On TechCrunch: ex-Googlers launch cobotics startup

by Chris Dima | Dec 18, 2018 | In the News

This week Formant was covered by TechCrunch:

Ex-Googlers Meld Humans & Machines At New Cobotics Startup

Our distinct skill sets and shortcomings mean people and robots will join forces for the next few decades. Robots are tireless, efficient and reliable, but in a millisecond through intuition and situational awareness, humans can make decisions machine can’t. Until workplace robots are truly autonomous and don’t require any human thinking, we’ll need software to supervise them at scale. Formant comes out of stealth today to “help people speak robot,” says co-founder and CEO Jeff Linnell. “What’s really going to move the needle in the innovation economy is using humans as an empowering element in automation.”

The growth ratio: why so many robotics startups fail to scale

by Jon Logan | Dec 10, 2019

Many robotics startups fail to invest in efficiencies and infrastructure that allow them to scale. We dive into that in this post.

Advancing AI to get robots to work with humans

by Jeff Linnell | Dec 5, 2019

We believe that the future of robotics is one where you have one operator managing hundreds or thousands of robots. With our platform, operators at robotics companies become superhumans.

It’s time we put “fleet management” to rest — here’s why

by John George | Nov 19, 2019

The term “fleet management” currently describes an array of activities so diverse that it undoubtedly causes far more confusion than it could ever make up for in convenience.

UX/UI

We pride ourselves in building world-class user experience. Our expertise includes user experience design, visual design, industrial design, web / mobile / desktop application development, 3D, AR / VR, human-robot interaction design.

We are experienced at designing interfaces that allow non-experts to use complex machines and robots.

We have expertise with OpenGL, WebGL, Qt, React, React Native, iOS, Android, Unity, and Unreal.

Security

Designing for security in a robotics company is essential to safely deploy robots in the field.

We are experts at best practices in cloud security design as it relates to robotics and edge-based devices. We can provide security architectures that are designed for robotics applications as well as for hybrid cloud environments.

We have expertise in application and networking security design, and experience performing API and IAM audits.

ML/AI

We are experts at designing and implementing machine learning models that target specific robotics applications in vision processing, anomaly detection, and de-identification. We design and optimize these models for robots and low-compute edge-based devices as well as backend GPU-backed cloud instances.

DevOps

Engineering (in)efficiency can be a surprisingly high cost driver.

We’re experts in build systems, continuous integration and deployment, configuration-as-code, simulation, integration testing, and DevOps tooling — as they apply to robotics.

Our expertise includes tools like Bazel, Terraform, Jenkins, Travis CI, Circle CI, Cloudformation, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Saltstack as well as CI/CD best practices. We have experience building and running robotics software with ROS, as well as running simulations with Gazebo and Unity.

Cloud

The cloud technology landscape is massive, fast-moving, and critical to a modern robotics company.

We privilege simplicity and security with expertise in the major public clouds, hybrid cloud/edge/on-premise architectures, multi-tenant and single-tenant architectures, multi-AZ/multi-region/multi-cloud deployments, microservices, containerization, container orchestration, observability, cost management, and reliability engineering. We have expertise in optimizing for performance, scale, security, and cost.

We can help with technology choices, cloud selection, and providing well-architected solutions that follow cloud best practices.

Our expertise includes AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes.

Business Intelligence

Deriving answers to business critical questions can be a daunting task for a robotics company. We can help build the BI infrastructure that allows your team to answer key operations, business, and engineering questions.

Our expertise includes analytics databases, data warehouses, data lakes, BI tools (Tableau, Looker), and data science methods, as they apply to robot-shaped data.