InOrbit has been driving connections across the industry with our ongoing efforts to promote heterogeneous fleet and data management of automation at scale but you may not have realized how much we’ve accomplished recently. We’ve made a lot of technical progress upgrading platform integrations with various products and systems. While there’s much more to discuss in the coming weeks let’s look at where we are with a quick overview.

This past year at InOrbit has been our most exciting yet. Our company turned 5 years old, and we’ve been thrilled to witness and (modesty aside) help inform the changing robotics landscape. Today we reflect on our growth, and success as we look back at the year that was 2022.  

We've been thrilled to share InOrbit's story and our vision for the future of robotics with friends, colleagues, and customers extensively this year. From new partnerships to exciting product announcements and a lot of events InOrbit has made so many new connections in-person and online, it's hard to keep up. And with a broader reach, we've found that there is still a lot of room to share our expertise with those new to automation and RobOps. Today, InOrbit CEO Florian Pestoni answers a few of the most common questions we get about InOrbit and the state of robotics.  

Recently our partners at Kärcher were celebrated with a Corporate Innovation Award at the Plug and Play Silicon Valley November Summit 2022. The award, issued in the IoT category, was given during the event at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, CA and the recognition of innovation is certainly well deserved. The award celebrates Kärcher for the ongoing successful collaboration between Kärcher and InOrbit. This relationship, which started at a Plug and Play event three years ago, has been a true success story.

It seems like ever since our team hit the floor at the AMR & Logistics conference people have been buzzing more and more about interoperability between heterogeneous robots. Certainly, it's being covered more in the press, but we've been hearing the rising chatter for some time now. We're glad to have played a part in fostering an open discussion about the value interoperability provides to the robotics industry. Robots need to work together: co-existing, coordinating, and ultimately collaborating to realize robust orchestration. Interoperability is critical to this belief.

For anyone who has worked in a corporate office, you’ll probably know what we mean when we say you can sure get a case of the Mondays there. Certainly antiquated, in the post-pandemic world some employers still feel the need to impose over-bearing middle management and force employees to use archaic tools. 

Even a modern ROC (Robot Operations Center) can fall victim to office politics and entrenched ideas. In fact, we see the same problems again and again. Orchestration is needed. So in honor of our favorite classic workplace comedy and as a warning to all those falling into the trappings of bad operations solutions for their growing robot fleet we propose an alternative. 

This week at the Association for Advancing Automation’s AMR & Logistics week conference we were excited to announce the launch of the new InOrbit Developer Edition and a host of expanded orchestration capabilities. The full press release is available to read now.

Marking milestones is important, especially at a startup. Here at InOrbit, we couldn't be more thrilled to be celebrating our 5th anniversary. In honor of that achievement, our team has come together in beautiful Buenos Aires, Argentina this week. Many of us are meeting IRL for the first time, and it has been an incredible experience.  

At InOrbit, most of our time is spent thinking about robots and how to make them perform better. But part of that vision includes robots and humans working together – without the human factor, robots are just a collection of metal and plastic parts. Here is another in a series of posts highlighting some of the outstanding humans on the InOrbit team, also known as InOrbiters. The posts aim to share details on some members of the team, what drove them to work here, and what they find most interesting about robotics and the development of the InOrbit platform.

Today we sit down with Florencia Grosso. Flor is a Customer Success Engineer and a Sr. Roboticist at InOrbit. She works closely with both the engineering and the customer success teams. She lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has been with InOrbit for four and a half years.

Operating a fleet of robots presents many challenges. The real world always has unexpected surprises and just because a robot works correctly in a lab doesn’t mean it will handle real world situations as intended. Even without an edge case occurring, the expected time to complete a mission may vary between locations or even time of day. A slight change in a given scenario may justify a different response, which robot operators can ideally account for and program ahead of time.