know, eight, eight hour shifts

And we, we got those robots working. So we were the first humanoid company to be able to do 24

hours continuously for five days a week which is what the what the people were doing that that has given us a very strong anchor So we been developing that ever since which has been 18 months since we made that first launch And that has been very helpful

to making much larger orders with customers. So we already have $100 million in contracted revenue

from auto manufacturers. And we have just about that in defense so far

Yeah. I mean, it seems like this industry is just growing so quickly. So having that scale to be able

to actually even produce them is so important here. I mean, governments around the world are

really increasing their investment in autonomous systems. So how do you see the role of humanoid

robots really evolving over the next decade as everyone seems to get more and more excited about

having them as part of their, whether it's defense or company or in other, some other way

helping their business? Well, I've been studying a lot about late 1800s when the automobile was

coming out. And a lot of people remember that story as Ford just coming and kicking everybody

else's butt and bringing the Model T. But when you really look at the history of it, there was

Carl Benz and Oldsmobile, Ransom Oldsmobile, David Buick, names that you know of all these car

companies. Almost all of them survived for at least 100 years out of these early ones. So I

think that the ecosystem that we're looking at with humanoids is probably a pretty good one

And so it's all going to come down to who can find the fastest use cases to get these out there

You know, for us, we think that the homes require a lot of adaptability

It's very scary. I've got three little kids at home. It's scary to put one of these big, heavy, you know, 185-pound robots around my kids

But in businesses and in defense, if you can take a soldier off the battlefield, if you can fill a position that you've been having a hard time getting somebody on your grave shift, those are going to be the places that we're going to see it really catch fire