Formant + PickNik power the best-in-class low-latency interface for advanced arm motion planning

Software Platform is Ideal for Space Missions and Other Unstructured Environments that Need Reliable Remote Supervision

Boulder, CO — October 19, 2021 — PickNik Robotics and Formant are pleased to announce the formation of a working partnership to expand both groups’ capabilities to bring cloud-based mobile manipulation to the forefront of robotics.

Formant, founded by robotics veteran Jeff Linnell in 2017, provides the data infrastructure necessary to efficiently deploy, command, and scale fleets of robots. Formant supports international RaaS companies and Fortune 500 in several verticals. Customers include large tech companies like Google, growing RaaS businesses like Naio, and large enterprises such as BP, and Westinghouse Electric Company. Formant’s telemetry, analytics, planning, and real-time control of robots helps expedite the new wave of robotic systems into productive commercial use cases. Formant plans to expand its offerings with PickNik into the mobile manipulation arena.

PickNik Robotics, founded by Dr. Dave Coleman in 2015, provides supervised autonomy for robotic arm manipulators that bridges the gap between manual control and full autonomy. The company’s flagship product, MoveIt Studio, is built atop the leading open-source robotic arm manipulation platform, MoveIt. PickNik leads and maintains MoveIt, a platform that integrates within the Robot Operating System (ROS) to enable robotic companies and developers to build automation applications. PickNik’s software products and services have helped companies such as Google, Hyundai, Samsung, and NASA solve hard manipulation problems.

“We’re excited to be working with Formant. We’ve been watching the maturing robotics industry and see a lot of potential in providing supervised autonomy to a similar set of customers as Formant’s platform serves,” said PickNik CEO Dr. Dave Coleman.

PickNik was recently awarded an SBIR Phase II from NASA for robot arm motion planning in microgravity environments. PickNik subsequently announced the development of a commercialized open-core model of MoveIt, branded MoveIt Studio, which will focus on supervised autonomy to provide localized autonomous action in high latency environments with the ability to reduce operator oversight.

Formant and PickNik plan to integrate MoveIt Studio into the Formant platform, allowing both companies to focus on their respective value offerings, and release a beta later this year. Together, the partnership enables customers to stay focused on their hardware, autonomy, and businesses and still have access to state-of-the-art data pipelines, operational workflows, and user experiences. To find out more, visit https://picknik.ai/pro/ and https://formant.io/partners/picknik

About PickNik Robotics

PickNik Robotics helps companies address the technical, cost and time challenges associated with the development of advanced robotic applications. Major robotics organizations, such as NASA, Google, Amazon, Kindred, and many others, have partnered with PickNik Robotics to develop robotic applications. PickNik Robotics also supports and collaborates with the worldwide open source robotics movement and is lead developer of MoveIt. Founded in 2015, PicKNik is based in Boulder, CO. More information at www.picknik.ai

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Sean Kolk
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