I had a great chat with the leadership team of Baltimore-based Ready Robotics at the ATX East show at New York’s Javits Center this week. Kel Guerin, the company’s CTO and Benjamin Gibbs, the CEO, described how Ready has built an easy-to-use platform for integrating industrial robots.

“We basically take out the headache of setting up the tooling, spending a lot of time programming the robot, bolting it to the floor—all that stuff that you have to do to actually get the robot to work, on top of buying the robot,” said Guerin.

Guerin explained that the company developed an easy-to-use software system that users you program the robot in minutes.

“We have a plug-and-play system for tools that allows you to swap out different grippers, be they air controlled, PLC-controlled, 24-V, any type of industrial standard gripper—such as Schunk or PIAB. We support it and it becomes a simple drop into our system in a few minutes. Because it’s on a mobile stand, you can wheel it into a factory and in a matter of hours, actually have it working. This is true with either newer systems communicating over PLC or legacy systems like 60-year-old punch presses that need physical interaction, like the need to press buttons, the need to use compressed air, things like that. That’s sort of our core that brings all that together,” he said.

“The bottom line is this takes integrating robots down from four to eight weeks to four to eight hours, which is critical in today’s flexible manufacturing environments,” said Gibbs.

The company, in business since June 2016, just celebrated its one-year anniversary last week. More details on Ready Robotics are at ready-robotics.com.