SAN FRANCISCO — Formant Inc. today announced the availability of its cloud-based robotics platform, which it said enables businesses to automatically collect and analyze robotics data.
Formant.io was founded in 2017 by a team of former Google, Savioke, and Redwood Robotics software engineers, roboticists, and product managers. By collecting all application data on a single Web-based user interface, Formant’s analytics and observability platform allows business teams, operators, and engineers to improve the efficacy of their robotic workforce, claimed the company.
In December 2018, Formant raised $6 million in a seed round led by SignalFire. In August 2019, Formant acquired Formation to integrate teleoperation into its product.
Formant manages data for robot fleets
The startup said its platform addresses the challenges robotics companies face when trying to move data to the cloud for analysis. It streams data automatically and intelligently handles challenging network environments. The data stream is enriched, indexed, and annotated for searchability, shortening time-to-insight for business consumers and incident resolution for operational staff.
“Robots are leaving the factory and adventuring into our world. They could use some guidance,” stated Jeff Linnell, CEO of Formant. “This release facilitates this journey by enabling robot fleets to thrive through human observability and assistance.”
Formant said its system has been in beta and is already in use by a number of customers in the robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) space.
“It’s essentially a DVR for data,” said Anthony Jules, co-founder and chief operating officer of Robust.AI. “I can skip the ‘commercials’ and just get to the relevant data in seconds.”
The platform is available now at Formant.io and is designed for customers trying to do the following things:
- Observe: Monitor and visualize robot fleets historically and in real time; find root causes easily
- Analyze: Automatically generate insights along any dimension of a fleet
- Operate: Collaborative, customizable robot tele-operations and fleet management
- Integrate: Connects a robot fleet to widely available cloud applications such as Slack and Tableau for communications; analytics tools such Looker; and cloud data warehouses such as S3, Redshift, and Cloudsight
“Formant’s analytics platform is a sales super-weapon, allowing me to close deals backed by insights,” said Henrik Bennetsen, co-founder and chief business officer at Canvas.
The Robot Report is launching the Healthcare Robotics Engineering Forum, which will be on Dec. 9-10 in Santa Clara, Calif. The conference and expo will focus on improving the design, development, and manufacture of next-generation healthcare robots. Learn more about the Healthcare Robotics Engineering Forum, and registration is now open.
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