RBR50 company IAM Robotics, developer of the Swift autonomous mobile manipulation robot (AMMR), is opening a state-of-the-art headquarters and showcase innovation center in early 2020. The new 30,000-square-foot facility will be located in the emerging high tech area of Pittsburgh known as Robotics Row, a stretch of land that has become a hotbed for robotics and technology companies along the Allegheny River.

The IAM Robotics Showcase Innovation Center will feature a distribution center environment where visitors will experience the company’s robotic labor system in action. A robotic labor system enables businesses to offer an assortment of products without adding labor as it fills the automation gap in long-tail business strategy between legacy automation and manual labor.

“We chose to be in Robotics Row because of its central Pittsburgh location, the ability to showcase our solution, the proximity to Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center, and all of the numerous amenities in Pittsburgh’s Strip District and Historical Lawrenceville neighborhoods,” said IAM Robotics Founder Tom Galluzzo.

Galluzzo added, “This new location is going to allow us to dramatically ramp up our production capacity and development testing for new technologies. We’re embracing our solution by operating our robots at the same scale as our customers and showing a better way to fulfill orders with autonomous robots.”

RBR50 Executive Q&A: Joel Reed, CEO, IAM Robotics

Swift is an AMMR that comes with integrated obstacle detection technology that allows it to navigate safely throughout multiple aisles of a distribution center. It uses a Fanuc 200 iD 7L robot arm and various end effectors to lift items up to 15 pounds.

At ProMat 2019, IAM Robotics showcased a new design for Swift that included conveyor integration and a transport robot that works with Swift to exchange full or empty totes. The sleeker Swift redesign includes a smoother lift and is available with a fixed tote or integrated motorized drive roller (MDR) for automatic tote transfer. The adjustable carriage can match the height of a facility’s existing conveyor infrastructure for simpler integration.

IAM Robotics was founded in 2012. It raised $20 million in November 2018 in a round led by KCK Ltd, a family-owned investment firm with teams in New York and San Francisco.