Formant

Software Vendor

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA, USA

Established: 2017Public: NOWebsite: https://formant.io

Software/OS:

Software and Cloud Service Provider

Quick Overview:

Formant.io is a software company which provides a unique solution for robot companies who desire to remotely monitor and operate their machines. Formant can be use by a corporation to remotely monitor all of their robotic systems, either within a specific factory or even worldwide across multiple facilities.

Products:

Observe
Analyze
Operate

Applications:

Remote Teleoperation
Robot Operations Center
Fault Analysis and Root Cause

Background

The Formant solution has all of the necessary features to enable remote monitoring and control, including:

Automated alerts
Data logging & root cause analysis
Remote teleoperation (coming soon)
Simulation
Fleet Management

Formant Cloud operations

Using the cloud and encrypted data communication, the user/operator can track and manage a remote fleet of robots. The Formant Cloud manages all of the communication between the Format software and the remote software agents which are tracking the physical machine operation.

Formant currently has a large number of integrations, starting with ROS. Any robot running ROS can immediately be attached to the Formant Cloud. Formant optimizes data flow from robots to cloud, to 3rd party applications and downstreams apps, all the way through to its own dashboarding product that enables out-of-the box monitoring, alerting and intervention solution.

Formant acquired remote control software company Formantion in August 2019. Formation, founded in 2018 by a small team based out of Pittsburgh, was driven by the growing trend of robotics companies optimizing for semi-autonomy.

Helps Control a Growing Manufacturing Fleet of Automation Systems

For manufacturing corporations, Format delivers a software solution to bring all of their automation under the control of a single, unified platform. This provides immense benefits as automation systems scale up and the ratio of operators to machines increases. Formant boasts that with their solution it is possible to have a ratio of 100:1 machines to operators.

A Standardized Solution for Robotic Service Providers

Another important use case for Formant solutions is as a Robot Operation Center (ROC) solution for young Robotic Service Providers (RSP) automation companies. RSPs will emerge as the dominant automation delivery mechanism over the next decade. Delivering Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) to a new automation market, a young RSP will find that the Formant solution is a quick way to setup their ROC and immediately start supporting their installed fleet of robots. Formant expects this to be a $40B market over the next 3 years.