Hey, it's Greg

Years ago, this week's guest was reading a draft safety standard for mobile robots. One requirement said that if a robot got stuck in the way, a person should be able to pick it up and move it. His company's robots weigh five to six thousand pounds.

What he did about it, and what 23 years at the same robotics company taught him, is below.

What's the messiest real-world condition you've seen a robot have to deal with? Hit reply and I'll share the best ones in a future edition.

In this week's edition:

This week I sat down with Michael Bearman, Chief Legal and Safety Officer at Vecna Robotics.

Mike was founder Daniel Theobald's outside counsel at a DC law firm before joining Vecna as a contract manager, back when the company had about 20 employees. Over 23 years he's served as general counsel, COO, chief administrative officer, and chief customer officer, and he once spent an all-nighter with a soldering iron before a robot demo at Congress.

These days he spends a lot of time on warehouse floors. He runs risk assessments at customer sites, sat on the drafting committee for the R15.08 mobile robot safety standard, and helped write the MassRobotics interoperability standard that is now becoming an ISO international standard.

Some of what we covered:

• The BEAR rescue robot, and why working one out of 10 to 15 tries in perfect conditions pushed Vecna toward industrial robots
• The 24-robot FedEx deal that was bigger than their entire fleet and led them to shut down their hospital robot business
• How CaseFlow helped a 3PL partner double throughput with half the staff
• Why 3PLs buy robots as a service that flexes up for peak season, while automotive customers buy them as capex
• What he finds on site visits, from protein powder dust and spilled hydraulic fluid to floors that never match the CAD drawing
• Why getting an ISO standard approved was harder than ANSI
• His answer to the fastest way to lose a customer's trust

If you're deploying robots in real facilities or building the safety case for your own, this one's worth the listen.

A few active searches that might be relevant to you or someone in your network:

Founding Head of Robotics Systems | San Francisco
Early-stage company building autonomous warehouses for middle-mile logistics. Own the robotics architecture, integration roadmap, and deployment playbook as the company moves from point solutions to end-to-end automation. Best fit is someone who has taken automation from pilot to production in live industrial environments and has seen what breaks after go-live.

Data Infrastructure Engineer | San Francisco
Robotics company deploying robotic cells at customer sites. Own the schemas, AWS infrastructure, and edge-to-cloud pipelines behind production systems, plus the ML stack for training, dataset versioning, and model deployment. 2+ years building application-side data infrastructure. Some travel to customer sites.

Modeling & Simulation Engineer, Operations Analysis | Los Angeles
Aerospace and defense company standing up a new Operations Analysis discipline. Build physics-based models of radar, sensor, and weapon performance across the kill chain, mainly in Python or MATLAB. 5+ years in defense or aerospace. U.S. citizen, Top Secret eligible, on-site.

Know someone? Reply to this email and send them our way.

Quick reminder: Long Horizon, Encord's first Physical AI Summit, runs October 20 and 21 at Fort Mason in San Francisco. Day one covers robotics and embodied AI, and day two covers autonomy across AV, ADAS, drones, and defense.

A few names from the speaker lineup:

• Sebastian Thrun, Founder of Google X and Waymo
• Carolina Parada, VP and Head of Robotics at Google DeepMind
• Deepak Pathak, CEO at Skild AI

Executives from Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, and Nuro will be there too. Tickets are limited, so if you've been meaning to go, now's the time.

A3 Releases Final Part of Safety Standard for Industrial Mobile Robots (Robotics & Automation News)
R15.08 Part 3 completes the series and covers the user's side: day-to-day operation, risk assessment, and managing change on site. It's the standard Mike helped draft, and it lines up with the site risk assessments he describes in the episode.

What Warehouse Robots Actually Replace, and What They Still Cannot Do (The Washington Times)
North American companies ordered nearly 18,000 robots worth about $1.2B in the first half of 2026. The piece looks at the maintenance and floor-monitoring jobs those robots create, which echoes Mike's view that people will always be on site helping the robots.

Iron Mountain Expands Dexory Deployment with 18-Meter AMRs (Robotics & Automation News)
Iron Mountain is the first customer for Dexory's new inventory-scanning robots, which reach racks up to 18 meters and scan 16,100 locations per hour.

RobCo Crosses $1 Billion Valuation (Tech Startups)
The Munich startup builds autonomous robots for repetitive factory work like pallet stacking. Its newest robot, Alfie, is a two-armed system that learns new tasks on the job.

Thanks for reading!

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