This past year saw major changes for InOrbit, and we couldn’t be happier with the results. Through experiment-led development, lots of trial and error, and some great connections with our friends and family in the robotics community (that’s all of you), we’ve made our platform more accessible, and robust for our users.

As 2021 comes to a close we are taking time to look back and reflect, if only for a few minutes on the year that was, and highlight some of our successes.

The value of early feedback in any product development – including software – is, well, invaluable.

Software development has evolved over the last 20 years to allow for more incremental or iterative development, to help eliminate the problems of delivering a product that a customer doesn’t want. We all know software engineers who have suffered from spending monumental time and effort on creating something that ends up being the wrong product, tool or app.

In our experience, robot manufacturers orchestrate specific robot tasks either with internally developed software that mostly works, or a hacked version of something off the shelf that sort of achieves their goals. In reality, “mostly working” and “sort of” does not cut it when it comes time to grow a robot fleet. Many software solutions that attempt these tasks are often opaque and keep developers in the dark, limiting the necessary customization around unique robot deployments. 

From the ground up, the InOrbit platform is designed to let users orchestrate and monitor their robots. The data platform is built to report, control as needed and manage a robot fleet to facilitate autonomy.

Individual instruments in the hands of a professional musician can sound wonderful, but when many different instruments come together in an orchestra or band the result can be awe-inspiring and magical.

We think the same thing can be said about robots and robot operations (RobOps). Individually, a single robot can perform some pretty amazing tasks to help human co-workers with their jobs. But when you add several robots and then add different types of robots to the system performing different tasks, the end result can be an amazing workflow that exponentially scales efficiency for a company.

Next week will mark the unofficial start of the holiday season for many online shoppers, whether this means you’ll be skipping out after Thanksgiving dinner to look for deals, hopping on your laptop on Black Friday to avoid the long lines at physical stores, or taking advantage of your high-speed connection at the office (for those that still work in offices) on Cyber Monday. 

With the continuing surge in online orders expected this year, a big question will be how many packages will be delivered through robots, drones or self-driving vehicles over that “last mile”, where a package leaves a sortation center to get to a customer’s house.

With all the talk about the metaverse, the 2000 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash that popularized the concept has been in the news. Reality has also been catching up with other key ideas proposed by its author, Neal Stephenson. 

The book paints the picture of a near-future where the pizza business had been taken over by technology-heavy corporations, including a totally legit CosaNostra Pizza, Inc. Deliverators are a sort of katana-wielding DoorDash driver on steroids, driving souped up, battery-powered cars. “Your pie in 30 minutes or it’s free” is the promise, prompting customers to want to lie about when they placed their order.

Today’s cloud was made possible by virtualization technology, which creates a software-based representation of hardware equipment. Virtual machines, such as those popularized by VMWare and the hypervisor technology that manages VM execution, make it possible to run different software on the same machine. 

In the beginning...

I entered the robotics world 10 years ago, thanks to an opportunity from Willow Garage and its outstanding people. I joined them from the world of enterprise software with the goal of helping to bring robotics research into the world with production-ready solutions.

I fell in love with the humanity and professional excellence of the robotics engineers I worked with, and the interesting challenge of creating tools to make our lives easier.

It was really great to be part of the A3 AMR & Logistics conference this year.

The conference had the usual good presentations and panels, but the exhibitor’s floor was where robot and technology manufacturers met to discuss the latest technologies and innovations in this nascent field of robotics. This conference in particular, being held in Memphis, saw the almost overshadowing presence of FedEx in attendance. But through the different panels and visitors on the exhibition floor, it became crystal clear to us that the “end user” is definitely considering operations as they think about how to deploy diverse robotics technologies in the field. This confirms that our drive to promote effective RobOps is working.

The topic of interoperability was a part of several different presentations this year, which showed a growing understanding from enterprises and robot vendors about how interoperability is the next important step to take the industry to the next level.

It’s been a few days since we announced the Free Edition of the InOrbit platform, and the reaction has been amazing. We’ve already seen a big jump in signups, and we have even more announcements coming up.

In case you haven’t heard, people can now use InOrbit to manage an unlimited number of robots for free. Unlike other solutions, there are no limited trial periods, no hidden fees. Free. For real.

However, many people have asked us, with a clear note of concern: “Why would you do that? Didn’t you just give your business away?”

So here I wanted to address all those questions and share the 5 reasons why we chose to go free.