No GPS, No Problem: The Robots Taking On the World's Most Dangerous Jobs

Autonomous robots could soon be doing some of the most dangerous work in the world, from mapping underground mines to exploring tunnels where GPS signals can't reach. Joining us now for more is Ben Williams, CEO and COO of Exyn Technologies. Thank you so much for being here, Ben. Thanks for having me. Of course, for viewers who aren't familiar with this, it's such an interesting topic, something that maybe a lot of people don't think about, but something that is so vital for all of the infrastructure and other needs that we're going to be having. So tell us a little bit about what your company does and how this kind of autonomous mapping technology really helps robots navigate environments where GPS and communication signals really just might be unavailable. Absolutely. So you can think of us as sitting at the intersection of high accuracy rapid mapping and autonomous navigation, specifically what we would call self-contained autonomy. And the idea here is you can't always count on communications or infrastructure or GPS. In those scenarios, you want the system to still be able to operate, still be able to complete the mission. So the self-contained autonomy gives you that confidence and the ability for the system to operate consistently in all of these areas. Yeah. I mean, it just seems like this is such a important use of this technology where it can really be helping people, helping companies, all of this coming together. Talk to us a little bit about the actual technology that you're using here. So you said you can autonomously map underground mines without a preexisting map or even constant human control. So how does this actually work? Sure. So basically you have a system that creates a map right around the system in real time. As a result of that, it sees changes in the environment and it can create a sense for where it's going, create the three-dimensional model in real time and navigate itself without having a constant human interaction. So you can define a high level mission objective. Say I want to explore this whole area or I want to inspect a ground plane or something like that. The system will self-define all of its sub-objectives. Define its safe navigation corridors and actually fly itself all the way through the mission and will navigate around changes in the environment that could be people or objects or something that wasn't planned, something that changes as it goes through. And so the ability to be a hands off system that is off doing a totally separate thing without human interaction means that it can be consistently used in really difficult environments. And so the idea is to be able to have people removed from the most difficult and dangerous places. Make sure that they can stay safe and focused on using the information and using the insights rather than just spending all their time piloting. Yeah, it seems like, I mean, keeping people safe in a lot of these environments seems to be, you know, obviously a top priority and a top function that this would provide. I feel like it also might save a lot of time as well, right? I can imagine the traditional underground mine surveys would take quite a bit of time and be expensive to actually get going. So talk to us a little bit about the time savings that you have on top of this already kind of safety component as well. 100%. I mean, you're seeing sometimes an order of magnitude faster captures in this case. You can think of someone that has to go and walk an environment, maintain safety, has to set up multiple surveys throughout a space. Instead, that person can just initiate the mission, stand back in a safe area, and the system might capture an entire underground mine in five or 10 minutes. What would have taken hours or maybe even days to capture with previous tool sets. And so you have a massive increase in this. An alternative version of this also is when you see the impacts of being able to have more targeted survey times, you might be able to scan a bridge, say, with traditional methods in five hours, but you're shutting down traffic for five hours. It's a huge impact. To be able to instead say, we're going to scan the whole thing in 10 or 20 minutes, shut it down for 30. All of a sudden, you have greatly improved your availability of that asset, and it means that the economic impact and safety impacts are far, far better. It does seem like that, especially with the time component there really helping out, again, so many parts of these missions to get the surveying work done. You were also recently selected as part of a national laboratory-led project under the Department of Energy's $29.5 million Mine of the Future initiative. So tell us a little bit about that and why that's kind of so important here as you guys take your next step. Absolutely. So I think this is a great extension of our core technology, right? So we started with the concept of, you know, how do you extend the reach for an individual that is off trying to do a survey, trying to gain information, trying to generate the insight they need to operate more efficiently. To extend that even further is to break that linkage of single operator, single system, and to say, we want to build this into an enterprise capability. How do you deploy these systems where they can be initiated remotely? You can gain that information access. And you can decouple from a single operator off using that. And so this is a great extension of that where you're saying we want this to be a more efficient tool to allow for economical extraction of critical minerals and to be able to generate those insights much more rapidly. So we think this is a critical piece for that critical mineral infrastructure extraction of these things in the U.S. or from allied countries. This gives a position where... These technologies can be far more economical and a lot more efficient in their extraction of these minerals as well. Yeah, I mean, talking about these critical minerals used for so many things now, so many pieces of technology that we all kind of take for granted to use every day, everything from electric vehicles and other electronics to defense systems. So tell us a little bit more about the actual kind of real world applications that someone would really need these critical minerals for and also beyond mining, other places that you've seen some customer interest where you could really be using this technology for. For sure. I mean, when you think about the usage of these tools, they're pretty much universal, right? There's a very high overlap between commercial and governmental and infrastructure and even consumer electronics, consumer tool sets. It all revolves around compute. It all revolves around electronics and the ability to give these systems the capabilities they need with electronics. All revolves around the same sort of core technologies and core mineral sets. And as a result of this, this also leads to these technologies being applied, not just in mining specifically, but across infrastructure monitoring, across construction, across forestry, across all kinds of different areas where it's a physical industry that needs to digitize. Their biggest challenge often is just getting the information from the physical world into the digital so they can use digital decision tools. And so that's a big piece of how we are helping solve these problems. in the mining world, in the geospatial world, across infrastructure and lots of physical industries. Yeah, I mean, it seems again, like so many sectors would want to use this technology. You've also been expanding into defense and government markets. So talk to us a little bit about how GPS independent autonomy can really change the way military and government teams can conduct reconnaissance, inspections, operations in these really high risk environments. Absolutely. I mean, it's not a new thing to think about having a contested environment where someone is going to try and prevent you from communicating effectively or locating yourself effectively. What has changed is that the tools have gotten far more advanced and the countermeasures have gotten a lot more advanced. And so having a system like ours that is built from the ground up, not assuming that you have communications or GPS means we don't have to develop a bunch of complex countermeasures or means to correct for these things. It's part of our baseline. We operate without that. And if you have communications, if you have GPS, it adds to the capability, but we don't depend on it in any of these scenarios. So it's really a leg up. It helps to use as a building block for resilient systems that can be counted on to operate in all of these environments, which we think is a really critical way to approach it rather than starting with the assumption that you have full infrastructure and then trying to correct as it degrades. Yeah, I mean, thinking about all of these different factors coming together makes a lot of sense as you try to then scale the company. Exxon is a publicly traded company on NASDAQ. As you are looking to scale, what are some of the biggest commercial challenges and milestones that investors should really be watching to measure the company's growth and adoption as you move forward? For sure. So I think we have a ton of really interesting growth factors across our four main industries, which are mining, geospatial, OEM, and government. You'll see a bunch of announcements coming out over the next months and years around new customer stats, new use cases, the expansion of these use cases on a per customer basis, and the fact that we are now really in this commercialization and growth phase. We're past the research and development. core where, which is when we were more venture funded, you know, the transition to a public company also reflects the state of the technology. We've been deploying these things in the real world for over six years. We now have external users that are doing well over a thousand autonomous missions every single month. So I would, as an investor, I would watch for the expansion of these customer sets, the announcement of our next generation technologies and the push forward into more and more different use cases and categories. Well, we really appreciate you walking us through all of this today. This is so interesting, and we're excited to see where all of this goes. Ben Williams, CEO and COO of Exxon Technologies, thank you so much for being here today. Appreciate that. Thank you.