Robot-Based Customizations: Elevating Heterogeneous Robot Management

At InOrbitAI, a broad, multi-vendor, multi-system perspective has always been championed. Now, the platform has received a major upgrade with a series of robot-based customizations. 

InOrbit is renowned for supporting different robots, smart infrastructure, management systems, and integrated technologies through a single pane of glass. This approach is essential for true interoperability and reflects how real-world environments operate. From warehouses to retail stores, hospitals to airports, machinery and systems increasingly work alongside human counterparts. These customizations allow InOrbit users to support and manage diverse robot fleets within a single, highly customized interface.

Why It Matters

These customizations enhance InOrbit’s ability to support diverse robot fleets, catering to the needs of both enterprise users and robot developers. Many customers manage fleets comprising various types of robots, each performing different functions. The challenge lies in effectively monitoring these diverse fleets through a single platform.

InOrbit addresses this by allowing users to categorize robots meaningfully, ensuring that only the most relevant data is displayed for each type. Whether it’s monitoring water and detergent levels for cleaning robots or tracking laser guidance system status for Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) that use laser guidance, the customization capabilities ensure that every dashboard is tailored to show the specific needs of the robots being monitored, excluding irrelevant or extraneous information.

This seamless and intuitive interface makes it easier to manage heterogeneous robot fleets. It’s not just about making InOrbit better for day-to-day operators—it’s about empowering everyone to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness in their operations.

Key Features

1. Robot Category Visualizations
   • Users can create meaningful robot categories (e.g., Cleaners, Movers, Depalletizers, Delivery) with specific attributes displayed prominently.
   • Dashboards are configurable for each robot category, displaying relevant information tailored to that category.
   • Aggregated data and reports are available per category to provide comprehensive insights.
2. Configuration-As-Code Enhancements
   • An upgraded Configuration-As-Code (CaC) system enhances ease of use and reliability. Users can customize dashboards and widgets based on robot type or tag-based classifications, ensuring the interface is perfectly tailored to their needs.
3. Comprehensive Observability
   • Users can monitor all elements of their robot operations from a single screen for unparalleled visibility. This unified view of robot data ensures that users can see everything needed to manage operations effectively and make informed decisions that drive success.

How It Works

Fleet Dashboard - The Fleet widget in the Fleet dashboard is essential for obtaining an overview of a robot fleet’s health. By configuring statuses for different robot types, users can seamlessly monitor a diverse fleet with various data sets through a single pane of glass. 

The screen above shows a selected robot, with a unique status set which includes: robot is stopped, localization, disk usage, RAM usage, fresh water, battery, docking, update failed, laser front, laser back.

Robot Dashboard - The Robot dashboard provides in-depth details of the selected robot. Using the Config API, users can dynamically adjust the dashboard based on the selected robot’s needs. This includes different data within widgets, different widgets within sections, and even entire sections appearing or disappearing based on relevance. 

These dashboards show different data within the same widget, different widgets and different sections as a different robot is selected in each image.

Navigation Dashboard - The Navigation dashboard offers various actions for a robot, such as teleoperation and relocalization, along with detailed navigation-related information like camera images and speedometers. The Config API ensures that only relevant information is displayed, reducing clutter and allowing users to focus on what’s important for the specific robot they are monitoring. 

This Navigation dashboard shows teleoperation controls, relocalization options and a D-pad controller, But these all may be removed if the selected robot does not have those capabilities, or the user does not allow access to those features.

Time Capsule Customization in Time Capsule allows users to determine what data is shown and correlated, significantly enhancing root cause analysis capabilities. This feature tailors the Time Capsule dashboard to display the unique and specific data details of the selected robot when reviewing historical data. 

These Time Capsule dashboards feature unique layouts that are dynamically loaded on the fly when a different robot is selected for review.

Empowering Efficiency and Effectiveness

These robot-based customizations provide a significant enhancement for managing heterogeneous robot fleets. By offering a more intuitive and informative interface, they enable those deploying robots to monitor and manage diverse types of automation more effectively. This goes beyond quality-of-life improvements—it's a step towards achieving more complete interoperability and enhancing overall control. For more details and to explore these customizations further, check out the InOrbit Docs here.

Stay tuned for more updates as InOrbit continues to innovate!