Developing modern information technology solutions of any reasonable complexity will require that you integrate existing technologies at some point during the system creation process. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re looking to scale, you will face the decision of using an existing piece of software or building your own. The level of sophistication needed today can only be attained by building on top of other components, such as libraries, platforms or services. Just like in the old Western, experiences with these services can be good, bad, or ugly, depending on the providers you choose.

Even as InOrbit is building a platform to make it easier for robotics companies to focus on their own secret sauce, our software engineers have faced these decisions. In the course of our development, we have chosen services and components along the way. By choosing this path, we’ve also been able to add our own expertise, allowing us to augment those services to create a better platform for our customers.

Along the way, we’ve also had some mixed results that we’d like to share with you. We hope this lets you avoid some of the mistakes we made, as a way to help you speed up your own development process. 

And should you choose to use the InOrbit platform yourself, we expect to be held to the highest standard.

At InOrbit, we’ve partnered with many robotics companies to advance the software tools and processes that have helped them scale to hundreds of robots, and eventually to thousands of robots.

Robots and Humans are Alike - We All Fail

At InOrbit, our mission is to accelerate the adoption of robotics at scale. After talking to 100+ robotics companies, from startups to companies with billions of dollars in revenue, with all types of autonomous robots, we’ve reached an inescapable conclusion: they will all fail.

We’re not saying the companies will go out of business (although, sadly, many have in recent years). Rather, every robot will experience failures, in some cases multiple times per day or per hour. While a few of these failures may be catastrophic (and occasionally hilarious), like steering into a pond, getting stuck next to a trash can, or suddenly catching on fire, many errors are recoverable. The most frequent failures are what we call autonomy exceptions, where a robot finds itself in a situation that falls just outside its operating parameters.

Today, InOrbit announced our latest funding news, with $2.6 million in seed round funding to help us on our goal to support 1 million robots that will positively impact the lives of 1 billion people.

We started InOrbit more than 2 years ago to help accelerate the adoption of robotics at scale. At the time, there were no good platforms to manage fleets of robots in the field, and most companies had to cobble together tools that were hard to maintain, and often didn’t work as their fleet grew.

At InOrbit we are driven to advance the positive impacts of robotics in the world. Our vision is that humans, robots and AI working together can drive radical improvements in productivity and solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges. We believe that we can be a catalyst to innovation and allow robotics companies to focus on their special sauce.

InOrbit, the platform for RobOps (DevOps for Robotics) is now generally available. After months of working closely with customers who joined our Early Access Program, we are ready to work with robotics companies that are growing their fleet of autonomous robots.