Google’s industrial robotics business unit Intrinsic chooses Comau as first project partner

Comau, a specialist maker of industrial robotics and automation products and systems, has been unveiled as the first industry partner of Intrinsic, a business unit of Alphabet, which is the stock market name for Google.

Intrinsic says it is on a mission to make industrial robotics accessible and usable for millions more businesses, entrepreneurs, and developers.

At the launch presentation, Pietro Gorlier, Comau’s CEO, demonstrated how the company has recently used Intrinsic’s new Flowstate developer product and underlying platform to create a modular solution to enable the assembly of a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) supermodule – just one of many possibilities for new applications made possible through the platform.

As the longest standing innovation partner of Intrinsic, Comau has contributed on all levels – providing their expertise and talent to test and validate the technology.

Pietro Gorlier, CEO of Comau, says: “We are excited to have partnered with Intrinsic towards our shared vision of democratizing robotics.

“Looking forward, we will continue to leverage the synergies with Intrinsic and our expertise in collaborative, mobile, wearable, and safe robotic solutions to move closer to achieving software-defined, AI-enabled robotics, which is indispensable for all industries and areas with low automation levels.”

Through Comau’s use of the Intrinsic platform, customers will soon benefit from capabilities such as object pose estimation, robot automatic path planning with collision avoidance, controlled moves until contact, peg-in-hole applications and force-sensing assemblies.

Comau says the benefits for customers include:

• The implementation and integration of Intrinsic’s AI-backed software capabilities will enable Comau to easily develop scalable, cost-effective solutions and pre-configured application templates that can be used to quickly deploy new or modified applications.
• The software platform will drive increased robotics adoption and better cost-effectiveness by helping companies in many industries access modern automation that can be easily deployed.
• Its low-code graphical interface also helps make robot programming intuitive-to-use for non-experts in industries approaching automation for the first time.

Wendy Tan White, CEO of Intrinsic, says: “Partnering with Comau over the years has brought our team a tremendous amount of expertise, knowledge, and real world use cases to focus our efforts on.

“The development of Intrinsic Flowstate has been expedited through Comau’s willingness to innovate together on solving hard problems in new ways. We’re excited for what’s next and what it will mean to the solution builders of today and tomorrow.”