Robotics & Automation News

Where Innovation Meets Imagination

Formant launches cloud platform to manage robot fleets

Formant, a San Francisco-based startup, has launched its new cloud robotics platform, which enables businesses to automatically collect and analyze robotics data.

By centralizing all application data in a single web user interface, Formant allows business teams, operators, and engineers to improve the efficacy of their robotic workforce.

Jeff Linnell, CEO of Formant.io, says: “Robots are leaving the factory and adventuring into our world. They could use some guidance. This release facilitates this journey by enabling robot fleets to thrive through human observability and assistance.”

The Formant platform is uniquely built to address the challenges robotics companies face when trying to move data to the cloud for analysis. It streams data automatically and intelligently handles challenging network environments.

The data stream is enriched, indexed and annotated for searchability, shortening time-to-insight for business consumers and incident resolution for operational staff.

Anthony Jules co-founder, COO at Robust.ai, says: “It’s essentially a DVR for data. I can skip the ‘commercials’ and just get to the relevant data in seconds.”

This release further builds out Formant’s capabilities in the robot fleet monitoring, observability, and operations space. Formant’s platform is designed to help robots and humans work together efficiently.

Formant’s platform has been in Beta and is already in use by a number of customers in the robots-as-a-service (RaaS) space.

Henrik Bennetsen, co-founder and chief business officer, Canvas Technology, says: “Formant’s analytics platform is a sales superweapon, allowing me to close deals backed by insights.”

The Formant platform is available now at formant.io and includes the following capabilities:

  • Observe: Monitor and visualize robot fleets historically and in real-time. Root cause with ease;
  • Analyze: Automatically generate insights along any dimension of your fleet;
  • Operate: Collaborative, customizable robot teleop and fleet management; and
  • Integrations: Connects a robot fleet to widely available cloud applications such as Slack and Tableau for communications, analytics tools such Looker, and cloud data warehouses such as S3, Redshift, and Cloudsight.