Breaking Out of the Box with Robotics

Steve Melito: Hey everybody, Welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now, the podcast that’s powered by FuzeHub. I’m your host, Steve Melito. Today we’re talking to David Pietrocola, the co-founder and CEO of Cohesive Robotics, a New York City-based company that’s making it easy for manufacturers to add robotics to their high-mix sanding, grinding and polishing operations. In 2023, Cohesive Robotics was awarded a $50,000 FuzeHub Manufacturing Grant in partnership with ITAC, the New York MEP Center for New York City. The goal is to get the company’s smart finishing robotic work cell system onto more production floors sooner. David, welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now.

David Pietrocola: Hi, Steve. Thank you for having me.

Steve Melito: Our pleasure. So, David, tell us about yourself. How did you become interested in robotics and automation, and is it true that you’re a former CIA tech officer?

David Pietrocola: Yeah, great questions. Yeah, I actually started my interest in robotics back in college. My alma mater, Trinity College, over in Hartford, Connecticut, had a very well-known robotics competition. This was before first robotics became very popular and so a lot of the curriculum and the engineering program was based around that and robotics. And I definitely developed a love for robotics and that technology and then trying to see how you could take it from the lab and develop more products, getting more robotics into different parts of our daily life. So, yeah, that started the passion. You know it’s like any other career and especially technical discipline, definitely has its highs and lows and exciting times and frustrating times. It’s been a very exciting journey and, yes, part of my journey was I did spend a stint at the CIA, so it was very exciting. I was very privileged to have that opportunity and essentially I was coming out of grad school working in the defense sector and had the opportunity to kind of switch roles from contractor into civilian and be a federal employee and a tech officer in the CIA and the Directorate of Science and Technology. If you’re familiar with the movie Argo, that office is where I was based out of. Can’t talk too much more about what we actually did there, but you know it’s a great movie. Definitely check that out. And I had really exciting times to develop exciting, complex technical solutions to advancing the national security mission, and so it was a good experience in my career and I’m very grateful for having that.

Steve Melito: It’s an amazing thing to have on your resume, I must say. So why did you start your own company, Cohesive Robotics? I mean, you could have probably worked for one of the leading robot OEMs instead. You could have done a lot of things.

David Pietrocola: For sure. Well, Steve, I grew up in Putnam County in the Hudson Valley and I grew up in a very entrepreneurial household. Both my parents are Italian immigrants and basically came to New York City area and started a business from nothing and then to something very successful business in the metal supplies space, and so I kind of grew up in that world. You know small business, you know hustling and trying to trying to make something happen, and I’ve always wanted to marry that experience with my technical training, my formal training in college and graduate school. And so certainly during COVID, there was that discussion about reshoring and disrupted supply chains and all those issues and, having gone through deploying a lot of advanced robotic systems into larger manufacturers, we deployed systems. I was on teams that deployed systems over to Mercedes factories, Tesla Gigafactory, Walgreens Logistics Centers. We weren’t really seeing a lot of that packaged in a way that was accessible and even affordable to smaller manufacturers, and so there’s this gap there and I felt that I was in a good position to see if we could develop something that could be more accessible to manufacturers and really drive more automation adoption to the smaller and medium-sized enterprises. So that kind of was the impetus for it. You know we were seeing the big robot OEMs still very much focused on large manufacturers, high volume automotive and, you know, by seeing a lot of the technical trends emerging and that gap. That’s why we definitely set off on this mission, this journey here.

Steve Melito: Sure, now you’ve got a pretty interesting product the Smart Finishing WorkCell. What can you tell us about it?

David Pietrocola: Yeah, so the Smart Finishing WorkCell is our first product that we’ve taken to market. It combines a lot of technology. We’ve developed autonomous 3D vision scanning so it allows an operator to place parts into this work cell. The 3D camera scans the piece, uses some information provided by the operator on what we’re trying to do in this particular job or process and then it programs that robot on the fly. So we take our software, we combine it with off-the shelf hardware that’s mainly you know, the industrial collaborative robots, the 3D camera. You know all the off-the-shelf industry-proven hardware. We package that up into a turnkey, accessible solution for smaller manufacturers and you know we’ve been taking that to market as our first product. Our technology can be applied to other applications, but our first effort here is to look at finishing and solving that problem, which is a particular pain point for a lot of manufacturers today.

Steve Melito: Yeah, that’s good. I wanted to ask you more about that. Why focus on these operations and not say assembly or welding or something else? What is it about surface improvement that is compelling for robotics?

David Pietrocola: Yeah. That’s a great question. I mean we’ve seen a lot of exciting developments across different manufacturing processes, whether it’s welding or assembly or palletizing, and those are all really important and great that we’re seeing more solutions in those spaces. But when we were getting started and we were visiting, and even now when we visit manufacturers, often they might even have automation today right, they might be doing welding robots, they might be having CNC laser cut or on the downstream operation or palletizing, but oftentimes we’d get to the finishing department and it would just kind of be this black box. It’s very manual for a lot of manufacturers still today. Production insights are kind of limited. You don’t know how long it might take product to get through a finishing department. There could be a lot of rework associated with that department. Some manufacturers could have rework as high as 50, 60, 70 percent requiring some sort of rework once it gets to the finishing department. And that’s a problem that becomes a big bottleneck for these manufacturers and so even if they’re automating other processes, they’re still not actually able to ship products, you know, get it out the door and increase their production capacity. So we felt it was important to start there, to try and solve that problem with our first product and then from there we went back to their product roadmap to move into serving other processes that that manufacturer might need to solve.

Steve Melito: Got it. So, of course, robotics costs money. But besides cost, why do you think that more manufacturers aren’t automating their operations? What are the obstacles?

David Pietrocola: Well, certainly the capital is part of it. But beyond that I think it’s important to look at. You know, it’s often one of two things, possibly both. But one is, you know, adopting automation often requires all the stakeholders at that company to be aligned. And I think that’s especially important for smaller and medium-sized manufacturers where they may not necessarily have a dedicated automation team internally, and often that’s the case. I mean, maybe you have one or two people looking at process improvements, bringing in new machinery and automation. But typically right, the smaller the company, less likely they’re going to have certainly dedicated resources for that. You might have a fraction of an FTE looking into those solutions. So you know, when you introduce automation, right, just like any other big change to your organization, to your shop floor, workflows might change. It integrations might be needed. Certainly safety is a consideration, maintenance schedules will change. IT integrations might be needed. Certainly safety is a consideration, Maintenance schedules will change. And so I think it’s just like any other organizational change. It requires that buy-in, that planning, and when you’re just trying to keep up with your production, certainly that falls by the wayside sometimes. So it takes time to make that a priority and then, secondly, I’d say, is on the education front, Certainly what’s possible today. Five to 10 years ago, when we’re talking about introducing more robotics into high mix manufacturing, you know we wouldn’t be having that conversation today. I think there’s been a lot of advances. Technology has become much more capable. Certainly, even the discussions with AI today are going to accelerate things even more and so, you know, as solution providers, technology companies, you know it’s on us to help educate more and more. I mean working with more manufacturers, organizations like Q-Sub and the MVPs, to make sure that manufacturers are staying abreast of all these changes and what’s possible, what might be hype, right, you know. I think that’s another consideration as well to make sure that they’re adopting technology that solves their business needs, and it’s not just, you know, some hype or some YouTube demo out there.

Steve Melito: Right. So, David, earlier in the podcast I mentioned that you partnered with ITAC on a FuzeHub manufacturing grant and of course, I want everybody to know about FuzeHub and everybody to know about New York MEP, including and especially their regional centers. But some manufacturers, some companies, aren’t even aware that the MEP system exists. How did you connect with ITAC?

David Pietrocola: Yeah, we were very fortunate to make that connection appreciative of how FuzeUp played a role in that. Essentially, you know we were talking about FuzeUp early on and we were introduced to Kinda and her team at iTech, since we are based in New York City. So you know, I think they’re doing great work helping manufacturers in what’s a challenging environment in New York City, certainly with the high cost of living and expensive real estate and all those other things that go with being downstate, particularly in the city and so, yeah, we were fortunate in the manufacturing grants application had opened up in early 2023. And then Patty from FuzeHub suggested that hey, this might be a good fit. You know, we were kind of beyond the prototype stage. We were looking to go to market to accelerate our design for manufacturing and making sure our work sale could go into a production environment. And so, you know, we were able to partner up with iTech and submit a successful grant. And you know, I’ve been able to help others in the ecosystem at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to apply for those as well. So it’s been a good experience. We’re very, very grateful to T-SUG and the larger ecosystem for supporting that.

Steve Melito: I’m glad to hear it. So what is the work that you’ve done under the grant so far, and what should we expect next from Cohesive Robotics?

David Pietrocola: For sure. Yeah, so we actually completed our grant work earlier this year. At the beginning of this year we finished that up and we were actually able to go from our prototype system to the full work cell design. So we did a series of industrial design iterations, design for manufacturing, improvements to really develop a work cell that can be easily configured and customized for each customer deployment. And for us it was really important to develop a system that can meet the needs of a lot of applications out there, a lot of manufacturer workflows, especially without needing to incur a lot of non-recurring engineering costs from project to project. And I think that’s really important to make these technologies accessible to smaller manufacturers without having no extremely expensive project costs and deployments. So you know, that’s what that grant went towards and definitely accelerated our ability to get that to market and start deploying it to manufacturers, especially in New York.

Steve Melito: Good. So, David. Last question, an easy one how does someone contact you if they’d like a demo or if they just want to learn more about your company and your technology?

David Pietrocola: Absolutely, Steve. Yes, they can certainly send us go to our website, CohhesiverRbotics.com. We’re also on LinkedIn and Instagram as well, so they can reach us through a variety of those channels. And yeah and we’re looking to do, you know, more webinars and trade shows later this year as well. We’ll be at the FABTECH show down in Orlando in October, so please stop by and chat with us there as well.

Steve Melito: Fantastic and, David, thank you so much for being part of New York State Manufacturing Now.

David Pietrocola: Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me, appreciate it.

Steve Melito: You bet. So we’ve been talking to David Pietrocola, the founder and CEO of Cohesive Robotics, a New York City company that’s making it easy for manufacturers to add robotics to their high-mix sanding, grinding and polishing operations. David has been a power user of New York MEP resources and we at FuzeHub are eager to help other inventors and entrepreneurs like you succeed. That’s why I’m inviting you to check out FuzeHub’s Product Development Fundamentals Workshop. It’s on August 7th 2024. This hands-on, day-long event in New Paltz, New York, will help demystify the entrepreneurial process and provide you with resources that can help along the way. So check it out with resources that can help along the way. So check it out. Go to FuzeHub.com, slash product dash development dash fundamentals, and if you didn’t get that URL, don’t worry, just go ahead and email us at info at FuzeHub.com. So, on behalf of FuzeHub and New York State Manufacturing Now, this is Steve Melito signing off.