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Left to right: James Peverill, Dan Patt, Justine Kasznica, Karen Leavitt. Source: Vecna Robotics BOSTON — At Robotics Summit & Expo 2019 here this month, a panel analyzed the technical, operational, business, and legal aspects of the Robotics-as-a-Service, or RaaS, model for acquiring robots. “The heart of RaaS is all about flexibility,” said Vecna Robotics CEO Daniel Patt during the panel discussion. “If you could predict the future and know exactly what your needs for work or process would be in 10 years, you’d just design and build the right thing for that. RaaS lowers the cost to grow and the cost to change. It’s about enabling flexibility.” As manufacturing and warehousing industries grow, robots are becoming a large part of the business plan. Traditionally, robots have been purchased as capital equipment and used to automate a part of the workflow. Recently, companies have been exploring the idea of hiring robot workers similar to the way people are hired: as independent contractors. The shift that makes this possible is the purchase of not the robot itself, but the service that it provides. Patt called this “work as a service,” while Karen Leavitt, chief marketing officer at Locus Robotics , called it “flexibility as a service.” From a legal standpoint, Justine Kasznica, a shareholder at Babst Calland Clements & Zomnir , noted that this model aligns well with business goals because it is pricing the service in a way that’s equal to the value provided to the customer. Materials-handling robots like Vecna’s are providing a solution that changes customer site workflows, essentially amplifying human productivity to increase throughput while maintaining the same footprint of people and space, said Patt. This helps companies overcome the factors that make hiring more difficult and space more constrained when demand is increasing . “If […]