Over the course of the last two years, supply chain issues have plagued important commodities like medical supplies, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. Analysts have bemoaned the broken “just-in-time” supply chain and sought solutions that would curb reliance on overseas manufacturers and limit time in transit.
For RIOS Intelligent Machines, the pandemic provided a stark illustration of the problem that they had always set out to solve. It’s RIOS’ mission to take labor-intensive and technologically outdated legacy industries and transform their manufacturing facilities, through robotics and AI, into the smart factories of the future.
From safe and gentle high-volume packaging to food handling without fear of contamination, RIOS’ solutions allow customers to realize efficiencies that small to mid-sized businesses of the past could only dream about. And the company’s robotics-as-a-service — or RaaS — business model would allow those customers to realize these advantages without a prohibitively expensive initial investment.
“The small to mid-sized customer doesn’t know what is capable at the cutting edge of robotics and AI quite yet, but we can bring these solutions to them — and in a timeline others find impossible,” Vineeth Velmurugan, senior technical program manager, said. “Our RaaS approach also requires far less capital expenditure, which allows our customers to compete with giants and companies overseas. And when our customers win, we win.”
Learn more about RIOS, some of the specific challenges that the company is addressing and how you can join in on the effort to transform manufacturing through robotics below.
Describe your company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?
“Versatile” is the perfect word to describe RIOS and the people who make what we do possible. Robotics is a rapidly evolving industry. Every single day new challenges rear their heads. And today’s challenges are far harder than the ones that came before. The simplest problems in robotics are already solved — the kind of problems that are highly repeatable and contain minimum entropy.
“Dumb” robots that can mindlessly repeat simple tasks are available to even the smallest customers. The next evolution of tasks is much harder. These are tasks that contain far more chaos and repeatability is a question. These are the kinds of tasks that require a novel approach and an intelligence impossible for machines to have until recently. RIOS’ approach to solving these hard problems is what the market has been waiting for.
RIOS’ approach to solving these hard problems is what the market has been waiting for.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
RIOS has been keeping our engineering team quite busy with a wide variety of solutions from numerous industries, but our AI vision-based quality control solutions are raring to take over the market. The capabilities our team has built out to automatically detect defects, misprints and shortages have come together to become market-leading in an incredibly short time.
Being able to train our neural models in the field and have our AI continuously improve every single day has been game-changing for customers, who didn’t even know capabilities like this were available. They can’t be blamed. Until RIOS came around they didn’t exist. I learn more about what is possible and what of the currently impossible we can tackle every single day from the team at RIOS. Working with a team like this in Silicon Valley has been my engineering dream.
