Realtime Robotics, a collision-free autonomous motion planning company for industrial robots, announced that it has received a strategic investment from Mitsubishi Electric, which will be used to optimize the company’s robotic work units and expand solutions to help engineers and manufacturers reduce costs and increase productivity. It was the lead investor in Realtime Robotics’ recently launched Series B funding round. Mitsubishi Electric is also A participant in its Series A funding round and will add a senior representative to Realtime’s board of directors.

V7768-122000 Image credit: Realtime Robotics

Realtime Robotics, founded in 2016, is a start-up company dedicated to developing motion planning technology and promoting the commercialization of its projects. The trajectory planning software is used to calculate the path required for the robot or vehicle to reach the target without colliding with obstacles in real time to achieve optimization.

Since its establishment, the company has completed a total of 3 rounds of financing, and the rounds have gone to the B round, and the amount raised has been disclosed to be more than 45.8 million US dollars (about 330 million yuan), and there are many well-known institutions such as Toyota Ventures (Toyota Venture Capital), SAIC Investment, and SPARX Group among the shareholders.

The company’s CEO, Peter Howard, has been with Mitsubishi for 12 years, serving as Project manager of Mitsubishi Commercial, founder and Managing Director of Tri-M Technologies, and founder and CEO of SM2E, with deep ties to Mitsubishi.

Realtime Robotics’ unique and innovative collision-free path planning: a solution for the entire life cycle of a robotic work unit

In view of the many pain points of traditional industrial robot programming, Realtime Robotics proposed a solution based on artificial intelligence. This collision-free motion planning technology is vividly likened to “the motor cortex of the robot brain”. The optimization algorithm can manage the complex actions of multiple robots at the same time, intelligently generate the collision-free optimal path scheme, and achieve the best cycle time.

V7768-122000 During the iterative design phase, its award-winning multi-robot optimization software quickly generates and evaluates hundreds of thousands of possible solutions to determine the shortest cycle time. Runtime control further simplifies deployment and production, enabling multiple robots to work more closely together while responding to dynamic changes. Finally, when the work unit needs to be retooled, complex robotic controls can be easily reprogrammed to achieve optimal cycle times from the first iteration.

Currently, Realtime Robotics’ existing customers include automotive manufacturers BMW and Volkswagen commercial Vehicles and integrators Valiant TMS and the Schaeffler Group. Customers report reduced cycle times, reduced downtime and increased production as a result of working with Realtime.

By increasing its stake, Mitsubishi Electric plans to further integrate Realtime’s cutting-edge motion-planning technology into 3D simulators and other software to optimize manufacturing through the power of digital twins. Subsequently, Mitsubishi Electric wants to integrate Realtime’s technology into plant automation (FA) control system equipment, such as programmable logic controllers (PLCS), servo motors, and computer numerical controls (CNC), to meet the need to expand automation capabilities, streamline plant operations to improve efficiency, and respond quickly to unexpected events. This ensures uninterrupted operation of the plant.