Software Defined Everything in IoT

Tom White:
Jan, welcome to the IoT Podcast.

Jan Van Bruaene:
You’re welcome.

Tom White:
It’s great to have you on the show. Been looking forward to this since we had our discovery call and to learn a lot more about RTI. And I guess that’s a great place to start as ever. So maybe you can give our viewers and listeners a bit of a background on yourself and how you got into the world of IoT.

Jan Van Bruaene:
Okay, very good. Well, I’m originally, maybe my name gives it away. I’m originally from Belgium and most of my professional career I’ve actually spent in Silicon Valley. So about a week after I graduated in Belgium, I was on a plane to San Francisco, always working for companies related to communication. I worked on, at VLSI technology, we worked on Silicon for originally Telco, but then Gigabit Ethernet, we did our first, the first Gigabit Ethernet chip. at VLSI. I worked at Sun Microsystem for several years, up and down with the.com, but it was also related to IO. And then now for the last little bit more than 15 years, I’ve been working for Real-Time Innovations where I’m now the VP of Engineering.

Tom White:
Excellent, excellent. So just a week after you graduated, you moved to Silicon Valley.

Jan Van Bruaene:
Something about that, yeah.

Tom White:
Wow.

Jan Van Bruaene:
It was sort of an exciting opportunity and it was the place to go.

Tom White:
It’s a big, big move from Belgium, right? And to, yeah, yeah, it’s incredible.

Jan Van Bruaene:
It is.

Tom White:
So obviously been in Silicon Valley for a number of years, been involved in telecommunications, joined RTI. Did you say it was 15 years ago, roughly, you joined RTI?

Jan Van Bruaene:
Yeah, 2006,

Tom White:
Okay, okay.

Jan Van Bruaene:
I joined

Tom White:
So, yeah, I’ve been involved in telecommunications for a number of years. I’ve been involved in telecommunications for a number of years. I’ve been involved in telecommunications for a number of years. I’ve been involved in telecommunications for a number of years.

Jan Van Bruaene:
RTI from Sun Microsystem, which was a large company. RTI

Tom White:
Yes.

Jan Van Bruaene:
was much smaller than, but very exciting in the space of distributed real-time systems.

Tom White:
Yes, excellent. And I think that’s going to be great to get into today to learn more about what RTI does. But as a sort of quick introduction, RTI is a business. What is the background of the company? Why did you join? And why have you stayed for 15 years? Obviously enjoying it.

Jan Van Bruaene:
Okay, yeah. Right. So, RTI originally was started by robotic researchers out of Stanford, and they wanted to work on real-time embedded systems. The first product that they built was actually a tool to better understand how those systems work. So it was called Scope Tools. And then from then on, we built a communications platform that takes care of the entire communication between the real-time distributed systems. So what we do at RTI, what we enable are systems, are smart machines, smart machines such as a CT scanner. So if you look at sort of the CT scanner, you pull away the nice packaging or the nice system. There’s a huge advanced system there. So smart machines, intelligent systems like hydroelectric dams, those are incredible systems out there, or even patient monitoring systems in hospitals. Those are quite evolved. And anything that looks like a robot, flying robots, medical robots, robots on wheels, so like autonomous vehicles, that’s what RTI has been focused on for several years. And it’s a very interesting space. 15 years ago, the applications were much different than what we’re seeing right now. So why am I still at RTI is exactly that. The type of stuff that we are seeing working with our customers, we’re no longer a small company. Our software is used in over 1800 designs, 250 autonomous systems. Even the technology is part of many different standards. So we’re sort of really at the, at the cusp of seeing how all those, those systems make a, make a world run smarter, healthier, safer. So that’s sort of pretty exciting place to be.

Tom White:
Yeah, I mean, thank you for that. I mean, what struck me in our discovery call that we had was just how many businesses the software is used in so many different industries as well. I mean, it’s really quite impressive. I mean, some of them you can talk about and some of them, obviously, you can’t, but RTI has a foothold across a range of different industries, hasn’t it? And it’s very, very impressive.

Jan Van Bruaene:
Correct. I mean, originally, a lot of our initial customers were more aerospace and defense based, and that’s still a huge part of our business today. And that whole industry keeps evolving, building more complex systems, etc. But since then, we also moved into areas such as medical systems, quite a few. Automotive is a huge area for us, especially recently, a lot of advancements there. Energy. industrial automation. So we play, we have a software technology that can benefit all of those industries because they all have very similar characteristics, sort of the problems that they’re trying to solve.

Tom White:
Yes, yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that we wanted to talk about today was a little bit more around, well, it’s a few things, but the industrial side of what you’re doing. So IOT is a big industry and the whole industry 4.0 movement into industrial automation and to change of the warehouse, really, from what it was 50 years ago to what it is today. Could you talk a little bit about some of the work that your business is doing? in industrial automation and what that landscape looks like today compared to say five, ten years ago.

Jan Van Bruaene:
Right. So when we talk about, I mean, people ask you like, what does RTI do in the IoT space? And you, of all people know this very well, IoT means so many different things to different people. So at one side, we’re sort of like, well, what we define as we work in the IoT, industrial IoT, as opposed to the consumer world. Consumer IoT is sort of Nest IoT is really about not about devices, but about big systems. And sometimes the world industrial, it does mean sort of manufacturing floors, things like that. But it also means medical, it means automotive, it means large systems that are much more complex than connecting a device to the internet. And both are really interesting places. But what we have a technology that is really focused on is the second part is how do you deal with. those environments where reliability is huge. Like if let’s say your hydroelectric dam has a problem, that people will notice, right? Or if in a operating room, all of a sudden some of the systems start misbehaving, that has huge consequences. Same thing in automotive. If you’re all of a sudden on the freeway and part of your system doesn’t work, huge, huge impact of that, right? So reliability is huge for us. Also the real time, where if you’re sort of like, what does real time mean for us? We’re looking at milliseconds, microseconds type of applications. And then we’re dealing with complex data flows. Just to contrast, I’m sure that the Nest Thermostat is a pretty advanced device, but the amount of data that it probably controlled is quite limited. Sort of temperature, maybe some log information, et cetera. When you look at what happens in an operating room in a hospital, There’s all kinds of data. Some of it is much more important, like checking that the heartbeat is still there. You don’t want to have a glitch there, but maybe some more video information, what is actually the scope doing. Those are different types of data with different types of characteristics. So if you sort of look at systems, reliability, real time, and then complex data flows, that’s where the space that we play in. That’s what we call the industrial internet of things. which spans all of these different industries because they all have very similar needs.

Tom White:
You’ve explained that incredibly well. Yeah, I think sometimes people, when they look at IoT, they see it from a consumer electronics point of view, mostly, right, rather than the entire landscape, which can mean a lot of different things. And I think that real-time aspect there is very important, isn’t it? Right? You know, real-time systems, embedded systems, you know, for events occurring there and then is a major aspect of this. Yeah. So it’s interesting to know that a little bit more around RTI’s kind of background where it’s getting involved and especially from an industrial setting. One thing I’m really keen to talk on is something that we spoke about earlier, which is software defined everything, which is a great concept. In previous podcasts, and our viewers and listeners will remember, we’ve had people talking about software defined cars, software defined networking. But you spoke about this going further and the fact that everything is going to become software defined very, very soon. Could you explain that to people that perhaps don’t understand software defined as a movement and why it’s so important?

Jan Van Bruaene:
So we see this, if you look at the different industries that we’re in, we see sort of the similar trends pop up everywhere, where the move towards more advanced systems, software defined systems that we saw this in the aerospace world, but we see this in medical world and automotive world, where instead of having just point systems doing one thing, and there’s quite a bit of software in a car already today. or the car from five years or 10 years ago. But now people want to actually partly driven by more capable silicon, more capable systems. They’re saying, instead of having all these points systems, we can actually bring that together. And so, and then if you actually then even push it even further, now your entire car, most of it will be driven by one or two large compute engines that will actually take care of the entire operating part. So it. It has a lot of benefits in different industries, in the car industry, consolidating the number of components you have to manage towards one or two or three larger systems, and also adding more functionality. Nowadays, when you pull up in your driveway, you may get a message from your car saying, I have new software that I want to update, whether it’s over the air update or connecting to your Wi-Fi system. And as that happens, more and more capability can be added to the car. So that even if the hardware components there, maybe they’re not enabled yet, but that actually comes a little bit over time, people add more capabilities. So

Tom White:
Mm.

Jan Van Bruaene:
we see that in automotive, but you see it in every industry where more and more smarter systems are being added, software developed systems that then can be evolved, because one of the things that we also see is, especially in the industrial IoT space, we’re dealing with real systems, hardware deployed systems. updating those is not so easy. Right? So if you sort of go and swap out a bunch of hardware, that’s not an easy thing to do, whereas maybe in the data center, okay, you put it on your laptop, you put a new operating system and you’ve got the latest features. So, um, but when it comes down to those, those, um, cyber physical systems, what they, what, what they refer to you, they put in a platform and then the new capabilities will be rolled out with new software.

Tom White:
I think from an automotive perspective, you’re right, it’s the convergence of both EV and software defined for automobiles at the same time it’s happening. But I think it’s interesting because the threat now is not mechanical failure, it’s software failure, isn’t it? And what that looks like in the future. And I suppose that picks up on your earlier point about reliability from an industrial context.

Jan Van Bruaene:
Correct.

Tom White:
It’s the same with

Jan Van Bruaene:
Correct.

Tom White:
in cards, right?

Jan Van Bruaene:
Correct. So, reliability, safety is also an important aspect there, so that making sure that the systems that you deploy can actually be used in a safe environment. We have applications both in automotive space for that, as well as actually in the aviation space. We leverage the same pedigree. Even in medical systems, the same thing, reliability and safety are very important aspects of the platform that you develop.

Tom White:
And how from, I’m curious as I’m sure some of our viewers and listeners would be, how can you through software and presumably through testing and verification of the software check the reliability of it? Is it just a multi-stage approach to try and break it to see under theoretical circumstances how it might go wrong?

Jan Van Bruaene:
Correct. Well, there’s a few aspects of that. So first of all, there’s a lot of work that has been done in the area of safety. So whether it is avionics safety, maybe most of these, I mean, if you look at these days, a lot of the airplanes are super safe. So there’s a long history of developing those systems. It comes from a couple of areas. It comes from… how you handle requirements and how you actually test those requirements. So there’s a very rigid approach to actually breaking down what you actually want to build and then how do you actually design it? How do you verify that design meets those requirements? How then you actually break it down to implementation and test that? So there’s a methodology of how to approach that. In addition to that, it’s about testing and using the right testing tools. So it’s a lot of… The type of test that you’re at, but also the level of validation that you built into your development process. Whether it’s static analysis, dynamic analysis, all kind of verification that you and capabilities that you add to validate that your software is actually well written. And then thirdly, having deployed systems that people that you actually run for a while also adds to reliability because you learn along the way. And that’s something that is also important. You see that in the automotive world where people put a lot of cars on the road just to go and see what happens over time with the right safety guards. So this is not just let’s go test and see what happens. But having deployed systems over time that you can actually then have with the safeguards evolve is also another aspect of building a very reliable system.

Tom White:
Yeah, I mean, it’s impressive, isn’t it? The amount of work that must go into this behind the scenes before it makes it out there is fantastic. I think one of the other aspects of software defined that we spoke about is actually in healthcare as well. And we spoke about this case study of new medical robots and how software is helping for remote surgery. Could you explain how that is and what? the future could hold with remote surgery through software to find

Jan Van Bruaene:
Right.

Tom White:
robots and in healthcare.

Jan Van Bruaene:
We saw, we’re sort of in a very privileged position when we work with our customers to see what the advancements that they’re building into healthcare. And maybe about five years ago, people were talking about alarm fatigue. How can we make sure that when an alarm goes off in the hospital, that we actually know that there’s something wrong? Nowadays, people are talking about really robot-assisted surgery. And then… tele-operated surgery. One of our recent customers, we just made an announcement last week, Monograph Orthopedics. They’re sort of doing two very complex systems. One is, how can we make knee replacement safer? And they have sort of a lot of technology around that, using our products to build that, so that they do imaging up front and they know exactly how the robot helps the physician. um, do the, do the surgery safely. But then secondly, they actually just did a, did a demo where the actual leading physician was actually 2000 miles away. So they, from, from New York, they were actually controlling the robot in Austin in the, in, in, in their, in their test lab where they were showing that. Um, and, and basically doing that end to end using Connext or software technology is pretty impressive. So they’re doing both the real-time connectivity over the WAN and then in the hospital room as well, they actually enable their robot to do the right thing using our software. And you’ll

Tom White:
Yeah.

Jan Van Bruaene:
see more of those. I think that’s sort of if I, one of the areas that I’m pretty interested in the medical world is sort of the robot assisted surgery, right? Because it’s, I mean, surgeons are trained for so many years and there’s so many things going on. But how can we make sure that they’re helped in their… in their craft and making sure that the right thing happens. That’s where I think we’ll see a lot more advances. And they need a good technology to do that. They need a real-time communication protocol to enable those robots to make it work.

Tom White:
Yeah. And I think, I think again, this, this example of reliability and, and literal real time is so important because you’re performing surgery. So they can’t be a delay. They can’t be a lag. Presumably one of the big benefits in this, Jan, and perhaps you can expand upon it a bit further is the fact that the surgeon, say a particular surgeon specialised in the field, wouldn’t actually need to be in the room. And so if you had a case, say somewhere in Australia, and you had somewhere, you know, in Silicon Valley, you haven’t got the issue of that person having to fly over, have jet lag, then feel in a better state to be able to perform the surgery.

Jan Van Bruaene:
Exactly.

Tom White:
So presumably that’s one of the main advantages of robot-based surgery.

Jan Van Bruaene:
Correct, correct. So that the specialist can be used in many different hospitals. And of course, there’s a local team as well,

Tom White:
Yes.

Jan Van Bruaene:
but they actually work closely together. You’ll see that both for the surgeons, but you also see that even for the nurses and the people who are actually monitoring the patients afterwards. It’s one of the really cool applications. In the Bay Area here, there’s always a shortage of nurses. And you hear stories, I mean, you read about them in the news, where even people, nurses from, from, let’s say, other parts of the country fly here to work in hospitals, which is sort of crazy, right? Well, with some of, so, and once I have the surgeons that can work remote, but you also see that the walls of hospitals are becoming less sort of defined by the building, where somebody who’s monitoring how is the patient doing afterwards, they can tap into the information. What is the heart rate? What is the, how is the patient doing? What is it? what is all the signals from the patient, and they don’t have to go into the room anymore. It used to be like, hey, let’s go and see how Phoebe is doing or what are the vitals of the patient. Now, they actually can do that from the nurse’s station, but even the nurse’s station can be remote. So you can get sort of 24-7 monitoring of patients, and they don’t even have to be in the same building. And that is also an application of connected… medical world. So both surgeons as well as the nurses running and monitoring the patients.

Tom White:
Yeah, yeah. And I think if you look back at the pandemic, COVID was a big issue in hospitals for contraction, right? So what would imagine if you’re in that environment and you’re having it done remotely or by robotics, you don’t have that risk of cross contamination and infection as well across different people, different fields, etc. Yeah, it is fascinating. I wonder how far it will go in the future. I know we’ll get onto that later, so we won’t get into it now, but I find it just incredible. Whenever it comes to inventions that will enhance humanity, I think it’s really, really quite impressive, actually. And it’s great to know that you guys are working on software around that. And the other use case we wanted to talk about when software defined everything was in the aerospace sector. So you talk a little bit about that. You mentioned earlier briefly about aerospace and automotive, but how is RTI working in aerospace?

Jan Van Bruaene:
So we have sort of two big fields. We have aerospace and defense.

Tom White:
Yeah.

Jan Van Bruaene:
If you just pure look at the aerospace field, several of the newer platforms, and some of them, unfortunately, we can’t name by name, but some of the newer advancements in sort of launch vehicles, they need, I mean, like one of the applications we can talk about is, for example, the launch control system. for the Artemis launch that happened last year. It was a really important thing for many people at RTI had been working for years with NASA and many other to build such a system. And that’s a very complex system. If you can imagine when the rocket goes off, there’s a very small window where a lot of things have to go right. And there’s a lot of data that needs to be shared and in the case that something goes wrong, they wanna analyze very quickly what is going on. Sometimes when there’s a delay in the launch, they also want to know exactly, hey, what was the status of a particular system? So you need a very good real-time communication backbone to do that. And that’s one of the areas that we’re very good at. So they use some of our technology to make that happen. And then when the rocket gets launched and some of the real exciting applications, when people want to control, let’s say, space systems. rovers remotely. Now all of a sudden they have to sort of figure out, okay, how can we actually test that, how it can actually operate. So we have some of the experiments that were done where our software running on the International Space Station controlling a rover first here on the Earth at the AIMS so they can sort of test it out and then eventually may go to any of the other Mars or other applications where they want to try it out. And there, Just to contrast that, we talked a bit about medical robots, where you can imagine the control loop being very tight, very high frequency control loop to make sure that nothing, you have fast responsiveness of the device. You can’t do that in space because you have a very limited bandwidth and you have to be very careful how you use that. So how do you have a technology that can do both? So we have a lot of the capability built into our software so you can work and you can control that rover because there’s a huge delay and a large latency controlling some of those spaces. So aerospace, huge area for us, but also just in general, the defense market. The US surface fleet from the Navy, for example, has many very advanced systems. that rely on a technology like Konext to make them actually work.

Tom White:
Yeah, that’s absolutely incredible. And again, testament to RTI’s portfolio of different industries and different places to do business, all right? And you mentioned there briefly, Kinects, and we’re gonna get into that now, so the different frameworks that RTI have. So could you start by explaining the framework? What is that framework? And then we can delve a bit deep into it afterwards.

Jan Van Bruaene:
Okay, very good. So, Connext is the family of products that we have, and they’re all about giving the right data to the right place at the right time. As part of that, we have several individual products. Connext Professional is our sort of big flagship product that is a toolbox of communication libraries, it has infrastructure services that help you build your big system, and also has debugging tools and operational monitoring tools. We have a secure, fine-grained secure version of that, Connex Secure. And then we also have other versions such as Small Footprint, when you have resource-constrained environments, certified product for avionics and for automotive. And then for automotive, we have Connex Drive as a much bigger product offering that has also very tailored solutions such as two standards and capabilities in the automotive world. Toolkit is one of the standards that are used there. So how do you actually make that work? So and then we have another product called connects TSS, which is focused on aviation Systems so that’s sort of the the product for offering that we we provide But there’s a lot of components that that go into that right? So it’s sort of maybe five six products that I I name here But underneath there is a lot of libraries a lot of capabilities to make help people build our application so they don’t have to worry anything about getting the right data to the right place at the right time.

Tom White:
So if a customer of RTI or a potential new customer wanted to acquire Kinect or a certain component of Kinect, it would be primarily around getting the right data at the right time and presumably as quickly as possible. And that framework of the different elements of Kinect enable that to happen. And that’s one of the main benefits as a back boat. So, and we’ve spoken a few different use cases in these industries, but there’s an autonomous backbone to this, enabling AI as well, wasn’t there, Yang? Could you explain a little bit about that in some of the advancements that RTI are making? AI is hugely popular at the moment, generative AI, it’s everywhere that you look, so that’d be an interesting point to turn on this.

Jan Van Bruaene:
Right. So, which is true. We’re sort of often say we sit at the intersection of AI and pervasive networking because what you need, I mean, on one side you have sort of like ChatGPT, BART, you know, Claude, all these large models where they’ve been trained on big data centers for a while. Right. So they often even like ChatGPT will tell you. the recent events I haven’t learned much about yet. So when you actually bring that and you want to do something in the real world, you need to have something that is actually very reactive, very responsive because all of a sudden you want to learn, you want to observe something, you actually want to act, you want to make a decision and you want to act on that. So of course, this is not about training. This is actually about running the algorithms, the algorithms at the edge. a mechanism to actually provide that data to those algorithms reliably and in real time. So they can actually work very quickly and make those decisions. Not to mention that also that a huge amount of in those systems, there’s a lot of different data that you have to handle. So you need to be able to have a platform that is very good at providing, handling the large scale of data, even to different consumers of that. And that is exactly what we do at RGI. We are experts at data distribution, at scale, under performance to those systems. So if you want to, and that’s what we see with an autonomous vehicle world. That’s what we see even in aerospace world where, and sometimes it’s even interesting to see the same application show up in different flavors over time. Processing a radar image, processing a lighter image. There’s a… from a data distribution point of view, a lot of commonality in that. So we actually have been building that platform so that we can provide those AI models with the right data. Sometimes there’s even also the aspect of connecting the edge to the cloud because

Tom White:
Hmm.

Jan Van Bruaene:
maybe some of the decisions are less critical decisions or maybe made post-processing afterwards. We actually have a very good one over an application where doing echo, echography, where the one aspect is actually taking the image locally, but then the actual processing and seeing what actually was happening with the patient may be done offline or in a backend system. So maybe not at the edge. In either case, you need to have a good robust system that can provide that data when you need it and even provide it to the cloud. if that’s part of the solution.

Tom White:
Yeah, thank you, Jan. Yeah, I think it’s crucial, isn’t it? And something that comes up so often in the podcast around the harvesting, understanding and analysis of data and how, you know, we’ve all been on a journey in this ecosystem to understand it and use it more because IoT devices throw off so many million and trillion points of data. it’s so important to be able to have a process around that. And we mentioned an interesting phrase actually, which hasn’t come up that often on the podcast, but it’s a really important one. And that is data centricity. Could you explain to the uninitiated what you mean by data centricity?

Jan Van Bruaene:
Right. So when we talk about Connext, we also refer to it as a real-time data bus. And that is a data-centric information sharing technology where the word, first of all, if you just look at the word data-centricity as data is your first class citizen that you’re dealing with. What does that practically mean? Instead of… So you have to sort of think in a distributed system, lots of application devices that need to share data. They look at it as sort of, instead of sending messages around that you then have to try to understand, parse, figure out actually what do you mean here, you actually think of it as a virtual data space that you update, read and write to that data so that the state is always the same, easily available. So you don’t have to actually have to go and try to understand from the message. Data centricity, then once you actually know what the data model is and the data that you’re dealing with, you can do some really advanced capabilities. Our infrastructure knows what type of data is being sent around, who’s interested in that data, and actually can even do some really advanced filtering as well so that we actually, and remember, the right data to the right place at the right time, you can’t just send everything to everybody. So if you have an infrastructure that knows what type of data that you’re dealing with, some opaque message and it says, oh, you know, this application is actually interested in that data, they’re subscribing to that data because underneath the cover there’s a PubSub mechanism that sends the data around, but in a very smart way. You can sort of look at some examples are, let’s say you’re interested in the position of cars near you, right? You can say, send me the position of the cars on the freeway. You don’t want to hear from every car, you just want to know the ones that are close to you. So that advanced filtering capability is something that the infrastructure can provide with you. And then the third aspect of data centricity here, where if you know what data that you’re dealing with, you can actually start putting rules on that. You can start putting what we call quality of service. You can basically say, well, that data is really important. I need to have it reliably. I can’t miss even an alert, or I don’t wanna miss that at all. Whereas all the data where you periodically update it, You can say, well, if I miss one, I’ll catch the next one. Or sometimes it’s live data that historically, that sample from five, six seconds ago doesn’t make a difference. But there’s a lot of different quality parameters that you may want to control. Sometimes you may be like, I don’t want to be swarmed by so many updates. Give me every fifth update. Well,

Tom White:
Hmm.

Jan Van Bruaene:
if you now know what data that you’re dealing with, you can actually start applying those rules. And that’s what the infrastructure does. That’s what all the. the libraries and the lines of code that we implemented are actually handling so that you, as an application writer, all you have to do is read, write, update the data. You don’t have to actually know how it actually happens under the cover. Now, data centricity is not necessarily a new concept. A database itself is a data-centric technology, but that’s for historic data, data in storage. We do that with a data bus for data in motion. Sort of the analogy is, you know, and there’s a lot of similarities you can draw between the two. The same way that you update a database, rows and columns and information. Now think of that as position, alerts, the same way. And again, you’re making it very easy of how to work with the data for the people who actually have to write the application.

Tom White:
Yeah, I mean, it’s really impressive. And I think the framework, the platform, what you’ve built and enabling people to, to carry on and focus on what they need to do knowing that the data has a quality of service around it, as you say, is really important. Because without that QoS, it’s difficult to reliably understand that it’s in a good place, actually, because you’re always going to have an eye on it and to check. the quality and the quantity of that data. I think that’s really, really important.

Jan Van Bruaene:
Good.

Tom White:
I wanna get onto the future actually. So I guess what does this all mean for the future? Where is it going? We’ve come on quite a journey so far. Where do you see it going in the next five years?

Jan Van Bruaene:
We’re already on the trend where we’re going to see much more capable advanced systems. It depends a little bit on the industry. Some industries are much faster on that trend already than others. Of course, in the automotive world, people are talking about flying taxis in the news or fully autonomous vehicles. That’s pretty interesting. That’s sort of the news grabbing headlines. I mean, wouldn’t it be great if he sort of like the taxi, flying taxi lands in your driveway. I think you’re gonna see a lot more, maybe less sexy, but very important systems such as delivery of goods, trucking, mining equipment, where all of a sudden very hazardous environments, where all of a sudden a lot of these things are automated, safety matters there. And those things will all of a sudden, autonomous. Yes, we’re looking at sort of like the flying taxi, but underneath the cover, I think all of a sudden you have a lot of these systems that leverage the same sort of advancements, but actually will be here very quickly.

Tom White:
Yeah.

Jan Van Bruaene:
That’s automotive side. If you look at the medical side, we already mentioned a few of those advancements, robotic assisted surgery, teleoperation, hospitals that are no longer defined by just one place. being able to discharge patients much sooner, provide them with some equipment so they can actually be at home with their family and still be monitored remotely will have a huge impact. So even just elderly care that are remote that you can actually monitor, see how things are going, a lot of these systems I think are gonna change how we are dealing with providing good healthcare to patients. And you’ll see that in other industries as well. Energy, I think all of a sudden, connecting, although the energy sector sometimes moves a little bit slower because they’re dealing with huge systems that

Tom White:
All right.

Jan Van Bruaene:
are installed, but you’re going to see a lot more of those alternative energy sources being integrated into the grid, and you’re going to get sort of more of the smarter grid capabilities available. So we’re already on that trend, we’re going to see more advanced systems coming out.

Tom White:
Yeah, it’s going to be a fantastic time and I have no doubt that you and your team are going to be at the forefront of a lot of this work. It’s mightily impressive some of the projects that RTI has been involved with. And again, a reason that you’ve been at the company for so long and in the esteemed position that you are now. Thank you so much for coming on to the IoT podcast show today. I’ve really enjoyed it, learning more about yourself and some of the innovations that RTI has been involved with. Where can people find out more about RTI, Jan?

Jan Van Bruaene:
So our website rti.com is the place to go. You’ll find our blog, you’ll find our links to where we’re on the social media as well. You can keep track of new updates from us, new releases, new capabilities that we’re bringing out. So that’s where the place to go, rti.com.

Tom White:
Fantastic. Jan, thank you once again.

Jan Van Bruaene:
It was my pleasure.