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READY Robotics, a Columbus, Ohio-based company founded in 2016, has shut down. It was best known for its ForgeOS robot-agnostic operating system, but it recently branched out into automation consulting and launched a palletizing system. Multiple sources told The Robot Report a funding round fell through at the last minute, which caused the company to lay off its staff and close its doors.
Silicon Valley Disposition is auctioning off equipment from READY Robotics between August 13-15. This includes nearly 50 robots from various industry-leading robotic arm companies, CNC machine tools, and much more.
Silicon Valley Disposition told The Robot Report the auction is being conducted as an assignment for the benefit of creditors (ABC). The American Bar Association describes an ABC as a business-liquidation device that is an “alternative to formal bankruptcy proceedings. In many instances, an ABC can be the most advantageous and graceful exit strategy.”
The former headquarters for the company is available for lease.
The Robot Report reached out multiple times to READY Robotics co-founders Benjamin Gibbs and Kel Guerin but never heard back.
What went wrong
READY Robotics set out to make it easier to program and control robots from all the major robotic arm brands. Back in 2021, Gibbs said the goal was for ForgeOS 5 to do for robots what Windows did for PCs and Android did for smartphones.
“This is how we go from hundreds of thousands of robots sold to millions,” he said.
At the time, READY Robotics said ForgeOS 5 was compatible with 250-plus robot arms and a growing list of accessories such as cameras, force sensors, grippers, and more.
So where did things go wrong? A big problem, according to multiple sources, is that robotics manufacturers have their own operating systems, many of which have become easier to use over the years. And it’s in their best interest to be exclusive.
Ready Robotics’ ForgeOS universal operating system.
Bob Little, chief of robotics strategy at Novanta and co-founder and CEO of ATI Industrial Automation, said READY’s selling point was that a facility could run multiple robot brands with one OS. He pointed out two problems with that approach:
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- A company has to buy the robot company’s controller and robot that includes the software. But it also needs to buy READY’s software and an additional PC, which leads to more expenses.
- Companies such as FANUC, Rockwell, and others have extensive educational systems for learning programming. So there are a lot of programmers out in the industry, and instruction is readily available.
“For READY to succeed, they needed to find big fish who bought into their programming language, and the two [aforementioned] problems prevented this,” said Little. “You can add the problem of aligning with a small company with low experience and high risk of failure.”
Another source told The Robot Report it needed software updates to be pushed through on ForgeOS earlier this year, but it took “months” to get a hold of anyone at READY Robotics.
Little said there’s always risk working with small companies due to the high-failure rate of startups. He also pointed out the efforts some large industrial robotics companies, including FANUC and Rockwell Automation, put into training on their software.
“People are not aware of the scale these companies have created in training – it is massive,” he said.
Little also cited GrayMatter Robotics, which has developed an “application OS” for sanding automation. GrayMatter uses machine vision to scan parts and software to create the motion-control plan for the task.
“I agree we need to make it easier to program robots,” Little concluded. “I see the AI/digital twin/sensor fusion route as the solution versus a universal robot OS.”
Pivoting to palletizing
According to Crunchbase, READY Robotics raised at least $41.5 million, with its latest funding coming via an undisclosed corporate investment from Rockwell Automation, according to Crunchbase. The startup closed a venture round from NVIDIA in 2022, a $23 million Series B in 2020, a $15 million Series A in 2017, and a $3.5 million Seed round in 2016.
In March 2023, READY Robotics said its platform enabled the programming and control of more than 3 million deployed robots.
Also early in 2023, READY Robotics introduced a palletizing product called READY Cells. The system was robot-agnostic, thanks to ForgeOS. Rockwell Automation signed up to distribute READY Cells.
“READY started to pivot to creating applications with the palletizing software they recently released,” Little said. “I looked at the program, and it wasn’t as effective as I thought it would need to be to capture many customers.”
One source told The Robot Report READY Robotics had a healthy customer pipeline, but also mentioned that a funding round fell apart at the eleventh hour.
READY Robotics is not alone
One source said READY Robotics went out of business “mostly due to the ongoing softness in the robotics market, in the U.S. and elsewhere.” Industrial robot sales fell 30% in 2023 and were down to start 2024, too.
Unfortunately, READY Robotics isn’t alone in its struggles. Other robotics startups that have recently shut down include Bossa Nova Robotics, Dextrous Robotics, Dorabot, and Small Robot Company.
Bedford, Mass.-based Soft Robotics this week divested its soft robotic gripper business to Schmalz. Soft Robotics was reportedly 100% dependent on robot sales. It spun out a new company, Oxipital AI, that is using 3D vision and AI for inspection tasks, and it will heavily focus on applications that don’t involve robotics.
Robot independent OS plays are as old as the robot industry. All of these plays were largely started by researchers coming out of universities that perceive the commercial industrial robot programming environment as the bottleneck to large scale robot use. They are correct to some point, but miss the point about integration, fine tuning, end effectors, error recovery, etc. being a significant challenge. If you are not significantly eliminating programming and integration, you are just moving the problem from one programming interface to a so called better interface. And your better interface may not have the inertia and infrastructure that come with robot vendors proprietary systems. Remember, Apple was always easier and nicer, windows still outsold them an order of magnitude.
I’m not following your analogy. I thought you were saying that a proprietary OS supplied by the hardware vendor wins out. But you state that Windows outsold Apple. Windows was and is hardware agnostic.
My forecast is that the Robotics market, like the computer market, is going to be big enough to support both models. Some customers will prefer a single vendor for hardware and software. Other organizations will want one software platfrom to support many applications across a variety of hardware.
To simplify his analogy (as I interpret it), Apple is easy and user friendly, Windows is more powerful and feature rich. The same is true of Ready Robotics vs. Fanuc. The trouble with Ready Robotics was they simplified robot programming but in doing so stripped more advance features that were available on the native robot pendant which kneecapped customers and integrators when deploying systems that required these advanced features.
Ready Robotics failure demonstrates a fundamental problem with silicon valley type software companies entering the automation space. They often fail to realize the realities of the plant floor.
Did not Google (alphabet) loose a few people to the same mission with the whole google X moonshot failure to launch model? Everyday Robots? Intrinsic?
This is a sad reality of the state of robotics in the USA, quite frankly the USA is not fully ready for robotics. Reason 1: Hardware is perceived as capital intensive by investors, and by its traditional sense it is, though in a rare case or two- not always true. Reason 2. Then you have the problem of public perception of what robots should/can do and the reality of what they are capable of doing with today’s technology. There is a major disconnect here and often disappointment. Reason 3. Startup companies can be slow to adapt to the market, in part because it takes long to develop and the investment is so high to achieve traditional robotics goals. The reasons investors like large companies against small companies is that they can adapt and move quickly, but for a few reasons that I will not go into in this comment, many robotics startups do not.
I have seen most of the robotics companies I have come to know or considered competitors go under for one or more of these reasons. You can see some will live longer by merging with other small companies, adopting the safety in numbers theory. But they must find a way around the above reasons to last.
Reason #2. There is a gap between what we need robots to do versus what they have been able to do historically. Historically we’ve had to dumb down the operational process to simple unit tasks and bring the work to the robot.
The future is robots performing complex multi-task sequences with the ability to adapt to unexpected events in the environment. PickNik, Intrinsic, and a handful of others are working hard to bring to software to market that will do exactly that.
Anthony – you are saying large companies can adapt more quickly than small companies? That seems opposite of common wisdom. Startups are agile and innovative compared to large, established ones, a la the “Innovators Dilemma” book.
If anyone is looking for an alternative now that ForgeOS is no longer here, we’re happy to help. We released a new version of our product this year, CapSen PiC 2.0, that provides an easy to program UI for many picking tasks.
Fascinating and quite relevant discussion. Given, Ready Robotics distress, is anyone interested in purchasing the Ready Robotics IP / Code? If interested, please email me ASAP at my Restructuring firm Armanino (Ryan.Zenga@armanino.com).
Thanks,
Ryan