Rapid Robotics: How MoveIt Pro Accelerated and Future-Proofed Rapid Robotics’ Industrial Humanoids

SITUATION

Rapid Robotics is reinvigorating American manufacturing by providing affordable automation solutions in real-time. Their end-of-line and logistics solutions optimize supply chains, reduce operational overhead, and remove the complexity from robotic automation — giving their customers the power to focus on growing their business, not maintaining robots.

PROBLEM

With an aggressive timeline to launch their new industrial humanoid, the Rapid 3PRO, not to mention several customers who had already placed orders and competitors racing towards similar solutions — Rapid Robotics needed a solution to accelerate their software development. The company had already mastered robotic automation for tasks like piece-picking, packing, palletizing, and kitting. Next, they wanted something even more adaptable. An AI-enabled “industrial humanoid”: a high-performance bi-manual robot. At launch the robot will operate from a stable base position that can be repositioned to various spots on the floor by operators and a mobile base is in-development. This type of hardware is proven to be faster, more accurate, and more stable than its bipedal counterparts, but the software behind it is incredibly complex.

The potential impact for customers made that complexity worthwhile, though, because a robot purpose built for industrial performance that has optional wheeled mobility and the ability to be transferred for alternate tasks, is a game-changer for manufacturers. Older robots require a massive frame to hang from, which disrupts existing layouts and requires alterations in the way products move through the factory. In addition to being confined to a frame in one area, these older robots can only master one task, meaning multiple robots — and their bulky frames — are needed.

Rapid Robotics’ vision is to replace this clunky setup with a general purpose robot with the footprint of a human that better serves modern manufacturers’ needs. A sleek mobile base, two arms, and more capable software would give Rapid Robotics’ customers the ability to automate a variety of tasks in a variety of areas with just one piece of hardware. However, bringing this vision to life was no small feat. Becoming experts in multiple industries, understanding their throughput challenges, and identifying high value tasks for robotic automation requires significant time and effort. Building a humanoid with fast and precise movement, stable operation with heavy payloads, and scalable production requires mechanical, electrical, software, and industrial engineering expertise. And developing a software platform with the foundational skills to enable these varied tasks takes substantial time to do the required recruiting, development, and maintenance.

Enter PickNik and our motion planning runtime and development platform, MoveIt Pro.

SOLUTION

With clear customer use cases identified and hardware development underway, MoveIt Pro’s pre-built advanced motion capabilities gave Rapid Robotics a fast development environment for dual arm and mobile manipulation. Since the building blocks already exist, all Rapid Robotics had to do was combine and customize them to power one robot performing multiple tasks.

There was an additional opportunity to accelerate go-to-market that was only possible with MoveItPro: detailed, real-time simulations that can test and refine the robot’s mechanical design and task sequences while the finished product is being constructed. It’s not only a faster process, but a less risky one because it enables Rapid Robotics to spot and correct any issues before deploying the humanoids in real-world settings.

OUTCOME

Rapid Robotics integrated MoveIt Pro so that dozens of unique tasks and processes could be executed on each robot, opening a market of never-before-tapped opportunities. Having a multi-task robot gives Rapid Robotics a strong competitive edge because a single hardware solution is easier to service, support, and ultimately optimize for industrial performance. In addition, the robot can flex with customers’ changing operational needs and with one solution, Rapid is able to keep costs low leading to stronger customer ROI.

Even better, this breakthrough came at lightning-fast speed. Building this out internally would have meant investing years of engineering time, plus the expenses associated with it. With the support of PickNik’s team of experts, Rapid Robotics could remain hyper-focused on time-to-market and approaching deadlines.

Leveraging MoveIt Pro’s advanced capabilities and modular design have future-proofed Rapid Robotics’ industrial humanoids. Focusing on the future is part of Rapid Robotics’ ethos, and with MoveIt Pro, iterations for new features and capabilities can be done faster than the competition. What used to take weeks and months can now be accomplished in hours and days — making Rapid Robotics the clear choice for manufacturers that need specific automation capabilities, no matter how nuanced or advanced.

Customer Quote:
“An industrial humanoid robot that can perform multiple tasks at different locations around a manufacturing facility is over 10x better than a fixed, single-process robotic arm. It’s also exponentially harder to develop since it needs to handle complex processes in unstructured environments. To accelerate the launch of our industrial humanoid, 3Pro, Rapid Robotics is deploying mobile manipulation software from PickNik Robotics. MoveIt Pro has hundreds of AI-enabled skills allowing us to fast-track development. Building a digital twin for key operations also reduces cost and time-to-market - we’re just solving mobile manipulation problems faster. For robotics startups - building a better product, more efficiently in a shorter timeframe is vital. MoveIt Pro delivers on all three.” – Kimberley Losey, CEO, Rapid Robotics