InOrbit Inc. this month announced new additions to its leadership team as it grows to serve the robot operations, or RobOps, space. The company said the executives will help it “build a world where humans, robots, and AI work together to empower people to reach new heights.”
InOrbit has appointed Ramiro Diaz Trepat as chief technology officer, Rosina Feser as head of marketing, and Florian Schoebinger as head of strategy and growth. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company recently received funding from the Google for Startups Latino Founders Fund.
“InOrbit is at a pivotal growth stage, as the use of robots and artificial intelligence explodes across industries,” stated Florian Pestoni, CEO of InOrbit. “These strategic appointments will level up our ability to meet our customers’ urgent needs, accelerate the growth of our ecosystem and presence, and push the limit on the use of physical AI.”
New InOrbit execs bring AI, market expertise
Diaz Trepat joined InOrbit.AI earlier this year as head of AI and helped launch InOrbit RobOps Copilot, which is designed to real-time insights for optimizing autonomous mobile robot (AMR) operations. With experience in product development at both startups and established companies, Diaz Trepat said he will continue integrating AI into the company‘s enterprise platform.
InOrbit
“The convergence of AI and robotics is transforming physical operations,” he said. “I am excited to lead such a talented product development team to drive innovation and even more value for InOrbit customers.”
“I didn’t have prior experience in robotics,” Diaz Trepat acknowledged to Automated Warehouse. “My background is in software engineering and quantitative finance. After that, I moved to product director in different organizations, where I learned to execute with an obsession to understand what matters most to customers. Then I moved to software and AI.”
How is InOrbit looking at AI?
“AI is a lot of things — generative AI and large language models [LLMs], plus VLMs [vision language models] for image processing, all under the big umbrella of machine learning and computer vision,” he replied. “We try to deliver value in all of these. People who want to use AI don’t often have the data, but in the world of robot operations, robots provide all the telemetry and images we need to fuel AI.”
Diaz Trepat said that unlike ChatGPT, which is a “stochastic parrot” prone to “hallucination,” RobOps Copilot provides answers based on real data. It can tell users how many missions failed within the past week, and its conversational structure provides faster understanding than traditional interfaces, he claimed.
“We’re enriching our Time Capsule tool to analyze intervals around incidents. Users can replay AI interpretations of events from sensor and camera data,” said Diaz Trepat. “InOrbit is also using computer vision with VLMs to summarize what has happened and find the exact moment.”
InOrbit is also working on adding object detection and interpretation to standard AMR telemetry, which includes the robot’s position and battery life.
“That allows us to integrate what the robot sees with RobOps Copilot,” Diaz Trepat explained. “In the future, users can ask, ‘Show me all the incidents last week when there was a pallet in front of a robot. We’re also looking at onboarding RTLS [real-time location systems] for human-driven vehicles, AGVs, and stationary cameras to manage traffic in general in a richer continuum of devices.”
With more than two decades of marketing expertise, Feser plans to drive InOrbit’s market presence. She said her background in high-tech and software will help her to spearhead the company’s marketing strategies and drive growth.
“Our target audience consists of end-user enterprises trying to implement AMRs,” said Feser. “In addition to developers needing InOrbit, enterprises can use it to get robots and other facilities in their facilities to work together. Companies that have already invested in robots want to get them to work more effectively.”
Source: InOrbit
Schoebinger previously founded an innovation hub in Silicon Valley and led Kärcher’s corporate venture capital investment in InOrbit. He said the move from investor and board observer to a full time role at InOrbit demonstrates his commitment to expanding opportunities for the company.
“I had met Florian [Pestoni] at a speed-networking event in 2020, and we had a great personal connection and realized a good business fit,” Schoebinger recalled. “InOrbit offered value to Kärcher as it got into commercial robotics.”
He added that his experience in driving strategic partnerships and capital investments will be crucial in driving InOrbit’s business.
“Partnerships are becoming more relevant as adoption grows,” Schoebinger said. “Systems integrators and other technology companies such as robotics and warehouse management systems [WMS] providers play a critical role in the ecosystem and can offer InOrbit alongside their hardware and software.”
“We’re continuing to educate customers in our pipeline who are just starting to solve problems we’ve encountered many times,” he noted. “There’s a lot of foundational work to be done educating industry about RobOps. We have features that aren’t fully used yet.”
Learn about RobOps at upcoming events
InOrbit will be hosting RobOpsCon ’24 on Tuesday, Oct. 15, the day before RoboBusiness, which will be in Santa Clara, Calif. Both events will provide advice for robotics startups and operators, as well as discuss the challenges of integrating and scaling AMR fleets.
The Robot Operations Group (ROG), which organized RobOpsCon, meets online regularly to discuss topics around robot operations.
