Hiten Sonpal: 0:00

They're roughly 25% efficient. So three quarters of the energy that's put into a hydraulic system is typically wasted. And that means that if you take a existing diesel driven heavy machine and you try to electrify it, you need a massive battery.'cause so much of that power is gonna get wasted. And that makes those systems unviable from a business perspective.

Tom Raftery: 0:32

So the barrier to electrifying heavy machinery may be buried inside the machine itself. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is Climate Confident Stories and Strategies that Cut Emissions episode 285, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. My guest today is Hiten Sonpal, CEO of Rise Robotics, and we look at how replacing hydraulics with belt-driven actuation can shrink batteries, cut downtime and oil leaks, and make heavy equipment easier to electrify without breaking the business case. So I started by asking what Rise Robotics actually does. Hiten, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Hiten Sonpal: 1:19

Sure. Thank you Tom, for having me on the podcast. I'm the CEO of Rise Robotics. I've been a CEO of this company for about two years. Before that I was CEO or president of a couple of other startups, and then before that I spent a large portion of my career at iRobot Corporation where teams that I led generated over 2 billion revenues, shipped 9 million units across 20 products.

Tom Raftery: 1:41

Nice. Nice. And let's talk about Rise Robotics. Who, or what are Rise Robotics? What is it you guys are doing?

Hiten Sonpal: 1:50

So Rise is a MIT affiliated startup. Three out of the four founders went to MIT and the fourth founder went to the Rhode Island School of Design, which is also a well known design school. And together the four of them decided that they wanted to build exosuits, so think Iron Man, but without the jet pack. And in that process, they realised that they had to build systems to create linear motion and rotary motion. And they also figured out that hydraulics wasn't going to cut it for them, and that they needed to find something better. And so the team invented a new technology that we now call beltdraulic and beltdraulic is exactly as it sounds. We've taken the oil out of hydraulics and replaced it with belts and pulleys. And in doing so, created a system that's three times as efficient, three times as fast, and three times as durable as hydraulics. And once the team had created that, they said rather than invent the exosuit market, how about we tackle the existing hydraulics market, which is $750 billion a year? And so that's what we're doing now, is we're taking existing hydraulic systems and converting them to more efficient, more durable, and more productive beltdraulic systems.

Tom Raftery: 2:59

Okay. What's the problem with hydraulics? We've had hydraulics around in all kinds of machinery for, I don't wanna say centuries, but certainly decades to almost centuries. I wanna think.

Hiten Sonpal: 3:13

Yeah, so hydraulics, you're absolutely right. Hydraulics has been the state of the art now for call it 50 years. But now it's going to be beltdraulic and I'll explain why. So, beltdraulic technology was inspired by muscles. If you think about how our muscles work, there are fibres that are pulling to make joints move. And because of the pulling nature of the call it actuation, we're able to move our limbs very fast. If you think of, humans throwing a ball. So we're able to move things, move our limbs very fast. We're able to move them very efficiently. We think about how little food we have to eat to operate the whole day move around and, and do things. And these muscles last a lifetime. Now, yes, they're getting nutrients through blood and so on and so forth, but the core fibres essentially last a human lifetime. 70, 80 years. If I told you that I'm gonna replace these muscles with the bladders that contain blood and I'm going to inflate the bladders rather than pull, I'm going to push the joints open. And so my bicep would get replaced with a bladder that's filling up with blood and my tricep would get replaced with another bladder that's filling up with blood. Every time I wanted move my arm, I have to pump blood into this bladder. if you just think about that process, it would be a lot slower.'cause it takes time to get the liquid into the bladder. It would be a lot less efficient. You can imagine how much work the heart would have to do just to move the blood and then it would be a lot less durable because the blood pressure would eventually lead to failure of that organ over time. And that's the problem with hydraulics is that they're slow, they're inefficient, and of course they're prone to leaking because there's pressure everywhere inside the system. And so every interface whether it's seals or even more static interfaces, will eventually leak and need maintenance.

Tom Raftery: 5:03

Okay, so if hydraulics are so inefficient why are they still everywhere?

Hiten Sonpal: 5:08

Because there hasn't existed an alternative for hydraulics at this time until we came along. And I'm glad you brought up the efficiency topic because one of the big trends that you're seeing these days is conversion of machines to electric, right? So electrification is happening in a big way. However, it's not happening very quickly in heavy machines. And that's because the hydraulic systems are very inefficient. They're roughly 25% efficient. So three quarters of the energy that's put into a hydraulic system is typically wasted. And that means that if you take a existing diesel driven heavy machine and you try to electrify it, you need a massive battery.'cause so much of that power is gonna get wasted. And that makes those systems unviable from a business perspective. California for example, has an initiative to take its ports and make them zero emissions. And they wanna do this by 2030. I think they'll have to extend the deadline some, but as part of this process, they put out a voucher programme so companies could afford the more expensive electric systems. If you have a $400,000 forklift, electrifying it gets you something that's $800,000, right? So it's just very, very expensive. So California started this voucher programme, but those vouchers get sold out in the first two weeks 'cause they only have so much money for the programme. And then the rest of the year nobody wants to buy electric systems. And what we do is with our technology, which is 75% efficient, we cut the size of that battery down in half. So that $800,000 system is now closer to $600,000. So we make the systems more affordable, but it's not just the heavy machines that we make affordable. We also reduce the size of the charging infrastructure because you need half as much electricity at the charging stations. And then this whole process of electrification is going to take more energy transmission and generation. And we cut the amount of investment needed to increase those things by half.'cause we don't need as much energy to electrify. So by making the nodes of this electrical network more efficient, we're able to reduce the stress on the entire network and reduce costs across the network.

Tom Raftery: 7:14

And are your beltdraulic systems just a simple drop in replacement for the hydraulic systems that are there at the moment?

Hiten Sonpal: 7:23

That's a great question. So in some products the hydraulic system is completely exposed, so all four sides are accessible, and we're able to retrofit those systems no problem. Just for context, our cylinders are roughly twice the diameter of hydraulic cylinders. So they do take up more space. In systems like an excavator where the cylinder is exposed and has, a wall or, or supporting material on one side. All we have to do is change the mounting point. So they have to get the tabs, have to get rewelded, and then if you have a system where the hydraulic cylinder is buried deep inside the system, then we have to design the product around our cylinders. I'll add that any company that's electrifying already has to deal with bigger cylinders. So if you think about screw type actuators, which are the alternative and we're much better than them and I can get into that later. Those also have larger diameters for the same amount of force. So if anyone is electrifying in any capacity, they have to create additional room for the cylinders anyway. And so at that point we would be a form fit and function replacement.

Tom Raftery: 8:31

And I mean, you, you talked about it being belt driven and it being a bit like a musculature that we have on, on mammalian bodies. In designing that, what problem took the longest to solve technically?

Hiten Sonpal: 8:50

That's excellent. I don't think I've been asked this question before on a podcast, so, that's fantastic. So part of it is like getting the density. So, the key breakthrough for the team was when they started thinking about these fibres, they said, what can serve as one of these fibres? And they looked to other in industries for inspiration, and they found out that the elevator industry had replaced steel ropes steel cables with these belts. So that's where the innovation originally came from. And these belts have certain engineering constraints. You can't twist them and you can't put a fleet angle on them, right? So you can't twist them this way, and then you can't twist them sideways.'cause if you do, then the force and the stress becomes uneven, leading to premature failure. So what the team figured out is how to do the twisting and the bending in a way that would not lead to premature failure, and how to package that into a form factor that could be easily applied.

Tom Raftery: 9:46

And you're claiming faster, lighter, more efficient. You've also, on the website, you talk about quieter, lower maintenance. Usually engineering involves trade-offs. So what did you have to compromise on?

Hiten Sonpal: 10:03

And so I already mentioned one of the compromises, which is that the cylinders have to be roughly twice the diameter. We think the diameter will go down and eventually be comparable to hydraulics. Right now, the belts use very contemporary materials. They use polyurethane and steel rope on the inside. But I can see longer term those belts turning into carbon nanotubes or Kevlar. And so these exotic materials will actually help us increase the density, the force density that we get out of our cylinders. The second trade off is because we have pulleys on the inside, they do take up some space, so the cylinders end up being a little longer for the same stroke length. And in some machines that's a challenge. Just like with the diameter, the dead length, if you will. The problem varies from machine to machine. In some machines, dead length is not an issue and in other machines it's very much an issue and so requires a machine redesign. But there are also machines in the middle where small changes in the mounting points can give you the additional stroke length that you need to install one of our cylinders.

Tom Raftery: 11:09

And what would you say surprised customers most during pilots?

Hiten Sonpal: 11:43

Most of our customers that are using hydraulic systems have used them for a while, and so they tend to be sceptical and they actually need to see the technology working before they decide to implement it in their systems. So when they look at our systems, the thing that surprises most of them is how fast we can move and how precisely we can move, right? So, because it's belt driven, these belts can run at very, very high speeds. And so getting to two metres a second of movement is just not a problem for us. And to do it precisely is also not a problem for us. That is a challenge using any other technology, whether it's hydraulic systems where trying to move liquid that fast runs into physical limits and creates tonnes of eddy currents, and heat, and even more wasted energy. Also creates safety hazards 'cause the pressures have to be insanely high. And then if you use screw type actuators to run it that fast, the actuators experience what's called a screw whip, where the mass of the actuators you're trying to spin it that fast ends up oscillating. And so it's, it's not feasible to run them that fast. So the speed which translates into productivity, which translates into greater revenue for our customers, is the piece that they find most surprising.

Tom Raftery: 12:54

Hiten, most climate conversations ignore heavy machinery entirely. And the only time I've seen conversations around heavy machinery in the climate space is when we're talking, for example, about big diggers coming from the likes of Komatsu, who are going into the mining industry and they're going electric to stop the use of diesel. But apart from that, you rarely see, and, and, China are moving the, long haul trucks, the 18 wheelers to electric. Now I think something like 50 something percent of new 18 wheelers in China in December were, electric. But for heavy machinery, it's, it's hydraulics particularly is not something you hear talked about, why?

Hiten Sonpal: 13:38

Yeah. So when you think about energy in general there are three areas to focus on. There is generation, there is distribution, and there's consumption. And, folks look at those problems from, what is relatively easy to do. So a new solar farm is relatively easy to bring up. A new wind farm is relatively easy to bring up. So, so those problems are getting a lot of attention because they are doable. Getting cars to electric is something that's had to start from an innovation perspective, right? And electric cars are still a lot more expensive, so it's not like, most democracies can just mandate that top down. So there's a challenge in doing that. So they have to wait for customers to adopt it, and then they have to find ways to provide incentives to get customers to buy a more expensive product. And then when it okay.

Tom Raftery: 14:28

I'll push back on that point, just because this year, for the first time in the European market, at least several of the EV models are now cheaper than their petrol and diesel equivalents. Well, that is exciting. That crossover is starting to happen.

Hiten Sonpal: 14:46

That's that's, a piece of information I didn't have because that's not the case yet in the United States. It might have to do with the supply chain and where the batteries are coming from and so on and so forth. So, so far in the United States it's still been market pull and then how can you incentivise customers to pull on that? And then when it comes to, other gas engines, for example when it like lawn equipment, because that would substantially increase the cost. There isn't really a tonne of regulation around those. So there are, in the US market, they're largely unregulated and they do create a lot of pollution. And then when it's come to the heavy machines there is this perception that it's going to be very expensive and vouchers are going to be needed and so on and so forth. So California is one of the few states that's doing that. There are a couple of other ports that are trying to clean up,'cause ports end up being very interesting property for developers. It's waterfront property, but it's also industrial and noisy and smoky. And if the noise could be brought down and the pollution could be brought down, then it would be a lot more interesting for developers to start to build high-end things there. So there's interest in, in ports in general. But I'll say that other areas of heavy industry aren't really looking at electrification the same way. And there isn't this legislative push to make it happen because the problem is so distributed. There are so many manufacturers that all have to decide to commit to making this transition, and then they have to know that the market is ready to adopt it. And as I mentioned, currently, at least in California, it takes vouchers to get people to switch over to electric machines'cause they're, that much more expensive'cause the batteries are that much larger.

Tom Raftery: 16:22

And if I'm swapping out a hydraulic system for a beltdraulic system, or if I'm trying to decide between the two, where are you there on the price point? And taking that a little further, we've seen, for example, in the battery space, in the wind turbine space, in the solar panel space, we've seen the costs dropping, around 20% per every doubling of capacity installed. So that's standard Wrights Law, learning curve, et cetera, et cetera. Where are you guys in that space?

Hiten Sonpal: 17:03

Yeah, so at scale we expect that the beltdraulic system would cost 50% more than the hydraulic system. That's not the full product. And so for let's call it a construction machine, the hydraulic system is about 30% of the total cost. And so imagine adding another 50% of that on. So we'd increase the, the full system price from a hydraulic to a beltdraulic system. The cost would go up by 15%. That's if you didn't electrify it, if you just took the diesel engine and you turn it into a generator and connected that to our cylinders, which are electric. So that transition would, essentially add 15% of cost at scale onto those machines. But then you'd, as I mentioned, the battery size could go down by half.

Tom Raftery: 17:50

And in terms of the climate story is the emissions opportunity here battery downsizing, reduced maintenance, reduced oil leaks, increased uptime, reduced energy use, lifecycle economics, all of the above, something else entirely?

Hiten Sonpal: 18:08

Most of the above. You rattle out quite the list there. Certainly eliminating diesel and moving to electric allows us to pick cleaner sources to generate the energy. So that's, that's step number one. Second, reducing the amount of batteries that you have to put on these machines or flip it around. You could put the same amount of batteries, use the same machines, two shifts, and now you need half as many machines. And so those would reduce the amount of energy spend in mining and extracting materials and so on and so forth.'cause I think electrification is going to happen anyway. The question is, can we do it in a way that's more efficient? Can we do it in a way that's faster and more economical, sooner? Oh, and I want to add you, you mentioned about leaks. Hydraulic oil leaks are really bad for the environment. Hydraulic oil is, is poisonous. It's a hazard. And so anytime there are leaks, really you need to remediate the soil and treat it. You just can't leave it there and let it run into the groundwater. However, because the leaks are distributed, it's very hard to catch those and make sure that they're clean. And so we have this hazardous element going into our environment despite best efforts. And so eliminating the need for hydraulic oil would solve that problem entirely.

Tom Raftery: 19:15

And what's the business case then? Because if it's more expensive, 15% more expensive, as you mentioned there, what's the business case that gets operators to care? Because it's not, not gonna be, they want to save the planet. That, yeah. What's, what's the business case there?

Hiten Sonpal: 19:31

Yeah, so I'll talk about a couple of our customers, right? So for so one of our products is a lift gate, and lift gates go on the backs of trucks. You use them when you need to load something at a dock and need to deliver it at ground level. And the highest capacity commercial lift gates are called rail gates. And they can move as much as 5,500 pounds at a time. And they have a lot of failures in the hydraulic system. So we eliminate the downtime because our systems last longer. One of the things I didn't mention earlier is that we have prognostics in our system because the belts that we use have steel rope on the inside. We're able to put electricity through those steel ropes and we're able to measure the electrical properties of the steel. And we know that the beltdraulic is ageing and we can let the operators know that it's time to service the system before it fails. But if you have a hydraulic system, you can't really tell when a hose is gonna fail, when a valve is gonna stop working, when there's gonna be a big leak that causes the system to lose pressure and not operate normally. So we get the prognostic capability so customers know that something's going to break before it does, which is huge. For our first commercial customer that's just buying our cylinders. We found an OEM in the oil and gas space, and we're excited about cleaning up oil and gas production. We don't think it's going anywhere. So this, this particular customer builds natural gas pumps that capture the natural gas that's coming out from, oil wells. And then they make sure that it's consumed as opposed to just being flared or being put into the air. And these natural gas pumps have hydraulic systems that foul up every three months. So every three months they have to go service this. And our customers based in Texas and most of these wells are distributed all across Texas. So they have to send a crew out and every time this one of these systems fails and stops working, they lose roughly 3% of their output.'cause they're running 24 7. So they, it, imposes a cost on them, and they're able to go with now with our systems, they will have to replace the belts roughly every nine months. And so we cut down the amount of cost it takes from a labour perspective to go service those. And we've converted them into things that don't leak and don't result in hazardous hydraulic oil that has to get disposed of.

Tom Raftery: 21:42

And I'm glad you mentioned the prognostics because I gotta think hydraulic systems are mostly analogue, right? You're not gonna get any kind of information back from them. Is there more information that you can get back from the beltdraulic systems? Can you get a lot, can you, give, do you, I don't know, telematics information or some other kind of information back from the devices that gives the operators more value for their money if you want?

Hiten Sonpal: 22:08

Yeah. One of the key things we enable when a system is converted to beltdraulics is we enable drive by wire. We enable teleoperation and then we enable autonomy. So, the drive by wire system is important because if you do want to make a system autonomous, you need to be driving it by computer. And computers typically need feedback so they know what the right position is and we provide all of that outta the box. So our beltdraulic cylinders have as interfaces, power and CAN bus. We can certainly provide EtherCAT or any other interface that our customers want, but the typical offering is power in CAN bus and through CAN bus you can get the force on the actuator. You can get that by measuring the current that's being applied. You can get the position of the actuator and you can also get the orientation. And so once you have those three things, you can create a very effective digital twin, which is a digital representation of the system. And having a digital twin allows teleoperation because now an operator can feel how the machine is behaving from a distance. They can have multiple screens and they can get a sense for what's happening. Otherwise teleoperation is difficult because you really need to be in the machine to hear the whine of the pump, to understand how much you're stressing the hydraulic system when you're picking something. You need to get a sense of how the machine is moving to understand is it gonna tip right? And those things are developed by intuition. But with our technology, because we're able to build a digital twin, we can build in policy that says, okay, you can't lift more than X amount in this bucket of this excavator and turn beyond a certain point so that you don't tip over the machine. So we can implement all of those safety features like anti tip behaviour at a reflex level so that when you eventually add autonomy to the system, you don't have to try and certify for those things. You can just focus on the top level operation. And teleoperation is key to getting to autonomous systems because most autonomous systems have this long tail. Waymo, which is this highly successful autonomous car company, which is spin out of Google, also has tele operators that help the system get unstuck when it doesn't know how to behave in complex situations. Right. And they've been doing this for a long time. And so heavy machines which work in an unstructured environment will, even if they're autonomous, they're always going to need, I think always, yeah, for the next foreseeable future, they're going to need a human operator to come in and step in and get the machine unstuck because there will be these corner cases that can't be anticipated in training.

Tom Raftery: 24:42

And do you think AI in heavy machinery is overhyped right now?

Hiten Sonpal: 24:47

I think so I think AI in general is overhyped. I think folks are talking because for a lot of technologies there is an asymptotic curve, an asymptotic curve of returns, and they're diminishing returns. And so even though people are like, oh, LLMs are 80% of the way there, well that last 20% is actually a lot of work. And we got LLMs to this point because there was the availability of all this data on the internet, years and years of text that had been put in. But there isn't that much data for how an operator runs a heavy machine today. And so those machines would have to get first, electrified, converted to drive by wire so you can collect the data and then once you have the data, then you can start training the systems. And then you have to make sure that you can get through a large number of corner cases. All of that data collection has been happening in autonomous cars for some time. Like they've been collecting data and refining their models. And the Tesla autopilot and the other autopilots keep getting better because every time they have a corner case, they code around that corner case, they run it through a test suite, right? All of that has to get done for heavy machines. So it's going to be a while, but we enable the first steps that have to be taken to make this transition happen. And what I see happening is not really replacement of humans, but amplification of humans. I see us going from, people operating one machine at a time to maybe supervising three machines and getting them unstuck. And eventually, working only on demand on certain jobs where there'll be certain things that can be done autonomously by systems. And I think that's gonna take, another five to 10 years before it happens. And I think fully autonomous systems, where, I'm imagining where you go and scan a work site and then you put it in the computer and then you redesign the new, what, what it needs to look like in simulation. And then you hand that off to a set of machines, it's probably 20 years out.

Tom Raftery: 26:43

And your fundraising approach has been unconventional, if we wanna put it that way. Why go community driven?

Hiten Sonpal: 26:51

Yeah. So when I joined Rise, I found out that we had a community of 1500 followers that were really excited about what we were doing. Some of them included suppliers that had come in and seen what we did when they're delivering something, and so they got excited. Others included folks from the MIT community, others included, robotics folks that had heard about Rise. And so we had this community of folks that had, in one way or another, asked us how they could get involved in participating in the upside of this business. And at the same time, when we were fundraising, VCs weren't offering really good terms. And so I saw an opportunity to connect the dots and we took our last institutional round and we opened it up to the public via this regulation in the United States called Regulation Crowdfunding, which allows us to raise after certain disclosures, allows us to raise up to $5 million in 12 months. And to my surprise, we ended up being the number one fundraise last year. We ended up getting almost $5.8 million worth of interest, which is 800,000 more than we could accept. And so we've had to open a second round to capture that interest and more interest that continues to come in.

Tom Raftery: 28:00

Very nice. Okay, and if this transition succeeds, what do you think is going to happen to heavy machinery over the next 10 years?

Hiten Sonpal: 28:12

I see them getting a lot cleaner, a lot quieter more drive by wire, increasing the comfort level of the operators. I see operators being able to work from home sometimes, assuming that we can get into those machines and create a digital twin for them where they can experience exactly what the machine is experiencing. And then eventually I, I expect to see incremental semi-autonomous behaviour added on, where an operator, instead of working on every movement, can say, take that pile of gravel from X and move it to Y and then they can supervise and the machine, when it can't do something,'cause the environment is too complicated, it can stop and say, I need help. So that's what I expect to see happening in the next five to 10 years.

Tom Raftery: 28:49

What sectors are gonna change first? Ports? Warehouses? Mining? Construction? Agriculture? Defence?

Hiten Sonpal: 28:58

Yeah, so let's circle back to mining for, for instance. So mining is electrifying because the mines are getting deeper and they have to go further to get the ore that they need. And so it's getting expensive to put down the air shafts to provide air to the personnel and the diesel engines that are consuming a lot of the oxygen. And so electrification makes sense because it reduces their operational cost and those shafts can be smaller to handle just personnel. And once they're electric, I think it's gonna be easy, relatively easy for them to make them autonomous systems because they aren't necessarily colliding with other things in a mine, right? You, you, you understand that you're going down the shaft, you're, it's a very well understood environment. So I think I see mining as being one of those first sectors that's gonna transform. And then I think marine we discussed and it's not just ports, but it's also folks that own any kind of boat or yacht, really don't want hydraulic oil on their boat. And they certainly don't want hydraulic oil in a beautiful location that they've taken the yacht out to. The last thing they wanna see is see a, a trail of oil. And so there's a lot of pull from the marine space to go hydraulic free. Also, there are boats that catch fish and crab and they have to keep them in tanks. And if you had a hydraulic oil leak and it gets into the tank, then the entire day's catch is ruined. So there are these pain points that need to get addressed relatively quickly. Food production and agriculture are another two sectors that I think will transform because folks want to get hydraulic oil just out of food and out of agriculture in general. So I think those are specific pain points that will cause electrification to happen there very quickly.

Tom Raftery: 30:43

I wanna go into a lightning round now where I ask you a couple of quick questions and you get o one sentence to to answer, ready for that?

Hiten Sonpal: 30:53

Yes.

Tom Raftery: 30:55

Okay. What's the biggest hidden cost in heavy machinery today?

Hiten Sonpal: 30:59

Lost revenue due to downtime.

Tom Raftery: 31:04

Okay. Better batteries or better efficiency?

Hiten Sonpal: 31:08

Better efficiency.

Tom Raftery: 31:11

Okay. Most over-hyped industrial AI claim.

Hiten Sonpal: 31:16

That they're going to be humanoid robots inside warehouses, replacing humans in the next five years.

Tom Raftery: 31:23

Diesel survives longest in what sector?

Hiten Sonpal: 31:27

Aviation.

Tom Raftery: 31:29

Okay, speed or durability. Which one?

Hiten Sonpal: 31:34

Speed.

Tom Raftery: 31:35

And lastly, what technology disappears first? Hydraulics or combustion engines?

Hiten Sonpal: 31:41

Combustion engines.

Tom Raftery: 31:45

Okay, good. If listeners want to start electrifying heavy equipment operations now, having listened to this, where should they begin?

Hiten Sonpal: 31:55

I, I, I would love for them to reach out to us. Our website is rise robotics.com. We have a contact form there, and if they could just talk about what they are looking to electrify, we'd love to have a conversation about how we can help them make that transition happen.

Tom Raftery: 32:08

and a left field question for you now, Hiten. If you could have any person or character, or dead, real or fictional as a champion for beltdraulics, who would it be and why?

Hiten Sonpal: 32:27

I think it would have to be Elon Musk because he has been pushing electrification. He has got a lot of companies that, like SpaceX that use a lot of hydraulic systems. He's personally experienced problems in his cars because of hydraulics. The, I think the initial gullwing doors on their SUV had hydraulic systems and then they had to replace them with something else 'cause they just didn't work the first time around. So I think he could help us. Also happens to have a lot of money.

Tom Raftery: 32:57

Great. Hiten, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now. Is there any question I didn't ask that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Hiten Sonpal: 33:10

That's a great question. Well, You didn't ask me about the stuff that's behind me. So that's, this is our shop. It's a holiday today. So folks aren't working. But in our shop you can see all of our products. Back there is a, the red cylinder there is capable of lifting 22 tonnes and that cylinder is attached to a forklift test stand. It's also the cylinder that we shipped to a prototype that we built for the Air Force which was the world's strongest robotic arm, which is used to load munitions onto planes. Then I'm trying to see if I can see a lift gate. So what you see there, where is a lift gate test stand where we test our lift gates. There is a banner there that says Guinness World Record for building the world's strongest robotic arm. And there's some test fixtures back there, very back. The blue item there is a test fixture, which tests cylinders. And there's a bunch of stuff underneath here that is not visible. This here item is a collapsible crane. It replaced a product that the Air Force was using that weighed 1800 pounds. And we replaced it with a system that weighs 300 pounds and it's capable of lifting one 50 pounds like the previous one. So we ended up saving them 1500 pounds of weight, but one sixth the weight to do the same thing. And of course it's a hand crank system, like the original one. And takes three times less effort'cause we're three times as efficient. So that's short list of products. We also have some other test fixtures here and so you can see our lift gate there. And then down there more test fixtures. So a lot of test fixtures in the lab. And then our work areas outside of the lab.

Tom Raftery: 35:00

Okay, and was the Guinness record engineering validation or marketing strategy?

Hiten Sonpal: 35:05

Both. So, and also the third reason was it was on my bucket list. So, yeah, shortly after I joined the team told me, Hey, we built the world's strongest robotic arm. And I said, I don't, I don't believe that. And they said, no, here, go take a look. And then they pointed to what was then the strongest robotic arm was a machine built by FANUC could lift 5,000 pounds. And we had built a system that could lift 7,000 pounds. And to be a robotic arm, you have to be drive by wire and you have to have six axis of movement, which we did in our system. So you could do yaw, pitch, roll and then front, back, left, right, up, down. So we had built that. So, and I said, if, if we've done something like this, we should get it out to the world. We should let the world know, especially because we had a crowdfunding round open. And we were also looking for customers who were sceptical that we could build something that was as strong as hydraulics. So both of those were important. So we went out there and the process does require engineering validation. The Guinness World Records team asks the folks that apply to bring an external third party in to test the systems. They measured all the weights, they measured the, before they, we put them on the system, they put the right sensors in all the right places. We had to bring in a local policeman to make sure that the people who were testing were the people they claimed they were, though they had ID and all that stuff. And then we had to collect all the video evidence and we had to send it over. That was the whole process. So very thorough

Tom Raftery: 36:32

Wow.

Hiten Sonpal: 36:32

And, at the end, of that, we got, validation from an engineering perspective, certainly that our tests that we had done were representative of the external company's test as well. So it's really good.

Tom Raftery: 36:43

Great. Hiten, that's been fascinating. If people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, you mentioned the website already, anywhere else people should go to find out more?

Hiten Sonpal: 36:54

Yeah, they can contact me on LinkedIn if they would like to send me a direct link. And also if they're interested in checking out our investment, they can go to invest dot rise robotics.com. And we have our campaign page and we talk about the opportunities. And also there are other investors who've written investment memos that describe both the opportunity and the risks so they can read about it and understand what's involved.

Tom Raftery: 37:19

Superb Hiten. That's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Hiten Sonpal: 37:23

Thank you, Tom. This was amazing.