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.

Today we’re so excited to announce the launch of InOrbit Connect™. This new certification program is designed to make life easier for robot developers and end users, by streamlining robot integration at scale. Now companies deploying robots to improve internal processes can add one or hundreds of robots to their InOrbit account with just one click. Robot buyers also have access to a free, comprehensive robot directory, including InOrbit Connect-certified robots. With a growing list of robotics companies, we expect this to become an invaluable industry resource.

In today’s exciting press release InOrbit, has announced an integration with Alfred Kärcher SE & Co., the world’s leading provider of cleaning technology to bring our best-in-class real-time observability, optimization and some newly launched advanced operations capabilities to Kärcher’s most sophisticated autonomous machine - the new KIRA B 50 floor scrubber.

InOrbit was excited to recently host another in our ongoing series of webinars exploring automation across various sectors; this time focusing on the state of automation in retail. As with the previous InOrbit webinars, CEO Florian Pestoni hosted the discussion with some fantastic guest speakers sharing their insights and expertise.

If you didn’t have a chance to join us, the webinar is now available for free on-demand. Although you might want to read on and explore some of our key takeaways from the discussion first.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the metaverse. Though the concept is far from new and the name itself is 30 years old, the hype cycle is in full swing, with headlines like “Everyone wants to own the metaverse, including Facebook and Microsoft. But what exactly is it?” appearing in mass media with increasing frequency.

While people may not fully agree on what it is and when it will get here, one thing is clear: The metaverse is all about virtual avatars in a virtual world doing virtual things. Unless we all end up hooked to machines that keep us alive while we gallivant in a virtual world a la The Matrix, we are still stuck with the real world, climate change and all.

Last week, InOrbit was thrilled to be in Atlanta, once again meeting with friends, colleagues, and customers for the premier supply chain experience trade show, MODEX 2022. Our team, InOrbit CEO Florian Pestoni and Strategic Business Advisor Ángel Hernández, took to the floor exploring the best in next-generation supply chain solutions including the latest in equipment and technology innovations. As expected, there were robots everywhere.

InOrbit is thrilled to announce that we have been selected to participate in the SAP.iO Foundry Data & Analytics Program as part of the Berlin Spring 2022 cohort. Out of over 100 applicants, five startups have been picked to be part of this selective program. Participating companies will have an opportunity to integrate with SAP products and work with SAP enterprise users who are looking to expand their use of data and analytics to improve their operations.

At InOrbit we’re always interested in the journey of robotics start-ups. We celebrate the success of our Ecosystem partners and others who are building the foundation of what will be the future of automation. Our vision of a world where humans, robots and AI work together to drive radical productivity improvements and enable people to reach new heights cannot be built alone. While we believe we can play our part as a catalyst for change, including the adoption of RobOps @ scale, others are working tirelessly to develop emerging spaces for robotics. As we explored in our recent Retail whitepaper this sector has been heating up significantly. One company poised to make an impact is Coalescent Mobile Robotics. A Danish start-up founded in 2018, their CEO Clionadh Martin recently sat down to explore the future of retail robotics with InOrbit CEO, and Robot Operations Group co-founder Florian Pestoni in the latest RobOps Masters Interview series.