InOrbit launches ‘Time Capsule’ to provide greater insights into robot fleets

InOrbit, a provider of cloud-based software to help operations teams orchestrate service robots, has launched a new service called “Time Capsule”, which gives engineering and operations staff greater insights into their robot fleets.

The latest upgrade to the SaaS platform captures critical data needed to understand robot autonomy exceptions, giving users the ability to “turn back time” to understand where the failures occurred and enabling them to improve productivity.

Time Capsule, along with additional user interface improvements, is immediately available for new and existing InOrbit customers.

No robot is perfect. However, it is often very difficult to understand the circumstances that lead to robot errors, whether it is a failure to perform a task efficiently, choose an appropriate route, or navigate in a difficult space.

By capturing the data and presenting it in an integrated dashboard, Time Capsule gives roboticists an easy-to-use, interactive visualization for root cause analysis.

This leads to a greater understanding of performance, which is critically important with autonomous robots to drive continuous improvement.

Florian Pestoni, CEO of InOrbit, says: “The autonomous robotics industry is still in its infancy and growing rapidly.

“We have seen the impact of continuous improvement processes before, which drove significant gains in manufacturing and more recently in the explosion of e-commerce. Today, these same processes are driving massive gains in the automation industry.”

InOrbit believes that robots, humans, and AI working together can solve the biggest problems.

Pestoni says: “We are striving to make it easy and intuitive for anyone to get insights from their robot, drive the right actions, and intervene if needed.

“With our updated user experience and new functionality, we are taking it to the next level to help our customers to optimize their robots even further.”

InOrbit customers can now arrange and display robot data for various roles, based on the context needed to get their job done. For instance, an executive can access key performance indicators about the overall fleet performance.

Meanwhile, a roboticist can configure the right data sources and visualizations, and a robot operator can see detailed robot status. Each company or user can customize their views based on the data that they need.

Another key area of improvement is the ability to get situational awareness about a robot. This includes understanding a robot’s position on a map, seeing through its multiple cameras, visualizing other sensor data such as a point cloud generated by LIDAR, and ultimately tracking the robot’s movement.

Should the robot get mislocalized, intuitive tools can fix the problem in seconds. And if the robot needs a gentle nudge to go back to operating autonomously, InOrbit provides the tools to set it on the right path.

Steve Croft, EVP of Operations at Savioke, says: “As we’ve been preparing our introduction of a brand new robot, InOrbit has been with us every step of the way in enabling targeted real-time observation that we have rolled out to our distributed team.

“On top of that, InOrbit is solving a critical need we have by bringing key data together for offline analysis as we continuously refine our technology.”

Michael Norrell, VP of Operations at Agility Robotics, says: “If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that it’s never too early to optimize the operation of autonomous robots.

“In order to achieve this, it’s critical that robotics companies deploy tools and infrastructure that enable continuous improvement and continuous learning across the company in order to realize the promise of this emerging technology.”