Buzzing about Interoperability

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.

At InOrbit we've always been hardware agnostic and dedicated to giving developers the tools they need to build the unique solutions their customers want. InOrbit Connect in particular gives robot developers across the value chain the tools to focus on their unique offering while connecting them to a larger community of customers, who through the Robot Directory are finding the Connect-certified robots that they know will work together to meet complex orchestrational needs.

The benefits of interoperability between differing robots regardless of the task or even vendor are being realized more every day.

At the AMR&l Conference InOrbit participated in two live demonstrations of multi-vendor robot orchestration. First, alongside partners from OTTO Motors, we showed two AMRs from different vendors coordinating movements in the same space. This was facilitated by a new open source Ros2 to VDA 5050 connector, developed by InOrbit in collaboration with Cleearpath Robotics with assistance by Ekumen. Learn more about the connector's launch in our recent press release or explore it yourself on Github.

NVIDIA has already been building additional fleet management capabilities as part of their Isaac Mission Dispatch tool using the connector.

Additionally, InOrbit CTO Julian Cerruti spoke with developers about the connector in a lightning talk at this year's ROSCon which you can watch right here.

AMR&L also saw InOrbit participate in a live demonstration of the MassRobotics AMR Interoperability Standard alongside partners from Locus Robotics and MiR. Joining the organization as a proud participant in the MassRobotics Resident Startup program last year we launched an open source connector. Now we are excited to show what the standard allows and happy to help drive the next version of the standard's development.

Specific support for a growing list of varying connections and standards aside, the intent with all of our work is to make access to our platform and connections to other robots easier so that our end users can drive the operations efficiencies needed to manage robots at scale. Regardless of how a connection is made, the fact that we can connect, and that the industry is realizing how powerful those connections can be is worth celebrating.

At InOrbit, our vision is to enable a world where humans, robots, and AI work together to drive radical productivity improvements and enable people to reach new heights. We will only achieve this vision by working together.

Learn more about InOrbit's ongoing efforts to support and showcase the value of robots working together, at our upcoming free Interoperability webinar, to be held on November 23, 2022, and hosted by InOrbit co-founders, CEO Florian Pestoni, alongside CTO Julian Cerruti. We hope to see you there.