Tom Ryden, Executive Director of Mass Robotics, shares the story of how he got into robotics, and some of his career's most pivotal moments.

Danny:

Hello, and welcome to today's IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by Tom Ryden. He is the executive director of Mass Robotics all the way up in Massachusetts. Tom, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm very excited to learn more about your organization. I've heard a lot about it and what's going on. We've had some previous guests here. So just thank you so much for joining me today.

Tom:

Well, thanks for having me. Really excited to talk a little bit about Mass Robotics and robotics in general.

Danny:

So real quick, if you could just give me a quick synopsis, a high level of Mass Robotics. What do you guys do?

Tom:

Sure. So Mass Robotics is an independent non-profit. Our mission is to support and grow the robotics, AI, IoT industry and really support it and see the adoption of this type of technology.

Danny:

Excellent. Well, there's those-- we all know that's huge, lots of digital transformation happening right now relative to all those spaces. So I'm excited to learn more about your organization, what you guys are doing, how you guys are helping companies. But before we jump into that, I just want to get in to learn a little bit more about you, about Tom. So Tom, tell me, how did you get into this space?

Tom:

So I've actually been in robotics for a long time. I've been in automation, first with chemical automation, things like that, autosamplers, but got into robotics through an interesting story. A friend of mine had a small company doing ground robots and got an offer to be acquired by an up-and-coming young company at the time called ISR. So we chatted a little bit about it, and I was fascinated by this young company which turned out to be iRobot. And so they ended up acquiring his company. I ended up joining iRobot because I thought the mission, what they were trying to do was really fascinating. And I was there for a number of years and saw some great growth in that company and through the robotics that they developed and then, went on to start some other robotics companies. I sold my last company and was thinking about retiring, taking some time off, and a couple of folks from the industry came and said hey, we're starting this new non-profit. Would you be interested in helping out? And that was five years ago, so I just have been doing it and loving it. It's a great way to get exposed to so much different types of technology and really try to help these young companies get going.

Danny:

Yeah, no, that's awesome. How did you get into robotics before that? Was it something that you studied? Was it something as a kid that you were interested in? What was that aha moment for you?

Tom:

Yeah, so my background is in engineering, electrical engineering initially. It was a unique way of-- I love seeing things move and being able to make things move. And so I was not always in the kind of science fiction type of thing. One of the cofounders of iRobot, Helen, talks about her experiences when she was young and seeing the first robots coming out of some of the movies. That wasn't really my background. I was just enjoying the mechanical… making things move… and then had an opportunity to do that and, from a young engineering, just enjoyed doing that type of robots. But when you actually get to make robots that physically move, and I ended up working on what are called bomb-disposal robots or robots that can go down-range and look at a device that might be a bomb or something and allow the operator to really stay far away and have the robot do that. When I learned, wow,