READY Robotics and NVIDIA Want to Make Programming Industrial Robots as Easy as Scratch
Inspired by MIT's Scratch, the Task Canvas application for Forge OS is a no-code robotic automation platform — now with Isaac Sim support.
READY Robotics is aiming to make the use of high-end industrial robotics devices more accessible to the less technical, with a platform that swaps text-based programming for a drag-and-drop visual environment: ForgeOS and its Task Canvas.
"There was this a-ha moment where we figured out that we could take these types of visual languages that are very easy to understand and use them for robotics," explains company co-founder and chief innovation officer Kel Guerin of the ForgeOS concept, led by his startup which spun out from Johns Hopkins University.
The idea is simple: rather than requiring users to write code in a text-based language in order to develop new applications for off-the-shelf robots, ForgeOS offers a "no-code" development environment dubbed Task Canvas — based, in no small part, on the accessibility of drag-and-drop visual coding environments like Scratch.
The Task Canvas system aims to boost accessibility, with beginners able to develop a useful program for industrial robots in around an hour according to READY Robotics. At the moment, though, it does little for actually giving you access to hardware — which is where the company's recently-announced work with NVIDIA comes into play, developing Omniverse extensions which allow the ForgeOS Task Canvas to be used with simulated robots as well as the real thing via Isaac Sim.
"Bigger companies are moving to a sim-first approach to automation because these systems cost a lot of money to install," Guerin explains in an interview with NVIDIA on the companies' work together. "They want to simulate them first to make sure it's worth the investment."
More information on the partnership is available on NVIDIA's blog, while ForgeOS details can be found on READY Robotics' website.