SIP Global Partners, a U.S.-Japan venture capital firm specializing in early stage technologies, this week announced its investment in READY Robotics Corp. SIP co-led the strategic investment round with NVIDIA alongside existing investor Micron Technology.
Columbus Ohio-based READY Robotics has developed Forge/OS, an industrial operating system for robots in factories and warehouses. Forge/OS provides a hardware-agnostic software layer that controls robots and related automation hardware from leading brands through a common set of application programming interfaces (APIs), according to the company.
Using those APIs, READY Robotics said it has built a suite of low-code apps designed to make it simple for non-engineers to program and manage robot cells.
“Manufacturing has been held back for decades by software silos between robot vendors. We’ve broken down those barriers with a standard interface that simplifies deployment for enterprises and dramatically increases the market opportunity for the automation industry,” said Ben Gibbs, co-founder and CEO of READY Robotics.
Forge/OS designed to be simple to use
Manufacturing enterprises require nimble, robust robot deployments that can be easily reprogrammed to meet the demands of dynamic digital supply chains, the company said. A shortage of robot programmers capable of quickly readjusting cells across multiple robot brands and languages limits deployment and growth across major industries.
Forge/OS uses standard APIs that enable commands for different robots and peripherals to be controlled in the same way. Task Canvas, a native Forge app built by READY, enables operators to write robot programs two to 10 times faster than existing robot languages, the company claimed.
It also uses a standard API that unlocks data streams for hundreds of different robot models. The software supports brands including Universal Robots, ABB, FANUC, Kawasaki, Staubli, and Yaskawa.
“READY Robotics Forge/OS and its low-code management of heterogeneous robotic environments represents a global sea change in the efficiency, cost, and growth of factory automation,” said Jeffrey Smith, general partner of SIP GP. “We see very large scale and highly defensible market potential worldwide.”
This investment will support READY’s global expansion and speed up the integration and deployment of the READY Robotics Forge/OS with NVIDIA Omniverse Isaac Sim, the companies said.
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