“We must teach kids that they can be a manufacturer too – not just a doctor, lawyer, or fireperson. You get to work with cutting-edge machines and with your hands, but we haven’t really been able to create this feeling yet.”

There’s a lot of work to be done when it comes to reaching down further into school systems to help them understand, and to help teachers and faculty understand that manufacturing is a viable career, said Suzy Teele, Chief Strategy Officer at the ARM Institute. In this episode of the Manufacturing Matters podcast, Teele dives into the work that the ARM Institute to grow manufacturing and increase national security, while also covering a wide range of other topics and technologies, including labor shortage and job resources available today, automation adoption in small and medium-sized businesses, and of course, AI. Additional topics include the use of VR in robotics, humanoid robots, some examples of recent companies that have spun out of the ARM Institute, and more.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:06] Hi everybody. My name is Jimmy Carroll. I’m the vice president of operations at Tech B2B Marketing. I have the pleasure of being joined today by Suzy Teele. Suzy, thanks so much for taking the time today. I really appreciate it. Suzy is the ARM Institute chief strategy officer and a newly elected member of the A3 Robotics Board, so congratulations for that.

 

Suzy Teele: [00:00:23] Thank you very much.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:24] Of course. Yeah. So for those who don’t know, could you tell us a bit about the ARM Institute and then I have a follow-up question after that. But let’s start there.

 

Suzy Teele: [00:00:33] Sure. So the ARM Institute is one of 18 — soon to be 19 — Manufacturing USA institutes. About 10 years ago, the federal government decided that it wanted to invest more in helping manufacturers move to advanced technologies. And so they set up a series of applied research institutes across the United States to do that. ARM Institute was started in 2017, so we just celebrated our eighth anniversary. They do a few every year, and they roll them out. And our mission is to try to advance the state of robotics, AI, and autonomy to make it easier for manufacturers of all sizes to adopt those technologies with the overall goal of increasing national security and growing U.S. manufacturing.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:01:19] Okay, awesome. Well, that’s a great introduction. I’ve had a lot of follow-up questions based on that, but we’re here, I should have mentioned right up front, we’re here at the A3 Business Forum in Orlando, which is great to be here every year. It’s a great event. I wanted to ask, how do you work with companies like the folks that are here? How do you work together with them? I cheated a little bit, because yesterday I met you and we met some other folks that you’ve been working with, but for the sake of the podcast.

 

Suzy Teele: [00:01:41] So we certainly work with — we have a national consortium, and that’s one of the features of all the institutes that are in the United States, the Manufacturing USA institutes. So what we do is we form a consortium and we try to create a great ecosystem of practitioners in the industry: manufacturers, research scientists, people within government who are focused in this area of using robotics for manufacturing. And so right now, the ARM Institute has about 475 member organizations throughout the United States. We all share the same mission, to advance the state of robotics and supporting technology, as well as all the workforce initiatives to grow U.S. manufacturing. So many of the people that are here at this conference, which I love and try to come to every year, are also our members, and we work very closely with A3 because we share similar missions. And so while our focus is really on investing in developing programs to move things forward, that very much complements the work that A3 does, which is to bring a consortium together and really think about what’s important to help the industry be healthy and how to solve some problems. So we’ve got a great working relationship with A3. We share a lot of ideas, and we do a lot of work to try to complement each other’s work.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:03:03] Well that’s great. Yeah, I love to hear that. And obviously they’re a great organization. So what are some of the most important points? What are the most important discussion points within the ARM Institute right now that you guys are focused on the most?

 

Suzy Teele: [00:03:17] A couple different areas. Workforce is a really big one.  You’ve heard all the statistics. Some research institutes said there’s going to be millions of jobs open by 2030 in manufacturing. There’s about 800,000 that are open right now in manufacturing. And that’s only going to continue to grow as we build more, for instance, chips manufacturing plants and semiconductor work in the United States. And so the ability to first attract people to manufacturing careers and then give them the skills that they need in order to be successful in manufacturing is a big focus of the mission of the institutes, because we can’t grow manufacturing if we can’t find people to work in it.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:03:59] Yeah.

 

Suzy Teele: [00:03:59] And regardless of how good the technology is, you still need people to manage and operate the technology. So that’s one big initiative. On the other side, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at how to make robots easier to program, more flexible, help them do jobs that human beings don’t want to do. We always talk about the dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:04:23] Of course.

 

Suzy Teele: [00:04:24] And if I can share a story. Yesterday, we met with S.K. Gupta from USC and also Gray Matter Robotics. Gray Matter Robotics started as an ARM-funded project with S.K. and some graduate students at the University of Southern California. And they grew that into a company that’s got 80 employees right now. So we helped spur innovation in that area. But we also look for ways to take basic research that the universities are doing and apply that to real manufacturing problems, and we do that through funding projects.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:05:02] Yeah. You’re almost answering a lot of my questions that I have in my head, but I want to dive in a little further. So anytime you look at the jobs reports and you see there are this many jobs open and there are always going to be — not always but over the last several years, and obviously COVID kind of exacerbated it — but there’s been a labor shortage, and a lot of these jobs that you’re talking about — I think of welding as one example. Don’t quote me on the source of this market study or the numbers or anything, but there’s something that was saying basically that in X amount of years, there aren’t going to be any skilled welders, for the most part. There’s going to be a large gap, but it’s way beyond just welding, right? There’s all these other types of jobs. So you touched on this a little bit, but how do you get the younger generation, how can companies get the younger generations, these people that are in college now or going to be graduating soon or graduating high school — even better I guess. How do you get them interested in welding or these other manufacturing jobs?

 

Suzy Teele: [00:06:08] It’s a great question and one that we all wrestle with honestly as a nation, right? Because we have created a culture in the United States that is slightly different maybe from some other cultures in other countries, where there’s a perception that a trade career path is not as valuable as going to a four-year or plus educational program. That is changing in the United States, slowly, but that is changing, and there’s much more emphasis on trade right now. And so that’s a good trend that we see. But one of the biggest challenges is that we really have to start to introduce the concept of a manufacturing career to somebody a lot younger in their life. I always say when you talk to a child that’s 7 or 8 years old and say, “Hey, Jimmy, what do you want to be when you grow up?” “I’ll be a fire person or a doctor or a lawyer.” We have to teach them that they can be a manufacturer too. And that’s kind of cool, because they get to work with machines and they get to work with their hands. And a lot of people like that. But we haven’t been able to create that feeling yet. And so there’s a lot of work that our institutes are doing to reach down further into the school systems to help them understand and help teachers understand, and guidance counselors, that these are viable careers as well.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:07:22] Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, they’re not romanticized in the way that becoming a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut or these things are in popular culture. But, I mean, these are great careers and high-paying careers that people might not realize. I’m just curious, though, and we talked about this yesterday too, but it’s worth bringing up again. There was this fear for so long that robots were taking jobs, and it’s just proved to be wrong. And in fact in many cases they create more jobs. Will manufacturers that have robots, will the robots be able to bring in young people? The ability to work alongside robots is a fairly attractive thing. Have you seen that?

 

Suzy Teele: [00:08:00] We have and that’s certainly a key advantage of focusing on advanced manufacturing is that you get to work with robots, other cool machineries, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, start to work with AI, right? And so a lot of the younger generation grew up with a phone in their hand or a laptop on their lap. I remember my daughter who’s 24, at 2 years old, she was on a laptop playing games.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:08:29] Just knew how to use it somehow.

 

Suzy Teele: [00:08:31] Exactly, yeah. So it’s second nature to a lot of the younger generation. And so what we have to do is connect them with: “Hey, you’ve got these skills. You’re comfortable using technology. You can use technology in a manufacturing environment, and you can do fun things using that technology in the manufacturing environment.” So we’ve got to do a better job at that connection. And we’ve all been working on that. One of the things that the ARM Institute has done that we’re really proud of is that about three years ago we launched a national resource, free to use, called RoboticsCareer.org. And what we did was we created a place for people to learn more about jobs in manufacturing using robotics. And it’s really designed for people who are seeking education, who are seeking jobs, and also the providers of education and the providers of jobs. And so someone can come out to that site and look at over 17,000 training programs that we have cataloged across the United States. They get everybody the opportunity to get everything from a micro-credential to a PhD that could qualify them to work with robotics in manufacturing. They can also look at jobs. We have an average of 2,000 jobs every day on the site for them to look at across the United States. And so it’s a great resource for them in order to come online. They can create profiles, indicate their skills, and manufacturers can come on. And we have a job-matching capability that will match the skills with the manufacturers looking for skills that the person has identified that they have. And we also have a capability for educators to provide information, more information about their training programs, and we can connect people directly to their training programs.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:10:07] That’s very cool.

 

Suzy Teele: [00:10:08] So we think that creating that awareness and having people understand and have a resource to go to where they can learn more and say, “This is a really cool job. Oh, I’m watching this video. This is a person that looks like me that’s doing this really cool job” can really help move the needle.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:10:24] Yeah. So as far as all these folks that are working with the robots, right, there’s going to be a wide range of different types of people. Some of these people might be an in-house integrator at a large automotive manufacturer or whatever. Others might be dealing with a robot, a mobile cobot system, in a really small business. What are some ways that your member companies have made the adoption of robotics easier?

 

Suzy Teele: [00:10:48] Well, many different ways. Certainly they are looking at some of the technologies that make it easier to program robots. They’re looking at cobots, right? They’re looking at finding students that maybe have gone through pre-apprenticeship programs in high school or have been involved in robotics competitions as good candidates to hire. They are working with community colleges to upskill the folks that they have. Not every state is the same, but I can tell you here in Florida, because I’m familiar with the school system, there’s a two-year associate degree program that somebody can go and they’re ready and equipped to go work in a manufacturing environment using robotics and CNC machines and 3D printers and things of that nature. And so there are a lot of resources that are available. Our RoboticsCareer.org tries to help those manufacturers know what some of those resources are. But it’s really a couple things. One is finding people who are interested in doing that and either starting as their first job or upskilling themselves. And secondly, getting them really involved with working with the systems integrator or the technology provider to make sure that they really understand how to use the technology once those people have left. That’s a big focus area for a lot of people. So they really need to take the time to upskill their team to feel comfortable doing that.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:12:19] Yeah. That’s interesting. And I think a lot of times too, a lot of these companies today are making their software more intuitive, like browser-based guided workflows. It walks you through the process and makes it all easier. And from the software side, I think that’s where you’re seeing a lot of this ease-of-use, usability terms being thrown out there. Like I think there’s a lot of improvements being made there that are making the adoption of robots easier, especially in those small machine shops that in the small to medium-sized enterprises that are may be using cobots, it’s become easier than it was 10 or so years ago.

 

Suzy Teele: [00:13:00] Yeah. And VR shows a lot of promise for that. One of the big challenges with small manufacturers is they can’t afford to take a piece of equipment off-line in order to teach somebody how to use it. But if you can create some software that allows somebody to actually be simulating the use of that, just like we do for flight simulation and everything else, that really moves the needle forward. So we’ve been doing some work in that area as well too. There’s still some challenges because almost every environment is custom. So you look at the ROI of creating a custom VR application, for some companies it makes sense because that equipment is important enough and they have enough people that need to be able to train to do that. But as those costs come down and the ability to create VR programs becomes easier and easier, which it will because it always does, that remains also a very viable method to bring people into the environment.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:13:55] I’m glad you brought that up, actually, because there’s also — and maybe you’ve seen this and I imagine you have given the amount of companies that you get to talk to — AR goggles. Those are much less expensive. You might be able to have somebody put those on and say, “All right, show me the machine. Show me what’s happening.” “All right. Go here.” And in some cases there might even be an overlay that shows you: This is where you need to go fix this. Or somebody can be patched through and look through and say, “This is how you fix this.” And that would be helpful for me because I’m not very handy. At home if I needed to fix my lawnmower or something, I’d be putting on the goggles and saying, all right, maybe go on YouTube or something and figure out how to do it. Have you seen that too?

 

Suzy Teele: [00:14:33] Yes.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:14:34] And it also makes me think of AI and the use of AI in simulation. I have to ask you about AI. I’m sorry, but I have to.

 

Suzy Teele: [00:14:42] No, no, no. It’s an expected question.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:14:45] Yeah. Given all the different companies that you get to work with, what are some ways that you’re seeing AI really add value within robotics and automation?

 

Suzy Teele: [00:14:53] A couple of key areas. First of all, the most important area is knowledge capture. The average age of an employee in manufacturing is around 55 years old, right? And so you’re at a point where a lot of people in manufacturing that have the real knowledge for how the equipment operates and how to handle certain situations where there may be a malfunction or something else, we’re losing that. And so AI is really going to play a critical role and is playing a critical role in helping to capture that knowledge. The other area is in those processes where they are more repetitive or more dull, and there’s higher room for error as a result of that. We see companies applying AI in those situations because it’s less likely to make mistakes than a human being who was up late the night before or something along those lines. That’s really key. One of the challenges that we see in the adoption is really on the data side. Our company is doing a good job collecting enough data to train the models. And some companies are really good about capturing data and processes because they’ve got other systems that are doing that. And some of the smaller manufacturers don’t do that. They’ve got Bob in the corner. And you know it’s all in his brain, right? And so that’s probably one of the bigger barriers that we see to the adoption of that is either we need to find ways to create good synthetic data or we need to help manufacturers capture more data about what’s happening in their environment so that they can apply the models to them.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:16:35] Yeah for sure. And my brain always goes to visual inspection with AI because I used to work at a magazine in the machine vision space. AI-based machine vision is really good at subjective feature inspection or something like inspecting a weld. That weld might be within tolerance, but an algorithmic rules-based machine vision system might look at that and say, that doesn’t match what it’s been trained on. I just think that now we’re seeing AI being able to really add value when the data is there, because if you don’t train the system based on good data and have Bob, who you mentioned in the corner, going in there and labeling, “This as a defect. This is a defect,” so you have a really good dataset that has been agreed upon labeled, and then it improves over time, it’s so cliche but it’s great. It’s garbage in, garbage out. If you have bad data, the AI is not going to work.

 

Suzy Teele: [00:17:32] Exactly. And so at the ARM Institute, we’ve done about 120 technology projects that we funded in our eight years of existence. About 40% of them have some element of AI associated with them. We do a lot of vision-related projects, as you can imagine, because that’s where people want the most help. In a lot of cases, like we said, Bob may be sick that day or something like that. And the attention to quality is really, really critical. And so we’ve been working with it for five or six years in a prototype environment. And starting to really look at working with our members to focus on the dataset side.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:18:13] Yeah. What about on the predictive analytics side? Have you have you had much experience there? I mean, there’s some companies out there that are really adding value with AI that can be applied to improve overall operational efficiency.

 

Suzy Teele: [00:18:28] Right. That’s not quite our spot. We’ve got other institutes that focus more in that area. But certainly if it applies to enabling robotics, we’ve looked at those types of systems.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:18:38] Okay. Let’s see what else. Oh, another question I have to ask you about is humanoids. First, what are your general thoughts? Obviously they’re fun. And I want to see them on the trade show floors as well. But what are some ways that you think they could be adding value and when do you think that might be happening?

 

Suzy Teele: [00:18:56] Again, if we put it in the construct of manufacturing, because there’s a lot of applicability, like in senior living and health care and other places that make a lot of sense. In the context of manufacturing, we really see it helping in those cases in the whole distribution area. People have to lift heavy equipment and it’s not enough for a forklift but probably too heavy for a human being. I mean, that’s an area where humanoids I think can add a lot of value. And moving things back and forth. I’ve got to move from point A to point B 27 times a day, right? Instead of having a human have that, you could have a humanoid have it. So we’re just starting to look at humanoids, exoskeletons, things of that nature. So I don’t have a lot of data to share on there, but again, we’re excited about any technology that keeps the worker safe and allows a manufacturer to produce more.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:19:55] On that point — keeping the workers safe. You know, one of the counterpoints that people always bring up for humanoids is: Why wouldn’t we just use a wheeled robot that can do the same thing instead of a bipedal robot? Any thoughts on that?

 

Suzy Teele: [00:20:09] It really depends, right? I mean sometimes the wheeled robot can’t have that level of motion that a humanoid might have in order to perform a certain task. And so the great thing about robotics is that we have so many different types of ways to do things now that we can be more selective. So yes, AMRs with robot arms on them are becoming very, very, very common now in distribution centers and warehousing. But they don’t fit every single situation. And perhaps a humanoid can fit some of those use cases that are exceptions.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:20:45] You mentioned AMRs and cobots working together. And I’m glad you did because I meant to ask about that. What are some new and interesting ways they are being adopted, and in general, are there any new applications? We mentioned Gray Matter with the sanding and grinding. Are there any new applications that you’re seeing a lot more of lately that are notable?

 

Suzy Teele: [00:21:06] One area that we got involved with fairly early that we’re seeing a lot of promise is apparel manufacturing, robotic sewing. Sewing today is primarily a person in a corner with a sewing machine, the way it was 100 years ago. And sewing is a very hard problem to solve because you’re dealing with highly flexible materials. So we’ve done a lot of research with multiple member organizations on trying to use robots as part of the assembly of apparel. We do a lot of work for the U.S. government and the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense has a law that all uniforms have to be US-made. We make very little clothes in the United States, right? We grow — what’s the statistic? — we grow about 70% of the world’s cotton and we make about 3% of the world’s cotton clothing. So we export a lot of cotton. And so there are opportunities for us to help the warfighter in making sure that we can assemble their uniforms more quickly and have the resources to do that. And also, we could maybe bring some of that back. Another big area is recycling and sustainment. And so there’s a lot of work going on in reusing materials. But who wants to sit in a room and rip stitches out of a purse or a pair of sneakers or something like that so that those materials can be reused. And so we’re really looking at the exploration and use of robots in those types of environments too. There are many, but that’s one that’s really cool to me because people can understand that one, right? Like sometimes you talk about robotic applications and they’re like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But everybody gets robotic sewing.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:22:53] Sure.

 

Suzy Teele: [00:22:53] So the other areas we see are things like food inspection and food processing. I mean, they’re already being used there, but those areas hold a lot more promise. Obviously construction. We’re not as directly involved with that. But we might be involved with the manufacturers who make materials in order that you can use robots in construction. So the great thing about robots, as you know, is that they apply to pretty much every industry sector. And some sectors, like the transportation sector, is much more further along using them. Others, like the the sewing industry and apparel industry, it’s really nascent in the use of robots. And so there’s a lot more opportunity for growth there and impact.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:23:37] Yeah, it is a very exciting time. And we’re seeing automation go farther and farther beyond the factory floor into new areas. And it’s fun to be a part of. Suzy, I want to be respectful of your time. Is there anything else you want to mention about the ARM Institute? What’s new, what’s coming up, where to learn more, things like that?

 

Suzy Teele: [00:23:54] Sure. Thank you for the opportunity. So our big focus continues to be skilling and upskilling workers and helping people find jobs in manufacturing that they’re excited about using robots and diving more into AI and how we can work with our members to really leverage and give manufacturers an easier way to take advantage of AI. But anybody who wants to know more can visit our website, which is www.arminstitute.org. Reach out to our website. You can sign up. We’ve got a monthly newsletter that keeps everybody updated on the work that we’re doing at the ARM Institute. And if you’re interested in membership, just send an email to membership@arminstitute.org, and we’d be happy to follow up with you.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:24:38] Suzy, I do have one last question for you because it’s a fun one and I want to ask you because you mentioned AI again, but I asked earlier about robots taking jobs. I asked, “Are people now finally starting to realize that robots aren’t really taking their jobs — they’re creating them?” And you said, “Well, not enough, but it’s getting better.” If and when that happens, though, then we have the problem of AI, and people are going to be terrified of AI. And a lot of it’s because of what they’re seeing and maybe generative AI and video and images that look real and or sound real, whatever. If you’re talking to somebody that’s sort of outside of this space, how do you tell them to not be afraid of AI?

 

Suzy Teele: [00:25:27] Same thing I tell them about robotics, which is that new technology creates new jobs, so jobs become different. But that’s been true for our whole lives. We always tell the story of over 500 years ago, Queen Elizabeth didn’t want to use the spinning wheel to make materials because that was taking jobs away from women, because they were hand-sewing everything, right? There’s never been a mass layoff in the history of the world as a result of advanced technologies. We always find a way to adopt and adapt, and we make sure that we create new jobs because all this stuff still has to be managed and operated. And so that’s what I say. I say it really is a productivity increaser, and it takes away the jobs that aren’t as much fun. The dull, dirty, dangerous jobs. AI takes the dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs away too, right? And so that’s what I say: It increases productivity. It takes away those jobs that most people don’t like doing anyway. And in most cases, it gives them a new job where they make more money.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:26:30] Perfect. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I really appreciate it. If anybody has any questions for Suzy, I’d be happy to pass those along. Just visit us at manufacturing-matters.com. And thanks for tuning in.

 

Suzy Teele: [00:26:41] Thank you, Jimmy.

 

Jimmy Carroll: [00:26:43] Awesome.