A new generation of "robot platform" companies are competing for the same job
Three different startups are pitching themselves as the operating-system layer for industrial robotics. Only one of them is likely to win the position.
Image credit: Photo by Petrebels on Unsplash · source
A pattern that played out in mobile and cloud is starting to replay in industrial robotics. A new wave of startups are pitching themselves as the operating-system layer that sits between robot hardware and customer applications.
The Information surveys three of them. TechCrunch interviews two founders, each arguing for a different theory of how the layer will be won.
The pitch
The basic argument is straightforward. The number of industrial robotics deployments is growing rapidly. Each deployment requires custom integration work across robot models, vendor SDKs, factory IT systems, and customer applications. The integration work is expensive, slow, and largely repeated from deployment to deployment.
A platform layer that abstracts the robot hardware, provides standard APIs for common factory IT integrations, and ships pre-built application components could save substantial integration cost. The company that becomes the default platform captures economic rent on every deployment.
The contenders
Nvidia is the elephant in the room. Isaac GR00T, combined with Omniverse and the Jetson hardware platform, is the most credible platform proposal in the market by virtue of Nvidia's existing customer relationships and engineering depth.
The three startups in The Information's survey each take a different angle. One pitches a vertically integrated platform tied to its own robot offering. One pitches a fully open-source platform designed to be deployed on any hardware. One pitches a hybrid model with a commercial platform plus open-source community components.
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