Formant today announced availability of its cloud-based robot fleet monitoring platform, which enables businesses to automatically collect and analyze robotics data. The platform collects all application data on a single web UI, giving business teams, operators, and engineers the ability to improve the efficacy of their robotic workforce, the company said.
One of the big challenges that robotics companies face is trying to move data to the cloud for analysis. Formant said its platform is uniquely built to address this problem. It streams data automatically and intelligently handles challenging network environments. In addition, the data stream is “enriched, indexed, and annotated for searchability, shortening time-to-insight for business consumers and incident resolution for operational staff.”
Observe, analyze, operate
Designed to help robots and humans work together efficiently, the platform’s release further builds out the company’s capabilities in the robot fleet monitoring, observability, and operations space.
Jeff Linnell (left) and Anthony Jules.
“Robots are leaving the factory and adventuring into our world,” said Jeff Linnell, CEO of Formant.io. “They could use some guidance. This release facilitates this journey by enabling robot fleets to thrive through human observability and assistance.”
Formant said its platform has been in beta, and is already being used by several customers in the robots-as-a-service (RaaS) space.
“It’s essentially a DVR for data,” said Anthony Jules, the co-founder and COO for Robust.AI. “I can skip the ‘commercials’ and just get to the relevant data in seconds.”
Features of the platform allow robot companies to:
- Observe, monitor, and visualize robot fleets, both in real time or with historical data. This lets companies easily access the root cause of issues.
- Analyze insights automatically along any dimension of a robot fleet.
- Operate robotic fleets, through teleoperation as well as customizable fleet management.
- Integrate robot fleets through widely available cloud applications, such as Slack and Tableau for communications, analytics tools such as Looker, and cloud data warehouses such as S3, Redshift, and Cloudsight.
Founded by a team of former software engineers, roboticists and product managers from Google, Savioke, and Redwood Robotics, Formant’s mission is to provide a more efficient cloud infrastructure to help unlock the shared potential of humans and robots. The San Francisco company was founded in 2017, and raised $6 million in seed funding in December 2018. In August 2019, it announced the acquisition of Pittsburgh-based Formation for its remote control technology.
