Vention launches new products to support robotics deployments in factories

The Cloud Robotics Platform (CNW Group/Vention)

MONTREAL — Vention, the cloud robotics company, released a suite of AI-powered capabilities to its Manufacturing Automation Platform (MAP). These new capabilities, available immediately to the more than 4,000 manufacturers already using Vention, improve the company’s platform through the cloud.

MachineBuilder capabilities enhanced for robot cell design

The latest version of MachineBuilder, Vention’s cloud-based 3D design software, reportedly brings forward a suite of enhancements with new design tools.

Specific product capabilities include:

• Streamlined design flow: Empowers teams to work faster through machine design templates.
• Smarter part placement: Minimizes the effort of creating mechanical structures when designing in 3D. Powered by Vention’s AI-driven Geometric Reasoning Engine (GRE), components added to a design automatically snap to the desired orientation with minimal user input.
• Enhanced part manipulation: Reduces the learning curve of designing in MachineBuilder with new part manipulation tools powered by contextual guidance and a more discoverable 3D manipulator.
• Real-time design and part specifications: Increases visibility into part and design specifications with real-time updates as components are added to the bill of material. Technical specifications, 2D drawings and more are now directly available in the 3D design environment.

Robotic programming capabilities pave the way for complex cloud applications

The release of Vention’s MachineLogic new code-free programming instructions reportedly simplifies how users program robot arms and all adjacent devices in a robotic cell. Vention says that developers can leverage their digital twin to accelerate the deployment process. Users can now program their robot in the cloud and deploy it directly to the factory floor.

Specific product capabilities include:

• Point and click robot programming: Inserts waypoints and reference frames easily into a digital twin. Enables developers to visualize the position of reference frames and waypoints in the scene using new scene widgets.
• Extensible workflows and powerful authoring capabilities: Defines parametric reference frames and waypoints with variables and expressions.
• Calibration Frame: Defines calibration frames in your digital twin to enable the level of precision required for your robotic application.
• Instantly and securely deploy robot cells from the cloud to the factory floor

The inclusion of a new instant deployment functionality empowers robotic developers to transfer programs and machine configurations from a digital twin to a physical machine directly in the web browser. This new feature integrates with Vention’s ISO 27001 and NIST-800-171 certified MachineCloud infrastructure, expediting deployment processes and facilitating a seamless redeployment from the digital twin to the real world without disrupting production.

“Those releases are all about the intersection of robotics and AI-driven design capabilities. Unlike traditional 3D design and offline programming software, Vention’s Manufacturing Automation Platform is poised to leverage AI to simplify the design-to-deployment experience. With a dataset comprising over 365,000 automated equipment and robotic cell designs, each labeled with rich geometric data and metadata, and continuous investment in Vention’s Geometric Reasoning Engine and Graph Neural Networks, the task of designing, automating, ordering, deploying, and operating robotic cells in the cloud has never been more seamless. And this is just the beginning,” said Etienne Lacroix, founder and chief executive officer, Vention.