Cobots for hire: Rapid Robotics fills automation needs with subscription model

By Bruce Geiselman

For companies struggling to find enough workers to staff their production lines, hiring a cobot might be just the ticket.

Rapid Robotics, founded in 2019, offers automation as a service. 

Instead of requiring customers to lay out tens of thousands of dollars to buy a cobot, Rapid Robotics leases its cobots, called Rapid Machine Operators (RMOs), said Jordan Kretchmer, co-founder and CEO. The robots can operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

“Our model is $2,100 per month, which is less than the cost of a single human operator,” Kretchmer said. “But with human operators, you have to have three of them to run 24/7, so, that is where the ROI [return on investment] comes in. It’s a pretty straightforward calculation, and we’re the only ones that are in the market with that kind of business model where the monthly fee is so much less than the human labor cost.” 

For that subscription fee, Rapid Robotics programs the cobots and can update the programming when needed. Most often, programming updates can be done remotely, Kretchmer said. 

“As far as we know, we are the only company that trains our arms in simulation prior to deploying the arm to the customer,” Kretchmer said. “We do this by using CAD files from the customer … When we deliver a robot to a customer, it already knows exactly what it’s supposed to be doing. It knows where it’s supposed to look for the parts and it’s updating its motion path in real time based on that data. That is the primary thing that enables us to deploy robots in a very, very short amount of time.” 

The cobots come with vision sensors and AI, which allow them to identify parts and their location and adjust motions accordingly.   

RMOs come programmed to operate equipment commonly used in plastics processing, including injection molding machines, pad printers and ultrasonic welders. They also can perform common tasks such as pick-and-place and parts inspection. 

“There are over three dozen different tasks that we’ve done in plastics facilities, everywhere from quality inspection to heat stamping and pick-and-place,” Kretchmer said. “We are kitting plastic parts together in boxes; we are taking plastic parts and putting them in boxes, taping the boxes, putting those boxes into shipping containers, so, pretty much everywhere along the line. Degating is another big one. One of the first degating tasks we did was degating [components] for COVID tests.” 

The number of tasks cobots can perform will grow as cycle times decrease and the accuracy and repeatability of robot arm placement improve, he said. 

“What you’re seeing is the amount of use cases for cobots is increasing dramatically as the technology improves,” Kretchmer said. “And the other thing that’s important is the cost of cobots has come down dramatically. This is primarily because of harmonic drives, which are what runs every joint in the arm. A six-jointed arm has six harmonic drives in it. Well, they came out of patent, I think four or five years ago.” 

That allowed manufacturers to produce those parts more cheaply, Kretchmer said. 

“The result is, we’ve seen almost a 30 to 40 percent decline in the cost of a cobot,” Kretchmer said. “As the cost becomes a lot more accessible, it enables us to provide our business model. If we were paying $70,000 for a cobot, then our business model wouldn’t work. We wouldn’t be able to provide a solution to the customer that was ROI-positive the second day deployed because we’d have to charge a whole lot more in our monthly fee. The cost of cobots coming down is what really has enabled us to provide a business model to our customers that is instantly profitable versus human labor, and also profitable for us.” 

Kretchmer co-founded Rapid Robotics about six months before the pandemic struck because he saw that companies were struggling with a labor shortage.  

“The demand that we were seeing in the market is what caused us to focus on manufacturing and, specifically, plastics manufacturing,” Kretchmer said. “The volatility of the labor market was already there; the cost of labor was already going up at 8 percent a year on average in every market in the U.S. We were seeing this issue become an existential crisis. When COVID hit, the initial impact was everybody shut down. It was weeks of trying to figure out what this meant for everybody. Then operations restarted in some cases at 40 or 50 percent capacity because they couldn’t have people near each other. The only solution in that environment was to look to robots.” 

Rapid Robotics is pitching “automation-as-a-service” as a way to fill up to three job openings at a lower cost. 

“We’ve got customers where we walk in and they’ve got 50 or 60 open head count for machine operators, and we talk to them about looking at Rapid as a labor force — an instantly scalable, highly reliable labor provider, where we can be on site, and in a couple hours be gone, and you’re up and running in production.” 

The average increase in profitability per Rapid Machine Operator deployment is $120,000 per year, Kretchmer said.

Contact: 

Rapid Robotics, San Francisco, www.rapidrobotics.com