Realtime Robotics

Software : Operational Technology : Industrial Robot

Website | Blog | Video

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

VC-A; HAHN Group, SAIC Capital, Toyota, Omron, Soundproof Ventures

Realtime Robotics was founded with the goal of transforming how robots and autonomous vehicles move. Realtime Robotics has continued to transform automation, with products that provide trailblazing features such as risk-aware driving, high-productivity multi-robot workcells and automated robot vision that continuously calibrates itself.

Assembly Line

Optimizing Multi-Robot Workcell Performance

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✍️ Author: Dan Sorin

đź”– Topics: Industrial Robot, Workcell, Xaas

🏢 Organizations: Realtime Robotics


What distinguishes the many possible designs? In a good design, every robot spends approximately the same amount of time per cycle; we want to avoid having some robots idle while others are still working. Similarly, in a good design, every robot is able to move without spending much time either waiting for other robots to move out of its way or taking a non-optimal path so as to avoid other robots. The goal of a design is to enable high-performance choreography of the robots.

Our team has developed Optimization-as-a-Service (OaaS), which uses a proprietary algorithm to find high-performing design options that would otherwise take months to be discovered by a team of engineers. We have obtained speedups of 5-20 percent using our OaaS (discussed later), compared to designs that were laboriously developed by experienced engineers. This result highlights that design is both very difficult and very important

Read more at Tech Briefs

Realtime Robotics Funded an Additional $9.5 Million to Meet Increased Demand for Technology that Transforms Manufacturing

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đź”– Topics: Funding Event

🏢 Organizations: Realtime Robotics, Shinhan GIB, Kyobo Life Insurance


Realtime Robotics, the leader in collision-free autonomous motion planning for industrial robots, today announced that it has secured an additional $9.5 million in funding from Shinhan GIB and Kyobo Life Insurance.

Driven by the strong response to its RapidPlan industrial robotics motion control and collision avoidance software, Realtime will use this additional investment to drive further product enhancements, incorporate feedback from customers and partners, and scale to support additional go-to-market efforts.

Read more at Business Wire

Realtime Robotics Now Supplier for BMW Group

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đź”– Topics: Partnership

🏢 Organizations: Realtime Robotics, BMW


Realtime Robotics, the leader in collision-free autonomous motion planning for industrial robots, today announced that it has been named an official supplier for the BMW Group.

Read more at Realtime Robotics Blog

Realtime Robotics Announces Additional Funding of $14.4 Million

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đź”– Topics: Funding Event

🏢 Organizations: Realtime Robotics, Soundproof Ventures, Heroic Ventures, SIP Global Partners


Realtime Robotics, the leader in collision-free autonomous motion planning for industrial robots, today announced that it has secured $14.4 million in additional funding, with Soundproof Ventures, Heroic Ventures and SIP Global Partners as lead investors. The funding comes on the heels of the official launch of the company’s new RapidPlan software, which helps manufacturers design and deploy industrial automation faster and more efficiently. With RapidPlan, customers can automate the programming, deployment and control of their industrial robots within applications such as automotive or logistics, autonomously creating and choreographing all robot movements without the need for brand-specific robot programming.

Read more at Businesswire

Mitsubishi Electric and Realtime Robotics | Collision Avoidance Robotics

Industrial robotics and generation change ahead

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✍️ Author: Frankie Youd

đź”– Topics: Partnership

🏢 Organizations: Kawasaki Robotics, Realtime Robotics


Realtime Robotics, a specialist in autonomous motion planning for industrial robots, has announced partnership with Kawasaki Robotics on a project that aims to automate the programming, deployment and control of its industrial robots.

The main benefits include an 80 to 90% reduction in robot programming time, freeing scarce robotic engineers to focus on automating the 90% of auto manufacturing that is still manual. The technology can establish a 100% reduction of line downtime and related costs due to robot collisions, and help optimize the work cell footprint, reduce electric consumption, and lower maintenance costs through reinforcement learning-based optimization software that can iterate hundreds of thousands of options to minimize these cost factors in only a few hours.

Read more at Just Auto

How Realtime’s Technology Simplifies Motion Planning

Can Realtime Robotics’ RapidPlan Software Break Through Industrial Automation’s Slow Progress?

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✍️ Author: Jacob Bourne

đź”– Topics: Industrial Robot

🏢 Organizations: Realtime Robotics


Despite continuous advances in the field of robotics, complex motion through space still presents a stumbling block for bots. In oftentimes hectic industrial settings, complex motion that entails a robot getting from point A to point B to perform a task is a feat that generally involves weeks to months of programming time, resulting in movement that’s relatively slow and collision-prone. It’s a challenge that George Konidaris, cofounder and chief roboticist of Realtime Robotics, says has been a persistent hurdle for robotics researchers since 1979—and he thinks RapidPlan represents a significant leap of progress.

Part of the software’s promise is enabling robots to more quickly determine the best path of movement in dynamic environments like factories, which Konidaris says so far hasn’t been accomplished. Software users start with RapidPlan Create, which guides them through the robotic programming phase. Then RapidPlan Control runs the robots’ operations.

Data from Realtime indicates that the software can reduce programming time by 70-80 percent, increase throughput rate by 10-30 percent and decrease a bot’s life cycle cost by up to 50 percent.

Read more at Engineering.com

Realtime Robotics enhances responsive workcell monitoring by reading CAD files with CAD Exchanger

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đź”– Topics: Industrial Robot

🏢 Organizations: CAD Exchanger, Realtime Robotics


It was Realtime Robotics who managed to fuse all the latest technological achievements and academic research and to elaborate a specialized toolkit for on-the-fly motion planning. “Realtime Robotics has created technology that solves a 30-year-old challenge in the robotics industry. Our motion planning solution allows industrial automation to move collision-free and respond to obstacles in real time,” says Will Floyd-Jones, Co-Founder & Robotics Engineer in Realtime Robotics.

The initial plan to cobble together various libraries was no longer relevant when Realtime Robotic stumbled upon CAD Exchanger. “We would have to hack a bunch of things together and try to figure out how to get them to import data in one common way. And then we discovered that CAD Exchanger has already solved the problem and would just do that for us,” explains Will Floyd-Jones, Co-Founder & Robotics Engineer in Realtime Robotics.

Read more at CAD Exchanger Blog

Realtime Robotics Completes $31.4 Million Series A Funding Round

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đź”– Topics: funding event

🏢 Organizations: Realtime Robotics


Realtime Robotics plans on applying the new funds to accelerating its product rollouts and continuing its investment in innovative enhancements and solutions. The company will deepen its reach in the warehouse automation industry, while continuing to serve global automotive manufacturers and their supply chain. Working closely with long term partners and customers, Realtime will also continue to perfect its “holy grail” collaborative system, which incorporates its proprietary real-time planning technology with other certified system components to enable industrial robots to proactively adapt their motions and avoid unwanted contact with humans, while continuously accomplishing their intended tasks.

Read more at Realtime Robotics Blog

Start-ups Powering New Era of Industrial Robotics

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✍️ Author: James Falkoff

đź”– Topics: robotics, automated guided vehicle, machine learning

🏭 Vertical: Machinery

🏢 Organizations: Ready Robotics, ArtiMinds, Realtime Robotics, RIOS, Vicarious


Much of the bottleneck to achieving automation in manufacturing relates to limitations in the current programming model of industrial robotics. Programming is done in languages proprietary to each robotic hardware OEM – languages “straight from the 80s” as one industry executive put it.

There are a limited number of specialists who are proficient in these languages. Given the rarity of the expertise involved, as well as the time it takes to program a robot, robotics application development typically costs three times as much as the hardware for a given installation.

Read more at Robotics Business Review