At InOrbit, we’re often asked for robotics advice. Our partners and prospective customers know that we have expertise across vendors, and across industries. Unlike systems integrators, we are, and have always been hardware agnostic. We are trusted to give informed, expert advice without bias. As we recently announced, InOrbit Intelligence formalizes our consultation service with guidance for companies using robots at any stage of their automation journey.

At InOrbi we want to demystify robotics. Our core business is B2B but we know we're reaching people outside of the "traditional" world of manufacturing and automation. We see it in the comments section on social media, we see it in the people brand new to the space who reach out to us for expert guidance, and we see it every day at the InOrbit Robot Space from average people on the street looking to learn more. Simply put the scope of the robotics landscape is growing as robots become a part of regular people's lives more than ever. We hope the people we connect with will share in our vision for a better world through robots.

At InOrbit we love getting the opportunity to connect directly with customers, industry peers, and each other. There’s a wonderful intimacy that binds us together as advocates for automation when we’re able to meet at events. This is even more important for InOrbit as we are a distributed company that most often works from far-flung cities scattered around the world. This May at Automate 2023, some of our team had a chance to come together in Detroit for one of the biggest robotics events in North America. There we celebrated our achievements, shared our passion for robotics and spoke to everyone we could about the recent strides InOrbit has made, promoting the value of effective robot operations.

We’re very excited today to announce our plans for Automate 2023, which kicks off in Detroit a week from now. The event, run by the Association for Advancing Automation (or A3) is the premier robotics industry conference, and one of our favorites. Last year’s Automate was a true highlight for InOrbit, as it gave us an opportunity to bring our platform and RobOps solutions to a massive and engaged audience. This year we’re thrilled to raise the bar once again as we launch new capabilities specifically for companies deploying robots and for companies building them.

Tesla has disrupted the traditional car manufacturing industry in many ways, and its use of data is no exception. Tesla's cars are equipped with a vast array of sensors and data collection tools. This data is then transmitted to Tesla's servers, where it is analyzed to identify potential issues, optimize performance and improve the user experience.

One of the significant ways that Tesla uses data is through over-the-air updates. Unlike traditional car manufacturers, that require customers to bring their vehicles into the shop for software updates or recalls, Tesla pushes software directly to the cars via a wireless connection. These updates can include improvements to performance, new features and bug fixes, all of which can be deployed quickly and efficiently. The impact is that cars improve over time, helping them maintain their value.

When dealing with robotics, missions mean much more than just a series of tasks strung together. For operators and those managing robots in the field, a mission is a floor that's been cleaned, an aisle that's been scanned, or an item that's been picked. Mission performance is critical to understanding success

At InOrbit, we have been developing missions as a key feature for fleet management. We’ve worked closely with customers who operate robots at scale and need to understand how their fleet is performing. As the definition of a mission may differ from one customer to another, or even within robots in the same fleet, we’ve focused on building an API that can easily adapt to different setups.

In this article, we will dive into the key features that make InOrbit’s mission tracking an invaluable tool for robot development and operations: observability, performance optimization and adaptability. If you already have your robots InOrbit but haven’t used missions yet or if you are exploring the platform, you will learn how this feature can enhance your robot development.

National Robotics Week runs from April 8 - 16, 2023 and the InOrbit Robot Space is excited to invite members of the public to a series of events, meetups, and educational talks during this time to demystify how modern robots are working with society to build a better world. Bay Area residents are encouraged to explore these all-ages hands on robot activities with us at the InOrbit Robot Space, 293 Castro St, Mountain View, California. 

Deploying robots is getting easier everyday, aided in particular by tools like InOrbit, but anyone who works in the field knows there are still major points of friction. As we’ve talked about what works in the lab often doesn’t in production. The real world is full of unexpected chaos, from other robots, humans, existing infrastructure, or sometimes just a door that Pulls instead of Pushes. While we’re working to tackle robot orchestration at scale through our RobOps toolset, others are tackling some of the same challenges in parallel or from interesting alternate angles.

Our newly announced partnership with Barcodes, and the launch of the InOrbit Warehouse Automation (IOWA) solution has generated a lot of excitement in the industry. As we developed IOWA over the past few months, we identified several key features that were essential to the success of the product. The most significant feature of IOWA is undoubtedly InOrbit missions.