A flock of seagulls. A school of fish. A gaggle of geese. Collective nouns in English are a lot of fun. However, when it comes to a collection of robots, we’re missing the mark, especially in the context of modern, smart robots.

In the industry, the term in wide use is a fleet of robots. In fact, many robotics companies sell a companion “fleet manager” box to control their robots. It’s not that the term is inherently wrong, but it has outlived its usefulness.

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.

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.