A young engineer slips a glove on his right hand and wiggles it around at the wrist, then curls in his fingers. A shiny, black robotic hand mounted upright on his desk whirs and clicks as it mirrors his "real" hand with rapid movements. Very cool. But ask any of the other engineers what they think this hand could be used for and they have one, enthusiastic response: "Everything." That's a problem for Shadow Robot, the tiny London company (2008 sales: 350,000 pounds or $577,000) that has been developing this robotic hand, considered one of the most dexterous in the world, for more than decade. It proudly counts NASA and the British defense department as clients, along with several universities. But the device has yet to be put to practical use or find itself a market, much less make a profit. Rich Walker, the company's 38-year-old managing director, wants to change that.
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Shadow Robot's hand is unique in its lifelike size and complexity. Its joints comprise 24 different degrees of freedom (or angles of independent movement) and are powered by "air muscles," which consist of tiny rubber tubes covered in a plastic mesh. When the tubes inflate, the mesh contracts, moving a tendon in a certain way. The technology is also easily compatible with other systems. Most other robotic hands, as developed by competitors like Barrett Technologies and Germany's Schunk Group, are simpler or larger. Barrett's hand has three fingers and is mainly used for manufacturing, while it also sells a robotic arm used for performing surgery. There are around 11 or 12 multinational companies in the world today selling 99% of the world's robotic arms, says Bill Townsend, the founder and CEO of Barrett. About 70% of them are used for making cars, and 30% are for other industrial manufacturing. But Shadow Robot's hand is so dexterous, Townsend notes, it is better suited to "emerging applications" that are more human friendly than his machines. "Emerging" describes it well. Over the course of a decade, Shadow Robot has sold about a dozen hands retailing at approximately 100,000 pounds ($165,830) each, but most of its clients have been so intrigued by its human-like qualities that they buy just to research it. NASA has been cagey about what it's doing with the hand, Walker says, but he knows the agency took it apart immediately after purchase. Britain's Ministry of Defense isn't doing such reverse surgery. It paid Shadow Robot 200,000 pounds ($331,660) to build and develop a robotic hand that could be integrated onto another robot used to defuse bombs, though it won't give the company much more information than that. This seems to be along the lines of where Walker, a Cambridge math graduate with dreadlocks down to his waist, wants to take the company: robots that can do things any human hand could, but shouldn't because it's too dangerous, including working with hazardous materials. He also imagines specialists using the hand to fix things from great distances--even many miles--with the help of a video camera. This is still years in the future, though. After a decade of struggling along with 250,000 pounds ($414,560) investment capital from founder Richard Greenhill and another director, Shadow Robot is currently at that difficult stage met by many high-tech companies, where the people behind it start to realize they cannot continue to just make cool-looking technology anymore--they have to make money too. Shadow Robot has never made a profit. Most years it has either booked a loss or broken even; it only started being funded by its own sales last year. Recently its accounts have started to show some promise. Shadow brought in revenues of 100,000 pounds ($164,880) in 2007, then 350,000 pounds ($577,089) in 2008 and is projecting sales of 700,000 pounds ($1.2 million) this year. A big chunk of that, or 200,000 pounds ($331,660), will come from the sale of a hand to Britain's Ministry of Defense, and another 150,000 pounds ($248,750) is the first installment of a four-year research contract with the European Union, via a lengthy grant application through Pierre et Marie Curie university in Paris. Shadow Robot is 50% owned by 66-year-old Greenhill, who was able to fund it until 2008 with money from a stock photography firm he started with his wife. The rest of the company is owned by its eight, full-time employees. Greenhill is the ultimate geek. He would happily continue tinkering with his robots for the remainder of his life and finds the notion of making money from them jarring and a "commercial pipe dream," according to Walker. One reason for his view may be the difficulty he had making money from robots in the past: he set up an educational robotics company in the early 1980s, which quickly folded. For many years Greenhill's anti-commercial stance bothered Walker and the company's main board member, Nick Singer, a banjo-playing design engineer who took care of about a third of Shadow's funding in the 1990s. After a number of heated discussions--"We provided hours of entertainment," Walker says of himself and Greenhill--he and Singer finally confronted the founder last year. "Greenhill didn't want to run a business. Singer and I felt that a commercial approach would enable us to get the company off the rocks financially, and Greenhill agreed to step back." The company's advisors recommended that Walker take over. It was a stark change in roles. Walker had first met Greenhill when he was just 15 and attending a summer camp devoted to computers. He became something of a protégé for the older inventor, and went on to spend his summers working with Greenhill and his small team of robot enthusiasts out of the attic of the founder's home in Islington, North London. (The company transferred to a store front just 400 yards away in 1993 after Greenhill bought the building. It remains there to this day.) While Walker has pulled away from robotics designing and started managing the office and accounts, Greenhill also pulled away geographically - he spends much of his time in the English mountains of Cumbria, hiking in remote areas with no mobile phone access. Occasionally he lends his advice to the company on research. This may be a good thing if Shadow is to succeed. "Richard is a visionary," says Walker. "And his long-term goal is building humanoid robots that will do everything." But while the protégé likes that long-term goal too, he wants to add "shorter goals and road maps and plans." With Greenhill having come up with the new ideas to prove people wrong, Walker wants to avoid reinventing the wheel. Whereas the founder avoided books, his energetic successor walks out of the library with 12 of them, all about business and marketing. "A few years ago we were focused inwards and assuming that people would find out about us. We thought that if you built a better mousetrap the world would beat a path to your door." Now Walker, a lover of metaphors, is the one knocking on doors and picking up the phone to companies or people he reads about in trade magazines. He tried hiring sales people, but found that research departments were put off by their pitches, so he stopped. Now Walker takes care of much of the selling himself, as well as of the grant applications; for three months out of the year he spends 75% of his time applying for grants. He's learned to spend as much of the rest of his time attending trade fairs, meeting potential customers, or reminding an engineer to drop a line to someone who could find their robotic hand useful. It's how they got that Ministry of Defense contract. "You sow bread on the water and eventually something bites." With the company now refocused, Walker is trying to find other markets to tap besides defense. The Defense gig has the potential to become much bigger, but until that is confirmed he's sniffing around in biomedicine, nuclear energy and hazardous waste. Gaining traction in those markets has been difficult, but Walker at least knows that Shadow Hand is a product that could one day minimize risk to humans, in war zones or with hazardous materials. More importantly, he's caught on to the basic principle behind running a business: "If you don't have somebody that's interested in what you're doing, there's not a lot of point doing it."
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