2023 has been the most exciting year for InOrbit yet. We’ve grown, adding new faces to our team and new partners to work with. We’ve talked, engaging with industry, media, and the community more than ever. We’ve learned, by managing our own multi-vendor robot fleet. And we’ve held strong in our goal to be a catalyst for change promoting effective RobOps around the world and at home.
Where to begin this reflection though if not with the defining and unorthodox opening of the InOrbit Robot Space.
A place to call home
InOrbit is a product-centric lean tech startup. The company is largely distributed with team members in Argentina, Canada, and spread across the United States. Classically this has helped us work quickly, stay agile, and remain open to experimentation. While this distributed setup is fairly common for a SaaS company, our decision this year to open a brick-and-mortar storefront in downtown Mountain View is in a word unprecedented. This decision has positively informed everything else we’ve worked on this year and proved an unmitigated success.
The InOrbit Robot Space, at 293 Castro St in Mountain View, California. opened its doors to the public in February to much fanfare, from the industry, and the community. The space serves many purposes, and although it may seem odd, or even crazy to those who haven’t experienced it, the Robot Space has proven to be a huge hit.
It is a space for RobOps demonstrations, where we can showcase InOrbit working with real robots. By showing customers a multi-vendor fleet of robots and supporting technologies executing collaborative missions we’ve made orchestration, a sometimes difficult concept to visualize, very tangible. Whether it's exploring incident management, traffic optimization, or data-informed mission insights, the Robot Space gives us the opportunity to show the power of effective RobOps. And it’s not just about InOrbit, our partnerships with companies like OTTO Motors by Rockwell Automation, and WiBotic have let us showcase their technologies at the InOrbit Robot Space as well. This has driven a deeper connection between our team and our partners as InOrbit roboteers and on-site operations manage this highly dynamic heterogeneous robot fleet pushing our technologies further than ever. The Robot Space is a robot playground, sometimes a mad science lab, and a touchstone for practically integrating autonomous technologies.
The InOrbit Robot Space is also a concept store and a hub for community activity. Our business is B2B, but our vision is to help build a world where humans, robots and AI in the cloud can work together to drive radical productivity improvements and empower people to reach new heights. This only happens if we live our commitment to demystify robotics, connect with the people that make up our industry, and educate the public. This is the driving sentiment that led us to launch InOrbit Education Edition this year as well - more on that in a bit though. At the Robot Space this year we hosted over 30 community events with thousands of attendees in collaboration with organizations like Women in Robotics, the Homebrew Robotics Club, Silicon Valley Robotics, SuperTech FT, and the Robot Operations Group to name a few. Some of the highlights have to include the WIR event to kick off Women’s History Month, our weeklong celebration of National Robotics Week, SuperTech FT’s AI and Robotics summer camp Space Race program, and our first Tech Together event which gave us a chance to celebrate some inspiring women in robotics (such as InOrbit’s own Florencia Grosso, one of 50 women in robotics you should know). These events also gave us a great excuse (not that one is needed) to eat more pizza. 🍕
The InOrbit Robot Space is also home to InOrbit’s community ambassador Orbito. Our adorable robot mascot celebrates robotic advancements from around the world, and educates visitors to the InOrbit Robot Space about the power and potential for robots working together. Visitors can even walk away with exclusive Orbito branded merch from stickers to shirts and hoodies and more. While they may be based in Mountain View, Orbito also joined the team this year for a number of events.
Mission Accomplished
2023 was marked by groundbreaking InOrbit platform updates as well. Nowhere is this more clear than in the release and exploration of InOrbit missions. A true culmination of work started in 2022 and released over the course of 2023, missions give InOrbit users the power to define, execute, and analyze robot missions. We’ve long understood the importance of performance tracking, we've had lots of first-hand experience managing fleets. Measuring success across missions, robots, and locations is critical to understanding value.
Our missions work brings this and more to the table. We understand that robot developers want real-time observability, performance analytics that drives optimization, and dynamic comprehensive incident management. This is why missions are pre-populated with time bounding in the Time Capsule feature.
End users across industries want systems that work together. The measures of success are throughput, more items picked, more items scanned, and more work completed from end to end. As we discussed in our most recent webinar this has been accomplished.
On a roll
InOrbit Connect grew exponentially this year as well with an expansion of the program and additions of exciting connected companies like Geek+, SVT Robotics, SICK, and many more certified companies joining the Robot Directory. The program itself was honored with a product award as well.
InOrbit joined with partners at Barcodes to showcase the InOrbit Warehouse Automation (IOWA) solution at ProMat 2023. IOWA is a comprehensive solution for robot operations designed specifically to help warehouse operators deploying smart robots. This solution was quickly followed up with the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) solution at Automate 2023.
Speaking of events, InOrbit attended, and hosted, a lot of events this year. We even developed something of a hack for event set-up by live streaming the camera feed at the Robot Space to our booth on an exhibition show floor. We leveled up our presence at conferences, and got a bit more time back for fun activities like hosting a truly epic pizza party in Detroit!
Leveraging our experience managing robot operations, we expanded our support options to include Total Support. Recognizing our role as the authority on RobOps we launched InOrbit Intelligence, guiding companies on their robotics journey to drive efficiency, resilience and flexibility. As evidenced at the Intelligence Live event, greatness emerges when we share our knowledge. We’re proud to note that this philosophy also encouraged us to launch InOrbit Education Edition. This is a free forever version of our platform designed specifically to help students get hands-on experience with the RobOps tools that are shaping the field.
Needless to say, this has been an action-packed year for InOrbit, and we couldn't have done it without you. Thank you for being a part of our journey. InOrbit has had a heck of a year in 2023, and we know that with your help, 2024 will be even brighter. 🚀