Task-Based Robots for Contractors to Solve the Labor Crisis in Construction with Shamoon Siddiqui

0:00On this week's show, Human Robotics with Shamoon Siddiqui from Human Friendly Robotics.

0:20Alright, Shamoon, how are you, buddy? Doing well, thanks for having me on. Big fan. What am I supposed to say? Big fan, long-time listener? That's the old line, right? That's the old line. Well, now you're going to have to get rid of that line. Everybody's going to get to say you are now a guest. Before we dive in, because this is going to be a lot of fun. That's right. I said robotics twice already. He's got a robotics sign behind his head. We're going to have fun. But you guys know the deal. We're back on YouTube. Check us out. YouTube.com forward slash at the contact crew. And just so you know, you're listening.

0:50You're liking. Everything's growing there. So I appreciate you. You know that moment when you're buried in submittals, the electrical contractor swears they're working on the latest set, the mechanical disagrees, and nobody can find the same detail. Bluebeam solves that problem and more with Max. Stitching pulls together every discipline's drawings into a single continuous view. So architects, engineers, and contractors are finally looking at the same thing at the same time. Wild concept, right? Flag issues before they cost time and money. Find what you need fast and stop herding cats across 100 sheets same blue beam you trust just way smarter free trial at bluebeam.com forward slash trimax all right so shimun we're back introduce yourself to everybody listening in yeah so hey everyone shimun sadiki from human friendly robotics we're based here in central jersey human friendly robotics is building robots for construction's most challenging problems.

1:48We have a line of robots, the first of which is a floor tiling robot. So of course, we named it Tyler. We're working on one that does electrical wire pulling called Sparky. And we are working on another one that does cutouts of prefabricated panels for modular construction, which we don't have a great name for yet. If someone's got one, you can get in touch with me. I'm a lawyer. Yeah, that's great. And we had a little fun playing on the humanoid robotics versus human robotics. So let's dive back. How did you, before we get into all that and what you guys are actually up to and doing and building, how did you get to this point where, you know, tackling building robots in general was a thing you wanted to do?

2:27So let people know a little bit about you. Yeah. So a few years back, like a lot of people, I got pretty deep in the humanoid rabbit hole. We're hearing about the optimists and the unitry and the figure, and it It was all going to be super exciting. So I kept delving deeper and deeper and deeper. And then I had to do some laundry. My wife asked me to do a load. So I brought it down, lugging this big basket that weighs, I don't know, 20, 30 pounds, however much laundry weighs, bending down, putting in the machine, doing all these things. I don't like this task one bit. And it's not just because my wife was telling me to do it.

2:58But my body's really bad at every step of the equation, from picking it up to bending over to putting it down to picking up a sock to putting it in the machine to bring it back up the stairs. And yet every humanoid robot company is advertising laundry as a breakthrough feature. If laundry is the killer app of robotics, why is it emulating the worst form desired for work ever? So that led me to go strictly the other way, hating humanoids with a passion, not humans, but humanoids. And I thought, well, the most successful robots that we all kind of know about are the Roomba class of robots and then the invisible robots that we don't see, but have existed for 40 years in factories and warehouses.

3:34They're boring. They do one thing. They do it well. And that's when we delved deeper and deeper into construction. So that's crazy. Yeah, you and I had this conversation when I first started doing robotics talks. I actually got picked to go to Autodesk University to kick off their sort of innovation stage. I'd call it like a sort of a TEDx type stage. And I was leading out the group of robotics people. And, you know, I got to him. I'm like, you guys do realize like mine's a joke. I'm going to make fun of humanoid robots. And like, there's so many things out there, like drywalls, the size it is, because that's as far as I can go.

4:14CMU weighs what it weighs because that's all a human can carry. It's like, why would you design and spend time designing something this inefficient to do anything? And also that expensive, like, you know, my favorite one was they showed Atlas, like doing a jump off of scaffolding and then going and getting the toolkit. it. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure that that's there's no ROI in that one. There's a way better way to solve that problem. Right. Like maybe a cart that follows you around with everything you need that you can call over to you. I don't know. Like and that's when I started digging in.

4:52So you just said that a lot of the world has been designed for humans and that's the pitch of the humanoid companies and followers that, oh, yeah, I can adapt to anything. And we're looking into modular construction, and a lot of it is framing offsite. The reason it's done that way and people are hesitant to move away from that is because two by four is something that a human can carry. But if you take that limitation or restriction out, you can think a lot faster about what modular construction would look like, right? Because machines can carry heavier things than a person, but a guy can carry a two by four in his shoulder.

5:22So that's the limitation. You can get two or three or four two by fours, and that's the bottleneck. So designing for that just, it boggles the mind. Yeah, and that's why you looked at exactly what you said. It's an arm-like looking thing on an assembly line for cars. It's all the Amazon warehouses. They have their own set of robots that look like a giant Roomba that can carry those stacks of stuff around and move them around. And it's so funny, too, because like a humanoid robot is going to need so much connectivity, so much instruction, so much feedback. Those ones in the Amazon and others, they're run by QR codes that they roll over.

6:02And the QR code tells them where they're going and adjusts them. It's not a lot of snappy, right? It's just a lot of reality. So you have one out there in the world. How did you get from, OK, I'm going to look at construction. I'm going to get to this thing called Tyler. How did you get there? So I was doing the market study and the market analysis and your TAM and your SOM and all that stuff and had a few different ideas. And the issue with most of the other ideas is that they're not global. So roofing, for example, here in the Northeast, we've got a lot of shingle roofs for residential out in California, maybe some Spanish tile and commercials, a whole different game altogether.

6:36Same thing with paint. Here in the US, we generally have drywall, whereas maybe in Europe, they've got more stone or masonry or plaster. But flooring is literally universal. universal. It could be a hospital in Mozambique or the Burj Khalifa. It's going to be tiled, floored, roughly, different material, I assume, but the same thing. And from a robot perspective, it's difficult because it's uncontrolled conditions, but the work is the same. If you can lay two tiles, you can lay 20. You can do 20, you can do 200. So the challenge isn't laying 2000 square feet. It's laying two square feet. I like that.

7:08Minimizing the challenge down to something you can bite off and start working on. What I've learned talking to floor tilers and contractors and owners and potentially even higher up the stream, depending where you go, we've talked to a few manufacturers this week as well. It's brutal and punishing on the back, the knees, the hips, everything. The thing that we're trying to extract is floor tilers and tradespeople in general have a lot of expertise that is valuable and cannot be replaced. And that's what I think the job site should demand. Your expertise, not your back and your knees. I think we should clip that as, you know, it's your expertise, not your back and your knees, because consistently that's where this works.

7:49And I love that there's these niche robotics. And I think yours is truly a robot. I'm going to be a little harsh on some of the others. And I think it's great that they call themselves robots because it gets people to pay attention to it. So we're like the mule that's out there from construction robotics. In my opinion, it's not really a robot, right? It's just a really well-built hand lift. And it's an assisted piece. It's awesome. Double the CMU size because you can move it. You don't have to move the equipment so much. So incredible there. And again, it doesn't make it the fastest mace and any faster.

8:25But at the end of the day, they don't hurt as bad. Their bodies are in better shape. And they've produced it more, maybe a little bit more. But honestly, they can continue to produce. We can reduce time off, et cetera, for injury. And repetitive injury is one of the biggest problems. So talk to you a little bit. I get the sense that you actually do care about the working man. I do as well. So protecting them, their bodies, their health is important. But let's just pretend we're callous. We didn't care. We were very Machiavellian and calculating. It was just ROI numbers. Even then, it makes sense to protect them because people are not entering the trade.

9:02They just aren't. The numbers, depending on which ones you read and how you read them, for every 10 to retire, one enters. If you want to be completely selfish and cold-hearted about it, we should save their backs so they could work longer. Now, if you want to be a human about it, we should save their backs because they deserve to have saved backs. Yeah, I would agree with you. I think some of the statistics that are even out of date now were 500 ,000 plus short across all the trades. So let's say Machiavellian Lee, you take over tiling and tiling is just not a thing people do anymore. We have a lot of other trades that still need to be done.

9:32To everybody who just threw something at us, we're not saying that, you know, I think we just saw this, the robotics team from DeWalt on, right? And they were like, listen, drilling holes in concrete is not anybody's craftsmanship. And so I'm wondering too about that. Okay, so you have a robot that lays tile, but anybody who's been in the tile business knows there's a lot of interesting corners and other, how are you handling that part? So that is where your expertise as a tradesman comes into play. And that's the part we're intentionally not doing. A, from a simply mechanical repeatability perspective, it's not easy.

10:12And B, it's 1 % to 2 % of the floor plan. So we would rather do the 95%, 98 % of the field work where you're just on your hands and knees the whole time and let you do the precision stuff. Let you calculate if I cut this tile this much, I'm going to waste. whatever that is, you still are needed and important. And it's more, at least from the people I've spoken to, satisfying, right? We all get a certain amount of satisfaction from our job, a well done cut around a column. I've seen tile setters that they're over the moon if the cut's perfectly circular. Like this is, it's prideful. They don't really take pride in, I got down 50 tiles on the floor today.

10:50They take pride in that individual thing. Yeah. And it's funny too, because we've tried to gamify and you've seen people, you know, try to make them want to compete with one another. But again, in the end, it's not that you went home and you did, you know, I laid 500 individual pieces of tile today. You're right. They talk about, look at how clean we did that column. Look at how difficult that corner was and how good we made it look. And eyeing it up and making sure, you know, like I hate to say this, but I had this once, It's like eyeing the tile and doing it correctly so that it's not, if you lay the wrong tile in one line, the lines look like they're moving.

11:28That's why you stagger tile. Like something I did not know until you've seen it done wrong. Once you've seen it done wrong, it hurts your eyes. You never walk into somebody's house and notice how bad the HVAC was done. But you will notice immediately that the floor wasn't done well. Once you get your thing to wood flooring, I got in this apartment that I know of that's horribly done, that needs a whole lot of work from the person maybe that owned it before, then we could just try it out all you want. You know, you just tell me what kind of flooring you want. We'll redo it. I got a good meme for when we make that robot.

11:58If Tyler does tile, what do we call a robot that does wood? Think about it. Oh, I would call it Woody. There you go. If we can't have the puns, we're not doing the bot. The half a million worker shortage, which itself is outdated. When people say you're coming for our jobs, I say half jokingly, but half truthfully, we have to backfill half a million workers before we take one job. So even if that were our Machiavellian, just horribly ill-intentioned corporate goal, we're so far away from that being reality that it's not an actual threat of any magnitude. No, it's not. And in all honesty, I mean, I talked to my son about this, like making the trades available to this next generation.

12:37There's always going to be a few kids out there, a few people out there in the world. They like getting dirty. They like being out there and they like those kinds of hard things. And we're always going to have lots of that work. But a lot of this next generation of kids that will want to be craftspeople, they're going to want to operate tools like this. That's going to keep them interested. and then they can spend time with that experienced Tyler that's like, hey, look, making this corner is going to be really hard. Getting this column right is going to be really hard. You get the robot going over there where it's, you know, just set it and forget it.

13:12Let's get over here and let me teach you how to do this. And then they're not busting their back all day. They're learning a cool art form that then at the end they're into and you've drawn them in. In construction, the number one reason someone chooses a job is, you would guess, money, compensation, right? Generally. Number two is surprising. What's the number two reason people rank for keeping a job or starting a job? What would you guess? I think it's impact, but I don't know how you would say that because I know it's what generationally has changed. It's how much impact they have. So at least for this generation, specifically in the physical work, it's the ability to learn.

13:49detect new tools, new paradigms. Because if you are a career, forget about tile setting, that sounds selfish for me to talk about. If you're a career framer or a mason or something else, I mean, sure, you're learning a new trick, a new thing every so often. But as you spend a decade or two, you're learning less and less. We are curious creatures. We love novelty. It's why we left the oceans in the first place. It's true. And that's where also I know this next generation and I know myself cares about renewables and doing things smarter. And so that is the other thing that robotics can do is they're extraordinarily efficient.

14:24And then you can focus on whatever else it might be. Hey, are you trying new materials? Are you making sure that, you know, what you're using is recyclable or using the most of it? Now we got some ways to make impact. So that's exactly it, right? It's this dichotomy, this yin and yang. You have people, and not just people in the trades, but all of us, you and me included, that are kind of set in our ways and we don't want to change the way we do things. But at the same time, we want novelty and we want to learn the newest tool, the newest gadget, the newest website. And that's where I think that not just selfishly us, but this whole breed of construction robotics is bridging because we're still letting you do the things you want to do in the trade and take away stuff you don't while giving you new tools and toys and paradigms to think about.

15:08I'm pivoting us a little bit here, moving us into a new space here a little bit. But what was so awesome, and I'll be honest, it's the reason I was like, you got to come on the show. Talk about your office and what this place looks like right now. And maybe we'll talk about how the thought process and the sort of, wow, the magic happens. So it is intentionally chaotic. I don't want a single person here that doesn't want to be here. I don't want someone here that needs too much handholding. I don't want someone here that's afraid to break something. We break something every few days, whether it's a Jetson or a metal shaft, something is breaking all the time.

15:47From the inside looking out, when you're here, the energy is so intense because it's all the standard stuff you'd expect, camaraderie and people helping each other. But also a lot of people and myself included fully acknowledging that we don't know the next step and we're figuring it out. So we've got all sorts of sayings and quotes and quips that we're we have another little task board that we're living by. And the one that gets repeated the most is action generates information. You can sit there and think about a problem. You can talk about it. You can just do something and solve it and figure out what didn't work.

16:17Right. So the other one is fail fast to succeed quickly. Because there is this whole like fail fast idea, but I think they don't connect it to what you just said. So talk about how you make that one go to action, because I think too many people don't understand, especially in construction, because we can't fail on construction projects. but what does that mean to you? So case in point, literally yesterday and today, we're trying to figure out how to get a lubrication thing on wire because you have to lubricate wire before going through a conduit. There's 400 different ways to do it. And if you get on chat, GPT or Google, they all have a different solution.

16:50And we did. We spent hours searching for different solutions and debating them. And then we just, one of my guys, he just said, I'm going to cut open this bottle and I'm going to see if I could use a piston and push it through. Let's do that. need to work, maybe won't. We'll file, yeah, I'll let you know in the next hour or two when he's done with it. That's the real world. So when it comes to not failing construction, I think that's the, if you want to call it the moat or the defensibility, it's not that our robot can lay tile or that it can do it better or faster or slower than a human, whatever the metric you want to use is.

17:20The thing that we're really optimizing for is how to do it infinitely variable conditions, right? Because if you did get the tile setting machine or some other company's robot in some way, your site was not pristine and it fails. Now what? Like you intentionally did not get a crew of six guys because you have the robot coming in tomorrow. And that's the actual problem of solving. We're not solving for the tiling problem. We're solving for that problem. Reliability in unknown cases. It's a completely wicked environment. I mean, construction always will be a wicked environment. It's not going to look the same day after day.

17:50And the robots that are going to have to be trusted are going to have to be able to deal with that. What were some of the earliest hurdles you didn't see coming? I love this, by the way, for the Sparkies out there. I'm sure a few of you guys are going to be sending messages to Shamoon about how do you get the lubricant on those wires? Please tell me. The biggest, I guess, mindset shift that I had coming from software and technology and different stuff before, everything in the physical hardware space takes way longer than you would want it to. A, because if it's code, even before the GPT or writing code or the cloud code, you could do something right away and see, okay, the button is now red or the API now works or whatever it is.

18:28but here we don't know if this lube thing will work until we actually design the piston make the piston use the piston we have no idea and that could be hours it could be days and if it's wrong we have to go back to the drawing board and that's why we're really big on fail fast let's fail in hours minutes if possible not days and weeks it's super important too because you don't just have to build it once like okay so if he goes and figures out that he cut that bottle open you put the piston on it, you get it figured it out. Now you got to mass produce it. And now we have to go back to the first part, all the edge cases where this thing doesn't work, right?

19:04It's plastic. What if it warps? What if it bends? What if it's hot? What if it's cold? What if the lubricants empty? The person put in the wrong lubricants. When it comes to the other surprise, and this is maybe, you know, possibly a detriment, but I viewed as a benefit is me not having floor tiling experience per se. I had a lot of assumptions that turned out to be highly unrealistic. Just you look at a tile, you don't realize that there are no two tiles on the planet that are identical in terms of size and tolerance down to the millimeter and submillimeter, right? Because the things chip and they're manufactured differently.

19:35And you just don't think about that. But coming from robotics or an engineering standpoint, we would like them to be the exact same. And they're not. So that was learning to adapt. Now there's rectified tiles that are better and so on and so forth. But my assumption was, yeah, it's perfect tiles. It's just a computer code, right? It's just what I want it to be. The real world is not that. No. And that's, I mean, think about it. The tiling companies, you know, the manufacturers, they have a tolerance level in there. That tolerance means there's variance. That variance means somebody has to handle that.

20:10And that is now you. And my job. Yeah. Well, Tyler's job. I'm not going to do it, but yeah, Tyler will have to take care of that. And I can appreciate that you don't have tiling experience and that you can be open about that because I think there is this misnomer that especially in construction you're like well you have to be a construction expert and I'm like that's actually not true and shouldn't be true right you need those experts around and learning from them and understanding sort of a not having the well this is the way we've always done it viewpoint is who's gonna bring you this comes from Disney right Disney's whole thing is don't fill your room with people who are experts in it all you won't get anywhere with it because you won't get any new ideas you bring in you know i'm a big duncan wortle everybody knows that you know he brought in the chef to one when they were trying to open one in china and she's the one who designed a different house and came up with the distinctly disney uniquely chinese like you don't get that creativity if you're an expert in all honesty.

21:14So there's this level of creative mix you need. Yeah. And I think that it's true. Like what did Jeff Bezos know about selling books? He was not in the book selling business. He had no industry experience in publishing and retail and all that. He was working for an investment bank, just as far removed from books as he could possibly be. What did Elon know about cars or rockets for that matter? It's the outside looking in because if you're from the inside looking out, you're just going to do the same way. Yeah. And interesting, too, because, you know, go to the Bezos one like Barnes and Noble was killing it at the time.

21:43They didn't believe this thing could be anything different, that you must buy books in person. And who knew this guy who, by the way, wasn't that big into books was going to just destroy that and change that market. it. The interesting thing is if we do this right with robotics and the way you're going about it, you're partnering with tiling companies. So that's the difference here, right? Is that they will be a part of their own evolution. It's not disruption if it's an evolution of how it's done. It's disruption as a byproduct. Yeah. It's going to be an evolution because we have a lot to learn.

22:20I'll be transparent about that. We have to keep talking to people, doing jobs, doing deployments, but also the industry needs time to adapt. How do you bid a project that changes. So if you were to bid a 20 ,000 square foot school, you've got your rules of thumb, you've got your metrics, you've got your numbers that you've used historically. Even if everything we say is true and works and works perfectly, how do you begin to bid around that? There's no way, there's no concept. All of your tooling doesn't have, and then a robot will be there. Yeah, there's no RS means for robotic installation of tile, et cetera.

22:51And that's something that we're coming into that we're talking to people that are doing larger jobs and public jobs. And they're like, yeah, but how do I bid this out? And I'm like, that's good. That's a good question. And I don't mean the math on that. I mean, the workflow and the tools are just not there because the owner of the company is not the one doing the bid. It's someone in the chain. So it very much is a workflow adoption problem, less of a technological adoption problem. Yeah. And it'll be, it's one of those things too. It's where in the beginning, you're going to have to bid it at the old way, do it the new way and figure it out and hopefully that it just means you're way more efficient and you're making more money until everybody figures out you're doing with a robot but you know that is too by the way at some point there is a commoditization of what we do in construction and we have to be okay with that it's not you know this shirt is of a nice fabric brand new it didn't get any cheaper but i'm pretty sure it's a lot cheaper to manufacture these days than it used to be but i'm still paying for it.

23:47So like there's a moment in which it is what it is. This is how we do it. But we're here to make money. That's a totally different one because there's a single innovation curve in construction that needs to go away. Like if I can do something differently this time and I save a bunch of money, that's what you expect me to charge you is to get rid of my own profit. No, at some point, this is just what the service costs. Deal with it. You know what's a good point, right? So we are in early talks with a couple of the unions because that's always going to be a big part of this. And one of the unions we're speaking with, they said, yeah, we actually accept innovation, right?

24:22Gone are the days where people are against the seven inch brush versus a five inch brush because it's whatever, 40 % faster. And we're working with them to get a department of labor certification. So there could be a union code for robot tile operator that outputs five times a person and gets paid four times as much, right? It's still a net win. So we're not driving that salary to zero. The goal in working with them is to drive that salary up. The product more. Increase the productivity of the person and pay them more. Oh, wow. We're getting more and we're paying more. That's a unique approach.

24:57Win, right? Because the client pays a little bit less. The guy gets paid a little bit more. The GC keeps his profit on top. It's going to be a long cycle, the problem with labor and all that. But once we're there, it's going to be massive. yeah once you're there you're there so all right we're getting close and i don't want to leave this out there because i know i've got a huge electrical group listening and you're getting sparky rolling but you had some asks you need some info we already talked about the lubricant issue what else is going on and what do you want those sparkies listening in to to to do here all right here's my ask so i'll tell you what sparky is robot system there's two one at each end one for the puller, one for the feeder, and it intelligently drives the wire through the conduit.

25:43Everything down from a 12 gauge to 500. It's real innovation isn't so much the pulling. There's the Greenlee, there's Southwire, there's other companies that make tuggers and pullers and feeders. It's the safety. It's the matching. If there's a kink in the line, we detect it before we just rip through wire. Whereas an existing tool, unless someone's watching and knows they're doing, has to rip to the wire. So my ask for you guys is what would it take for you to be convinced that the safety part matters? It's a good one because I'll be honest, that's not something for me, right? I've been around electrical a long time.

26:21It's not something we have a big conversation about ripping wire. What is the safety issue with ripping wire for somebody else listening? Because I go, oh, that doesn't sound good, but I didn't know it going in. So if you have the big fat wires, the 500s, the 300s right there, the thick wires, they're inch, inch and a half diameter of pure copper could weigh two, three, four pounds of foot. And if you have to push through a conduit, Isaac Newton did us all a big disservice by inventing gravity, because if it's got to go up, it gets a lot heavier. And if it's got to go up 100 feet, it gets a lot heavier.

26:52And without any tooling whatsoever, it's a guy or a series of guys pushing, pushing, pushing. That's going to break your back faster than you could possibly imagine. Now there are tools, basically a winch. These winches are unreasonably powerful, which is good because they have to be to pull this wire. But if you get in the way, they're not forgiving. If something breaks, something snaps, they're not forgiving. I was talking to an electrician the other day. He said on one of these machines, a pulley just fell off as it's one to do. And went witzing by his brother's head and missing him by inches.

27:21When there's injuries in that space, it's not an injury, it's a fatality, right? That's why if you're not doing it correctly, there's the repetitive stress injury to your body. but if something goes wrong, it's catastrophic. Now on the flip side, if a wire pull goes bad, you know, your Sparkies will correct me, but you don't recover the wire, you scrap the wire. That's hundreds of dollars of wire, thousands of dollars of wire if it's a long run that can't be reused because it gets mangled inside conduit or the puller was too much or too little. The current state of the art in that industry is a walkie talkie.

27:52That's the bar. The bar is not perfection. It's better than, hey Jim, slow down on the other end. And so basically what Sparky's yours doing is you got one pull in and one push it. Yeah. And they're communicating with each other. Yeah. And the real time matching down to 10 times a second. Right. So before there's a problem, if let's say on the feeding end, because it's pulling off the spool, there's a kink in the spool. We know that. We can stop. We can slow down. We can alert the person. Say, hey, we have an issue here. Let's fix it. It can turn a 10 man crew down to a two man crew. Now, electricians, they are hard to get.

28:28Commercial electricians, even more so. Because I didn't know the magnitude before, but they're building a lot of data centers. Like a lot. Maybe a few. Yeah, you think about it. But when you start to actually talk to people and I'm talking to you, they're building out in Alaska. They don't have people in Alaska. And they have even fewer trades people in Alaska. And they have even fewer qualified electricians in Alaska. So they're flying people out there just to work. I think the numbers that I was told was unskilled trades, let's say a helper, struggling$400 ,000 a year in outlay for that person.

29:02So I just got the skill. So it's not a cost savings thing. They don't exist. You can pay them a million a year, but you're still not going to get enough of them because it's just not there. And you're absolutely right. And the electricians in general, because of the rise in the amount of scope and what is now electrified in any facility, a data center, a hospital, an industrial manufacturing, everything is electrified now. So that scope is huge. And there's fewer, fewer people. And the same thing we said, even if I'm wrong today and there's enough electricians, there will not be tomorrow. No, and you're not wrong.

29:38And the safety aspect is huge, along with you're talking about safety and predictability. And more than anything, just thinking about it now, any pool that goes bad, and granted, I knew pools went bad and cause schedule issues, but now realizing that it could cause an injury and it causes waste for the material itself, but then it also causes the biggest waste we have, which is time. Time is money in a data center and anything we're dealing with. And so you have that. And so predictably, when you're talking about planning and scheduling, you now have a higher level of confidence in completing those polls in a repeatable amount of time.

30:27And oh, by the way, let's say over time, these polls are not coming out to what we thought. We have a lot of human excuses for why things don't turn out the way they turn out. When you're using a robot, they're giving you all that data. Now you have the data. And to be honest, you can just say, listen, the reality is this is how long these polls take and there's no refuting it. So here you go. Here's your RS means on the time for the schedule. That's actually a great point, because when you ask a tile setter or an electrician, how many square feet can do linear feet, you will get 200 answers out of 20 electricians.

31:05They've all got, well, it depends on this and that. But once we've got data, this is what it takes. This is it. It's not good or bad. It's not fast or slow. It is. Yeah. And it's irrefutable. And it is. Yeah. And that's the estimating problem, because right now when the guy's doing the bid, rule of thumb, however many square feet per day, however many dollars per square foot. but reality rarely matches rule of thumbs. And their entire profitability depends on it matching. It never matches rule of thumbs. And listen, humans have good days and bad days. We all do. Robots do not. They have days. Honey, not only do we have good days and bad days, I don't care if you're a tile sider, an electrician, a mason, a framer, a carpenter, whatever you might be.

31:45Hour one is different than hour eight. There's an absolute natural drop in productivity over time. It's just the way it is. I was at this site in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and I was putting down some carpet tile myself. Now, I'm not skilled. I do not know what I'm doing. I don't, you know, it was just for me to understand better how it all works. And it wasn't real. So we can just rip it right back up. Eight to nine tiles into it. I just need a nap. I just need this to be over. After nine tiles, that's it. That's nine 36 square feet. And I was just like, I can't, my knees are cracking. I thought to myself, I'm a smart guy.

32:17I can figure out how to do this efficiently. Nope. Nope. There's a craft to it, man. And we just want to save them and let them be a little bit more productive over time. Yeah. And really, it comes down to, I think the adoption will happen slowly and then all at once. Because we will reach a tipping point. I'm probably wrong on the numbers, but I think I read somewhere around 2030 or 2031 or two, we're going to be 3 million short in the trades. So even if the number is up, the magnitude is not. No, no. The magnitude is there. And we're headed for a cliff, man. We just are and we know it. And I mean, that's why you don't have all the time in the world, but you have some time right now.

32:56And so figuring these really powerful robotic assisted devices, robotic assistants, whatever term we want to call them is awesome. Listen, Shimon, I could talk to you forever. People are definitely going to want to come figure out more about you. Tell people where to go hook up with you. And hey, before we get all the way there, I got to say thanks to Shepard for connecting us. He was the LinkedIn Meister to get us to start talking. So huge thanks to Shepard on your team. Let people know where they can go find out a little bit more about you, a little bit more about human friendly robotics. So the website is humanfriendly.bot, which is easy enough.

33:35You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm sure we have a Twitter. I'm not very active on our Twitter or Instagram or anything. But the best ways are just get to the website. We've got our phone number. We've got our little email address and contact form. Or just hit me up on LinkedIn. Usually pretty responsive. And yes, I do with Shepard's. Awesome with partnerships. So huge shout out to him for connecting us. And thank you for tuning in today to geek out for our interview with Shamoon Siddiqui. To read all our news stories, learn more about our guests, and to listen to this show, visit thecontechcrew.com.

34:05This is The Contech Crew, signing out. Until next time, enjoy the ride and geek out.