Coming up: Saurabh Chandra at Ati Motors on a rendezvous with robots

The idea of a “lights out” factory or a “dark factory” is decades old. Engineers dreamed of fully automated installations where robots and machines took over — without human intervention — and made useful things for us. Cars, for example.But a combination of both technical challenges and real-world non-engineering problems ensured that such factories remained more science fiction and less reality. Until recently. Today, many experts in industry and advanced manufacturing believe that we’re approaching an “inflection point” — yes, that cliche, but it might be true — with respect to automation and robotics technologies.Saurabh Chandra, founder and CEO at Ati Motors, discussed his views on some of these points with me earlier this week. Ati makes autonomous mobile robots for materials movement in factories, and it’s customers include several Fortune 500 companies.Saurabh spoke about how Ati is preparing for the “Future Factory” where robots will no longer stay in the safety zones of “yellow cages” but mix with humans and other robots. He outlined the idea of a materials (and robots and even human) movement orchestration, which Ati has already developed an early platform for, envisioning the physical AI, software AI agents and humans all interacting with one another in making factories more efficient and sustainable.Catch the full conversation right here on Friday, April 10, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s a one-minute preview, with Saurabh explaining how we’ll rendezvous with robots.