In this ongoing series, we share advice, tips, and insights from real entrepreneurs who face business battles on a daily basis. (Answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Piaggio fast forward
Table of Contents
Who are you and what do you do?
Hi, I’m Greg Lynn, CEO of Piaggio fast forward, Inc. We are a Boston-based robotics company with a mission to build technology products that move the way people move. We build robots for real pedestrian environments where our machines navigate safely and intelligently with and around humans using what we call ‘pedestrian etiquette’. For the consumer market we developed two robots with different sizes and payloads, Gitamini and Gitaplus.
Our robots are designed to track individuals and families in communities across the United States. Common to almost all of our customers are neighborhoods where daily needs related to shopping, education, sports, entertainment and leisure are all within walking distance on modern sidewalks, but rather than on foot, these journeys are made by private car or ride. . Our technology replaces the need for car and truck journeys with robots that detect, predict and track people outside and inside for a more efficient and healthy lifestyle. Our robots even detect and navigate through doors that people open in front of them and hold, then automatically reconnect and follow as you walk through the door behind them.
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We recently moved into business use and sales, with a focus on hospitality, retail and hardware stores where goods are frequently moved. Our technology enhances workers, enabling them to work more efficiently, safely and in a healthier way by traveling less, lugging less and staying focused on the job at hand instead of pushing and pulling materials around the job.
What inspired you to start this company?
Our “ah ha” moment came from decisions about what we wouldn’t do: We wouldn’t design a self-driving scooter, and we wouldn’t design an autonomous delivery robot. Understanding the features we didn’t want in our design gave us the freedom to create a product that perfectly matched our goal: human autonomy with the help of robots.
We looked at navigation and self-driving cars and tried to identify the core knowledge we would need for robots that transport things where people work and live. We have found that people do not occupy places with the regulation and simplicity of roads, warehouses or factories. Driving from point to point avoiding obstacles was not our first initiative. Instead, we started building a library of human movement algorithms and operating our robots by understanding how to detect and interact with humans and also how to map and classify the built environment without the need to create and maintain detailed maps such as those used in factories and roads for self-driving cars.
What has been your biggest challenge and how did you choose to overcome it?
Our biggest challenge is to produce an intuitive and easy-to-use device that requires no prior knowledge of robots or training. We build very sophisticated technology that works behind the scenes, but we want user interaction to be easy to operate and intuitive to understand, both for users and bystanders
We ship our machines to consumers and businesses and our robots can be up and running in 20 minutes out of the box using a one page quick start guide. We don’t need expensive or complicated integration efforts and we don’t have remote controls in NOC centers.
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What advice would you give entrepreneurs about pitching?
Explain how your product and technology can deliver immediate value and how this will affect the quality of work performed or the consumer’s lifestyle. We combine a strategy on ROI combined with a broad view on qualitative improvement of work and lifestyle through technology. We don’t focus on replacing employees 100%, whether it’s replacing delivery drivers from the store to a home or the housekeeper at a hotel. Instead, we make sure people have an enjoyable trip to the farmer’s market and set up carts for the hotel cleaning team and follow them when needed so they can focus on what they do best without having to worry about moving goods. Whenever we talk to a client, we listen to their needs and look for ways to improve efficiency and quality of work. We are very focused on the human experience and making sure technology improves rather than diminishing or eliminating the value of humanity. We look at the potential benefits of robots rather than their potential for disruption.
What does the word “businessroundups.org” mean to you?
We are an entrepreneurial company because we invent technology that we apply in the real world today. Our innovation is focused on market readiness in a world that does not need to change for us to implement. An businessroundups.org must identify opportunities, often created by technological innovation, and get them to market in the real world as quickly as possible. We are currently all alone, with no competitors, when it comes to creating technology that interacts with people on human terms and not in a cage. There are other sidewalk and warehouse robots, but they treat humans like obstacles, very special obstacles, but obstacles nonetheless. We have observed, analyzed and defined how people move, how two people go through a door together, how people cross each other, when a person signals that they will turn the corner, even how people form a convoy of things and line through obstacles lead. We develop pedestrian etiquette algorithms so that machines are acceptable and perform successfully in densely populated pedestrian environments. No one else is learning and designing what we do. We have signs of some competition from companies trying to optimize productivity in warehouses and are beginning to understand the importance of interacting with people and the dynamics of human environments, but nothing that can accompany a person 20 miles in the real world , right out of the box.
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Is there a particular quote or saying that you use as personal motivation?
We founded the company with a market focus on curb mobility at a time when scooter sharing and food delivery were on the rise. We operated for almost two years without a mission statement. We assembled the entire team, including our advisors and directors, and worked to define our core competency and our mission. With very little conflict or effort, there were over 60 people who all agreed that together we should invent a new kind of robot, one that moves the way humans move. This clarified so much. We weren’t building a miniature self-driving truck for the sidewalks. We didn’t build electric vehicles to drive passengers. We were building robots that moved as humans moved, so that we can improve their operations in everyday environments in the real world. It is our mission that is my personal motivation and inspires me every day.
