(New) Connections

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.

Standards - VDA 5050 and MassRobotics AMR Interop

Let’s begin with some notes on developing standards. As we demonstrated live at the AMR&L conference back in October, InOrbit has a commitment to support evolving standards including the VDA 5050 and MassRobotics AMR Interoperability standard. The open-source ROS 2 to VDA 5050 connector we developed along with partners from OTTO Motors has already been leveraged by NVIDIA in their Isaac Mission Dispatch software. If you’re interested in learning more about building robots using NVIDIA’s platform you might want to join their upcoming webinar. As for MassRobotics, our expectations are that v2.0 of the standard will be developed through Q1 and Q2 of this year. InOrbit are members of the MassRobotics Resident Startup program, and sit on the driving committee for the AMR interop standard development. We’re extremely excited to continue contributing to this initiative.

MiR Fleet / OpenRMF  and beyond

As we announced last year, InOrbit is now a MiRGo partner. This means InOrbit InOrbit joins other industry leaders in supporting one of the largest producers of AMRs globally. As an InOrbit Connect-certified company we now confirm support for most MiR robots. We also support MiR Fleet with more of the top commercial fleet management systems to be announced soon. Our team is exploring additional integrations with top WMS and ERP systems now.  

There has been a lot of news and talk lately around Open-RMF. Regardless of your opinions on corporate developments, this middleware framework has proved extremely interesting to the robotics community. Rest assured, InOrbit is compatible with Open-RMF and has some exciting tools in development right now. More on this soon… 

Feel free to reach out and contact us to find out if the software your company uses is already supported by an InOrbit integration.

ROS 2 updates

Manufacturers may be kicking off their robot development in ROS 2 or migrating from a ROS 1 setup, now the InOrbit agent is ready to make life easier. While we’ve long supported Foxy distribution, the ROS 2 agent is now available out of the box (via our quick installer, or Debian Package Installation) for Humble distribution. 

This added support aligns with our ongoing efforts to bring the most comprehensive and useful tools to our users. Explore the InOrbit Developer Portal for more details on RobOps dev tools, and information about the InOrbit Developer Edition.

InOrbit on the Edge

The InOrbit Edge SDK is truly flexible. Offered in Python or Javascript, see the documentation here, it allows developers to integrate individual robots or virtually any fleet management software with the InOrbit platform. Users can leverage all of the InOrbit features and capabilities, even if using the out-of-the-box InOrbit Agent is not an option.

We understand that even exploring new software may be challenging, especially when red-tape may get in the way. Our tools are built with real developers in mind. InOrbit’s Edge SDk alongside the totally Free Edition of our platform are ways we can combat that friction.

Yocto support

InOrbit now supports OpenEmbedded / Yocto installations natively! Users can easily add the InOrbit agent as a recipe to their custom image - whether they use ROS or not - and keep the benefit of a fine-tuned tailored image and deployment process, while letting the InOrbit platform accomplish even more.

Click here to find the recipe to install the InOrbit agent in a Poky Dunfell distribution without ROS. Given the flexible nature of Yocto, the recipe may vary depending on the setup that each user has and might need some tuning. Please check with our support team about setting up the agent in other flavors of Yocto and ROS environments.

InOrbit Docker installer updates

For those developers building robots in a dockerized environment InOrbit offers a simple way to connect to them. Take a look at our documentation with the steps to get started running the InOrbit agent on a docker image.

We currently provide docker images supporting ROS 1 (Kinetic, Melodic, Noetic), ROS 2 (Foxy, Humble) and non ROS environments. Additionally for those running on an ARM architecture, we encourage them to explore the documentation for the image for ROS 2 Foxy on arm-64.

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At InOrbit we’re always looking for opportunities to make new connections and improve our integrations with the software or products already being used in real production environments. These updates mark just some of the most significant platform additions we’ve added to InOrbit recently. Stay tuned to our social channels (LinkedIn, Discord, Twitter, and YouTube) and here for more updates.